Author (#2)May 2005 Archives

Interesting take from the O'Reilly Radar on the Google factory tour--or better said, a slam.

I'm attending the Google Factory Tour today, and I've figured out what bugs me about Google's public presentations.... we've seen over-produced video segments cut as though for MTV, putting "about our company" banalities against shots of the executives making funny faces... the tone just feels all wrong. It's akin to watching comedy from a foreign culture; you can see that the director and the editor think this next part should be funny, but it's not.

I think the author is a bit harsh. I think Google likes to portray itself as a different company and for example, having their CFO (Chief Food Officer) address analysts is meant to communicate fun not incompetence. Sounds like they may need to add some traditional elements to these sort of meet-ups. But I know the stuff I like about company meetings is seeing new product releases, achievements and a sense of humor. Financials by companies usually show graphs up and to the right. They never change much. I think the only way you really know companies are doing well is to look at what's actually coming out of them.

Check out Greg's weblog for a good overview of the tour.

Given most users are lazy, I've been waiting until someone started experimenting with automated tagging. Yahoo has a prototype they just threw up for popular tags generated from top Yahoo News stories. Explained here. I'll bet we'll see a lot more of this from others in the not so distant future.

Still rebuilding my system after my OS 10.4 install. Today I hacked around trying to get the Seattle Public Library lookup (a la Jon Udell) working. Looks like the library changed their search URL around a bit and broke the bookmark listed on Jon's site. Here's the updated javascript. Copy and paste it into a bookmark URL field and when you visit some book page and select the bookmark, it will scan your web browser URL field for an ISBN and run a look-up against the Seattle Public Library catalog. I tested it with this ISBN on Amazon and B&N.com and worked great.

Seattle Library Lookup Bookmark (drag this link to your browser bookmark bar or right click, copy the link and paste into a new bookmark)

I saw Viesturs talk at a National Geographic lecture a few years back. Amazing guy and extremely well disciplined. Well, I guess that's how you get to climb the 14 highest peaks in the world without oxygen. Did you know I ran an eight minute mile today? ;-)

Local climber attempts record summit (5/10/2005): "In an attempt to become the first American to summit all of the planet's 26,250-foot peaks, Ed Viesturs of Bainbridge Island today began his climb to the top of Annapurna in Nepal." (Via PI: Local News.)

Keyboard short cutters unite. Apple posted a helpful Spotlight Tips page outlining some power user features. Already, I'm using Spotlight to navigate my system. A quick Command + Space, enter an app name and away I go. I'm wondering if I should give Quicksilver a try again.

This last Saturday I spent the morning lounging around reading. Then a little email and RSS catch up followed by a trip to Madison Park to buy some flowers for Mother's Day (BTW, the Red Apple there is one of the best places in town to buy flowers without breaking the bank). Then I took a coffee break at $tarbucks and read some more. Went back home and went for a run. No TV. No ADD lifestyle. It was wonderful. That's when I decided I have to try this more--it shouldn't be out of the ordinary. How to do it? Do what matters. Cut the distractions. I've been thinking more and more about the ETech talk about Life Hacks I listened to back in March.

Things that have caught on at 43Folders. Getting things done--a framework for making progress on the projects that are important to you. Get things you want done into atomic activities that you can more easily track. This is one of the things people come to 43Folders for. "I have these challenges in my life and this is how I choose to form the solutions."

Challenges and how to form solutions (that actually get done). You'd think I'd simply apply my program management mindset and away I go. It's easier to make other people do stuff than myself. ;-) But working on it.

There's some panic in-suing about Tiger's new Dashboard functionality. Some notes from Macintouch this morning. Here's the jist:

[Dave Schroeder] When Safari is in its default state, i.e., with "Open 'safe' files after downloading", what happens is the following:

• The widget is downloaded, unpacked, and moved to ~/Library/Widgets (a website could do this automatically)
• The next time you run Dashboard, the widget is in your shelf (when you press the "+")
• You must deliberately run the widget

Mac OS X likely assumes that if you click it, you intend to run it. The only problem I see here is that a widget could be auto-downloaded (and installed) somewhat surreptitiously, and you might not notice it for a while. There probably should be some sort of prompt in Safari at download time (which it now does for applications). In the meantime, the sure fix for this any many other past questionable download situations is to always uncheck "Open 'safe' files after downloading" in Safari's preferences. This way, the file is downloaded, but it remains in its packed/compressed form.

Automatic installation of Javascript powered web apps on your computer? Can you say ActiveX. Apple better get this hole plugged fast or else they'll be joining Microsoft on the evening news for virus attacks.

That said, I do think the Dashboard does hold a lot of promise. A few problems I've noticed so far using Dashboard is waiting for widgets to refresh, sucks. Rather than having to set every widget with refresh options, Apple should create a Dashboard preference panel that allows the user to select a widget and choose it's refresh options. The widget developer shouldn't have to worry about stuff like that. Also, it should be trivially easy to delete widgets. Right now you have to dig into your library directory to get rid of them and then restart Dashboard. Widget Manager is a nice little freeware app to handle removing Dashboard widgets. A cool addition would be a way to ping a developer's download site so you can find out if you have the latest version of a widget. You'd think Apple would have thought of some of this--granted it's still a v1.0.

A couple cool widgets I've found so far:

• TiVo Now Playing - Looks up the most recent recording in you TiVo Now Playing queue. Very nicely done.
• Flores - Email checking app that displays itself as a vase with flowers. The more flowers you see, the more email you have. Mail already tells me when I have new email so I don't need it for that. I use it to ping Gmail as I don't regularly visit since it's mostly my junk mail account.

A good, albeit slow, dashboard site (with RSS feed) to keep track of new widgets.