Captain’s Log

Congratulations to Jeff, Josh, and Devang at GoTime for going live. If you’re in Seattle and wondering what to do/where to go, this is the first site you should check out.

I’ve been using Vista as a development machine for a few weeks now. I think it’s prettier than XP. Other than that and the appeal of using “the latest and greatest”, I haven’t enjoyed it.

Some notes so far:

• Searching. The search never seemed to find any of the files I was looking for. I eventually discovered that it wasn’t really searching everything on my hard drive, only areas that were indexed. So, I added C: to the index so it would find everything. Now it actually finds things, but the search results page is amazingly distracting. There are filters and options littered everywhere! It makes the Mac’s mediocre Spotlight look like a marvel of modern usability.
• The command line. It really is amazing. This thing has not evolved in a decade. Copy and paste is still incredibly awkward and broken. Oh, and who needs tools like grep when you have that awesome search?
• Sharing. This was one area where Windows beat the pants of the Mac for as long as I can remember. Sharing in Windows was so much easier. Vista took sharing a step backwards. After sharing a folder (which you can only do after navigating through the various control panel options which allow you to do so) the dialog box says “please wait a few minutes while your folder is shared.” Yup, that’s right, minutes. It used to be near instantaneous. Those were the days.
• UAC. I’ve heard so much about this, but it really was a site to behold. It makes Windows feel like KDE on Linux. Sometimes to edit a file (ex. your hosts file) you’ll have to literally fire up Notepad as an administrator and open the file that way in order to be able to save it. If you happened to open it by double-clicking it from a non-administrator Explorer window, you won’t be able to (and to my knowledge, you can’t in-place switch to a user mode and have to close and re-open notepad a different way). This is part of what used to give Linux such a bad rep for desktop apps. It felt so primitive - like a GUI slapped atop a system that was developed by other people (which, in Linux, is exactly how it is). Windows has now regressed to that point. Thankfully you can disable it.
• The Sidebar. I tried to like it. I like the idea. It should be useful. I found it hovered somewhere between “useless” and “distracting.” I disabled it. When I was a Linux user, I used GKrellM on Linux and really liked it, but when I tried to move to something more Gadget-like (SuperKaramba) I found it distracting. I’m currently happiest with tiny menubar meters in the Mac (in particular iStat Menus) and calling up the Dashboard if I really want to interact with a more serious widget (usually the calculator).

The good things:

• Terminal Services (Remote Desktop) is quite good. Better and faster than any equivalents I’ve seen on any other OS’s (although, in fairness, it was also good in XP).
• The font rendering is appealing to me. I don’t know much about it, but I notice that it’s different from XP and I like it.

Luckily in my case I’m not attaching a bunch of peripherals to it… that apparently has been people’s biggest source of agony. I’ve had no such issues (aside from Vista warning me that my graphics and sound card drivers, which seem to work fine, have problems). I almost wanted to come away saying “well I’m sure it’s a great OS for most people who surf the web, do some word processing, and check e-mail” until I realized what a low bar that is. So, my current conclusion isn’t that it’s bad, just that it’s not very good.

If you’re working on a software project of any magnitude, you’ll have a bunch of source files and will often need to jump between them. Most of the IDE’s I’ve used have convenient keyboard shortcuts to let you open a file by name without browsing around with a mouse:

IntelliJ: “Goto File” - Ctrl Shift N
Netbeans: “Go to File” - Ctrl Shift O
Eclipse: “Open Resource” - Ctrl Shift R

It’s a pretty basic command which is used many times a day. Lately I’ve been using Visual Studio, and I’ve yet to find an equivalent. There’s this tip which doesn’t work for me, and the FileFinder plugin which seems to do the job, but it keeps forgetting it’s keybindings after I set them. How do people open files in Visual Studio? Do they really poke around with a mouse?

I couldn’t find a website that would explain this to me in simple terms, but I was eventually able to figure it out. This is how I was able to connect my MacBook Pro to my cell phone via Bluetooth, and then use it as a modem to get it online (via 3G). To do this, your cell phone needs to support Bluetooth, and being used as a modem (sorry iPhone users). I’m doing this with a Nokia N75, and the connection parameters are specific to Cingular/AT&T.

