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  • 2 min read

Switcher’s Log, Part 6: All is not honey and peaches in Mac OS X land

When things go wrong is when you start seeing some of the disadvantages of being on the 5% pc platform. Help is hard to find, alternatives are non- existent. Briefly here is the story: I tried a 'better' Palm synchronizer called "Missing Sync" from Mark/Space. After using it for a little bit I decided it didn't really have too many advantages over the standard one, so I uninstalled it. But… I uninstalled it "the wrong way." Who knew? Who knew that there is a wrong way to uninstall on Mac? Anyway the result was that not only couldn't I continue using Missing Sync, I couldn't even continue using the original Palm HotSynch. It was exactly like what might happen on Windows XP with a corrupted registry entry or a wrong .DLLs. Every bit as bad.

  • I looked for a "force uninstall" utility for OS X. Can 't find one.

  • I tried to call Missing Sync for help. Do they even exist? I got no response to email and phone calls for several days. Finally I got several, totally off the mark responses.

  • I tried to get help from Sprint (who sold me my Treo Palm phone) - who knew exactly nothing about Macintosh.

  • I tried getting help from Handspring who built the Treo, and again, nobody home - they bounced me back to Sprint.

*

Anyway, it was hopeless. Finally with the help of some Mac expert friends, I went around deleting files and directories all over the place and was after lots of (scary) trial and error able to get the thing back to life. So, the lessons are:

  1. Uninstallation can be as dangerous as installation. Look for instructions about the 'right' way to uninstall

  2. Use the Mac market is so much smaller , expect much worse support and don't feel bad when you get the cold shoulder

  3. OS X isn 't perfect

  • 1 min read

Talking about RSS Aggregators

Doctor Scoble poses a provocative question: "Which aggregator do you like best"? Quite an amazing variety of aggregators are mentioned. It might be the most crowded space I've seen in a long time. Gee, and my own project, BlogBridge is in the space. Of course, we are willing to take on all comers because we feel that we've got a better mousetrap, and that we've pushed the envelope in some really important areas. But you know, I bet all of them feel the same way. Robert, if you read this: check out BlogBridge won't ya?

  • 2 min read

[GEEK] Java Web Start

There's another flame- up on the WebStart commentary on the web, this time under the title _" Webstart, now I see why people don't use it." _Even though I've spoken out about this once or twice, I couldn't resist weighing in.Here's what I wrote:

I have written so much about this in Blogs, newsgroups, etc that I won't rehash it here; however I will put some links below for those who are interested. My Bottom lines:

  • WebStart is a very promising (I would call it tantalizingly close) approach. The problem is that when you are trying to get people to use your application, the one place where you need to be super robust is in the install and setup and initial user experience, which is exactly where WebStart falls down.

  • The BlogBridge project is a major cross platform application that uses Java Web Start. Today there have been thousands of installation. Of the people that have any kind of installation or startup problem, 9 out of 10 are Webstart related. Try BlogBridge's Web Start experience for yourself.

  • Java Web Start is not a solid solution for a cross platform java application that you intend to deploy widely (on the internet not just internally where you can handhold each user)

  • BlogBridge will be abandoning WebStart in the next release with Great Regret.

  • IMHO Sun is acting contrary to their strategic goals (as stated) by not paying sufficient attention to a major hurdle to succeeding on the desktop and their progress on this front is so slow it's absurd.

  • Sun has heard lots of highly specific technical explanations of where the problems are and what the impact is and they say they understand but don't act on it.

Here are some links where I wrote about this in the past. I am but one voice in dozens. Click to read:

  • 1 min read

Another VC is blogging – what’s going on?

If you are interested in some thoughtful perspectives about the world of Venture Capital , from a reformed (or is it a corrupted?) entrepreneur, you should check out Jeff Bussgang 's (of IDG Ventures) new blog, "Seeing both sides." He's off to a great start!

