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20
Dec 09

CDs are no more, they have ceased to be…

The real day was a long time ago, when finally we all realized the physical CD serves no purpose whatsoever. How about the art, the booklet, you may ask? Turns out you leaf through them the first time, rip the CD into iTunes and never look at it again. And then you end up with a huge pile of plastic that takes valuable space in your house. With the convenience of iTunes, Amazon’s MP3 store, and others, there’s no longer any reason to have physical CDs, unless of course, some retrograde music industry executive or group forces your hand. As Rolling Stone pointed out, the Beatles Remastered 2009 CD set is probably the last physical CD you’ll ever buy. It was for me.

CDs in Storage Boxes

CDs prepare for their new life in storage

So, today was the day to run through all those CDs and put them into boxes, by category, sorted within each category. That was fun! The process resulted in a large pile of CDs not even worthy of their new backup-in-the-basement role. Some can probably be given away, most others will end up in the garbage.

Another side effect of this epic development: removing from our 18 year old stereo any component that is not directly involved with playing music from iTunes via AirTunes. That is, the tape deck and the CD player carrousel are Gone, Gone, Gone. Only the amplifier, speakers and connection to AirTunes remain. The cabinet that hosted all those components is now too big and will soon go meet them wherever it is these obsolete but noble devices end up.

It’s all part of the trend shared with eBooks: more and more annoyance at the environmental impact of having to produce these physical items.

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14
Dec 08

Looking for illumio in Google Reader

My old company, Tacit Software, has ceased to be: its intellectual property assets were acquired by Oracle. Two weeks ago Oracle shut down the illumio service, bringing the illumio experiment to a close. illumio was a feed reader with matching based filtering, dynamic interest discovery and adaptive matching. With illumio I was able to subscribe to more than 200 RSS feeds and keep up, as the system automatically showed me items most relevant to my interests. illumio automatically discovered what I was interested in and got better with use through my feedback. It presented articles using a newspaper metaphor, with a front page and sections grouping RSS feeds by topic area. It was addictive, but now it is gone, and I have switched to Google Reader.

Google Reader works well, updates quickly and is easy to read. I like the sharing feature and the ability to expose my shared items as an RSS feed. I use this feed to populate the box at the bottom right of this blog. I also like the incredibly easy search and subscribe user interface that makes it trivial to discover RSS feeds.

But there were some features of illumio that I sorely miss.

Matching Based Filtering

illumio matched articles to the interests of the user, assigning a matching strength to each article and then allowing filtering of the articles by strength.

Each article was distilled into a search expression capturing the article’s main focus which was then used to match the article against the interests of the user. Articles were assigned a matching strength giving default priority to the best matching articles. The illumio home page showed the best, current matching articles, selected from a variety of sources. It kept changing during the day, much like an online newspaper. It provided a personalized view of the world, customized just for you. Each of the newspaper sections could also be viewed by strength, as well as recency and other criteria. Continue reading →

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10
Oct 08

My dead mouse story

This is the setup: I have an HP Pavillion zd7000 laptop. It’s getting old. Attached to it I have a Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical USB mouse.The OS is Windows XP with SP2 and later SP3.

For the past few months (yes: months!), the mouse has been driving me nuts. How: at seemingly random intervals, the mouse disconnects, then reconnects. Maybe once, maybe multiple times in rapid succesion. If I’m lucky, the “Unrecognized USB Device” bubble pops up.

I have lots of USB ports, some on the laptop and some on the docking station. It does not seem to make any difference where the mouse is connected. The error happens randomly.

My first approach was to reinstall drivers, check the status of the USB bus, tell the device manager to rescan for new hardware devices, etc, etc, etc. Nothing worked. And today, I found this site:

http://www.deadharddrive.com/deadmouse/

Ha! Finally somebody described exactly what I was seeing. It ended up being a hardware issue with the mouse, more specifically with the USB wire itself. The link above shows how to fix the problem by opening the mouse, identifying the failing section of the cable, cutting it out, re-splicing the cable and putting everything back together.

Unfortunately I was at work without a wire cutter nearby. So instead I identified the bad section and laid it down inside the mouse case in a position that does not make it fail, then closed everything up and my mouse has been working fine for at least 8 minutes! Bliss.

