Disqus - Friends of srod710

Re: Could S3 be an end-user product? (Scripting News)

ryantate — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 15:11:06 -0000

I second JungleDisk. I use it to back up the more critical files on my home PC. I like that it encrypts the data before storing it on Amazon's servers.

Re: Could S3 be an end-user product? (Scripting News)

ryantate — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 15:11:24 -0000

Re: The UGC limb, day 2 (Scripting News)

ryantate — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 01:31:01 -0000

Yes and yes! Bing!

But what about ...

3. The next next step will be API clones of S3, EC2 and SimpleDB (from Google, MSFT, Yahoo, etc etc) so you can deploy your packaged app not just to Amazon but anywhere, and probably in multiple places at once, for sake of redundancy.

Re: Interview with Scoble (Scripting News)

ryantate — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:59:05 -0000

This was a great interview and you kept in on track well Dave. Well timed, good questions.

Re: Embargoes: Thanks but no thanks

ryantate — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:25:51 -0000

The practice is, at heart, a gimmick, to add hype to "news" the press might otherwise ignore or underplay. Your IPO comparison is apt.

I have some inside information on why PR people do this, but I won't tell you unless you promise to keep it under your hat for a week.

(*Cough*)

Re: Full text in RSS? (Scripting News)

ryantate — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:48:44 -0000

Feed Readers can just truncate full text feeds if skimming is desired (which is orthogonal to river of news btw). That's how Google Reader works -- you can look at headlines and first few words of description in river of news headline mode. Then click an item to see the full included text. (Or you can switch to "extended" view, still river of news, and see full text of everything by default)

Seems best to encourage content publishers to do full feeds and leave the tools to trim it for the users.

Re: Full text in RSS? (Scripting News)

ryantate — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 20:41:11 -0000

99% of people don't care if they're reading an excerpt or a "hand-crafted" summation, imho. Granted they're not the same but you're just trying to decide whether to click through. And offering multiple feeds is just too confusing for an everyday non geek.

And if you really care, as a publisher, you could always do an atom feed, which can have a summary _and_ fulltext. But it's much better to have one feed. One less meaningless decision for people to make -- just click the autodiscovered RSS feed tag and you're off.

Re: Full text in RSS? (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:45:06 -0000

Nah, I'm a fascist! ;->

Re: Full text in RSS? (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:46:05 -0000

PS and the reader isn't clever enough. And doesn't care! Well, mine at least. Technical blogs, maybe not.

Re: I heart 30 Rock (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:21:03 -0000

Here's a downloadable link for the Fresh Air interview:

http://podcastdownload.npr....

Re: The space between Twitter and FriendFeed (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 22:57:33 -0000

My thought too. Most people use Tumblr exactly as DW is discussing. But it's not enforced -- unlike Twitter, you can use as many chars as you want. If Tumblr added "tiny post" or somesuch as one of its post types (along with pic, video, txt, etc), with a char count monitor and limit, and offered a truncated version of the feed (enforced to no longer than X chars), it would be a lot like DW describes.

Re: What is a netbook? (Scripting News)

ryantate — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:04:13 -0000

Regarding your point on vendor lock-in, is there any, with OS X or XP or anything else? -- aren't all the key apps you use on one of these things Web apps? So as long as there's Firefox or whatever browser you like, you're good to go.

Or if not what are they key desktop apps you tend to use. I ask because I don't own a netbook and am curious about why the OS is important if I do buy one.

(On my laptop I use the Web for my mail and rss apps, and would gladly switch for music (if I didnt have so many DRMed itunes tracks) and image editing (but I need blur) and video editing (not yet a Web thing, but who does that on a netbook). And Web post writing (ecto).)

Re: What is a netbook? (Scripting News)

ryantate — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:27:50 -0000

Thanks!

Re: CTO of the Year (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 23:26:23 -0000

I had not heard of SQS. It looks interesting, but messages can only be retained for a few days:

http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/

So the model might be: Send message to every follower's "incoming" queue for every tweet.

On the other side: Poll your own "incoming" queue for messages, write to a DB or RSS file and/or send to a cell phone and/or ping IM depending on who it's from.

OR:

Send tweets to your own "outgoing queue." Followers must poll within four days or they miss the tweet.

OR, SIMPLEST THING THAT COULD POSSIBLY WORK:

Your tweets are just an RSS feed with a special flag (via namespace extension) indicating all items are Twitter compatible, ie 140 chars or less. You store them on S3 or any other Web accessible URL. Followers poll at will (respecting any limits within the RSS file as usual).

(Their own client software, probably open source, running on their cloud or desktop, handles the tweets -- writing to an HTML interface, or SMS or IM etc.)

PS Twitter.com is just a fancy RSS reader, with optional hookups to your cell phone, the ability to ferret out and display "replies," the ability to authenticate into restricted feeds and an IM bridge.

A Twitter stream is just a tightly constrained RSS feed.

PPS Caveat: Restricting readership is tricky. HTTP authentication would work but you'd need some kind of universal login database and common login technique. Would this matter to Twitter power users?

Re: louisgray.com: The Christmas Story, As Told Through Twitter

ryantate — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 06:53:01 -0000

Wonderful.

Re: Julie and Julia (Scripting News)

ryantate — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:31:16 -0000

-moved-

Re: Julie and Julia (Scripting News)

ryantate — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:33:17 -0000

Are you talking strictly about this controversial nytimes.com op-ed?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005...

Because that's a lot to extrapolate from one foofaraw!

Re: How to avoid getting run down by drivers walking around town (Scripting News)

ryantate — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:12:11 -0000

Perhaps this goes without saying, but with the wrong driver in the wrong part of Berkeley this could get a person in a dangerous confrontation. I'm very much in favor of taming drivers, but also very personally aware of the risks.

Re: Archiving your tweets in XML (Scripting News)

ryantate — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:07:20 -0000

My question: Where do I get this app? :->

Re: Archiving your tweets in XML (Scripting News)

ryantate — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:09:31 -0000

Oh I see, click on the "docs" link above:

http://editor.opml.org/twit...

Re: Maybe Schieffer should Face the nation? (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 02:59:35 -0000

MP3 for Terry Gross' Simon Johnson interview:

http://public.npr.org/anon....|1|&topicId=1017&parentTopicId=1006

Re: Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:52:51 -0000

Reading this just once, my brain shortened what you wrote to "long URLs shouldn't really exist."

If the Web app itself contains the shortener, and the server it runs on can resolve the short URLs, there's not really a need for the long version of the URL at all, is there?

Anyway, maybe that's not a fair summary, but my conclusion is that since Web app authors created the need for URL shorteners in the first place it might be expecting too much to ask those same authors to obviate that same need.

Re: Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem (Scripting News)

ryantate — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:01:11 -0000

This is really an implementation problem -- Web app authors don't have the time/energy/knowledge to wire up apache in such a way as to shorten their app urls though they could theoretically do so without too much pain.

Maybe the solution is an Apache plugin/filter that would look for incoming requests for urls over a certain length Then it would generate a short url (using its own database/hashing code) and redirect the user to that url, which would become the canonical url for that link, Rinse/repeat for IIS. Dead simple for the app developer once implemented in the server.

Re: Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem (Scripting News)

ryantate — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:00:06 -0000

Interesting point! I hadn't thought if that way.

Re: Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem (Scripting News)

ryantate — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:00:46 -0000

PS According to Disqus you posted your reply _before_ the comment you're replying to. Odd.