Disqus - Latest Comments for eas

Re: Who or what will be the BitTorrent of Realtime? (Scripting News)

eas — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:43:19 -0000

I'm not sure how far Unite goes, but I think the concept of putting a server inside of every browser may get further in a more browser-agnostic incarnation. HTML5 local storage features are becoming more widely supported. The mobile browsers on iPhone and android support enough of it to enable browser-based offline versions of gmail and google reader, and on the desktop, I know Safari 4, and I think Firefox 3.5 have similar levels of support, and if IE8 doesn't, it can be added with Google gears.

The local storage features mean that javascript code, images, and html data can be stored locally, along with a persistent datastore. The app runs inside the browser when the user visits the page. Once started, it can reach out and request updates over HTTP.

The shortcoming of this approach is that it doesn't provide for long-running processes that can be accessed remotely, but I question whether that is a big strike against it, since firewalls make P2P communication across the Internet difficult.

The missing piece then is a way for peers to communicate. Some sort of generic HTTP accessible message-queue could provide that piece of the puzzle.

Re: Who or what will be the BitTorrent of Realtime? (Scripting News)

eas — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:23:38 -0000

The seeming deficiencies of bittorrent are interesting to consider. The other P2P clients I'm aware of, like Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, etc, bundled both content discovery and content distribution. BitTorrent only handled distribution, and even that wasn't totally decentralized, since the client needed a "tracker" to find other users with the content one wanted to download. As you note though, all the pieces were open, which, among other things, allowed the deficiencies to be addressed or worked around.

Re: WordPress Adds Themes Optimized for Mobile

eas — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:38:59 -0000

I'm pretty sure that caching conflicts are why I ditched the mobile theme I installed over a year ago. Of course, since they, I've ditched caching plugins in favor of better hosting and the ability to run a PHP opcode cache, so, I'm back to having a mobile theme on my blog.

Re: What's obvious about netbooks (Scripting News)

eas — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:59:13 -0000

And yet there are plenty of people (not just techie-types like the author of the post you are commenting on) who love their netbooks and make heavy use of them.

Personally, I find netbooks to be a little too small and underpowered, but I realize that not everyone is like me.

Re: Why Flickr should do Realtime RSS (Scripting News)

eas — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:21:23 -0000

Flickr is big, bu maybe try pitching to dailybooth.com, which is a lot like twitter, only focused around pictures. Small team, but the site seems to be growing fast. They may be more open to it than Flickr is these days.

Re: He has a million followers (Scripting News)

eas — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:27:03 -0000

Where does Scott Simon represent himself as an expert on Twitter? Certainly not in that interview.

Simon might have a blog, I don't know, but that interview isn't posted on his blog, that's a transcript on NPR's website. I'm sure he didn't do the transcription and I very much doubt he wrote the little blurb at the beginning that you object to. Maybe he signed off on it, but I wouldn't count on that. You might be able to argue that NPR is positioning Simon as an expert on Twitter, but if they are, the actual interview undermines that. In the interview, Simon himself mentions that he has a million followers on Twitter, but only to ask Shirky what that really means.

I missed the segment you Tweeted him about, but it does sound like he doesn't get it. Both that people are proud of their own blogs, but also that people profess to love blogs they follow the way he claims they profess to love a newspaper. My wife, for one, quite loves some of the blogs she reads, including the two that do the work of local papers for our Seattle neighborhood.

Re: Google Chrome Turns One: Has It Been a Success?

eas — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:37:42 -0000

Yes, its been a success. Since chrome debuted, Javascript performance, and various other issues that Chrome helped draw attention to have become a focus for other browsers (well, for Firefox and Safari/WebKit, IE seems hopeless). As a result, at least 10x as many people as actually use Chrome have benefitted from the competitive pressure from Chrome.

I don't want to overstate this, the Firefox and Safari teams were clearly already working to improve javascript performance, but still I think the competition has been helpful.

Re: Hey Mike, I told you so (Scripting News)

eas — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:33:29 -0000

I don't think Weiner, Arrington, or any of those bloggers are getting their iPhone and service for free. That is to say, they are customers too. You think their opinions should be discarded though.

Re: Did VoloMedia invent Podcasting? (Scripting News)

eas — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:32:47 -0000

Yeah, and don't forget pointcast.

Re: Walter Cronkite's 'Cosmic Disaster' editorial (Scripting News)

eas — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:19:13 -0000

Thanks.

You know though that who ever posted it looks like a nutty conspiracy theorist (which may skew the message)?

This one seems to be posted by less of a nutter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdOb_183d1o&feat...

