Disqus - Latest Comments for tommorris

Re: A social namespace (Scripting News)

tommorris — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 14:26:53 -0000

Prior art: FOAF/SIOC, XFN, vCard/hCard, PortableContacts.

pius is right (hey, pius!): FOAF+SIOC - you can reuse the RDF ontologies inside OPML as XML namespaces.

And some recent prior art that shows how to REALLY do it wrong: TweepML. I wrote up a page the other day explaining what's wrong with TweepML - http://gist.github.com/223649

Re: Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype

tommorris — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:08:26 -0000

I know. I watched the videos and read the docs. But the difference is that Wave is competing with e-mail, which is already everywhere. As I said, every device and platform has a mail client, and on most platforms you have a pretty wide choice of mail client.

E-mail is already trained into people, along with a whole stack of architecture that is built aroud it: boring things like mailing lists, authentication, directory services, LDAP, corporate VPNs, anti-spam/anti-virus, attachment handling and so on. We've got stacks of logic around it. And it's damn simple: you can write an app that reads mail from POP3/IMAP in about five or six lines in a high-level scripting language like Perl, Python or Ruby. All the niche uses that e-mail has gotten will never get moved over to Wave. There's not a compelling reason for someone like me to rewrite all the crufty little scripts that run just fine on top of e-mail.

Re: Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype

tommorris — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 04:36:45 -0000

And if you are expecting 'email 2.0', prepare to be disappointed. It's a bloated, web-based mess that eats system resources. It'll never replace e-mail, because it'll never have the sheer choice of different clients. With e-mail, I can choose between Thunderbird or Outlook or mutt or Mac OS X's Mail app or Evolution or KMail. I use mutt and it works great. But if I want to use Wave, I currently have to use it in my browser. Every device I have that's capable of connecting to the net has an e-mail client of some variety. Only those capable of running a full desktop web browser can currently use Wave.

You may as well say Facebook is 'email 2.0'.

Re: Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype

tommorris — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:10:03 -0000

I reviewed Wave back in August and came to much the same conclusions:
http://tommorris.org/blog/2009/08/08#When:15:50:47

The whole thing is so stupid. I mean, it's supposed to be an e-mail killer. As I said in the review, every dumb phone on the market has POP3/IMAP/SMTP support. Everything talks e-mail. The only problem with e-mail is some people are too stupid to use it correctly. Well, I have a simple solution to that: stop talking to them. E-mail, if everyone does it right, is quicker and more flexible than Wave.

Re: Antifeatures: big mistake that location app developers make

tommorris — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:29:15 -0000

See, this is why I really like Yahoo's FireEagle. I can give it an exact location safe in the knowledge that the apps which pull their location data from FireEagle get only the level of data I am comfortable with sharing with them. So, with Facebook, I share my exact location because I know it's only going to be seen by friends on Facebook.

How am I updating FireEagle? Simple: I have an iPhone app on my iPod touch which uses the wi-fi-based location services to figure out where I am. I've got a script on my Linux box which keeps an eye on where I am logging in from (over SSH) and tells FireEagle about them based on the IP address: it's loaded up with all the free wifi spots I use around London. I'm also going to start detecting where I am based on what devices are connected to the local subnet on my network at home - if my laptop or iPod touch are connected, I'm at home. You know what? I'm getting pretty damn precise geolocation even though none of the devices I use have any GPS in them at all.

If you are going to build a location-based service, make it so I can check in using any damn method I want to. Because I can come up with more accurate ways to tell you where I am than you can ever imagine. I really want to be able to update my Google Latitude this way: if Google ever open up an API, I'll just write a bridge script to automatically push my FireEagle location into Latitude.

Re: Google gets a patent on reading lists (Scripting News)

tommorris — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:08:01 -0000

There is at least one other Reading List capable news-reader I know of: Pito Salas' BlogBridge.

If Google are serious about it simply being defensive, they should transfer it to a neutral third-party like the EFF.

Re: cubicgarden.com...

tommorris — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:04:57 -0000

There's a rumour going around that there may be a London BarCamp soon...

Re: Did VoloMedia invent Podcasting? (Scripting News)

tommorris — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:38:58 -0000

It'd be a start if the various patent regulators around the world figured out how to use Google.

Or if they had a system of public comments - and there would be a set of public feeds based on categories with patent applications, and the public would be invited to collect evidence of prior art. That way, software guys could subscribe to a feed of software patents and submit comments as to prior art and obviousness.

Or even simpler just have a way so that any ordinary citizen can file prior art, safe in the knowledge that they would investigate it thoroughly and determine (a) whether it invalidates the patent and (b) if it does, if the patent owner ought to have known about it. And if they should have known about it, they'd have to pay full costs. If the USPTO can determine whether to give a patent claim in the first place, they should be able to revoke it and charge fees for time-wasters.

The barrier is the courtroom. And the likelihood of decent law reform on IP issues is about as likely as when the president after Obama settles down to work on the first day of the job and says to himself: "Great. Don't have to worry about healthcare. Everyone's got universal coverage!"

