Scripting News for 5/31/2007

Weak wifi 

Sorry for the lack of posts, the wifi here is pretty weak, I get a connection then lose it.

Good morning! 

Arrived at the Reboot venue.

Movie of empty auditorium at start of day.

Scripting News for 5/30/2007

Jet Lag News 

Hey that would be a good name for a blog!

Anyway, here’s what’s new in the world of Jet Lag.

Couldn’t get to sleep until 1AM (maybe even a bit later).

Sun was up by 4AM (maybe earlier).

Only three hours sleep last night.

Exclusive: That’s not enough sleep for Comrade Davey!

Google Gears 

I read that Google is going to announce a toolkit today that lets you run web apps on a disconnected machine. Something we had working in Radio in 2001. The key is something called a desktop web server. Nothing revolutionary about it. A database and CMS that runs on the local machine. I suspect that their approach will be heavier on the database and lighter on the CMS, since they like Ajax apps (as do many others, of course), where the content rendering happens in the browser, in Javascript.

Reboot 2007 

Pics from the opening party at Reboot 2007.

Congrats to Jason? 

Wired has a scoop on Jason Calacanis’s new service, a “people-powered search engine” named Mahalo, which they say is launching this week at an insider’s conference.

Glad to hear someone is innovating in search. I bet it’s cool.

Not sure I like that the insiders will see it before I will.

PS: The site is live now. I signed up, logged in and started looking around. There’s a page on me (of course that’s the first thing I looked for), and what little it contains is accurate. I like that they identify the person who edited the page (someone named ck).

PPS: Looks like Yahoo?

From Rex Hammock, on vacation with family 

“I’m vacationing and am offline but had to share the following snippet of a converation I just had with my son, the high school sophomore.

“‘I’ve got a friend you should meet — He speaks your language,’ he said.

“‘What do you mean, he speaks my language?’ I responded.

“There was a pause and then he said, ‘You know — he’s the kind of guy who knows who Dave Winer is.’

“That was high praise from the 16 year old.”

Here’s one for Naked Jen 

A billboard in a Swedish ferry terminal in Halsingbord.

Still the best picture I’ve taken 

Proof that every picture tells a story.

Scripting News for 5/29/2007

Easy upgrade to Facebook 

When someone lists you as a “friend” on Facebook you get to confirm it. That’s good.

When you click on the “Confirm” button, you get a list of choices that almost never seems to have the right choice. Does that mean you don’t have a relationship with the person? No. It means that the list of possible choices hasn’t been updated since Facebook was opened to people outside the education system.

For example, Jeff Jarvis requested that I confirm that he is a friend. Of course I’m going to confirm that, because there is a relationship between Jeff and myself that should be part of my social network. In this case, Jeff is part of my blogging network, and I am part of his. We point to each other frequently. When we run into each other at a conference we have friendly words for each other. If you want me to introduce you to Jeff, I can probably do it, and vice versa. Also, Jeff has introduced me to a company I subsequently invested in (not something students usually do).

Jeremy Allaire is also in my queue, and is verified immediately. What’s the relationship? We were both early relatively successful web developers. We once, jointly, floated an interesting proposal for a tech standard that didn’t go anywhere. I’m a founder of and pundit in a field that Allaire has started a company in (and raised a prodigious amount of money). He probably reads my blog.

And there’s the “delighted by” checkbox for women I’ll never date (too young, live too far away, etc), but who nonetheless flatter me by requesting friendship.

Another checkbox — “fantasizes about.”

PS: For extra credit, relationship-defining should be part of Facebook’s open architecture.

Memorial Day postscript 

In Monday’s NY Times, I read a rousing op-ed piece by Paul Krugman, who quoted President Bush saying that Americans never go to war unless it is absolutely necessary to do so. Krugman said that no American president has ever had less right to say that.

Gives you goosebumps, until you realize it may not be true.

When I was writing my Memorial Day piece, I said that the war in Iraq is an insult to all other wars. I gave World War II as an example, but that is one of the few wars that the US has fought, except for the Revolution and World War I that you can say that about. If you stop and think about it, the US goes to war all the time for no good reason.

For example, who but the US could you blame for the Civil War? That counts as a war, doesn’t it? Lots of people died. It devastated huge parts of the country. You think 9-11 was bad, think again. The Civil War was much much worse. The clever part of the hype about 9-11 is that it disclaims that the attack came from outside the US. Well, that’s a distinction without a difference. If the terror comes from within is it any less terrible?

