Finally got some comment spam so shut them off. Its not like I'm leaving a lot to comment on at any rate.

Shredded Ballot

My Washington state ballot just went into the shredder. You have to pick a
party or you're vote doesn't count. The options : Republican/Democrat. Me
: neither. Shocking. Hmm, I can't imagine who thought this up.

Next gen consoles

The debate/discussion over cpu power and required software optimizations in
next gen games consoles is really interesting.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050629-5054.html

MSN Spaces

I notice that when I launch someones msn space from messenger it always
opens in IE despite my default browser being firefox.

Google plays

Of course then there is always the chance that Google will sort out the
bandwidth problems with media distribution and make everyone play their
game. http://battellemedia.com/archives/001658.php

Text wrap

My preferred way to post here is via email. Various reasons, but in the end its just convenient as email clients are already part of my workflow. Unfortunately this seems to be resulting in ugly line breaks. I'm suspicious Thunderbird is marking up the email in a way I don't like. Sorting that out here.

Wrapping Gnomedex thoughts

End of Gnomedex weekend and its time to go back to "real" work. Great conference, many ideas, very dense. At the end I pretty much ran out of conference mojo though and I think I know why. Whats impressive is the way just about everyone there is offering, sharing something with the conference. Its a 2-way kind of thing - no one way lecure here - the term seems to be unconference. The problem here is I definetely went in a very consumer mode and that sort of leaves me feeling I'm not holding my own.

So resolutions if I make it again next year. First, start the conversation in advance. All this writing here today is sort of the down payment in that regard. I was constantly struck at how people seemed to have come mid-conversation, ideas already in play. I guess thats the blogosphere for you. Second I need to have something concrete to offer. An application/code, a big idea with a plan, a blog with actual content. Something.

One way RSS

It seems to me that microsoft is having a hard time getting their heads out of a client-server mass media kind of world. Their newfound love of RSS seems to be all about comsumption and not a hint of production. They seem to be excited about providing platform/developer type support for retrieving/using RSS feeds, but what about producing them. They talk about consuming all sorts of new data/binary enclosures, but what about producing and publishing them?

Bandwidth

Where is the magic bandwidth for media enclosures going to come from as this stuff gets big? Podcasting, videocasting, whatever, creators are already experiencing bandwidth constraints that inhibits their ability to reach an expanding audience. So what happens when apple ships a
podcasting client and listener numbers start jumping by orders of magnitude? Are they going to do anything (proxy, etc) to mitigate this. Apparently we'll find out soon. http://archive.scripting.com/2005/06/27#When:1:56:22AM

The generally discussed solution to this is bittorrent. Even if everyone implements this , it has a couple of problems right off the bat. The random hosts people are prone to useing frequently don't like to find themselves hosting torrents and its likely that even the seeding requirements would still be too high. Of course it would be way cool if Apple were to come through with some kind of explicit support for bittorrent.

Things get really interesting however with Microsoft in the picture. Their stated means of downloading enclosures in RSS in their newly announced feed support for IE7 and longhorn is BITS (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=842773). No cool bandwidth saving p2p there. Of course they won't be shipping for quite a while. This interval seems like a really cool time to push widespread use of bittorrent.. What would microsoft do if they go to ship
longhorn/ie7 and find that everyone's enclosures point to torrents? If they don't support it, most/many media feeds would not work. At the same time it wouldn't be an option for the creators to re-support straight http downloads because they'd be right back to being overwhelmed. Fun, fun, fun.

Firefox and tabs

Talking quite a bit with asa (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/) from
mozilla here at gnomedex about tabs. I think there are several bits of
functionality around tabs that are really missing. Generally these
involve giving tabs the same sort of functional framework as single pages.

So this to me means a couple of things. First we need a may to create a
URL for a set of tabs that can be passed around the same ways as a
normal URL (IM, email, etc). It seems to be agreed that this would be
good and is not bad, its just work to be done. Its common for me to
research some issue (think OPML extensions) and wind up with a set of
tabs. Its great that I can bookmark that, but I want to share the
results with other people.

Secondly though, I would like to be able to open and address tabs in
javascript. This is definetely more controversial, prone to problems
(security), and probably less important.

Third I want to be able to save my entire window state on shutdown and
restore it when I reboot. I frequently haul my laptop around and reboot
several times a day, Frequently the shutdown timing has little to do
with wether I'm done working on something and restoring things easily on
startup would be a huge help. Its quite possible that this can be done
entirely outside of firefox.

