However, I travel constantly and oddly have been reasonably unscathed by the travel woes that so many others have had to suffer this past Spring and Summer. Omar notes that much of the nation’s flyers have not been so lucky (so much so, that even the Bush Administration cannot ignore it any longer).
I suspect my good fortune is a combination of (1) never traveling with luggage; (2) never having to travel through NYC airports; (3) traveling between major airports.
Mind you, I have had a few delays and a couple aircraft/equipment changes that totally screwed me in the seating chart. However, compared to the horror stories that some have had, I consider this nothing (especially when one considers how often I travel).
Categories: Travel
An interesting observation: I have a iPod “click wheel” (80GB). While recently listening to it, it was sitting on my desk, face up. Directly next to it (parallel and separated by about 2 inches) was my Blackberry 8800. I was just working away and listening when all of a sudden the volume on the iPod completely freaked out (went way up, way down, way up).
After I calmed down from the jarring effect this had, I wondered what could’ve happened (and feared that perhaps I was seeing the beginnings of some “blue screen of death” type of iPod behavior). It happened a few more times, and I was able to realize that it wasn’t a ghost that was causing the “volume freak out”. No, instead it seemed to freak out when the Blackberry beside it received email or SMS messages.
However, after I moved the Blackberry (to check a message) and replaced it on the table, I was unable to replicate the behavior. I suspect the two gizmos were lined up “just right” and with some more playing I may be able to recreate the behavior, though I’m not sure that that’s worth the time investment.
It was just weird.
Categories: Gadgets
September 17, 2007 · 1 Comment
As I’m flying about all the time, I frequently find myself seeing interesting views out my airplane window. It seemed like something that would be easy enough to chronicle, and thus was born my most recent online creation – the photo blog 10 days (13,680 minutes) at 30,000 feet.
These snapshots are by no means works of art. However, the Internet is now able to enjoy, in all their glory, any odd views that find my fancy while I’m shuttling between my 3 favorite destinations1.
For those curious about the technical details, all photos are currently being taken with a sad little Logitech Pocket Digital 130 at it’s maximum resolution (which isn’t saying much). Any contrast, etc. adjustments happen in Gimp.
1 If you don’t know what those are, checkout the About section.
Categories: Travel
I’ve had a UI feature on my wish list for iPod for awhile. Simply, I frequently listen to my music using the “shuffle music” feature on the iPod (e.g. randomly play all the music that’s in that thing).
While listening, I will often come across a song that makes me think “man, that’s a great album, I’d like to listen to that right now”. Unfortunately, this is really painful to accomplish. You need to back out to the main screen, then drill into music/artists/album hierarchy to get to the album that’s current playing and then play it.
I find it hard to believe that I’m the only person that this happens to. It doesn’t seem like it’d be that difficult to have a method to “hop” to the parent album from a song being “now played”.
I understand that the iPhone and iTouch basically have this ability (e.g. you can “flip” album art over and see the entire album’s index. While I’ve never tried to actually accomplish this use case on either device, the demos I’ve seen imply that it’s probably possible for them). However, rumor has it that the newly revamped Nano and Classic interfaces have no optimizations here.
If true (I’ll get my hands on one to try myself eventually), it’s a real bummer.
Categories: Gadgets · Technology
September 9, 2007 · 1 Comment
One feature key feature in the Outlook + Exchange pairing is calendar free/busy. This is the ability, when scheduling a meeting, to see the available times that the various invitees are free. Unfortunately, until recently there haven’t been very many good options for allowing non-Exchange users of Outlook to do the same1. I’ve been dying to find a reliable solution to the sharing of calendars in this way so that my wife and I can see each other’s schedules (especially valuable when we’re in different time zones and trying to connect with each other).
With Outlook 2007 there are now finally a couple of options. Outlook now supports publishing calendars (and updating them automatically) via WebDAV. Anyone who’s a Mac user out there, already knows that iCal has been supporting this for some time. This allows one to publish their calendar to any web server that supports WebDAV.
Additionally, Outlook also supports publishing and sharing calendars via the free Office Online (not to be confused with Office Live – don’t ask) service. However, when I tried to publish a restricted (read: password protected) calendar on the service it failed multiple times (in various ways). I eventually gave up2.
