Pito's Blog

Interesting article about counting blogs makes a good point right off the bat:

"First, let's step back and consider why we're counting blogs at all. You no longer see articles that attempt to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Web by stating how many Web pages there are.

But blogs are still in the process of entering mainstream consciousness, so numerical credibility is important; bloggers themselves cite the statistics a lot." (from Wall Street Journal Online)

Technorati Tags: blog

Posted by Pito Salas at 09:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I love my Mac, as y'all know. I was amused to read about Intel CEO Paul Otellini who publicly recommended getting a Mac. He was being interviewed by Walt Mossberg at the "D" conference:

'... Asked whether a mainstream computer user in search of immediate safety from security woes ought to buy a Mac instead of a Wintel PC, he said, "If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe you should buy something else.' (from Mac News Network, but I saw it in several other places.)

Meanwhile, in a related story, Dave Winer sounds like he's tempted to jump onto the Mac bandwagon. Come on over, the water's fine!

For those who want to read more, here are some links to my experiences,

• Switcher's Log
• Do Mac users have eye problems - Switcher's Log - Part 2
• Switcher's Log, Part 3: What I miss from my PC Days
• Switcher's Log, Part 4: So what software DO I use on Mac?
• Switcher's Log, Part 5: Man does this machine scream.
• Switcher's Log, Part 6: All is not honey and peaches in Mac OS X land
• Switcher's Log, Part 7: How can Apple be so brain dead about usability?
• Switcher's log, Part 8: In conclusion...

Technorati Tags: mac, microsoft

Posted by Pito Salas at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not that I'm an expert or anything...

In the last few days there have been several articles about the problems in High Tech Venture Capital. One particularly interesting one was in the New York Times on Sunday talked about the exodus of recently minted venture capitalists from the business:

"We can't really have people learning on the job anymore," Mr. Kramlich said. Two-thirds of the partners who were at N.E.A. in 1997 are no longer at the firm, he said, and then cited an internal study that went a long way in explaining why: the surviving third accounted for 85 percent of the firm's profit." (from New York Times)

Another one, from Technology Review, a first hand report from Howard Anderson, about why he is leaving the business:

"Good-bye! We venture capitalists like to think of ourselves as giants striding across the technology landscape, showering money on terrific young entrepreneurs, adding value, creating jobs, nurturing real companies. We are financial samurai. But I am giving it up. Why? [...] First, Technology Supply is bloated. [...] Second, there's a good reason why technology spending is stagnant. [...] Third, the financial markets for technology companies is no longer exuberantly stagnant. [...] Fourth, these changes in Venture Capital are structural, not cyclical."(From Technology Review.)

For me, I'll say, I consider these bullish signals. The fact that there is public hand-wringing about the "VC Model" makes me predict that the next round of Venture funds will do better than the last few. But what do I know?

I was wondering if any of my VC friends would care to respond?

Technorati Tags: startups, vc

Posted by Pito Salas at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I Just came back from seeing 'Falsettos', an unusual (and unusually good) musical, at the Huntington Theatre, in Boston. The themes cover the gamut from family, children, love, judaism, homosexuality, life and death. The music is unusual and complex and very nice. I recommend it highly. So much that I also just got the music from iTunes!

Technorati Tags: music, recommended

Posted by Pito Salas at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Check out Synergy:

"Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s)."

Cool!

Technorati Tags: interesting

Posted by Pito Salas at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The latest weekly build has been posted, BlogBridge 1.6. Check it out! There are lots of bug fixes but the major new functionality is Phase 1 of SmartFeeds. Read our blog for more details, and download it here.

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, RSS

Posted by Pito Salas at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nothing to add:

"Not only will you be able to subscribe to whatever podcast you would like using iTunes, but producers will be able to submit their podcasts for inclusion in the iTunes Music Store so that people can find them" (The Unofficial Apple Weblog)

Technorati Tags: mac, podcast, itunes

Posted by Pito Salas at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Michael Feldman of Dowbrigade has a really interesting report on something that I didn't even know was going on in Boston. Apparently they/we are thinking about providing wi-fi access across the city:

"However, there are a number of important issues to be resolved before one of these plans becomes operational: opposition from current ISP's and wireless phone providers, differing business models for paying for and possibly charging for the service, which of several competing technologies to support, and the proper role of municipal and state government in regulating access and content."

Michael has some fun with the 3x5 cards that are apparently the only way to ask questions from the panel - in the expectation of getting answers by email!

"On our yellow card we carefully wrote "We feel like we are watching C-SPAN. Why are you afraid to face the opinions of the PEOPLE?" and handed it to an efficient-looking aide and left to look up another cup of coffee. If the second panel was anything like the first, we were going to need it."

