Posts
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June Mobile Monday
The info for the June Mobile Monday is up:
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Feedster's New Offices
Today is the first day in the new office! It’s at 116 New Montgomery Street, Suite 605. Nice setup. Plenty of open space, plenty of light. Little bit hot today, but that’s supposed to be a temporary issue. And there are tons of places to eat. Chipotle is right here. I’ve never tried it, but I’ve heard good things. And Specialty’s as well, which I have had, and now plan to have over and over again.
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SuperHappyDevHouse
Yesterday we were over at Adam and Michelle Rifkin’s place for a BBQ, and as it was about time to go back home Tantek asks “Hey, are you guys going to SuperHappyDevHouse tonight?” Oh, he’s good! We spent a bit of time debating if the car was going into the water or coming out, and promptly decided that the only sane thing to do was to head over and find out.
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Craptacular Service
While I was fooling around with the Treo last night I sent an MMS over to Russ to test out the setup. Russ is the only person I use MMS with normally, so it’s a good control test for the system. He gets the message no problem, but the reply he sends doesn’t make it back to my phone. We were chatting via IM as we did this, otherwise I would have had no idea he sent a message. Not a big deal, MMS is actually an IP based service, and I probably need to do manual setup of the 650 to get it working on the TMobile network. But when I got up this morning I swapped my SIM back into the 6600 before Elle and I headed out. We went wandering around for the morning, picked up some groceries and ran some errands, visited her father, and were here checking email. New message on my phone, it’s the MMS that Russ sent, I had completely forgotten about it. This is about 4 hours after I swapped my SIM back into the 6600. It took that long to get the message out of whatever holding place it was in and on to my phone. I can’t believe that. I find that service level completely useless for a “messaging service”. My conclusion, I think, is that Russ and I might be the only people using MMS. I don’t think anyone else would tolerate that kind of behavior in a system. There should be all kinds of yelling and screaming going on.
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The Horror! The Horror!
I went over to Palm DevCon this past week, and I won the Treo 650 they raffled off! Lucky me, I didn’t have to buy one. Unlucky me, now I don’t have any excuses for not updating my palm software. I didn’t even turn it on till this evening, things being busy as they are. I threw my TMobile SIM into the phone and stuff “just worked”, which was pretty cool. Normally voice will just work, but you’ll have to setup other options to get data services working. I pulled up the web browser and pulled up my blog though, and it worked as it was. Nice. And then the full realization that I had an unlocked quadband GSM version sunk in. See, normally Treos come in a crippled version reflecting the suckitude that is the greed of the american cellular service provider. Most versions can’t be used as a Bluetooth modem with a PC. The one I have does have a dialup networking option! W00t w00t!
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Odd Quirk in Bloglines Cache Handling
I noticed something kinda odd when adding a new feed to our ad publishing system today. I test with Bloglines cause I love the system. It’s my normal use aggregator and by far my favorite. However I noticed that after having run my testing feeds with ads in them through Bloglines that when I went to view the source version of the feed in Bloglines it had ads in it too! I went back and viewed the source of the feed in my browser, and sure enough there were no ads. Hmm, it seems like my testing of the ad populated version somehow caused ads to appear in the original version. How could that be? When I test out feeds I put them in a public place, and just scp the feed output from my laptop and pass it through some web based aggregators to make sure that nothing odd happens. However I don’t change any of the links within the feed. So although my feed might reside at, oh, I don’t know, lets say http://www.bitsplitter.net/herepiggypiggypiggy.xml, the links within the feed still point to site the original content came from. The end result is that if you have a link like http://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://www.wingedpig.com/index.rss which would seem to subscribe you to Mark Fletcher’s blog, it really takes you to a fake post I shoved into Bloglines to make it look kinda like it’s hosted at Mark’s site. Astute subscribers will notice the mismatch between the urls in the feed info, but most people aren’t astute. I think there might be more insidious uses for this, like setting the link location for the feed to an already existing site. I don’t want to be mean and try it on existing feeds, but my little bit of fooling around would seem to indicate that the fake version could shove entries into the cache for the overall feed. So there you go Bloglines folks, there’s my free suggestion for the day. Refetch if the current cache version comes from outside the link domain and the user is requesting an “authoritative copy” (something from the same URL as the feed link).
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Spit the vile breath till my tongue bleeds
I haven’t been able to post much to this blog. I tried to for a while but other issues rapidly sucked up all my time. I haven’t even had time to read news except for the bits I can read on my phone while I’m wedged between two people on Caltrain. The post that Jay Allen has up about trying to reign in your schedule really struck a chord with me. Yet here I am at 1:00 in the morning once again, testing out some code and checking to make sure that the SMS messages I’m getting from my monitoring systems are because someone else messed up and not me. Maybe I need a less stressful job, something like Menlo Park police officer.
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There's an Opportunity in there Somewhere
I just read Good-Bye to Venture Capital (link via Brad Feld) and the whole thing seems to stand in stark contrast to what I’ve been seeing. I tend to agree more with Fred Wilson. A couple of odd things have happened directly to me over the last few weeks. Mind you, my take on this might be a bit skewed compared to other folks in Silicon Valley. I wasn’t here for the boom, I kinda missed that whole thing. I moved here mid 2001, when most people seemed to be headed out of the area and not into it. I’m not quite sure how the whole boom got started or what it looked like from the inside. But I can tell you that the previous 4 years here were nothing like the last 2 months.
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Transcript From #FutureSalon IRC Channel
Here’s the transcript from the IRC channel during the Enough Dumb Agents Get Smart presentation at Future Salon:
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Wordpress 1.5.1 Conditional Get Breakage?
Sorry to chuck this here, but I’m on my way off to meet up with some folks and don’t have time to search out if this is a known issue or not. It looks like the conditional get support in Wordpress 1.5.1 might be broken for some combinations of requests and maybe PHP versions. There’s this check in wp-blog-header.php:
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