Extending OPML

It seems the currently prescribed manner for extending OPML is as
follows. Include a "type" attribute and then any abritrary additional
attributes that belong to that type. Thats fine with me although there
really should be some sort of at least semi organized repository so
needless marginally different implementations of the same idea do not
happen.

I would really like to catch Dave Winer's ear for a couple minutes here
at Gnomedex to chat about this. I expect at this point he will tell me
that if thats what I want then why don't I go do it. Of course given
his apparent distaste for new formats expressing the same thing (meaning
atom of course) I would think he'd have a bit of interest in some
documentation of the established de facto standards.

I don't like feed readers/aggs

At least none of the ones that I have currently seen out there. I
understand they are valuable in terms of covering a very large amount of
info quickly but I have still never gotten myself to use one consistently.

I think I've narrowed down the major causes to 2 reasons. The first is
design. I like web design and think it provides valuable context. I
want to read the nytimes on the nytimes home pages and not in generic
blank text feeds. One idea I have here would be to have feeds provide a
style sheet along with their feed. Readers could optionally render
entries as html by applying the stylesheet.

The second reason is that I find the discontinuity between my normal
tabbed web browsing and and a separate feed app really annoying. I like
to read down a blog/news site, opening any interesting links in a new
tab. I cycle through this way pretty quickly and sometimes go directlly
to the new tab to read if it is directly in context, but normally close
tabs as I finish and eventually cycle through everything. I'm not
totally sure what the best way to resolve this although its likely that
one of the web based aggregators may substantially address it.

Sub Sync

Discussion is ongoing about subscription synchronization but I think
thats such a small part of the problem. Why are we looking at some
custom sync protocol that only covers this microsubject of feed subs. A
way bigger concern is sync of everything which I generally think of as 3
categories of stuff. Configuration, data, and applications. In other
words I don't just want my feed subs synced up, I want my feed reader
app too. Obviously thats quite a bit tougher. But thats still not
enough, I want the config, etc for all my apps, environments, etc.
Everytime I build up a machine from scratch, taking probably a days
worth of work to get to a not quite complete environment I am reminded
of this.

MSDN RSS Info

http://msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn/understanding/rss/default.aspx

Thank you to Thunderbird for putting (no subject) in my blank subjects to my posts get such cool titles.

(no subject)

Platform level rss enclosure downloads uses BITS.

RSS support in IE and common subscription store with API access is
downlevel supported for winXP.

(no subject)

Platform level rss enclosure downloads uses BITS

(no subject)

Microsoft rss extensions for list management will be released under a cc
attribution share-alike license.

Live at noon ... whats shipping

blogs.msdn.com/ie

simple list extensions spec

rss platform will be in the pdc 2005 longhorn bits.

(no subject)

These posts are going to hit in pretty random order. I'm posting via
email and the connection is way shaky so the send order is less than
predictable.

So the word is..

dean from msft is up to review msft plan. rss on longhorn is 3 main
things. 1. rss enable all windows user features. 2. rss platform for
development. 3. expand rss scenarios.

examples. first public ie7 demo. ie7 detects feed and shows rss icon.
ie7 will prepare a rendered view of a feed. live filtering of feeds.

ok this is ridiculous. i just don't care enough to bash this out.
maybe highlights later.

(no subject)

A totally open question at this point is how much of this stuff is bound
up into longhorn. Also at this point at least msft has not said they
are shipping anything.

longhorn central feed store

so longhorn is supposed to have a central feed store. the stated
functionality is that this is accessed through some windows apis. why
is it not just a common opml doc?

longhorn version

random note is that the longhorn build being demoed is 5087.

RSS and OPML

It seems to me that RSS is could be seens as the derivative of OPML.
RSS is how you stream changes to an OPML document.

Just how many blogs will blog exactly the same things from gnomedex. The wireless problems, the fire drill, ornery dave winer sticking it to whiners in the audience, etc. We probably need to read at least 300 marginally different reports.

Home Media

A really annoying thing I have come to realize about home media (music,
video, etc). If you can imagine the cool usecase, its not longer technical
barriers that stop you, its basically just drm. Working around drm and
implementing a mishmach of tools can accomplish just about anything you
want. Its difficult to believe the massive amount of functionality that's
being stopped in the course of failing to stop or really even slow piracy.

Lame

Nothing interesting and automatic happens with the phonecam shots. Oh well,
that would have been way too easy.

A Picture Share!

What happens with these phonecam shots?