ryan.freebern.org

I do all my writing in Google Docs these days, and I love it. It’s simple and straightforward — I can write my stories, and it saves them for me and helps me organize them, and that’s it. It doesn’t have tons of fancy bells and whistles that I don’t need and it lets me fit a whole lot of text on the screen instead of cluttering it up with toolbars and rulers and stuff. And nicest of all, no matter where I am, if I can get to the internet I can work on my writing.

The problem is that when my internet connection goes down, like it did today, I can’t access any of my work. There was a problem with our cable service for about three hours this afternoon, and I sat here stewing, thinking “What can I do to pass the time until it’s fixed? Oh, I know. I’ll do some writing!” And then I realized my fallacy.

There is evidence that Google is planning on making an offline version of Docs, but right now it looks like it requires running the code on a local webserver installation, which is not optimal. Come on! It’s almost entirely javascript already — why not make use of the nicely-polished, awesome offline storage solution dojo.storage? It uses one of any number of available offline storage providers (a fancy name for “things on your computer that let your browser save stuff to disk”) to allow you to store data locally, and lets you sync the local and remote copies when you do have internet access. There are already demos showing that it works safely. Google really needs to take advantage of this neat thing, to make Docs available even when my network connection isn’t.

I briefly pondered trying to integrate Greasemonkey and dojo.storage to forcibly add this feature to Docs, but then realized that first, it would take way too much effort to both decipher Google’s code and learn dojo.storage, and second, I don’t have the time for that sort of stuff.

Tobias Buckell likes the idea of taking his computing environment with him wherever he goes, but doesn’t want to carry a full-sized laptop. The post and discussion there is regarding various ways to package up your OS, frequently-used apps, and home directory on a thumb drive or an iPod and whenever you need to use a computer away from home, you just boot using that portable data storage as your drive.

I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and I think it’s just a stopgap measure. Right now laptops, while portable, are generally bigger than most people want to carry everywhere with them, and PDAs or UMPCs are really too small to effectively use for anything other than simple computing tasks. I want something that provides the full functionality of a laptop with the portability of a PDA. Carrying your personal stuff around with you and booting into it is all well and good, but what would really be most useful is an unobtrusive wearable computer that, when activated, can function just like a desktop. With a head-mountable display device that looks to the user like a full-size monitor, a tiny chorded keyboard/mouse that can easily be manipulated with one hand, and an iPod-sized CPU/battery/flash drive combo to do the processing, you could easily take your entire computer with you. None of this rebooting other computers to use your environment, or attempting to type on a tiny fold-out thumb keyboard.

For more information in this vein, see the wearable and life_recorder tags on qumbler.

This steam-powered walking robot makes me happy. Lego’s programmable robotic parts are lots of fun and very popular; someone should make a sell a big set of erector-set-like parts designed to make use of steam power, with various sizes and shapes of boilers and engines, and nifty little spinning valves and steam whistles and stuff. I’d love to play around with making my own steampunk-inspired gadgets, but I don’t have the metalworking equipment or know-how.

I installed this WordPress OpenID plugin this morning and played around with it a little. While the installation was fairly smooth, I couldn’t manage to get it to work in what I considered a sensible fashion. I’m sure if I spent an hour or so fiddling with it I could figure it out, but to me that means the plugin needs more work. Fiddling shouldn’t be required.

The first problem is that while I could make the OpenID login form appear above the comment box on a post, if I typed my OpenID URL and a comment and hit the submit button, it would log me in but bring me back to the (now empty) comment form, and my comment would be nowhere to be seen. If I’m given a login box and a comment box, it ought to perform both actions.

Second, once I had logged in with my OpenID identity, the “Logged in as” text that appeared above the comment form was ugly and I couldn’t easily figure out how to style it. It would be nice if the plugin options included text boxes that let me directly enter the styles for the various elements that it adds to my pages.

Third, and this is more a complaint about the WordPress architecture, I don’t like that my administrator login and a low-level commenter’s profile page both have the same URL and look nearly the same. I think the commenter’s profile page should be a totally separate file that I can lay out and style however I like.

I’d love to enable OpenID support on my blog, but these issues (especially the first) are deterring me.

Why aren’t more cars equipped with in-dash USB ports these days? They don’t need to do anything datawise, just provide power. Then we can all use our MP3 players in the car without needing a cigarette-lighter power adapter.

