Category Archives: Web Applications

Filter Failure

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What if your entire social life came to you? Friends, family, work email, personal email, messages, updates, and feeds… everything, constantly updated and streamed together in one place, so you can keep track of whatever you want and focus on what matters most.

Disclaimer: NPH does not come included with the Motorola CLIQ with MOTOBLUR.

I hate you, Motorola, and your caps.

Talk about overpromising and underdelivering. Well, then again, I don’t know, maybe this is the god-device everyone needs. iHear the Droid is supposed to do things the iPhone doesn’t, or something. Eh.

We, the Internet users, have only begun to generate data. Currently, I feel like the filters don’t exist in the present to deal with that mountain of already existing data. When I sat down and thought about StatusFix (a possible solution to this mess) three years ago, I built it for me, someone who continues to this day drink straight from the data firehose.

But with this commercial, I realized that the day has come when any person with an Internet-enabled phone (WAP? What?) is going to have this issue of Filter Failure.

Clay Shirky has talked on Filter Failure before about a year ago, just in case you missed it.

I sure hope someone’s working on it.

Google, Wave To Firefly

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Yesterday night, I started rewatching an episode of Firefly (while weeping uncontrollably at the cancellation of such a great show).

At around 1:20 on the fifth episode (not by airdate), Safe, a conversation occurs between a young Simon Tam and his Dad, Gabriel Tam.

Simon: Did you get my wave?

Gabriel: I got it. Your text shorted. I got the whole thing during a board meeting. Thank you.

Simon: If I had a dedicated source box, it wouldn’t short out. I lost half my essay.

Gabriel: Yes, and you would’ve have access to any “tyen-shiao duh”* that filtered in from the Cortex. I absolutely forbid it.

**According to this awesome compendium of Chinese phrases in Firefly, “tyen-shiao duh” (天曉得/天晓得) means “Heaven Knows What”.*

Recently, a bunch of invitations were sent out for Google Wave, a new communication project by Google. For a moment, I thought maybe it was possible that Google Wave was somehow inspired by this little conversation… but instead, I thought little of it since the idea of a “wave” seemed just ubiquitous enough in general sci-fi.

Turns out, Someone from Whedonesque already made the connection:

The presentation includes the lead programming engineers and project managers making multiple Firefly/Serenity references and even the “Wave” program itself prints the words, “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” at the bottom of the screen when it unexpectedly crashes (it’s still in development).

A couple of fun little notes, if this little conversation actually took place in a world where Google Wave has united all communication.

  • “Your text shorted.”: I think that the word “text” means something else here. Any ideas?

  • “I got the whole thing during a board meeting.” Maybe Gabriel didn’t set his settings properly… but I’m fairly certain that as things are today, it won’t push things to you, unless you’re logged in. Maybe there’s some awesome third party apps action going on. Or… maybe you’re logged into Wave all the time.

  • “… A dedicated source box…” Since the whole thing is open source (and quite a bit of XMPP magic, might I add), I wouldn’t doubt that a dedicated “source” box would be fun to play with.

  • “I lost half my essay.” That still happens? I’m pretty sure Wave starts saving things as soon as you start typing them. Regardless, are applications not able to save every single character that we type, including all the fun metadata (when was it typed, where in the universe it was typed, even… how hard it was typed on the keyboard)? Heck, do we even type anymore? I’m already missing the point by thinking about the future in such present terminology.

  • “… Filtered from the cortex.” Too open? Parental controls?

I’m having too much fun with this. And actually reading the comments from the Whedonesque post, there seems to be a bit more references to waves.

Not only is this post discussing the nerdy in a fictional universe, it’s also a friendly reminder for you to go back and rewatch Firefly. Chances are if you’re reading this, you have already done so multiple times.

Delicious, Quicksilver, And You

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Yeap, I’m still using Quicksilver. And yeap, I’m still in love with it.

And mixed with Delicious … it gets even better.

Note: There’s a note on the Delicious plugin page;

Plugin not compatible with Intel based Macs yet (does this mean “does not work with Intel Macs”, or that it’s not “universal”?)

It’s worked before on an Intel Leopard machine, as well working currently on the Snow Leopard one, so don’t worry about that.

The Goods

Bookmark your pages, just like you would, but just remember to rename the titles for those pages. Little did I know, the plugin only uses the title of the page, not the tags.

Delicious

You’ll notice that there are three “WebFaction Control Panels”, even though they all go to a different page. So I went ahead and named those something more useful for each page.

Also, I decided to lead the human-readable titles with something shorter to type. For example, I have it so that wfa goes to WebFaction’s Apps page.

Changes to Delicious Bookmarks

One caveat: After you’ve done all your messing around in Delicious, don’t forget to go into your Quicksilver preferences and refresh the Delicious catalog.

Refresh The Catalog For Delicious

Bonus: Bookmarking Via Quicksilver

Quicksilver uses the bookmarks you have locally, in bookmarks folder and your bookmarks tab.

If you already have the Delicious bookmarklet “installed”, then you already can invoke the Quicksilver action for creating a bookmark by typing out “Bookmark”.

Bookmarklet in Quicksilver

But who has time to type out “bookmark”? Time to go make it yours.

By The Way

My delicious page is at http://delicious.com/joshkim.

Git, GitHub and Social Coding

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via Video: Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath and Scott Chacon — Git, GitHub and Social Coding.

While I don’t use GitHub for my projects, most of the rubygems and other code bases exist on GitHub. I guess there are the few that are still on Google Code and even fewer on SourceForge.

The video, not only being extremely informative for someone who doesn’t know anything about git (but would like to know more), was a very nice overview of what I’ve been learning in the past couple months. (Especially more so the past couple of weeks.)

What I find awesome is that (at least Chris specifically) had a very personal problem he wanted to fix with version control systems (Subversion, in his case) and supporting tools (Bugzilla, in his case).

Sidenote: Chris’s presentation images are just hilarious. One comment: SVN could have been the lighthouse, not the “house”. The whole centralized repository idea?

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again

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I tweeted this nine days ago:

I didn’t know Flash stored so much info. http://bit.ly/S6e1v And that emptying my browser cache doesn’t do anything.

Just now, there is a story on Wired on this subject:

Defenders of behavioral ads say that privacy shouldn’t be a concern since cookies really identify a browser, not a person. Moreover, they argue that users would prefer to have relevant ads. Targeted Behavioral Ads could also help save online journalism.

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again | Epicenter | Wired.com.

It’s good to see that Wired is covering this story. It’s not necessarily 100% bad that Flash does this, and I really hope that the general blogosphere doesn’t make a fuss about it. The more the people on the Internet learn about the way the web works, the better. Remember the cookie paranoia of the ’90s? Let’s not live through that again…

Google Voice For iPhone To Reemerge As Web App

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FORGET APPLE: Google Voice for iPhone to Reemerge as Web App.

Browsers can do some amazing things these days. Hooray for the Internet. And WebKit. And Apple, for making such a revolutionary Internet-powered device, regardless of whatever may have happened with a certain App Store. Without the iPhone, we wouldn’t be where we are.

Native apps are great, but with HTML 5 becoming quickly the bandwagon for webdevs to jump on, it’s only inevitable lots and lots of hardware level support will be baked into the browser.

Think about using the keyboard and mouse on a browser. Not only do the browsers themselves interact with them (from a much more lower OS level), there are JavaScript event handlers for webdevs to tinker away at them (like onmousedown).

I’m waiting for a browser-baked camera doodad. You know, so I don’t have to depend on Flash for such things. At least <video> is included in html5… now if they would settle on a video codec…