Palm Pre a possibility? 

I left a comment on jkOnTheRun about the new Palm Pre that was announced today at CES.

First question: Can it tether?

That is, can it play the role of the Cradlepoint router I just got, and the Sprint EVDO modem plugged into it?

Are they going to be as locked down as Apple is with the iPhone?

When and how can I get one to play with?

This morning I couldn't imagine why anyone would even go to a Palm press conference, and now I'm on the edge of wanting one of these to try. I'm ready to get off my iPhone, I'm sick of the locked up mentality. If this thing pairs nicely with a netbook, I might just switch to it for a year or so.

The next step in the evolving netbook is the cellphone that pairs with it. Whatever it is it must be reasonably debugged both in software and philosophy. Apple has the software but their philosophy is totally up a creek.

Now I'm looking for some Palm Pre clipart.

Conclusion of the Feedburner latency test 

It appears that it takes FB some amount of time to recognize a feed once its been registered, but that once it does, it's pretty close to perfect at caching a feed for 30 minutes before refreshing its copy from the original.

A table that reports on the test.

Notes on the test when it started are here.

Here's the original feed and here's the Feedburner version.

I looked for docs on how to ping Feedburner, but came up with confusing and contradictory instructions, none of which worked. They all got Java errors from the server. I tried pinging using their form and through pingomatic, neither of which had any effect on the latency.

I tried adding a <ttl> element to the feed, set it to 1 minute to see if that had any effect. I'll let you know.

Update: Apparently Feedburner ignores <ttl>.

Update: I turned the test off for now.

Measuring Feedburner's latency 

Yesterday I listened to a Gillmor Gang podcast that focused on one issue -- how much time does it take Feedburner to reflect the changes in a feed they're hosting. Steve had some evidence that it was taking as much as three hours for it to reflect changes in his feed at techcrunchit.com.

Being an engineer, I wondered what was going on, so I constructed a test with a feed to see what Feedburner would do with it.

Here's the original feed and here's the Feedburner version.

Here's what my test does. Every minute it reads the Feedburner version and compares it against the original. If they don't match, it does nothing. When they do match, it notes the time in a log, generates a new version of the test feed and repeats the process.

I'm going to let the test run for a few hours and then make one change -- I'll ping their server when I create the new version.

And of course I'll report the results here when they are available.

A note: I ran the test overnight and got what to me are astonishing results. Feedburner never noticed the change in the original feed. Anyone who was subscribed to it would not have known there had been news. I couldn't believe this, I felt there had to be a bug somewhere in my test, and it could be that there is. That's why I'm re-running it this morning while I'm working and can keep an eye on it.

Update at 11:10AM Pacific: First results after running the experiment for almost 2 hours: It took the following amount of time for Feedburner to reflect a change in the original feed: 24 minutes, 31 minutes and it's still returning old results after 61 minutes. This is without pinging.

Update at 2:20PM Pacific: Here's a table that summarizes the results.