Once again the collective wisdom of the Intertubes comes to the rescue.

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30
Sep 08

Facebook: what is it good for?

Absolutely nothing? No, that’s war.

After months of regular usage I finally figured out what I like to use Facebook for. Surprisingly: for very little.

I started using Facebook many months ago. The first thrill came from discovering long lost friends. Just type their names, verify it’s really them and add them to the list. For extra credit browse their friends to see any other people you know.

Once I had enough friends and read about their whereabouts in their profiles it was fun and exciting to see their status updates.

Then applications seemed cool and even useful. I really liked the apps that let me rate books and movies and share my reviews with my friends. I rated a few things, but after a while it became like work and that was the end of that.

The problems started when my friends discovered applications. Being tickled, poked and even super poked was cute the first 5 times. But you can’t underestimate the boundless energy of your friends who happily ping you in increasingly silly ways over and over again.

And it gets worse because every Facebook application is obsessed with viral spread. Applications are so desperate to distinguish themselves from the thousands of apps nobody cares about (98% of all apps?) that they use every possible opportunity to let people invite their friends. Many pop up a dialog containing all your friends preselected for infection! I hope my friends write really dull things on my super fun wall because I have no inclination whatsoever to install another application.

So, I quickly learnt to ignore all requests for new applications. I don’t even see them anymore.

Which brings us to the main point of this post. Facebook: what is it good for?

Pictures! The little icon labelled “photos” takes me to a page that shows the latest pictures posted by my friends, in reverse chronological order. Brilliant! I log in once a week and with one click get to see a current picture of someone I know and even find out what they’re up to.

I find Facebook’s photo sharing easier and more convenient than sites like Picasa or Flickr, only because I can see all my friends’ pictures in one place.

Uploading pictures is made easy with helper applications. Facebook has an iPhoto plugin with a very convenient interface. It lets you select pictures, tag your friends in them and then automatically scales and posts them to the site. Nice! For security, the final step is to go to the website and approve the images you just uploaded.

Having finally made peace with Facebook, balance was restored to the force when… Invitations started pouring in for hi5, family mingle and others! Ach! One social networking site is more than enough for me.

Internet — 1 Comment
1
Jun 08

illumio WordPress Widget

illumio is a desktop RSS reader that matches incoming articles to your interests and shows you the most relevant items. It presents the results using a newspaper metaphor, rendered in the browser. (Full disclosure: I’m on the illumio team). You can find more about illumio in its official website.

illumio is social, allowing you to ask questions to other illumio users and also to make comments on any article you see. Your comments are shown to any other illumio user that reads the article.

illumio provides a widget that shows the last 10 comments a person has made. It shows a snippet of the original article, the comment and a link to see the full article text in the illumio website. You can see this widget at the bottom right of this blog.

I packaged the illumio widget into a WordPress widget, which you can download below (right-click and “save link as” to download):

illumiocomments.php

To use the widget follow these steps:

  1. Make sure you’re theme supports Widgets. I was using Hemingway and had to change to HemingwayEx, which supports widgets. BTW, HemingwayEx is nice!
  2. Copy the php file above into your widgets directory.
  3. Enable the widget.
  4. Use the widget placement UI in WordPress admin to place the widget in the right place.
  5. Configure the illumio comments widget. You need to specify the account id of the account whose public comments you want to show. (You can use this widget to show public accounts from any illumio user, but it probably makes the most sense to show your own).

To figure out your own illumio id, follow these steps:

  1. Log in to your account in www.illumio.com
  2. Click the My Account link
  3. Mouse over the “My illumio page” banner and look at the status bar. It will show a URL of the form <baseURL>_<accountId>.do. Extract your account id out of this URL, it will be a number.

That’s it. Visitors to your blog can now see the last 10 comments you’ve made on illumio.

Of course, there are other possibilities, like automatically creating blog entries from your illumio comments, serving your comments as an RSS feed, etc. If there’s demand for any of these, we can easily add them.

UPDATE (12/05/08). illumio no longer exists. The assets of Tacit Software were purchased by Oracle and illumio was shut down. I replaced the illumio widget with a widget displaying the last items I shared on Google Reader.

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