Krugman was right about many other things, but I think that those who hold the US up as a shining beacon of morals in war-going have been watching too many John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart movies. Maybe we should aspire to that.

A Berkeley prof with his hand out 

An over-covered story — the professional reporters will go away, which is bad news for you and me. Not saying it isn’t true, but how many times, and different ways have you read this story. But if Google were to fund the reporters, as the author suggests, what happens when Google’s fortunes decline? Tech is a cyclic industry. What goes up must come down. Count on it. And who will watch Google? That’s been the problem with the employees of big media companies, they never look at their funders. How do we know they’re really losing money? Maybe they’re controlled by politicians or business people who want to do nasty stuff without being observed?

I could make the same argument, persuasively, for basic computer research. Who’s doing it? Who’s funding it? But the money dried up there without many articles in the SF Chron decrying it. Big surprise? Nope, of course not. The reporters are selfish and narcisistic. Hey, if you want our attention, stop complaining, stop the open offers to sell out, and let’s get working on solving the problem. I want professional reporting to continue, but I also want to live forever, and that ain’t happening.

Arrived in Copenhagen 

At 2:17PM Central European Time, Tuesday.

Left Berkeley at 11:25AM Pacific, Monday.

Thomas just showed up, all is good, seeya after a bit.

Flickr: Having lunch at a coffee house in Copenhagen.

Paolo is coming to Copenhagen tomorrow. Who else?

From Jim Posner things to do in Copenhagen.

I want to take a train trip up the coast tomorrow.

Some kind of record 

I haven’t slept since 5AM Pacific Monday.

It’s now 6PM Central European.

Which is 9AM Pacific Tuesday.

So it’s 28 hours since I slept.

Tired, but I took a shower, so I’m not sleepy.

Makes sense to stay up as long as I can.

Took a melatonin though.

Should be nodding off soon.

Jetlag 

I got 0 hours sleep on the plane, so now I’ve been up for 26 hours straight.

I just asked Thomas if David Weinberger has ever been to Reboot. He says yes.

I say then I feel like Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

I’m going to try to stay up for two more hours and then go back to the hotel and crash.

Can’t recall beeing this jetlagged.

Economist: Viagra and jet lag.

Internet perf in my hotel room 

Scripting News for 5/27/2007

Nothing Accomplished! 

Relatively speaking I have very little to be angry about about the war in Iraq. Except for the information that comes to me in the news, and that’s very abstract, hard to feel unless I really try, the war has no direct impact on my life. I don’t know anyone who is serving in Iraq. I don’t know anyone with relatives in Iraq. My taxes haven’t gone up to pay for the war. There is no rationing, no shortages. I don’t drive much so the increased price of gas isn’t having much impact.

But the war does make me angry.

To call it a war is an insult to all other wars.

World War II really was a war against an Axis of Evil. It was unavoidable. A war for our existence. A fight for freedom.

Watching 60 Minutes tonight, on Memorial Day, it’s hard to imagine how we go on living our lives as other Americans give up so much, for something so utterly pointless. As the program ended, it became clear that our soldiers are having the same discussions about the war that we’re having here. They know about the lack of support for the war in America. They process it in different ways. Listening to the soldiers, I can tell they were lied to as we were lied to, and of course because they have so much at stake, it must be so hard to consider that the lies were actually lies.

This week, for the first time, the President is floating the idea that a massive pullout is coming soon.

Oh what an effect that must have on our soldiers in Iraq. The futility in risking so much knowing that the outcome, instead of Mission Accomplished will be Nothing Accomplished. Other than the unnecessary sacrifice of a nation, ours, and its army.

Robert Byrd: “Today I weep for my country.”

Shopping 

I had a long shopping list for my getaway tomorrow. I went to a half-dozen stores, the experience ranged from ridiculous to sublime.

Ridiculous? I wanted to buy a new jacket. Something roomy and warm, because it might get chilly in Copenhagen at night. I wanted pockets, and I want it to look good, but not so flashy (i.e. memorable) that I can’t get away with wearing it every night on this trip. It’s the only jacket I’m bringing. (I want to travel light this time, a small suitcase on wheels and a knapsack.)