Another idea: some bright folks like Larry Lessig, the EFF and others could set up a foundation that could pre-emptively file for patents on things like RSS and so on, on behalf of users and developers, and then figure out a way of 'patent-lefting'-ing them. Just as open source uses copyright law, the same could be done with patent law. Of course, they could fund such a group by charging a modest fee to patent trolls to use the otherwise free patents.

Re: twdsc.us: @davewiner. "A friend is launching a site that says: "Only contributors can log in because we don't care what anonymous Internet commenters think." :-)"

tommorris — Sun, 31 May 2009 11:08:45 -0000

Anonymity does have value. There's a reason why academic peer review processes ensure that the reviewers don't know who the author is (until after the review, of course), nor the author know the identity of the reviewers (though that is journal-dependent). Slashdot do this for meta-moderation: you see the comment, but you don't see who rated it. You then have to say whether the moderation was fair.

Anonymity cuts away ego and, if carefully managed, lets the substance shine through. Careful management though.

Back when 'social media' was 'social software', people discussed this kind of thing with a lot more realism and a lot less marketing bullshit.

Re: twdsc.us: @davewiner. "A friend is launching a site that says: "Only contributors can log in because we don't care what anonymous Internet commenters think." :-)"

tommorris — Sun, 31 May 2009 11:01:23 -0000

Sometimes the anonymous people are right and the established names are wrong. If anonymous person says 2 + 2 = 4 and non-anonymous person says otherwise, non-anonymous person is wrong.

The difficulty is coming up with a way so that the anonymous people can correct the non-anonymous people on the facts, while preventing them from posting viagra ads, pornographic pictures of goats and "Which Harry Potter owl are you?" quizzes. Stupidfilter.org is a step in the right direction.

Re: Retweet is stupid (Scripting News)

tommorris — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:22:14 -0000

Retweeting is pointless. It's completely ridiculous. You only have to fill up 140 characters, and you don't have the creativity to even come up with that. So, you fire up TweetDeck and hit the retweet button all day long. Uncreative and utterly pointless for anyone who's not a pointless social media retard.

If I see a Twitter profile and it's got nothing but retweets, I hit the magic "block" button. These people are pointless leeches, and usually have nothing of any interest to say: it's all "OMG social media is so transgressive! I love Web 2.0 so much!" etc. Pointless crap.

I wrote a post about this: http://tommorris.org/blog/2009/03/03#When:18:20:18

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

tommorris — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:17:43 -0000

URNs can still be used for some things, and some of us Semantic Web types use them as identifiers (SQL translation: database keys) for stuff that has an existing naming system that won't map sensibly into URI-space. urn:isbn is used quite a bit to identify books, and I think that the digital library people might also use urn:issn. Obviously, the problem with URNs is that you have to have something intelligent in place to get data from them, while URIs have a set of useful built-in methods (HTTP GET, POST, PUT and DELETE) that URNs don't.

This doesn't really solve the URI shortener problem: if we turn some long URI into a URN, we have introduced new problems.

The solution is for everyone to stop making long URIs in the first place, and for places where long URIs are a problem to make them less of a problem.

Re: Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky (Scripting News)

tommorris — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:09:58 -0000

What concerns me more is the HTML framing. The good URL shorteners are those which use the 302 response header. What would seem sensible would be for TinyURL et al. to basically give a database dump in a consistent format to someone like the Internet Archive, and for the Archive to then operate a lookup service for the no-longer-provided service as an API.

Re: HowTo: Creating a server on Amazon EC2

tommorris — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:13:02 -0000

I'm using Linode for Linux hosting for a small site I'm building on top of Rails on Linux. The way I think of it is that I can use Linode until my hosting needs hit the EC2 spot. An alternative would be if Amazon were to start making 'micro' instances available with less memory and storage. Small websites don't need 160Gb of storage and 1.7Gb of RAM.

Have you looked at the new EC2 Reserved Instances? It'll be interesting to see what happens when Reserved Instances become available for Windows AMIs, because the economics for Linux AMIs look pretty attractive.

Re: HowTo: Creating a server on Amazon EC2

tommorris — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:07:54 -0000

My preferred tool for EC2 management is RightScale. They have a really nice web-based interface to EC2 that makes setting up Linux instances very easy, and they give you ten hours of free server time before you have to put your EC2 credentials in. I found the Linux setup to be very, very easy and you can basically have a Debian server running in about ten or fifteen minutes.

Here's their tutorials page: http://wiki.rightscale.com/1._Tutorials

You can do Windows EC2 through RightScale too: http://wiki.rightscale.com/index.php?title=2._R...

The other thing is that if all you want is somewhere to put an OPML Editor instance for low use, then EC2 is not really the cheapest way of doing it. Just find a Windows VPS provider. They'll do what you want for a lot less money ($20-$30 monthly). Finaly, MediaTemple look like they are going to offer VPS hosting for Mac OS X - http://mediatemple.net/labs/xv/

It'd be cool if someone could port Frontier/OPML over to Linux, as well as make a 'headless Frontier' that could sit on a Linux box and be controlled remotely.