(more…)

Apparently I live at a grocery store. They even have a picture (of my apartment complex).

Apparently they ship directly from China. Looking forward to it.

Step 1: Insert screwdriver under Caps Lock key
Step 2: Push down on screwdriver
Step 3: Caps Lock key goes flying off somewhere
Step 4: Type without ever accidentally hitting it again

As I later learned, I’m not the only one who’s tired of having such a useless key in such a prominent location.

Last year I’d made a prediction about Quicken developing an online version which, a year later, still hasn’t happened. Mint, the startup that just won the TechCrunch 40 competition did hop into this space, and they started by tackling one of the two things I’d highlighted as the most important topics for a startup to handle: automatically connecting to the various financial institutions to download your data.

The second thing I wanted the startup to tackle was importing one’s existing Quicken data, which Mint doesn’t do. It really can’t until it matches Quicken’s feature set to a reasonable extent, which it may never do. I want to do “crazy” things like enter my own transactions to manage cash, and track stocks/investments. Little details like that.

I’m not sure if that’s where Mint is heading, but it certainly could if it wanted to. Coming up with the base infrastructure, data syncing, and the scaling/security around all of that are the hardest parts, I would think. Adding features like the ability to create a cash account, which is just a check register that’s fully editable, are probably not hard. Neither is adding some rudimentary investment tools and growing those features.

I’ve used Quicken consistently for 6-7 years and am perhaps currently spoiled by it’s feature set. A good rule of thumb for whether or not something is a serious competitor to Quicken is whether or not they can tell you your Net Worth. To get an accurate count for that, it would have to include all of your cash accounts (checking/savings/cash in wallet) plus investment accounts (401k/IRA/other investment accounts) plus your liabilities (mortgage/car loans/school loans) plus your assets (car/house/boat/etc). It is becoming clear that building such a feature set is no small feat, and as such there seems to be no end in sight for me as a Quicken user.

This is old news (July of this year) but I didn’t see this post until now. Tom from MySpace explains what the idea was behind the phrase “extended network” on MySpace, and why they eventually got rid of it.

if dave knows john and john knows amy, then dave could see amy in the network. when you’d view someone’s profile it’d show if you were friends, or how you were connected to a person … within a week (or maybe even less time, hard to remember), we realized that this ‘network’ concept was really hard to scale .. the site was slowing down trying to process this relationship each time you viewed a profile. in fact, i later heard from a friendster developer that this is what slowed them down for the first year.

I thought it was pretty interesting, especially when he goes on to explain that people preferred simpler controls anyhow (public, private, friends only) and didn’t see the value in the “extended network” concept. This is in obvious contrast to LinkedIn, where the degrees of separation are an important aspect of the site (obviously, the sites serve different purposes). My gut feel is that it wouldn’t be hard to get that to scale (memcached hashtable with extended friend ids?) although MySpace’s userbase is roughly ten times larger than LinkedIn’s.

If you have a wordpress blog, and have the usual comment spam issues, I’d recommend checking out Spam Karma 2.

I don’t get a lot of spam on my personal blog because I have comments automatically disable after a few days, however that’s not an option on the wishlisting blog, especially for technical posts that people sometimes stumble upon months later via Google.

Spam Karma is free on commercial blogs (unlike Akismet) and uses a number of cool tricks to figure out whether a post is coming from a legitimate person, including:

1. How long they spent on the page before submitting a comment
2. Whether or not they’re using an actual browser (javascript test)
3. How many links are in the comment and the ratio of links to text
4. A few other things

It then gives the post a “karma” score. If the karma score is too low (looks like spam) it will give the person a captcha so they have one last shot at proving they’re a human. It’s a pretty sweet idea. Rather than hitting everyone with a captcha, they just use it on particularly suspicious comments which is far less intrusive.

Posts with low karma and a failed captcha get marked as spam, and don’t end up in your moderation queue (although you can get a regular spam report).