Technorati Tags: boston, wireless

Posted by Pito Salas at 08:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just a quick note of the very nice mention of BlogBridge by almost-famous Dowbrigade blog by the incredibly prolific Michael Feldman.

(Emphasis mine, throughout)

Blog Bridge is the amazing new RSS reader and aggregator from Pito Salas. Sure, it makes it easy to subscribe, arrange, view and blog from anything with an RSS feed.

But what really sets it apart is that it is written completely in Java, which means that it is platform-independent, works on any computer connected to the interenet, and it remembers not only what you are subscribed to, but which articles you have already read, or saved, or filed to read later. From anywhere, on any machine.

Being used to the much simpler aggregator built into Manila, it took us a while to discover the utility of moving feeds into channels and groups, but now it seems second nature.

There are suggested sample groupings to get beginners started, pre-packaged packets of feeds, which you can easily modify by adding and dropping feeds. (from Dowbrigade)

Wow, thanks Michael!

Technorati Tags: blog, blogbridge

Posted by Pito Salas at 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the cool things about BlogBridge's (free) companion service, is that keeps track for you what you have and have not read, even if you are using BlogBridge on more than one computer!

In other words, please sign up for the service, and set your synchronization options the way you want them (daily, each time you run BlogBridge, or manually.) Each time you synchronize, not only will your subscription lists be kept in synch, but also which articles you have or have not read.

Important note on new BlogBridge 1.5. For those of you who are running our 'weekly' release of BlogBridge, you are now experiencing a faster, smaller architecture. One of the known consequences of this is that when upgrading to 1.5 from a previous version in many cases articles unread state may be lost. Don't worry, this is a once only, known occurrence! Thank you for your patience!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge

Posted by Pito Salas at 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Some buyers of Toyota MotorCorp.'s Prius gas-electric hybrid cars are complaining that their vehicles are stalling or shutting down at highway-driving speeds, a problem Toyota attributes to software problems in the sophisticated computer system." (from WSJ, subscription needed)

And also:

In one complaint, a driver told NHTSA that the car shut down while driving at 60 miles an hour. The Prius continued to lose power as the driver pressed the accelerator. The car had to be towed back to the dealership for repairs.

Heaven help us! A whole new meaning to mission critical software!

Technorati Tags: cars

Posted by Pito Salas at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Check out the BlogBridge blog and site for the latest weekly release.

Technorati Tags: blogbridge

Posted by Pito Salas at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Welcome back Chris Lydon! Those of you who have lived in the Boston area for a while (and who are NPR listeners) will recognize the name. Chris has been on local and national TV and radio, and a couple of years ago did some really early, innovative podcasting work (yes, before Adam Curry :-)

Anyway, he is launching a new radio show, called "Open Source", and he is debugging it in public, which is pretty cool! Check out the show's blog for background and also links to the first three beta test shows. They're great!

Amusingly the latest show on his site is about Wikipedia (of which I am a huge fan) and this is Wikipedia's entry about Chris! (Wheels within wheels!)

Technorati Tags: interesting, pbs, podcast

Posted by Pito Salas at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I often hear folks beat up Microsoft Windows for being a breeding ground for viruses, spyware, and all sorts of malware. Bad Microsoft for being so sloppy!

There was a recent exchange between Scoble and Dan Gillmor, where Scoble defends Microsoft against what he feels is an unfair attack:

"But, today, he took a shot at Microsoft that I thought was unfair. Here, I'll wait while you go and check out his post.

"I would have written a different beginning to this story, roughly as follows: In winning and sustaining its monopoly in the operating system and browser markets, Microsoft has exposed countless millions of people to woes from security holes that have become conduits for viruses, worms and spyware. Now the software giant is planning to charge its captive customers to clean up the mess it created."

Dan, we've done a TON of security work and distributed that to our customers for free (one of the largest operating system updates in our history, Windows XP Service Pack 2, was given away free). We've given away a beta of our AntiSpyware program for months now (after spending lots of money to buy the company that made it). (From Scoblizer)"

People living in the world of Windows may not know that in the most recent release of the Mac OS, "Tiger" there's a security hole so big you can drive a truck through it, that if it had been in Windows, there would have been hell to pay.

So being that I live with a foot in each world, and being a fan of irony, I can't help but point it out :-)

One of the fairly neat features of Tiger is the so-called "Dashboard" - an environment to launch little handy applets (we used to call them Desk Accessories in the old days, remember? Dashboard calls them "widgets")

I say fairly neat, because while they look very pretty, in practice they aren't that useful. They are practically a direct knockoff of a product called Konfabulator, which is available for Mac and Windows. But that's not the problem...