I walked into The Gap on Bay Street, and started looking through the racks, and was approached by a salesperson who didn’t speak English. She pulled me over to the Clearance rack and pulled out a small jacket (I wear XXL) and handed it to me and walked away. I put it back on the rack, but there wasn’t enough room for it, so I really had to work. She came back, mumbled something in Chinese English (whatever language that is) and pulled the jacket off the rack again and tried to hand it to me. I wouldn’t take it, and I turned to go back to the rack I was looking at. She came over and started talking to me again in jibberish. I turned around and walked out, confident that I wasn’t missing anything.

I looked in the window at Banana Republic across the street and saw two clerks talking to each other, and no customers. After the Gap experience, I didn’t dare walk into their zone.

All this happened after I walked into the Apple Store on the same street. It was the sublime experience. I zipped from station to station, looking at merchandise, drooling over things I don’t need, seriously considering buying an iMac because I saw a man walking out with one with such joy on his face. I want some of that. I had two ideas, to buy a third battery so I could use the computer all the way to Europe even though there was no power at the seat on the KLM 747. I bought one for $69. And for $39 I bought their World Travel Adapter Kit. A sales kid, respectful and competent (and he spoke fluent English, the language of our country) got me exactly what I asked for, so quickly I didn’t have time to consider another impulse purchase. But while I was waiting, another competent English speaking sales guy asked if I was being helped. All this while the store was packed with customers. I noted that there were people with dogs in the store, they seemed to fit right in. I asked, when the sales guy came back, if dogs were really allowed in the store and he said yes. Apple really gets retail, they understand their product and their customer, and the experience is just fantastic. And every time I visit they get at least $100 from me. Sometimes much more.

I continued down Bay St, still looking for the jacket. I stopped in a much bigger Banana Republic on the corner, asked where the men’s dept was, they said it was in the other store. I turned around walked across the street to Old Navy, where a person at the front door tried to hand me a brochure for something. I said I didn’t want it, but I did want a jacket. She pointed toward the back of the store where they had a few ugly hoodies, nothing like what I wanted, so I continued down the street to Barnes & Noble to get a book about Italy, which I found in short order. No sales people got in the way, I also picked up a copy of Al Gore’s new book, went upstairs, made the purchase with my membership card, got my parking ticket validated, and got out quickly with what I came for and one optional purchase, got in the car, no jacket (which was the primary goal for the stop at Bay St).

Went grocery shopping, a predictable, quick and pleasant experience, went to the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions, the service there is excellent, but not quite sublime. Smart young people behind the counter, they treat everyone well, out the door quickly after paying a huge amount of money (drugs are so expensive) and went across the street to have a burger with a friend, who recommended going to REI for the jacket. After the burger we got in the car, they had exactly what I was looking for, I bought a jacket for $50, then looked around a bit and bought a much nicer one that will also work for $179. My friend bought one of the $50 jackets (an impulse buy) and a REI baseball cap (also on impulse).

All in all, I spent well over $1000. The stores that had their act together got all the money. The stores that didn’t even come close to meeting my needs (about half of them) got nothing.

Links only a nerd could love 

Les Orchard says each API is a snowflake that every developer has to build custom interfaces for. Someday all these guys will realize they need to get together and come up with some standards for serializing data to simplify the work for themselves and developers. A lot of compromise and working together will be needed to make this happen. And when they have finished, many years from now, they will be where we were with XML-RPC in 1998.

Brent Simmons writes a tutorial that I can use. It’s really nice to see Brent caring about Frontier! After sorting out the mess on Friday, I have a new sense of what’s possible with Frontier. Not saying that has anything to do with Brent’s piece, but there may be some kind of wave of karma flowing around Frontier that wasn’t flowing before. Or it could just be my imagination.

Scripting News for 5/26/2007

On mediation 

Observation: “At least it’s over.”

And yes, I learned a lot.

Creativity is coming back in new ways. I, and UserLand, were under a cloud from 1992 until 2007. It’s amazing how much we got done, considering. The cloud is now gone. This morning, I felt like the stack has been popped back to much brighter days. We’ll see if this holds up.

My small Web 2.0 dividend now appears reasonably safe. Another way of looking at it is that I got back a good chunk of the cash I put into Web 2.0.

Yesterday’s post was entitled “community” for a very good reason. As I went into the mediation, I remembered how genuinely happy people seemed to be when the deal with VeriSign came out. I couldn’t understand why, usually people seemed to resent my success. And weblogs.com seemed a particular lightning rod for grief. Now, a couple of years later it’s more clear. I had a much bigger reservoir of goodwill than I was aware of.