Mark Cuban can be a bit of a jerk when it comes to sports, but his grasp of technology is quite solid. In a post today about the future of personal computing, he speculates about the (very real, in my opinion) possibility of a Google OS, and during his meanderings, makes this point:

Google can put some beautiful HD content out on their servers, and it will be perfect.. until it gets to the peering points, at which point it loses all its priority and becomes just another packet. Which is the downside of net neutrality. Google can’t buy their way to having their packets given priority, so those who expect big bandwidth video to the home from Google Video… as both Google and I mentioned in this post, it aint gonna happen the way things stand today.

So how long until Google gets into the broadband ISP market? It seems like the next logical step in the progression. Provide online alternatives to the most common desktop apps, attempt to become the number one information storage and retrieval provider, and then make the connection directly to the consumers’ homes — and here’s where Cuban’s speculation comes in — and give your data packets higher priority. Don’t disrupt your customers’ gaming sessions or streaming internet radio, but when they want to watch a YouTube video, make sure it plays smoothly without interruption if at all possible. By encouraging its broadband customers to use the Google services (because they’re faster and more responsive) you can increase ad-views and pass the profit along as decreased broadband costs to the subscribers.

I can easily see a point in the near future where starting your computer means booting into a Firefox-based desktop environment, where very little of your data is stored locally — heck, base the system on a few high-capacity flash memory chips, decreasing the power consumption and size and startup time — and practically everything you want to accomplish can be done online — hopefully, for safety’s sake, encrypted and securely. (If you haven’t seen YouOS, it’s a big step in this direction.)

While Google’s evilness is up for debate, for the most part they seem to be doing things right. I’m not quite ready to give up my Linux and local storage, but I can easily see a point in the future where I could be.

Right now, when someone posts comment-spam to a blog and it is identified as such, their IP is blacklisted, so that blog and any other blogs that share a blacklist with that blog no longer accept comments from that IP. Whoop-de-doo. This isn’t working. If a spammer can’t post to blog A, B, or C, it just ignores those and posts to blogs D through Z. The punishment doesn’t deter them at all.

When an IP has been blacklisted by a given number of blogs, why not disallow that IP from visiting any sites at all that you control? Have a server-level check of the RBL or whatever, and instead of serving them the page they requested, redirect them to a malware-removal tool that they can run to remove spamware from their system.

“Hey, looks like your computer’s been sending spam. If you’re doing it on purpose, go die, jerk. If not, download and run this handy tool to remove the spam-sending application from your computer. And while you’re at it, run this free antivirus and install this firewall.”

Sure, blocking a spamming IP means one fewer hit to your site, and if you have advertisers that could translate into fewer ad dollars. But that hit isn’t necessarily a consumer’s eyeballs, anyway, right? It’s probably just the spamware.

Obviously there would be complications. The tool would have to generate a code to prove that it’s been run on the system before the IP would be un-blacklisted, or something. But if it could be done in a sensible and workable way, this could really change things.

While I haven’t seriously spent any time shopping for a house, I occasionally do look at the real estate listings for my area just to see what’s available. Every time I do, I am struck by how pathetically uninformative and frustratingly closed-off the information is. The multiple listings service does an okay job letting me search on one site to get listings from lots of different realtors, but the resulting hits, which offer no street address and a couple tiny, grainy photos, are hardly enough to let me know which ones I’d actually want to spend time looking into.

My brother once told me that if people actually knew what a house was really like before they bought it, no-one would ever buy a house. There’s definitely some truth there; the more time I’ve spent in a place, the more little problems I’ve come across. But like he said, every house has its share of problems. Nothing’s exempt, and the best that you can hope for is that you notice the problems early enough that you can deal with them before they become major.

So right now, the housing market in this respect is almost entirely in the hands of the sellers. If you can hide the bad stuff well enough that potential buyers don’t notice it on a walkthrough, you can unload your old shack for more than it’s worth and saddle the new owners with the cost of fixing things up. And I’m not talking about major stuff here like dangerous wiring or shoddy plumbing — any half-decent home inspector will catch that before the sale is final. I’m talking about the little stuff, the fact that the molding is loose around the livingroom doors, or that the shower head is always getting clogged, or that whenever the weather’s warm you get dozens of houseflies from who-knows-where.