[Update: the following paragraph has been clarified based on the comment below]

The problem is that in the default settings of Tiger, Widgets are automatically downloaded and opened without any warning. Exactly how much of the widget code gets run simply by opening it is not totally clear, but feels quite dangerous, because widgets can contain arbitrary code, with full access to the underlying system. They can even run unix shell scripts!

Now there's a simple setting ('Open "safe" files after downloading') which you can turn off to disable this risky behavior. But of course most users will never discover this setting or be aware of the risk.

There has been quite a bit of handwringing about this in the Mac community, and speculation that Apple will fix this bug in the first rev of OS X Tiger. But in the meanwhile, let's see if any malware strikes.

Certainly if the shoe had been on the other foot (or the shade on the other Windows) there would have been hell to pay for Microsoft!

Technorati Tags: mac, microsoft, osx, security

Posted by Pito Salas at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I came across this bit:

"Are we going to be a player in VoIP? Absolutely. Are we going to be prepared to disrupt our own business? Absolutely, Why? Because if not, somebody else will." (Techdirt)

It reminds me of stuff I used to say way back when, when I was making the case for building Improv (which was code named "BackBay", and as an R&D project "Modeler".)

In those days, of course, Lotus (remember?) was the undisputed PC software leader, with 1-2-3 (remember?) being the wunderkind-unbelievable-cash cow for Lotus. I used to say things like "With Improv we threw out the rule book and went back to basics - what do people really need to build good spreadsheets?"

What happened of course was that all that talk was great and even convincing while we were building the product, away from the eyes and ears of our field sales force and sales organization.

Once the product was done and needed to be launched and sold, suddenly we weren't quite as easily prepared to "disrupt our own business."

Live and learn!

Technorati Tags: improv, strategy

Posted by Pito Salas at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Richard MacManus made a statement in a post last week which elicited a lot of very interesting responses:

"Competition for Bloglines: We're nearly halfway through 2005 and there's still no heavyweight competition to Bloglines, in the web based RSS aggregator stakes."

The comment thread on the post is excellent and interesting, so I won't parrot all that stuff all over again. If you are interested, take a look there. (I especially recommend this response from Michal Migurski.)

But here's my question: isn't it way too early to be assuming that there's a 'winner' which has to be unseated?

Of course I am a big fan of blogs and RSS, but let's recognize that this is still a tiny phenomenon in the greater world and that there will be many variations and combinations, integrations and disintegrations that will have to be invented.

I mean, clearly Bloglines is a first generation web based aggregator. Yes, it's garnered an apparently strong following (within this proportionately tiny phenomenon.)

But as you can see the comment thread on Richard's post, there are several teams working on reinventions of the idea of a web based aggregator and any of them may turn out to be the Next Big Thing.

Technorati Tags: blog, RSS

Posted by Pito Salas at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A really interesting article about Blog Comment Spam. This is one person's attempt to really follow all clues to their sources. It doesn't end all that satisfactorily but it's a good read. Coincidentally I just opened up comments on this blog and got hit with 80 bits of spam (and 6 real comments.)

For some crazy reason the comment spammers attack a single post. In my case, it was "Hacking the Papal Election" which alone got hit with the 80 comments.

Technorati Tags: blog, spam, puppy

Posted by Pito Salas at 05:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good morning sports-fans. We recently totally revamped the BlogBridge web site. Take a look, and let me know what you think.

Importantly, it now includes a group blog where the BlogBridge team posts bits of interest to anyone interested in the project.

We have started a new series of posts there called: "Did you know" where every day we (try to) post a short article describing a feature or capability of interest to users.

Check it out!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, UI

Posted by Pito Salas at 07:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I like to come across music from my collection of CDs that I haven't listened to in a while. Here's what I do:

1. I create a "Smart Playlist" called, for example, Folk - Unplayed
2. The "match query" includes Genere is Folk and Play Count is 0

As I play this list, it gets continually shorter as each song is played and removed from the list. Riff on this technique - other genres? Played once only? etc. Neat.

Technorati Tags: cool, itunes

Posted by Pito Salas at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Susan Senator has published a book: "Making Peace with Autism":

"It's her memoir about our family, and how we have dealt with the autism that afflicts our oldest son"

(Susan is Ned Batchelder's wife.)

Check it out, and also check out the web site (probably written with Python :-) that Ned built for Susan.

A book that I read recently about what it might be like to be autistic is "The Curious Incident of the Doc in the Night-Time", or the book with the upside down dog on the cover.

I thought it was an excellent book whether or not you are interested in autism. It's an engaging and quick read. And if you don't know anything about it, you are sure to get some new perspective.