Another bit of information. While the threat of a defamation suit was hanging over me, I heard from a number of bloggers who had been similarly threatened, and caved. This was understandable, but disheartening. I felt in yesterday’s negotiation that I was not just looking out for my own interests, but also trying to create a precedent for bloggers in the future. You may not have to cave under a threat of a lawsuit, although I understand that there are good reasons people do it. However, before making a decision, look in your homeowner’s insurance policy, if you have one. Many of them cover defamation judgments, believe it or not.

Most of the terms of the settlement are confidential, but otherwise I did not agree to limit what I say publicly, or remove or modify any posts. In some ways I knew Russo pretty well, and I was pretty sure he wasn’t misleading me in the past about his respect for the First Amendment, and as it turns out, that belief was correct.

Do I feel like a winner? More so this afternoon than I did last night. I’m optimistic that when I get on the plane on Monday for Copenhagen, I’ll leave more than California behind.

Afternoon humor 

Steve sez 

Geez, apparently I’ve pissed off Steve Jobs, again.

Scripting News for 5/25/2007

Midnight update 

It was a marathon mediation, starting at 10AM, finishing at 9PM, but we reached a settlement, drafted an agreement, and signed it. Most of the terms are confidential, but the important point is that we executed mutual releases, so there won’t be any lawsuits. I’ll probably post more about it over the weekend. Good night y’all.

Great community 

Illuminating and informative comments in the last two days.

I’m spending the day in mediation of the Russo & Hale matter, so expect little or no blog posting. If you feel so inclined, say a little prayer for peace in our time, I’m hoping to come out of today with the whole mess behind us.

I’ve learned a lot about mediation in the last few weeks, esp talking with some people in Berkeley who do it for a living, and have come to think in terms of mediating conflict. Can we find middle ground, where we both achieve our goals? That’s what mediating is about, finding what’s in between.

It’s a funny concept for me, since I’ve spent my whole professional career doing things to dis-inter-mediate, so maybe it’s possible to go too far, and decentralize so much that in order to solve a problem you need to come together?

I expect to learn a lot today. To give some and get some, I hope.

Namaste y’all!

Jim Goodman: “A compromise is both parties going away unhappy.”

What to make of the Facebook APIs? 

I have a Facebook page, but I don’t use it much.

I like the wild wild web, the unbounded frontier.

To me, getting to include something in a web page is ho-hum, been-there, etc etc.

A long time ago.

Like Amyloo, I wonder if they got it backwards?

Scripting News for 5/24/2007

Say it ain’t so 

AppleInsider “believes in all sincerity that the Mac mini is dead.” I, for one, would be disappointed if this were true.

The Mac mini is exactly the kind of product Silicon Valley should never stop making. It’s the perfect platform for tinkerers in the middle of the hottest growth area for tech, the home network. I keep mine under a 46-inch Sony HD-TV. Nothing else in Apple’s product line would fit except Apple TV, which doesn’t do enough to interest a guy like me. I want a new much faster Mac Mini, and would pay for it. It’s the most cripped Mac I own, slow at everything. Yet its the workhorse of my home network.

Flickr: Mac Mini in my geeked-out home network.

Europe travel questions 

1. Will my Cingular Blackberry work in Europe?

2. Will my Sprint EVDO?

3. Will there be Internet on the KLM flight from SFO to Amsterdam?

4. Will there be power at the seat?

5. Which power adapters do I need to bring?

Todd Mitchell offers some very detailed answers.

Brian Benz has a novice geek’s guide for staying connected while overseas.

I got Cingular to turn on the international roaming service. Calls and email will be expensive, but what the heck, I’m only there for 11 days.

KLM says no there’s no Internet on the 747 and no electric outlets either. It’s an old plane, but it’s huge. I got them to put me upstairs, in a window seat. Let’s hope I don’t have to go to the bathroom too much.

The consensus is that I can leave the EVDO card home, it won’t work in Europe at all. Luckily wifi does work in Europe, and it should be better than the last time I was overseas.

Two eye-openers in the NY Times 

I don’t often read op-ed pieces in the Times, they’re part of Times Select, and it’s never really occurred to me to pay them for opinion pieces. Today I happened to be on a plane flying from San Diego to Oakland, and I picked up a copy of the Times, in print, an affirmation that newspapers aren’t dead.