So, as a buyer, what’s to be done? We need some way to work together, share information about these houses that goes far, far beyond the handful of vague datapoints in an MLS listing. We need to take photos of the excessive wood-rot around the windows, the cracked linoleum behind the toilet, the gaps in the flooring that the seller is trying to hide behind his armchair, and let each other know about it. We need to do what we can to level the playing field by sharing what we can find about properties for sale and, in doing so, attempt to reveal their true values.

We need a social real-estate information sharing portal. A site that lets us say “See this listing? The actual address is 123 Main St. in Somewhereville. I went there and took two dozen photos — here they are. And you know how the realtor’s photo makes it look like an idyllic wooded lot? Yeah, they’re not showing you that it borders a busy road and has a mosquito-filled swamp a hundred feet behind it.” We need to post what we saw, what the owners told us, and what we thought, in order to let other potential buyers know exactly what they’re getting into.

Tenants can use it too. “I rented this property for two years, and let me tell you, unless you’re ready to be saddled with twenty grand in renovations it’s not worth your time.”

And eventually, if enough people share information about these properties and do their best to show the world what the properties are really like, sellers will learn that it’s in their best interests to be up front about stuff. When you decide to sell your house, you log onto the info-sharing site and say “it’s not perfect — here are the problems — but there’s lots of good stuff, too.” When people see that you’re being honest, they’ll be much more willing to work with you to reach an equitable agreement.

And then people will know what the houses for sale are like, but be able to make an honest comparison, and will still be willing to buy them because they’ll really know what they’re getting into.

Many people are becoming more environmentally conscious in general and opting for smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. Even those who don’t care about the environment are watching the steady rise of gas prices and realizing that fuel efficiency is good for their wallet. As a result, SUV sales have been declining fairly consistently for the last two years.

Last year, GM lost over $10 billion due to its focus on SUVs and large trucks and disregard for compact cars and trucks. Investors got scared. GMAC, their financing arm, is weakened and about to be partially sold. Their credit rating has been dropping lately, and they’ve been given a negative outlook by investment firms.

So what does GM do to reassure its investors that things will be okay? How do they say “look, we know what’s causing the problems, and we’re going to correct it”? That’s right: by increasing production of its full-size SUVs, the same ones that they haven’t been able to sell for the past year. Good move, GM.

Meanwhile, sales of hybrids continue to climb at an astonishing rate. Ford has realized this; why hasn’t GM?

Hong Kong – 14 March 2006 – Motorola, Inc. (NYSE:MOT), a global leader in wireless communications, today announced the name for its newest and most advanced smart phone, the Motorola MING (previously announced as the A1200), and confirmed that units are already shipping to distributors in Hong Kong.

[...]

“The name MING was chosen to resonate more deeply with people in Hong kong than a traditional model name or number can,” said Terence Ma, director of sales, Mobile Devices Business, Motorola Hong Kong. “Like the design and usability of the phone itself, MING will help bring our smart phones into entirely new market segments.”

Flash Gordon was unavailable for comment.

Press release here, if you feel the need to read it.

37 Signals says that less is more when it comes to web apps. They say make something simple that does one thing well, and people will use it. They’ve proved it over and over with their various web apps, so I figured it was a good idea. Today, I decided to follow their lead, and created WebMeditate, a yogic meditation aid for the web.

In the spirit of 37 Signals’ “Getting Real” philosophy, I’ve gone from concept to execution to release in approximately a minute and a half; WebMeditate is fully functional, tested, and ready to go. It has incredibly frugal screen real estate usage, an interface so simple a baby could use it, a zero-time learning curve, supported by all major browsers, able to handle an infinite number of users without trouble, and it’s 100% bug-free. It even has an offline mode.

Visit WebMeditate now and clear your mind, Web 2.0-style!

Remember how I just posted about a camera that would automatically upload your photos to Flickr? Yahoo anticipated this, sorta: instead of a camera, it’s software for cameraphones. Check out Zonetag, which also (if your phone has the capability) tags the photo with the GPS coordinates it was taken at. Instead of wifi, this uses your phone’s MMS capability to send the photo to a Flickr email account. Pretty sweet!

I’d be using this right now if I had a cameraphone, and if sending picture messages didn’t cost money.