I’m speaking on a panel with Matt Mullenweg, Stowe Boyd and Mike McDerment at tomorrow at Mesh in Toronto.
Oh, and Tara‘s going to totally rock the house with her Pinko Keynote. Fer rizzle.
The state of the cowork
I have to make this quick. But I promised to get it out and it’s a good time to jot down a note or two about the State of the Cowork.
We had a meeting last week at Ritual with two new arrivals: Michelle and Wai Yip. That’s from a total of 81 members on our nascent Google Group.
We floated three courses of action:
- Pursue Ted‘s upholstery repair shop discovery
- Follow up with Schlomo about his place
- Look into the American Industrial Center down in dogpatch
…and at the very least set a course to do more research on AIS — resulting in this video from Ryanne and Michelle.
Interestingly, much of what Ryanne says maps identically to what Bill MacEwan of Vancouver’s Workspace says in this video — which happens to coincide with some excellent photos of their newly renovated space on 21 Water St in Gastown.
So, this is where we’re at: We’ve got more information about AIS and it’s looking promising. It’s possibly not ideal in every respect (not streetfront, for one thing) but the space is pretty excellent in general and seems affordable for our needs. Riya is also donating furniture to our effort and, wouldn’t you know it, David Crow of Torcamp fame and Teh Boris of Vancouver’s Bryght have cooked up a business plan that’s nearly ready for publishing under CC license. Oh, and it’s no accident that Boris has decided to push forward with an independent Innovation Commons in Vancouver separate from Workspace.
Anyway, once that plan is out, we can start tossing in the numbers from our potential spots here in San Francisco and see what adds up… what kind of infrastructure we need, how many people we can support and what extra money we need to beg for… just kidding. But yeah, we’re close, we’re hungry and dammit, we’re goin’ to get Teh Space up this summer.
And apparently yet another person out there on the intarweb has a similar idea in Atlantic Canada. Those crazy Canadians…!
QuickSilver β49 Borzoi is gorgeous
Is this not the next generation of Apple application design?
Pulling back the curtain on Shuttle
Matt drops a link to Khaled’s announcement about Shuttle, a long-term project to overhaul the WordPress admin UI.
Looking it over (and as someone who participated from afar some time ago) I have to say that I actually prefer Steve Smith’s WP Tiger Admin. I use it on this blog and love it. There are a few glitches here and there, but for the most part it’s a huge improvement over WordPress’ old school default.
In any case, it’s great to see such major changes coming to WordPress — I just hope that it maintains the original simplicity that makes WordPress so widely successful.
On the JOT acquisition rumor…
Huh. Well, I was going to post this:
If Yahoo! were to acquire JOT I bet it would be Alex Russell and his dojo… given that they’re working on a very slick open source AJAX UI library (that’s now in its second beta release).
But then I just read that Alex has left JOT to work fulltime on Dojo! Whoa!
Well, guess that could explain why the acquisition didn’t happen, eh? 😉
Fruity? Full-bodied?
No, that’s not the title of an ad for some young guy in the Castro. Rather it’s the intro line from a site that just launched called WineLog.
I’m pretty curious about this site — I’m not sure exactly what it does because I can’t see to log in to it, but hey, that’s cool! I’m still excited to try it out when it’s ready!
…And heck, what a perfect chance to review the wines that you might enjoy at WineCamp (hint! hint!). 😉
NetNewsWire 2.1 released
Only 37 betas later, Brent Simmons, now of NewsGator, has released the next dot-release of the Mac’s best feed reader, NetNewsWire.
Highlights of this release
- NewsGator syncing
- Universal binary
- Performance enhancements
- Print command
- Post to del.icio.us command
- Email-link and email-contents commands
- Sorting subscriptions by attention
- User interface changes
- Bug fixes
I’ve been using all the betas and love it just as much as ever — totally solid feed reading. Would love to see support for microformats like Endo but there’s always 2.2…
Calling all heros
→ ..rant follows.. ←
Been reading Batman, The Dark Knight Returns after I found the series at a closing sale deep in the Mission. I always have loved Frank Miller’s work and this is no exception.
Reading comics now, when I’m 25, is a different experience than when I was younger, more naive, and perhaps less literate. And certainly just as much if not more visual. In fact the stories really never resonated with me much; sure I’d read them but I was much more into the art.
So reading comics now — comics only 10 years old but already classic in their own right — while reading the news, I wonder if we’re stuck in some weird life-imitating-art vortex. Or some alternate reality. Yeah, that must be it.
In which case, I don’t see any reason why I can’t put a call out for all remaining heros to show themselves. In fact, I’d call for amnesty on all of them, if they’d just come out and give us a hand and maybe provide, even for a fleeting moment, some semblance of a heroic ideal.
You see it in the movies in fact. You see it with characters like V. But those tales of hyper-violence that exist in the Matrix genre of reality are farcical, pretending to give us some deep clue about the inner reality of our time but only obfuscate the confusion and true alienation of our time.
I’m sorry, I can’t just call in an exit. I’m sorry, I just can’t take the blue pill. I’m sorry, I don’t have the strength of 40 men with the ability to absorb hundreds of bullets fired point-blank. I’m ordinary; I’m human; I’m no hero: I’ll die and make mistakes. And so I’m terribly desirous of someone who is some kind of superperson to come in and clean up the mess we’ve made.
. . .
No but see, I did the dishes tonight (– at least part of them). We had our pasta, we did the dishes. Has the President ever done dishes?