Re: Apologies for organizational issues at LeWeb

tommorris — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:06:07 -0000

Loic: the infrastructure issues were not the problem. We could have lived without that stuff if and only if the content was good. Softball questions, meandering panels and pitches for half-baked products do not count.

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

tommorris — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:43:34 -0000

I did something like this a while back. 'bartsf' is a Twitter account I created a long time ago that gives updates about delays across the whole BART network. For London, I've also made Twitter Tube Tracker (google it) which provides similar information on delays across London's tubes. I'm also planning on adding a few selected bus routes too (probably 9, 10, 24 and 91).

I'm in Paris at the moment and was very surprised when I took the metro - there's full 3G mobile coverage on all the metro lines I've tested.

Re: What is the Open in an Open Standard or Specification?

tommorris — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:28:08 -0000

W3C publish Recommendations. Though there is a lot to criticise them for, I have to say that within my area of knowledge (HTML is, because of the WHAT WG thing, rather an anomaly), the W3C have been doing a pretty good job - I can think of a few W3C WGs who have invited very good experts onto WGs even though they don't work for a Member Org. Similarly, for OWL, they've basically done on a much smaller scale what they did with HTML - wait until a group of knowledgable experts came along and formed a group (the WebOnt Working Group), kept an eye on what they were coming up with and then made it formal at an appropriate point.

Here's hoping that things like OpenID/OAuth/OWF etc. push the W3C further towards the side of sweetness, happiness and pretty flowers.

Hope you are enjoying the transplant to SF!

Re: High quality over-the-air TV (Scripting News)

tommorris — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:06:45 -0000

Dave: when you are next travelling, you might want to take your EyeTV with you (maybe leave one plugged in at home too to record local stuff). Digital terrestrial TV is broadcast on this side of the Atlantic too.

I'm just about to see if I can borrow an EyeTV from someone to test at my home, with a view to replacing our £40 ($60) a month satellite subscription with a home-built PVR.

Re: I need a conference home (Scripting News)

tommorris — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:52:49 -0000

I think you should try BarCamp. There's lots of them - geographically distributed (I've been to BarCamps all across the UK and in Ireland and the United States). They are free, 'open source' (anyone can host) and tremendously good fun. And you are encouraged to talk.

There isn't the 'subscribability' of conferences - but, for instance, if you go to BarCamp in London, there is a community of people there who will give talks there every time there's a BarCamp. Plus there's more than just talking: there's hacking too - people writing code, designing stuff and coming up with cool ideas.

Re: Why I like netbooks (Scripting News)

tommorris — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:34:51 -0000

I put up a screenshot of Firefox running in Ubuntu on my Acer here - http://tommorris.org/files/firefox_netbook.png

Re: Why I like netbooks (Scripting News)

tommorris — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:27:33 -0000

I have to say, bar the little accident of dropping the thing on the floor and destroying the screen, I love my Acer AspireOne. Disagree on XP. I have one machine that runs XP and it causes me more headaches than all the other machines I have combined. Ubuntu, though - whew. It's beautiful. Alas, there's no decent outliner available for it - but for everything else, it's superb.

Looking forward to getting it back. My MacBook Pro may actually be the last Apple machine I buy. Maybe. There's about four apps I use which are Mac/Windows only. If I can find decent Linux equivalents, then I can exorcise both Bill and Steve from my life.

Re: Interview with Scoble (Scripting News)

tommorris — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:41:59 -0000

There *is* a divide between the BusinessWeek types and developers. SXSW is predominantly a developer conference - all the people I know there (with the exception maybe of Scoble) are designers, web developers, software developers, W3C staff/standards people and so on. The reason developers go to SXSW is because they can't stand the self-serving nonsense that goes on at Web 2.0 and similarly over-priced VC fodder.

Just as a complex discussion of tech standards or APIs would be inappropriate at an event for VCs and business types, BusinessWeek questions aren't appropriate at a developer/geek event.

Re: Recommendation for Flickr (Scripting News)

tommorris — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 23:55:49 -0000

Amend 'RSS feed' to 'RSS feed and API' and it's a very important point. Significant amounts of drama has been heaped on situations where people have used the API in ways that photographers don't expect - see this thread on flickr.com - http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/50508/

It'd be helpful if the people who run sites like Flickr and Twitter (etc.) could actually inform their users that people will build mashups, software and services that reuse their content in ways they might not expect.

Re: Programming less (Scripting News)

tommorris — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 12:23:29 -0000

Dave, one thing that's made me love programming again is unit testing. It avoids the "morass of patches and workarounds" to some extent. Google 'test-driven development'. The idea is really simple. You write a test that determines whether or not a function, method or class works properly before you write the code. Then you run the test, see that it fails, write the code and run the test again. You know that the code works when the test works. Then as you build the system bigger and bigger, you can keep track of whether one piece breaks another piece, because your tests show you that.

I haven't done much with Frontier for a while - I've been using Python and Ruby which have unit testing frameworks, but it'd certainly be interesting to see if a Frontier/UserTalk testing framework could be written.