One of the pieces that caught my attention was by Nicholas Kristof, an essay about trade with China. He explained that while the balance of trade between the United States and China is lopsided in favor of China, there are countries with which China has a trade deficit.

For example, China is in the business of assembling parts created elsewhere, and those parts show up as a negative on their balance sheet. So while a Barbie doll they send to US creates a $3 debt from the US to China, only $0.03 of that belongs to China, the rest of it is owed by them to other countries. Our massive trade deficit with China actually distorts the economic strength of China. They’re not so strong.

The second piece, about nursing homes in the US, was written by Atul Gawande. He explains that while nursing homes are good at keeping people alive, and better than they used to be, for people who lead rich lives before requiring care, they can be like prison. For people my age, this reality isn’t so far away that it wouldn’t be a good time to start thinking about it, and learning, and maybe helping to reform the system.

Season finales 

Two TV serials I follow wound up their seasons this week.

I have to watch the last episode of Heroes again to figure out the details, but it left me satisfied. A good story, with a good moral. Check.

The finale of Lost left me wondering why they’re going to have another season. So much was resolved. It also had a strong moral message, be satisfied with what you have.

TV is definitely getting better.

Advisory board finale 

Every so often I get an email asking what’s up with the RSS Advisory Board.

Here’s what I thought in May 2004: “This group is not a standards organization. It does not own RSS, or the spec, it has no more or less authority than any other group of people who wish to promote RSS.”

Today I think it’s even less than that. It basically stopped functioning later in 2004. The people involved went on to do other things. In the meantime RSS kept growing and growing.

Did RSS actually need an “advisory board?” No, it didn’t.

I think it’s great that people care about RSS. Keep supporting it, and if you want to help people use it, great. Just don’t pretend there’s any official board or body or whatever behind it, because there isn’t.

Oh and by the way this is where the RSS 2.0 spec is and always will be. (Modulo redirects and Acts of Murphy.)

Postscript: Any group could create a profile of RSS, and recommend that other people use it. That group could be the authority on the profile, and change it in response to feedback. A validator could have an option to test against conformity to the profile, to say that a file is not only compatible with the RSS spec, but it also conforms to the profile. The group could act according to rules they devise, which they could pattern after the IEEE, IETF or W3C, or come up with a completely new protocol. Doing a profile is a logical and fair way for people who want to do standards work based on RSS to proceed.

Yo Ted! 

Kind words from Ted Leonsis about Web 3.0.

Request for linkage 

Valleywag used a Creative Commons licensed photo of mine, one that I’m quite proud of, taken when I knew Scoble was leaving Microsoft and the rest of the world didn’t (yet, it would leak out the next day). I asked how it felt to be out of Microsoft, and he made this face, in jest, for sure. It would be great Valleywag linked back to the original from the photo they used, share some of the flow and credit. Seems like a fair trade. Thanks in advance!

Scripting News for 5/23/2007

Today’s talk 

Audio of interview with Stephen Evans of BBC World Service.

Today’s quick hits 

Jose Marinez: Poor Man’s SMS Gateway.

Rex Hammock: Web 3.0 delayed until fourth quarter.

Peter Rojas asks if there’s interest in an unconference to discuss the podcast player. I would certainly participate and help organize the event. Podcasting won’t be fully ready for prime time until there’s a player designed specifically for podcasting.

A recent article about Steven Rosenberg, who’s mediating the dispute with Russo & Hale on Friday.

Todd Cochrane says Google buying Feedburner is “pure evil.”

What do you think of Fleck?

Movie of the beautiful beach, pool and patio at the hotel.

Congrats to the Knight Award winners, many of whom are readers of this weblog.

Congrats to Feedburner, whose $100 million payday was confirmed by Mike Arrington. Let’s keep an eye on Google hoping they are kind to the ecology of the RSS coral reef.

What is Web 3.0? 

My talk went well, and I did talk briefly about how we should think about Web 3.0. I know other people have said it’s the Semantic Web, and maybe that use of the name will stick. I’m with Tim Berners-Lee who says Web 2.0 is really what the web itself is about. He always intended it to be a two-way medium.

First, I think of Web 2.0 as the Two-Way Web, the Read-Write Web, the Web of User-Generated Content. It’s Flickr and blogs and wikis. It’s everybody creating the medium for everyone else.

