My Projects // September 8th, 2006
Here is a list of projects (in no particular order) that I would like to complete in my free time over the next 12 months or so, if for no other reason then I like to do these sorts of things. It doesn’t quite seem like a hobby, but it certainly doesn’t feel like work.
Finish my baseball stat sites by the free agency periodfailed.Build a local web server running Ubuntu Linux with LAMP and Ruby on Rails while using a wireless USB adapter(ugh) to connect to my home network. failed, sorta. I have the box running like I want now.Create web sites for my parents restaurants, but sites geared more towards the business administration aspect. Having it web based, they could then access the tools from anywhere.Overkill, not needed.Develop and maintain my own social web site that is only for people I know and trust, all 8 of themNot really a priority, moved way off the to-do list.- Create my own version of the Flickr home page, you know, one that is actually useful
Update the layout code of my web sitedone- Create my own php script that can scrape web data to create RSS feeds for sites that have none
- Look into using FreeNAS as a local backup solution and maybe tie in with Amazon’s S3
Blog more, begin to develop a better personal brandDidn’t happen. Lost interest really.
Sounds like a lot, it isn’t really. I just need to prioritize well. I am hoping by making this public it will force me to work on these ideas rather than just talk about them.
Lunch 2.0 at Hitachi Data Systems // August 21st, 2006
My co-worker, Jeremiah, has put together one of the next Lunch 2.0 events to be held at our company’s conference center on September 12th in Santa Clara.
I look forward to this event and meeting a lot more people who are interested in the web experience. If you’re also interested, come on out, it is a free event.
On Web Feeds // August 10th, 2006
As a web developer and avid web surfer, I find it annoying when I come across a web site that does not provide a web feed.
For those that don’t know;
A web feed is a document (often XML-based) which contains content items, often summaries of stories or blog posts with web links to longer versions. News websites and blogs are common sources for web feeds, but feeds are also used to deliver structured information ranging from weather data to “top ten” lists of hit tunes. The two main web feed formats are RSS and Atom.The terms “publishing a feed” and syndication are used to describe making available a feed for an information source, such as a blog. Like syndicated print newspaper features or broadcast programs, web feed contents may be shared and republished by other web sites. (For that reason, one popular definition of RSS is Really Simple Syndication.)
More often, feeds are subscribed to directly by users with aggregators or feed readers, which combine the contents of multiple web feeds for display on a single screen or series of screens. Some modern web browsers incorporate aggregator features. Depending on the aggregator, users typically subscribe to a feed by manually entering the URL of a feed or clicking a link in a web browser.
One site that doesn’t provide a web feed is the news page for an unofficial Tool fan web site, The Tool Page. Now this site has been around and provided quality news and information about the band Tool for 11 years. In a majority of that time, I would check the site every day, sometimes multiple times a day looking for the latest news or info on one of my favorite bands. Even those days are gone and my interest in the band wanes, it would still be nice to get the updates in my feed reader but I can’t, but more importantly I don’t want to bother with reminding myself to checking for updates daily — another reason I am losing interest in the band.
Another site that should provide web feeds, but doesn’t is Yahoo! While they provide RSS feeds for their AP, Reuters, and entertainment news feeds, they don’t for other items such as fantasy sports. I often play some sort of fantasy sport; baseball, hockey, or football each year on Yahoo because they provide the most reliable and user friendly environment. However, it has been frustrating to stay on top of things in my league as I am too busy, tired, or uninterested in keeping up with the day-to-day happenings. A web feed of the necessary information would alleviate this issue because I would find out about the latest transactions, scoring, and discussions in one place, on my schedule allowing me to keep track. Instead I check at random times during the day, maybe missing a relevant trade, or important or funny message board thread. It would be great for all users if Yahoo were to provide a web feed of all transactions and discussions occurring in the various leagues. But, as of now, Yahoo does not, presumably because they would rather have users’ “eye-balls” on their site viewing advertisements. Shame.
The last site I want to mention is Equibase.com the web site for the Equibase Company which is a “general partnership between the Thoroughbred Racing Associations of North America (TRA) and The Jockey Club to provide the Thoroughbred racetracks of North America with racing information and statistics”.
For a long time I have casually watched the triple-crown horse races but only up until a few months ago did I try to learn more about the sport. Now instead of being able to track horse and jockey performances, race results, and various industry news via web feeds, I have to go their site ( hopefully after all the data has been updated), and then either find the wanted result on their result page, watch a scroller with the simple results go by or load a PDF file with detail results of each race that occurred at each track. Needless to say that is a hassle, why would one put themselves through the ordeal? If I can’t learn more about the sport or access the information I need or want or should have, how am I going to be more involved and help make it grow? Simple, I can’t and it has been over a month since I watched a race.
Now compare these three with the Amazon Web Services blog. It is maintained by the Amazon Web Services Developer Relations Team and they recently linked to my ‘I hate hard drives post‘. It was through their incoming link I discovered their blog and honestly, at first I wasn’t terribly interested in the Amazon services beyond S3. Even so, I subscribed to their feed to follow along with their various discussions, and guess what? I’ve become considerably more interested in all of their services. Why? Because I was able to read along at my pace, at my set time, when I choose. And when I can choose the time and place, the topic has all of my attention.
Bottom line, a content-owner-to-visitor relationship is just like any other, a two-way street. If a content owner wants people to come to their site, they better make it usable, beyond interface design, and useful for the visitor to return and in turn users will help them grow. Web feeds are just one way to do this. I say a good rule of thumb for providing RSS feeds should be that if your site has any relevant content that is updated on a regular basis, it should have a companion RSS feed.