Look, I’m utterly distressed. I’m at a loss for a clear sentiment here — I mean, any hope of raising kids normally, with a sense of right and wrong and order is out the door, thanks to the most popularest-ever Decider in Chief. You do realize what’s going on, right? You do realize what else has been happening lately? You do realize that nothing the President says is true, is believeable, is trustable, is something that you should repeat with authority? That our credibility as a nation is in the ashtray? That this country — our country — is being lead by a baboon?
Fuck, the man signs a bill into law and then jots down the ways in which he’s not bound to play by them in the Federal Registrar. I mean, why have a system of courts? Why have a Constitution? Why did they fucking play that stupid ass “How a Bill is Made” video over and over in grade school when they left out the most important part: that the Supreme Dicktator isn’t bound to mortal laws… only the ones of His choosing.
. . .
That’s why I’m calling out the superheros. That’s why we need their help. There is no law in this country — not even the one that was supposed to get the person that we voted for the most into the White House — that applies to this administration. While the sniveling proletariet stutter through the metal detector conveyer belts that They Who Rule’ll never be subjected to, shovel $8 fuel into oversized steel death machines, while we foot the bill and they sip the champagne of Crusade Spoils and the rancorous chorus of the maligned, the disenfranchised, the disenchanted, dispirited, overpromised, underdelivered — the normals — grows deafening, the cracks begin to appear.
But they’ll not tumble without an unyielding force of righteousness — and without the help of the supers. I mean, badazz supers, like Batman. Or like Jules in Pulp Fiction. This is what he’d say, on the page right before the very last page of the series:
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
Text HellsYeah to 66937
So I’ve been doing some work with Palo Alto-based startup Mozes for the past month or so and it’s exciting to see that work beginning to trickle out, first at Maker Faire and now AlwaysOn Hollywood (check out 19:19-26:00 in this video). It’s funny, but apparently I’m a “presentation” guy too — meaning that, yeah sure, I do interface and experience design, but I also do presentation prep. Guess it just comes from the “communications” part of my training. (Oh, and some pop trivia for you: the first work I did for Mozes was unpaid, happened at ETECH and turned into the design they used for their Maker Faire shirts).
Anyway, I just wanted to put out there how cool this stuff is. I mean — disclosure: I’m paid to help Mozes improve their product and get the word out — but that’s not why I write about things. Nor why I’m writing about Mozes. Nor why I’m working for them (though reconciling what else I have of value that would help me pay the bills still eludes me).
I actually really like their tech — and I think they’re eager to make this the best, coolest platform for leveraging the nexus of the SMS-Web.
Don’t believe me? Ok, smarty pants — try it: text hellsyeah to 66937 (aka Mozes on the keypad). You should get not only get back a text message, but you’ll also have some links and other goodies stored online for you to retrieve at your leisure.
Guess how long it took me to set that up? 24 seconds. The stupid icon took me longer than inputting what I wanted for the response.
“Yeah, neat, big deal” you say? Well, ok, tonight only, try this: text dj? followed by a number 0-201 — or choose from this list. What will it do? It’ll change the currently playing that the Mozes folks are listening to at their Cinco de Mayo party!
How is that possible? Well, for every keyword that you create (go sign up now and get your own free keyword), you can shunt the data off to your own open API and have the data returned to Mozes. That means that you can pipe dynamic data from your super-hyped up Web Two Dot Oh app back to any SMS device via a simple keyword on Mozes’ system.
This is just the beginning — and I’m terribly jazzed about pushing this platform forward. In fact, I want to know what you want to do with this thing. I mean, I gave you one example — another is to text a radio station like ‘kroq’ to Mozes to get the currently playing song information… But I’m more interested in what you want to do with this thing. I’ve got plenty of ideas, but none are likely as good as yours. So tell me, whatcha whatcha whaaatcha want, whatchawant?
Damn you Apple hardware! Damn you to hell!
No less two months after I brought my PowerBook G4 in to get the trackpad, power input and white spots fixed, not only are the effing white spots back but the lower RAM slot is b0rked.
You know what the means.
My precious two jiggabites of humina humina memory have been slashed in half like the rainforests that were destroyed as a result of Apple’s poor environmental record.
So it need not be said that Tiger’s speed isn’t so speedy anymore; in fact, its moves more resemble a sloth with a limp. But I digress.
This is apparently a “common problem” according the Mac Genius who took my repair details down — notably the same one that I talked to two months ago when I had my other issues. And it’s also apparently the reason that my PowerBook doesn’t sleep when I tell it to — coming alive like some “Sorry, Dave I can’t do that” somnamulbot when I tuck it away in my fraying Timbuk2 bag.
Man I’m a mess.
Anyway, here’s what I need some advice on… I happen to have another PowerBook G4… the previous model — that works fine. All I want to do is copy over my system verbatim to the old and pick up from where I’m leaving off from my current system so that I can ship this puppy off to Apple to get repaired. This shouldn’t be that hard, should it?
Anyway, I left Synk (an rsync wrapper) running for 8 hours last night but after encounteringo only 5 minor errors, wasn’t able to produce a bootable clone machine… I’m sure the data’s there, but a key component here is zero downtime when switching over — I just want to swap the data from one system to another and keep going!
I’ve tried Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner in the past but had a similarly sticky time — having it crash midway through a backup.
Is there any simple way to do this?! Preferably with a GUI? I mean, I could try to just take out the whole harddrive and deposit it in the other, but I’ve never done that… would you recommend that route for a fairly savvy hardware dude?
Factory Joe 