Re: What of Woodstein in the Rebooted World (Scripting News)

eas — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:13:59 -0000

You seem to assume that things are better today, after the professionals were cowed and manipulated into supporting the Iraq war, when even NPR is still so cowed and corrupted that it refuses to use the word "Torture" to describe acts of torture.

Re: Okay I'm trying iPhone tethering (Scripting News)

eas — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:35:50 -0000

That required a jailbreak.

Re: Iran streets after election (Scripting News)

eas — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:55:50 -0000

It would be more futile to assume that protesting the results is futile. I've read nothing to suggest that Iranian politics are simple, so it doesn't boil down to any one individual.

Re: Iran streets after election (Scripting News)

eas — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:51:11 -0000

I also found these:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zhubin-najafi/

Re: An end to the endless cycle? (Scripting News)

eas — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:33:18 -0000

A few weeks ago I saw a little sign of the light coming on for one journalist, James Fallows. Fallows posted the contents of a few paragraph email from someone he knew at Google (but speaking for himself) giving a perspective on the problems of the news industry's business model. The writer of the email had apologized for the quality of his communication by telling Fallows that it was the middle of the night and he had a major headache, and Fallows noted that if a non-journalist in a hurry could dash off such a clear and cogent analysis of the issue (or any issue), then maybe journalism was in even more trouble than he thought.

Bingo!

I note this not to pick on Fallows. He's been willing to be critical of his own profession, industry and colleagues, and while I haven't been following him closely for a while, I don't have the sense that he's been one to sneer about blogging. Still, its interesting to see things sink in, especially since on some level, I think he's understood it for a while. He's done a lot of blog posts that are basically composed of long quotes from email sent by readers, so he's been willing to let his sources "speak" for themselves from his soapbox. He is serving the editorial function a lot of other bloggers serve, by finding good information and thinking, providing some context, and giving it more exposure. It's something I'm sure he's done a lot of through his career since he's been an editor, as well as a correspondent.

Re: Who do the people of the NY Times follow on Twitter? (Scripting News)

eas — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:35:01 -0000

Dave, thanks for sharing this data. It's always interesting to see this sort of thing, even if I'm not sure what to make of it. It's like looking at those charts of boards of directors, or campaign donors.

It helps expose hidden influence, which is always a good thing. It would be great if someone who is a wizzard with visualization did something with your data.

I'll note too that insight into patterns of influence is what Google was founded on.

Re: Twitter’s Response to #fixreplies: We Can’t

eas — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:10:52 -0000

The filtering has long been there, and shouldn't be that expensive. If I were Twitter, I think I'd store followers lists in a denomalized form so that a users list of followers can be a single row retrieval, so: Retrieve followers list for sender, retrieve followers list for @ reply target, calculate intersection of those two lists, publish tweet to queue of each user in the intersection list. Offering the option not to filter involves another lookup for each recipient. I suppose though it would be no more costly to store that info in a flag for each user in a followers list. It could also be handled as a filter on read. All this is speculation though. We don't know the details of Twitter's architecture.

Re: Gadget talk with Scoble (Scripting News)

eas — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:29:16 -0000

Amazon is rumored to be testing these larger Kindles at various colleges and universities, so whatever the tech press may think, it would seem that, at most, saving the news industry is just one part of Amazon's plans for a larger kindle.

Re: The cloud is gritty and awesome inside

eas — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:30:48 -0000

James Hamilton, until recently at Microsoft, has been writing a lot about very large data centers in his blog. Apperently Microsoft has been interested enough in the containerized data centers to have devoted half of one of their new data centers to the concept. Of course that's no where close to where Google has taken it. Hamilton is now a VP on Amazon's web services group. Not that we needed any clues to realize that they have ambitions in the cloud.

I think though that the biggest equipment cabinet Ive ever seen is in Manhattan, just north of the financial district. I'd see it looming when I came out of the tunnel from Newark airport. It was a tall dingy building with no obvious windows. I finally got a chance to check it our. I estimated it to be 30 or 40 stories, at least. When I got closer, I was right, almost no windows. There were liquid nitrogen tanks from ConEd all around it feeding into manholes. The building itself had an old bellsystem logo on it, but I think at ground level it was either AT&T or Verizon. I realized that the whole skyscraper, maybe a bigger building than any in the city I grew up in, had been built to house a massive telco switch. Of course, these days, the communications equipment is much more compact, which is why they can build big facilities in remote areas, rather than building up in some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

Re: Hey Sulzberger, there's money over here (Scripting News)

eas — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:36:17 -0000

Part of the reason we don't have the same population density as Japan is that we built a bunch of freeways starting in the middle of the last century and invested a lot of blood and treasure in keeping oil prices low so that people could live in suburbs and commute to work.