Allow your user base to grow by making it easy for them to access information with no hassle and they’ll come to trust you. Worry about making money later rather than trying to force users to do what they don’t want just because you want them too (a violation of the 2-way relationship rule). It is better to prune a overgrowth rather than try to force something to grow from nothing - I don’t know, that makes sense in my head.
I hate hard drives // July 28th, 2006
My hard drive, which was throwing a huge fit this last weekend and caused me to lose 3 days of productivity to work on one of my 6 side-projects, looks to have finally died sometime late last night. The failure of this drive as well as the drives on my last two iPods has made me start to hate hard drives and their fragility. Sure you can have 100, 200, 300 gigabytes of storage on your computer, but what are you going to do when those crash? What are going to do when you need to back up all that data? Buy yet another hard drive? Then what about backing up that drive?
One solution is on-line storage and for me, that’s the direction I have chosen to take. Using Amazon’s S3 (simple storage service) I backed up most of the data from my notebook computer before the drive failed(I think I am going to lose the last 4 days of emails and a few Photoshop comps) to the S3 servers where it sits, encrypted.
S3 is a web service currently geared towards application and web developers who need a lot of storage for their projects but don’t want to, or simply can’t pay for space they may not need or use. S3 provides unlimited storage at a low price, $0.15 a gigabyte a month stored. Good enough for me, but since I didn’t have the time to code something to use this service, I looked for existing tools.
Enter JungleDisk, a software application that will upload and encrypt your data to the S3 servers which you can then access from any computer with JungleDisk installed. What you need is simply sign up for access to Amazon’s Web Services, and you can use JungleDisk. JungleDisk is a small app the creates a network connection to S3 and maps that connection as a folder. All you need to do is just drag and drop your files to that folder and they are moved on over.
But JungleDisk isn’t the only player to utilize Amazon’s S3, there are other applications that do the same, and more are presumably coming. A few of them, as listed on TechCrunch, are Altexa, ElephantDrive, and MediaSilo. None of which I have tried as of yet, but may in the near future.
This current solution won’t be for everyone. I’m not using S3 as a network drive (I need a lower price to access the data more frequently), it is just my backup drive, where I will place files I will access, probably rarely, at a later date and time, but still need to keep a hold of. Having said that, I will still look for some sort of on-line storage for use of a network drive, you know, because I hate the hard drives now.
San Jose/South Bay Fireworks for July 4th 2006 // June 30th, 2006
Here is a list of firework shows in the San Jose, South Bay area. If you know of any others, please list them in the comments.
Great America in Santa Clara will not have a firework show on the 4th, but the 1st through 3rd instead (lame).
- NBC11 Festival for Independence (Downtown San Jose)
This will probably be the biggest firework show on the 4th. Traffic isn’t that bad if you take the streets just north of downtown to get out. Forget 87 since it is closed until midnight. - Church on the Hill (San Jose)
This one is the closest you’ll find to Willow Glen. I have a balcony view of this show. Photos may or may not follow. - Central Park (Santa Clara)
I don’t know what to say about this one… I lived 2 blocks from Central Park for about 4 years and never noticed their 4th of July events. - Cupertino
Fireworks Display at Cupertino High School, Cupertino Parks & Recreation - Morgan Hill
This outpost town claims “Northern California’s largest Independence Day Celebration”, whatever. Head down there if you want to watch a 30 minute firework show then spend 1 hour in traffic trying to get out of there. More info… - Gilroy
Just head to Morgan Hill and be thankful your high school’s mascot isn’t an acorn.
- update:
- There will be a fireworks show following the San Jose Giants game
Also, the Merc has a listing of locations as well. Hopefully they won’t put this article behind their membership walls.
Again, please add any I may have missed in the comments.
update:My photos
Great Unintentional Comedy or “You Had to be There” // May 2nd, 2006
The past few days I have heard so many unintentionaly funny audio clips that I have to wonder if something is wrong with me. I only remember a select few, but trust me, there were a lot more of these gems.
First one was the most recent, it was a radio spot for Shane Company that I heard last night. Tom Shane’s voice over goes like this;
“Guess who I just got off the phone with.”
a slight hesitation.
“Your mom. That’s right YOUR mom”
Thanks Tom, for reminding me of my junior high school days. For the rest of you, maybe you had to be there.
The next funny thing was some guy reciting his wedding vows at the end of TLC’s “What Not To Wear” makeover show (uuhh… one of my girlfriend’s favorite shows). Trying to express love to your new bride in front of friends and family probably isn’t easy. And it apparently wasn’t easy for this guy. As he chokes up with tears from all the emotions of the day, the groom says the following, I kid you not;
“You’re… the…. the last woman I want to spend the rest of my life with.”
OK, I know this one wasn’t just me, that has to be funny to everyone else. Right? Freud on line two, Frued on line two.
Finally, the best had to occur during this weekend’s NFL draft. Just moments after the San Francisco 49ers made their first round selection by picking Vernon Davis out of Maryland, he began to cry. And cry and cry. Now when this happens during anything sport-related the announcers will always talk about how great the cry baby is, basically making excuses for the guy. This time was no different, as Vernon was crying and walking and crying to the podium, Tom Jackson of ESPN clears everything up with, “Now these are tears of joy.” Right. As opposed to tears of sadness; “NOOOOOO!!!…. I’m going to the 49ers! waaaaaah! A team with 6 wins the last two season, waaaaaah. The whole organization is a mess, waaaaah. Mommy!”
Great Unintentional Comedy or “You had to be there”? I’ll let you decide.