  • 2 min read

Attention.xml

Steve Gilmor muses about the history of the Attention.xml spec in his blog. Steve thought up Atttention. xml as way to capture what feeds and items people do and don't spend time (their attention) on, collecting, aggregating and then mining this information for all kinds of purposes. (This is my interpretation, but I think it's pretty accurate.) BlogBridge is a feed reader with a primary goal to save the reader's time by collecting and using any information possible to help the user focus on what will be useful to them and ignoring the rest. So there's an excellent alignment between BlogBridge's goals and what Steve is trying to accomplish with Attention.xml. BlogBridge will support attention.xml. The section in Steve's post that is particularly interesting to me (and to BlogBridge) are his ideas on how to use Attention information to triage information being displayed in a feed reader - basically an outline of the kind of heuristics that might be used. It's a long section (in the second half of the post), so I won't quote it, but here's the tantalizing beginning:

" Why is this so important, at least to me? Because RSS is about time, and the data about lack of interest is intensely valuable to me as an indicator of what can be thrown out or pushed down the priority stack. As RSS takes hold, we are moving rapidly to a multiplicity of valuable content, where throwing out duplicates, redundancies, and repetitive analyses is key to providing enough of a window for absorbing the much greater signal-to-noise of the attention stream."

If you are interested in this topic, I really recommend that you read Steve's whole post.

  • 1 min read

Web Radio is not the same as Podcasting

Here's a really interesting article by Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe about Web Radio, reminding us that there's a whole other world out there that is related to but quite different from PodCasting.

"Thousands of others share a similar affliction, thanks to Internet technology that lets anybody with a little money set up an online "radio station." The term isn't quite right, since the Internet uses wires, not radio waves, to transmit music and chat. But Internet broadcasting has grown in popularity to the point where it's become a significant alternative to traditional radio, and an appealing venue for major advertisers."

  • 1 min read

Remix Remixed

[I wrote this in responseto this post, which had generated a lot of commentary. I liked what I wrote so much I decided to post it here too :-)] I can't count the ways when someone looked at some great new product and said something like, "I did something just like that 20 years ago as a PhD thesis", or comments like that.

"Visicalc, oh that was just like some mainframe financial modeling system I used on Mainframes…"

"Quicken, oh that's just a glorified spreadsheet…"

"Windows XP? Oh a total ripoff of the Mac, which in turn was a ripoff of the Star."

"Salesforce.com? Big deal, nothing more than Siebel running as an ASP"

"Oracle - gee we did that stuff in College in the seventies. Relational databases are just so last millenium."

I think comments like that totally miss the point. Yes, sometimes the kernel of an idea came from some other project. And often things are invented simultanuously in different domains. And ok, certain products 'perfect' what was done already in a more primitive way. But I can salute and respect each of the products I gave as examples. In my experience a 'successful' product has a relatively small bit of 'science' or 'invention' or 'creativity' and a ton of great engineering, not to mention marketing, sales and business strategy. So there's nothing new under the sun, it's all just remixes. But that doesn't necessarily make it unimportant!

  • 1 min read

Interesting blog survey

Blogads has conducted a survey of people who read blogs. The results are quite interesting. One thing that stood out to me was that72% don 't use RSS (i.e. an aggregator) to read blogs. This is consistent with another finding, which is that people who read blogs typically read about 10 of them every day. When reading "only" 10, using a web browser is more than fine. Check it out, there are lots of other interesting tidbits!

  • 2 min read

[ETECH] Taxonomy of Folksonomies

There's been a lot of talk about tags, folksonomies, taxonomies, etc. Trying to make sense out of this can be confusing. At the recent ETech conference there was more than one presentation on the topic, each of which helped me understand the subtleties a little better, and organize them in my mind. [What follows is fairly inside-baseball so if you are not particularly into this topic it will probably be somewhat obscure and likely not very interesting, so you are warned!] What are we to do with this term ' Tags'? It is used in many different places, sometimes to mean the same thing and sometimes something subtly different. This is not surprising about a set of ideas that are morphing right in front of our eyes and ears. So let's look at some examples and compare them. Let's look at tags in Flickr and tags in Del.icio.us (if you don't know one or the other, you owe it to yourself to look into them.) Both have tags, but they are different in a subtle way: In Flickr I am tagging my own stuff (pictures that I've uploaded) mostlyfor other people to find. In Del.icio.us I am tagging mostly other people 's stuff (links to web pages) formy own benefit , that is organizing links of interest to me. Look at this: metataggraph.jpg One way to organize a taxonomy of folksonomies is to notice that there are two dimensions: Whose stuff is being tagged, and for whose benefit. Flickr ends up in the bottom right, and del.icio.us in the top left. But what about the other quadrants? This organization gives a new way of looking at conventional concepts like folders and directories on personal computers (my stuff/my own benefits) and Web based directories like Yahoo (other people 's stuff/other people's benefit.)