The benefits of this investment were not realized in equal proportion by the entire US population. Rural residents who lived further freeways were disproportionately isolated from commerce and saw the decline of their communities accelerate. Owners of land near the new freeways saw the value of their land increase as it was bought and turned into suburbs. The residents of those suburbs got bigger homes. The cities lost their tax base to the suburbs even as suburban residents continued to benefit from the dense economic activity of cities. People who remained in the cities saw their quality of life decline as fewer taxes were spread over existing services and infrastructure. They also saw their property values collapse because of federally influenced lending policies that favored loans for new suburban homes over loans for urban properties.

I'd hope that our broadband policy wouldn't end up being as unjust, but would it doesn't seem unfair that people accepting the tradeoffs of living in high-density areas shouldn't get awesome broadband for less than people in areas where it is more expensive to provide. Suburban dwellers have traded cheaper property for other costs, like automobiles & gasoline. Why shouldn't they pay more for broadband, especially since better broadband could substitute for some of the costs of commuting.

One irony is that some small towns in rural areas actually have better broadband at better prices than cities and suburbs.

Re: Is Firefox slower than other browsers? (Scripting News)

eas — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:19:03 -0000

"Here's what I do care about -- how slow it gets after it has been running for a number of hours with a full complement of tabs"

Exactly!

The irritating thing is that Firefox partisans (not necessarily the developers) immediately start blaming the user or 3rd party dev: "That's because of Flash." "That's what you get for using 3rd party extensions," "That's because the sites you are visiting have poorly coded DHTML" How can any of these answers be acceptable? Imagine they were saying this about the OS?

Part of what intrigues me about Chrome is that it's at least trying to deal with these issues, at the very least, its providing some visibility into what is hogging CPU or memory.

As for your extension dependence. I think you mentioned needing plugins for AWS. I mentioned before, Cyberduck, an FTP client, has decent S3 support, and doesn't Amazon let you manage EC2 via a web app now? What are your other must-have's? Your post made me realize that mine were things I used to help work around Firefox's tendancy to bog down.

Re: What Firefox should do (Scripting News)

eas — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 17:12:58 -0000

Asa's post really pissed me off, whether you provoked him or not. The technique of dividing people into "regular users," and everyone else is Orwellian. Actually, that's probably putting it nicely, but I think there is still some constructive dialog to be had before tripping over Godwin's law.

By taking the stance that he did, he missed a chance to convey that a lot of what Firefox has been doing is non-flashy work that is at least starting to address your concerns. He talks about some it in his post, but its hidden under a sheen of spit and bile.

For example, the problem of needing a plugin to display video in YouTube is being addressed in the next version of Firefox via the addition of video support from the HTML v5 spec.

The web protocol handlers he talks about make it possible to open links in a web browser that formerly would have required invocation of a desktop app. This seems to me to be a big step on the way to making it possible to use a web browser as a word processor for documents stored on the web, and do it in a way that allows the user a choice of which web app to use.

I don't know about your javascript UI issue, but it does seem that at this late date, we should have some good tools that allow you to easily graphically create lightweight cross-browser UIs. It seems like a logical extension of these increasingly rich javascript UI libraries.

The more I think about it, the harder it is to fathom Asa's attitude. A lot of web browser improvements mean nothing to "regular uses" without support from developers and designers. Does he think developers and designers should shut-up and be greatful for what they are given too? If not, why didn't he take the chance to suggest a better way to communicate ideas.

Re: Chrome vs Firefox (Scripting News)

eas — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:44:38 -0000

I couldn't agree more. This post made me realize that the Firefox add-ons I consider must-haves help work around performance & stability issues.

I like that people at Mozilla are trying to push the user experience forward, but I'd rather they focus on getting the basics right first.

Re: Chrome vs Firefox (Scripting News)

eas — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:37:37 -0000

I like the awesome bar too, but I'd trade it for more stability and better performance. Firefox lets users open more tabs than it can reasonably handle. I'd rather see them get important existing features right before chasing "awesomeness"

Re: The Future News System of the World (Scripting News)

eas — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 16:39:58 -0000

"An aside to Fred and Bijan, this is why people need to know the business model."

An excellent point that bares repeating. If I'm building something I want to last, I want confidence in the foundation. For a lot of people, in the past, that meant using well supported software from an established company. More and more, these days, it means using open source software and open standards that can live on even when a vendor starts thrashing around and dropping or changing things for want of a profitable strategy.