Technorati Tags: interesting, book

Posted by Pito Salas at 06:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The highly anticipated Mac OS X "Tiger" arrived in my hot little hands, and I've spent most of the day installing it (2 hours) and getting everything to work again (6 hours and counting.)

One of the highly touted new features is "Dashboard" which is a "not quite as good as" knock-off of Konfabulator.

One of the widgets is a 'translation widget" to translate from one language to another. I've no idea whether the translation is on board or being outsourced to a web site.

It works pretty well, but you can have fun with it, by translating the same phrase back and forth.

"Why are you looking at me?"

"¿por qué usted me está mirando?"

"why you are watching to me?"

"¿por qué usted está el mirar a mí?"

"why you are to watch at me?"

"¿por qué usted está el reloj en mí?"

"why you are the clock in me?"

"¿por qué usted está el reloj en mí?"

At which point it stabilized asking me about the clock in me.

Ok, so some of those hours were spent playing around!

Technorati Tags: mac, osx, funny

Posted by Pito Salas at 09:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Pretty neat little web site, via Ned Batchelder: AllTheLogos.com - Gif and Vector EPS Logos:

Technorati Tags: interesting

Posted by Pito Salas at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Interesting: I can reach 1.1 Million people through my 125 connections on LinkedIn, and there are a total of 2.1 million people registered. So I can reach one out of two. My statistics are not good enough to analyze the significance of that, but it is a bit surprising.

Technorati Tags: interesting, linkedin

Posted by Pito Salas at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Two of my all time favorite Mac OS X applications just came out with new releases:

Adium Xis a beautiful multi-IM-service client. It's based on GAIM but with a true OS X user interface. For PC users, it's kind of like Trillian but nicer! They just came out with a new version. The one thing everyone hasn't done yet is to add Skype IM support. They are coming on strong as a competitive IM network.

Ecto is a beautiful multi-blog-service authoring tool, in other words, it gives you a nice and rich edior for your posts. They also have just come out with a new release. For me the key new feature is Technorati Tags support.

Recommended!

Technorati Tags: blog, cool, mac, osx

Posted by Pito Salas at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I saw this in the Wall Street Journal:

"Marcos Weskamp, a 27-year-old Web designer in Tokyo, created a graphical interface1 for Google News as a way to see how much attention is given to individual stories. A headline that has appeared in several publications is represented by a large box, while a story that is less widely covered shows up as a smaller square. The boxes are grouped by color into categories like business and entertainment." - Wall Street Journal, subscription needed.

What a totally cool idea, and beautifully implemented!

Technorati Tags: cool, UI

Posted by Pito Salas at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Maybe you've read or heard my rants about what has become known as the "Scary Dialog Box" that users see when the run a Java application without a valid certificate.

And if you have used BlogBridge, you will have seen it and many of you have asked what the heck it means, and I am sure many more have chosen not to run BlogBridge because of it.

Sun has heard this complaint from many many people and is now trying to fix the problem, by introducing this new alternative dialog box to report the same thing. There's a post and a thread about this here. Here's what you see if your application is signed with a verified certificate:

Is this an improvement? Yes.

Is it good enough? No!

IMHO the whole idea of using certificates to sign applications is fatally flawed. It provides illusory security.

As a small developer, all I have to do to make it go away is to spend some number of hundreds of dollars to get a certificate from Verisign or one of the many other CAs. When I do this, the message then becomes this:

How is the user any more secure?

Any malware developer could do the same thing. Of course they are smart enough so their company name wouldn't show up as "Malware Developer" and the application wouldn't be called "Big Bad Virus."

How is the user to know?

So my problem with this whole signed application certificate thing is that it gives the user a very false sense of security.

Technorati Tags: java, security, webstart

Posted by Pito Salas at 08:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Long time readers of this blog (yes, I can say that now, it's been 2 years or so :-) know that I am a Dave Winer fan and a daily reader of Scripting News. In yesterday's posts, Dave talks about life and death, honest, open, sincere, like no one else can:

"What's it like to die? Some people believe they know, but that's just a belief. You won't know for sure until it happens to you. And that, my friends, is both the curse and the blessing of humanity. It's the curse because it haunts each of us from the age of seven or eight when it first hits us that we're going to die too." (from Morning Coffee Notes, Scripting News.)

I remember, but for me it happened around age 11 or 12, but it was the same experience.

Anyway, it's Dave's birthday today, so this post is in his honor. As it happens Dave and I are almost the same age. For me the big five-oh is coming in about 6 months.

So Dave, Mazel Tov on your birthday, and I hope to still be reading you when we both are eighty!

Posted by Pito Salas at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)