Instead, I went back to just using the WebDAV support in Outlook. Here are the steps I took to share my work calendar with my wife:
- Setup an Apache + WebDAV server on my home machine (actually on my Mac Mini) and configure it to require basic authentication for any DAV actions.
- Go to my work Outlook, calendar view, and right click on the icon for my main calendar in the left side task pane. Choose “Publish to Internet” > “Publish to WebDAV Server”.
- In the “Location” field fill out the URL to your DAV-enabled directory on the server. In “Detail” set the information you want to share (I want my wife to see everything on my calendar – I have no secrets from her <grin>, so I chose “Full Details”).
- In the “Advanced” button/dialog, ensure that “Automatic Uploads” are chosen. Also, you can include details on items marked as private here if you want.
- Hit “OK” and Outlook will start trying to upload the calendar data to the server. Assuming you have your server’s DAV directory password protected, you will be prompted with a Windows username/password authentication dialog. Fill this out and don’t forget to tell it to remember the credentials with the checkbox.
- You’ll be asked if you want to “send” this published invite information to anyone. Say “yes” as, even if you don’t want to send anything, this is the easiest way to the get the full URL that Outlook published the calendar to. This will open an email compose window with a URL of the calendar in question in the header. Copy down the URL and close/cancel the message.
And here are the steps required to allow my wife’s machine to read my published calendar:
- Go to Outlook and choose the “Tools” menu > “Account Settings”.
- In the Account Settings dialog, go to the “Internet Calendars” tab.
- Choose “New”.
- Enter the URL you wrote down from step 6 above (it should begin with webcal://).
- Choose “Add”.
- You’ll be prompted with the same Windows username/password dialog that you were when you published the calendar on the other box. Fill in the appropriate information and presto, you can now see the calendar (it appears on the left task/calendar pane under “Other Calendars”).
As an added bonus, as I noted above, any of my Mac machines can use iCal to read these calendars too. It’s a “nice to have” for me (my Macs are not my primary boxes), but cool nonetheless.
1 Yes, it is true, there are some Internet calendaring options out there. Windows Live Calendar + Outlook Connector should allow you to get your calendars and share them with others (if you’re a paying Hotmail Plus customer). However, I found this solution was awfully fragile and, historically, had little success with it. I have high hopes for the future WL Calendar releases. Other options like Google Calendar do allow users to publish their calendars out, but don’t allow them to use Outlook as their primary repository/editing method.
2 The Office Online sharing service also, if you choose to restrict your calendar access, uses Microsoft Passport (now Windows Live ID) to authenticate users. This is something I was hoping to avoid having to use.
Categories: Online Industry · Technology
Omar mentions that Google Reader finally got search. I have only just started playing with this tool (after being pointed to it by Omar’s prior post on same), and I have to agree with him. My early impressions are that it will replace my use of FeedDemon.
The lack of search was one of the major bitch issues I still had about Reader. Interestingly, however, it doesn’t appear to have a key binding for getting into the search box (unlike just about everything else you can do in reader, which does have a key binding – something that has helped it truly win my heart). Perhaps it was an oversight as part of shipping the new feature quickly. On the same “not sure if it hasn’t been added because the feature is still evolving” front: special search markup for applied tags vs. in-line keywords and phrases, etc. would be nice.
As I spend so much time on planes, my next experiment will be to see how well it does in “offline mode”. Predictably it uses Google Gears, so this will be my inaugural experience with both.
UPDATE: Chris Wetherell was nice enough to note in the comments that the “/” key is the shortcut to the search field in Reader (just as it is in GMail).
Categories: Online Industry · Technology
Perhaps there is something to this whole Facebook thing. Sitting in the coffee shop in my sleepy little berg in the Midwest (we get everything last here) mid-day on a Friday. 5 laptops. 4 have Facebook on their screens.
It’s a valley lunchtime game amongst many: what’s the price that Facebook will be picked up for (rumors have been that they were offered about $1.5B a couple years ago and turned it down). There are those that argue > $5B, I’ve never been able to believe it. However, if the damn thing has this much market penetration and the average visit length that they claim (something like 30 minutes a day is what I’ve heard), who knows.
Categories: Online Industry · Technology
While trying to get into a modified version of Getting Things Done, I found myself doing some web searches to find how to leverage a smartphone/always-available-email for the same purpose.
Gary Slinger has a good set of tips and recommendations for helping to fold GTD-style workflow with the use of a Blackberry. Nothing crazy new here, but a nice synopsis of some good best practices. Of course, there really isn’t anything in the suggestions that couldn’t be applied to any connected smartphone.