Imho, the next step after that, I hope, is the professional media fully embracing the new media, no longer see it as a threat to their continued employment. See amateur public writing, the former audience who is no longer silent, as sources who can get attention for their ideas without going through an intermediary.

I think it will continue to shrink until they accept bloggers and podcasters as legitimate sources of news and perspective, without interpretation by professional reporters.

I totally disagree with my friend Robert Scoble who says that newspapers are dead. There’s always been too much made of death in the tech world, in fact newspapers are still published, you can pick one up at any airport or train station. Many people have them delivered at home. We often go to newspaper websites for the news. Sure, there are problems, and the world is changing, but imho, we’ll all do better if something called the San Francisco Chronicle continues to be published, even though the form of the newspaper will certainly change in the future. It would be a waste of a tradition, of a good coral reef, if newspapers really died. They need to change, and imho, when that change happens, we will safely be in the era of Web 3.0.

If you have questions about this vision, please post a comment here.

Good morning everybody 

I’m here at Future In Review, sitting between Dan Gillmor on my left, and Stewart Brand on my right.

We’re hearing Cynthia Figge interview Janine Benyus about biomimickry.

I’m interviewed later this morning on ideas for the future in blogging, podcasting, etc.

Last night at dinner I talked with Stewart Brand about future-safing archives, so my schpiel about that is well-rehearsed. I’ll certainly talk about that this morning.

Here are some of the questions they asked me to address.

What’s on the horizon — still OPML, podcast player (wifi, open to other apps, recording), real unconferences.

Service I’d like to buy that isn’t available right now — future-safe web sites, relate this to conversation with Charlie Nesson.

What is Web 3.0? Easy to answer. Stay tuned.

Excellent wifi at Hotel del Coronado 

Scripting News for 5/22/2007

Silicon Valley Sitcoms 

When the VCs gave $25 million to Adam Curry and Ron Bloom to create a record label and ad agency for podasting talent, and John Markoff wrote in the NY Times that Evan Williams was going to create the eBay of podcasting, I had an instant deja vu moment. I’ve been here before, it seemed.

The last time I had this realization was at a Christmas party in San Francisco at the tail end of the dotcom boom, with people from competing pre-IPO pet food companies, each boasting how rich they would be after their companies went public.

Silicon Valley goes through predictable cycles of boom and bust. I think it’s totally avoidable, that it’s a simple bug that the great minds of the valley could cure, by rethinking and then tweaking how capital works, but in the boom times they’re too lusty for quick returns, instead of funding technology companies, they fund TV sitcoms. They cast their companies with people who could play the mad genius or ruthless marketing exec if it were a weekly series like Heroes or Lost, or sometimes even The Sopranos, and very often Entourgage.

Instead if they hired the math genius from Numb3rs, he might tell them what’s obvious. They eat their seeds, and don’t invest in creating new ones. In the last bust, I had a blog, and documented it here, it’s all in the archives. But I’ve been through a few busts before I had a blog, and as Mike Arrington says in today’s TechCrunch, it’s time for another house-cleaning in Silicon Valley, because the place is clogged with hangers-on, and you can’t find the new ideas among all the pet food companies and me-too social networks.

As they say, you can’t throw a pot sticker into a crowd without hitting a budding entrepreneur with a pitch. The place is crawling with get-rich-quick schemes.

When I moved back to sunny California, I decided to give Berkeley a try. I have a nice guest bedroom, and Mike you can stay at my house any time.

PS: I think it’s cool that Mike wrote his piece. I think it’s because I write stuff like this that the VCs and BigCo execs tune me out. I can’t imagine what they will say to him. Should get an interesting discussion going.

A reminder from Les Orchard 

We need to keep beating the drum for OPML reading lists.

Hotel del Coronado 

Movie: I arrived at my hotel, to a lovely room, so I made a movie to show it off, and the surroundings, and a cameo appearance (near the end) by one of the pioneers of the Mac software world (not me). Hint: His company was called Farallon. Remember them?

San Diego-bound 

I’m going to the Future In Review conference, where I will speak, in the future (tomorrow) about the future, in review.

With Loren Feldman in Little Italy 

Live video with Loren Feldman and some tiramisu, canoli, Steve Gillmor and a beautiful Italian waitress.

Copenhagen or Amsterdam? 