Categories: GTD · Gadgets · Technology
One of the more powerful, yet simple, accessories that Apple shipped for their iPods is the universal dock when coupled with an Apple Remote control. Suddenly, you really can plug your iPod into your home stereo (via the audio out port on the dock) and use “shuffle my music”. Before, if your Backstreet Boys came on during a gathering, you’d have to dive across the room to hit the next track button. However, now you can use the remote to control the iPod.
I was thinking that it would be really nice if you could use the same basic pieces to control iTunes on your PC. Mac owners get this built in, thanks to the IR sensor on the front of all Macs, and their software that’s aware of it (Frontrow et al). However, wouldn’t it be great if the dock, which can receive IR commands, could also go up the USB cable that connects it to the PC and control iTunes?
I’m not sure if this is even possible (I suspect not), as the electronics in the dock would have to know to send signals to the USB port upon receiving them at the IR port, but it’d be neat. As Apple continues to try to sell digital media (movies, music, etc.) and gear to distribute it (Apple TV, iPhone) it doesn’t seem to crazy that they might want to export Frontrow and Apple Remote control to the PC platform. After all, they’re a technology company now, not just a computer one, right?
Categories: Gadgets · Technology
A recent article in the NYTimes about the Connecticut attorney general’s office probing Facebook for not doing enough to combat sexual predators and predatory behavior on the site is interesting to me. In the early years of Facebook, it was only open to students (those with a confirmed .edu email address). Later, in an effort to expand their market and allow students graduating to continue to use the service, it was opened to “established” .com company addresses.
However, now – in what one can only cynically assume is a bid to increase traffic as much as possible to try to raise the company’s valuation for sale – anyone can sign up with any email address (including “disposable” addresses from web mail products like Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail).
This seems like a classic issue of simply needing to provide a more robust “web of trust” mechanism to their users. As long as Facebook is open to all, it can never hope to eliminate entirely prior criminals from signing up. However, it can provide highly visible mechanisms to allow users to make more informed decisions on if they should trust another user. Thanks to their heritage, starting as a restricted sign up service, much of the plumbing should already be there. Here’s some ideas:
- Make network affiliated users the only “first class” citizens. To be affiliated with a network (example: University of Michigan or Microsoft are both “networks of users” in Facebook today), one must posses a valid email address with the entity that that network represents. Ensuring that this list of entities continues to be of only well known institutions and companies goes a long way to ensuring that a person’s identity has, in some way, been “validated”.
Facebook has this today, now it needs to make the difference between those that are in at least one confirmed network, and those that are not, more visible. The GUI should brand the two tiers of users more clearly. It should require users adding non-network friend candidates to their friend permissions to be “really really sure” (e.g. call attention to the fact that no amount of “confirmation” of this user’s identity has occurred) and non-network users may even have more restricted levels of ability (e.g. cannot start groups, cannot upload photos, etc.).
- To ensure that network affiliation continues as a valid “endorsement” of a user’s trustworthiness, Facebook should reconfirm network membership on a regular basis (probably by just requiring that the same registration process via email used prior, be used again – quarterly or annually).
- For those folks who work at small/micro companies or just don’t want to register their with employer/school/alumni network, Facebook should allow for unaffiliated users to “establish their bona fides”. Specifically, a non-networked user can become more “trusted” if they get endorsements from networked users.
To prevent gaming of this by getting some unsuspecting users who will endorse anybody, if an endorsed user is reported to be unsavory by multiple trusted users, the value of the endorser’s endorsements drops (and can eventually go to zero if they endorse many untrustworthily members).
Finally, a user may choose to not trust non-networked (even if endorsed) members, and thus ignore them, unless endorsements come from friends in their own social group.
These mechanisms allows for non-network users to become “more trusted”, while preserving the “first class citizen based on trust” model.
At the end of the day, the best a service like Facebook can really hope for it to provide enough information to its users to allow them to make informed decisions. Providing more explicit coupling of trust to verified (or at least trusted) identity can help this. As an added bonus to Facebook, it should encourage more folks to signup with their trusted entity email addresses, which only helps the business side of Facebook (allowing them to have a more robust understanding of the demographics of their user population, thus providing a richer value to advertisers).
Categories: Online Industry · Technology