Interestingly, next week Mike will be in Amsterdam at a tech conf at the same time I’m in Copenhagen at a tech conf.

It seems that Copenhagen is to Amsterdam as Berkeley is to Palo Alto. Funny how things work out like that. (My flight goes through Amsterdam. And I’m headed south after the conference, destination Milano.)

Zune, part two, day two 

I spent a few hours yesterday updating the XP laptop with the broken keyboard with four years of Windows updates. As it was rebooting for the last of six times a DOS screen flashes by too quickly to read saying something about a registry error, and when I try to boot using the last good configuration it fails, and loops, flashes the same message, and never boots. I pulled the power cord and let it do this overnight until the battery ran out, hoping that maybe a power recycle might cure the problem, but this seems desperate and very unlikely to work.

So despite my best efforts and dozens of hours invested, I still haven’t managed to get one song or podcast onto my Zune. In the meantime, of course the iPod is still serving my audio listening needs, with no extra effort.

There’s no hope of it working with the the other laptop, since it requires XP Service Pack 2, and it has Windows 2000 installed. I suppose I could buy a new copy of Windows XP for the laptop with the broken keyboard, but that seems ridiculous. I’ve paid for a copy of the OS for that machine, and I also have a working copy of XP running in Parallels on my Mac. And it would just be yet another experiment, because after all this michegas (including lugging a couple of heavy laptops through the NYC subway, JFK, SFO, and BART) there’s no reason to suspect that more effort would result in success.

Postscript 1: I took a movie of the machine rebooting, and froze playback on the error screen. It’s hard to read, but maybe you’ve seen it before and have an idea how to fix it?

Postscript 2: Jarod says Knoppix and a USB drive are a good way to get data off a dead PC.

Scripting News for 5/21/2007

Advice for campaigns 

At the end of the last session on Friday they asked the people in the audience to raise their hands with ideas for the campaigns. I had my hand up, but they didn’t call on me. Had they, this is what I would have suggested.

Take the money you raise and instead of spending it all on advertising, spend some of it on stuff that helps people now.

Spend 1/4 of the money on political advertising. The usual stuff, attack ads, issue ads, whatever. It’s all a waste, but you have to waste some money to persuade the press your campaign is serious. Try to run your ads in media the press follows.

Spend 1/2 of the money on a social program that people care about. Buy health insurance for 50,000 poor people in Mississipi. Install free wifi in one American city for a few years. In 2004, I recommended to Dean that he set up permanent blogging infrastructure because at the time setting up a blog was too hard and unreliable. Now that’s no longer a problem.

Spend 1/4 of the money telling everyone how you’re using 1/2 of the money to help people. This proves that your Presidency will be about solving problems, because you’re not waiting to get elected to solve problems. (I predict this will raise you even more money, for you to spend on helping people, and the idea is so fresh, it might actually help you get elected, but even if it doesn’t you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that you not only helped people in a real way, but you also helped people feel positive about politics. I think net-net this is why a lot of people got behind Dean, something that Dean himself never really appreciated. They wanted to do something powerful to help their country. Politicians tend to be cynical, so they don’t get that many people are not inherently cynical.)

Next attempt at Zune 

When I was in NY, I picked up a couple of old Windows laptops I had left at my parents’ house, out in the garage, in plastic containers. They weathered the east coast winters fine, both booted right up, one has a broken keyboard and the other runs Windows 2000. And they have files I had previously lost, so that’s welcome. I’m going to back them up to DVD right away. And I’ll use the one with the broken keyboard to try again to setup the Zune that Microsoft generously gave me to play with at Mix 07 in April.

BTW, on the flight back from NY I saw someone using a Zune. Made me think that if I had mine working we could have shared some music over wifi (even though I guess it violates the airline rules).

Checklist 

I started my checklist for my 11-day Europe trip which starts a week from today.

Purchased my Eurail Pass. I have five days starting in Copenhagen and ending in Milano.

They ship it from Newton Center, which is pretty close to where I used to live when I was in Massachusetts.

Thanks for PDF 

I had a wonderful time at the PDF, even though I spent a fair amount of time writing and surfing instead of participating. I really like both of the guys who ran the conference, Andrew and Micah. And everyone was so warm and friendly, much more so than at conferences held in California. How unusual for a NYC event!

Late start 

First post today at 3:25PM.

Yikes!