Scripting News

From a former Apple genius

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 04:50:47 GMT

Of all the comments on the hard drive, and there have been hundreds, this one explains it best.

I'm sorry to hear about your experience at the Apple Store. I was a "genius" for a year and can assure you that the policy regarding HDs was frustrating to us as well. In warranty it wasn't so hard to justify, but out of warranty customers often had a problem with it. My recommendation to them (and to you) is the same. AASPs often do not have the same contractual obligations with HD manufacturers that Apple does, so they may very well let you keep it. If you still wanted to have it done through an Apple store, take a magnet to it before you hand it over. The techs have better things to do than trawl through your personal data (there are exceptions, of course), but if it sets your mind at ease- go for it. Honestly, I would do this in your position because I have read of people getting reman drives with other people's data still on them. But that would have nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with the companies contracted to remanufacture the HDs.

Not much more to say after that. I will probably write a summary tomorrow.

Twitter's business model

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:11:55 GMT

When I was in college, professors used to ask questions that are much harder than the question Allen Stern asks in this piece.

The NY Times crossword puzzle is harder.

Geez, installing a new hard disk in a MacBook is harder, and as I've found out that's pretty easy.

Okay what is Twitter's business model?

They give away access to the API only to find that add-on devs have a business model selling Twitter clients while Twitter itself is left sucking air.

And this is some kind of problem?

We should all be so lucky.

Here's what you do if you're Twitter.

Distribution.

How much you want to bet that Twitteriffic reaches a very small number of Twitter users.

Twitter, of course, reaches every Twitter user.

So what could be easier than to offer to sell everyone a client that makes Twitter work a lot better?

And of course Twitter would be entitled to some of that money.

Now, imagine that Twitter was really ambitious and they wanted to design a cell phone around Twitter. One that could make phone calls and play MP3s and do SMS but also had Twitter baked in.

Okay, so you can't imagine Twitter getting into the hardware business or being a cell phone service provider. But what if one of those did a deal with Twitter, or even bought Twitter? Then you'd be paying a monthly service fee to use Twitter, and might have chosen TMobile or Sprint over Verizon or AT&T because they have Twitter and the other guys have Microsoft's ripoff of Twitter. Or Google's. I think there's a premium for being the original guy, if you play it right (I never do, but Evan Williams does this pretty well.)

Anyway, there are lots of ways for Twitter to make money once there are enough users. And right now their business is to grow and their first priority is to stabilize their service. This isn't based on inside knowledge, but comes from reading the tea leaves and applying common sense.

I never learn

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 03:49:02 GMT

Okay I wanted something for Christmas and I didn't get it, so I decided on 12/31 to buy it for myself. I opted for one-day shipping which meant it would arrive on 1/2, which is today.

So I was following it on the Amazon site, as it made its way from Louisville to Oakland to San Pablo, to oooops.

I don't know, is it just me, or are we getting too deep into this computer thing.

New FlickrFan feature

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:25:10 GMT

Change #21: Subscribe to a Flickr tag.

Makes it easy to subscribe to new Flickr pictures that are tagged with snowstorm, for example.

FlickrFan and the Mac desktop

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:44:35 GMT

Here's an interesting Howto on connecting FlickrFan to the Mac desktop. I love this stuff.

Here's a movie that demonstrates this coolest of hacks.

Update on the missing disk

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:42:05 GMT

Looks like I'll get the drive back soon.

Update: I got the disk.

First I got a call from the Emeryville store, then I got a call from a person in Apple Executive offices (she gave me her name and number, but I'm not going to publish it here).

I'll report back when I have more info.

PS: The number of idiotic comments has gone way up.

Mike Arrington told me...

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:33:24 GMT

Mike told me it would be okay to use Firefox 3 beta on the Mac.

So I am. So far so good.

Firefox 2 was starting to hang every five minutes.

But one of my critical plugins doesn't work in Firefox 3.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh.

Software sucks.™

I just realized something

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:25:46 GMT

There are no more big holidays looming over the horizon.

Whew...

Glad that's over!!

"cheesecake"

PS: If I could be Emperor of the Universe for five minutes I'd outlaw all holidays in November, December and January and would declare that everybody should be nice to everyone all the time, no matter what season it is!

It's a security issue, folks

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:06:15 GMT

In 1980, I signed a deal with a company to market a product I was developing. The contract required me to turn over the source code, which I did. One day I went to a meeting at the office of the company, and there on the product manager's desk, next to a door that opened to the outside, was a floppy labeled "Dave Winer's source code" in big letters.

If you own a Mac you may soon find out what that felt like.

It's amazing to me that the tech blogosphere doesn't treat Apple's policy re broken hard disks as the huge gaping security hole that it is.

Think about it. We worry about bad people getting their hands on little pieces of data that, when added together, give them the power to be us in banking and credit transactions.

Think about what you would do if your laptop was stolen.

Well, if you own a Mac and its hard disk goes bad, and you make the mistake of bringing it to Apple for service, you will turn over all that data to Apple. Not "may" or "might" but "will." What Apple in turn does with that data is none of your affair. They don't sign anything or offer any guarantees that they won't sell the disk to a data miner. Think it can't happen or that it's unlikely? I don't gain much comfort from your feeling of security.

I've been writing about this issue since December 22. Usually when I write something critical of Apple, the results are mixed. Some people are supportive, but far more people attack. This time the ratio is very different. Almost everyone who has commented gets that there's a huge problem here.

Some say that other vendors do this too. That gives me less comfort, not more. That means there's no escaping this crazy way of treating user's confidentiality. Ultimately it hurts the vendors because people can't use their computers for things the manufacturers say we can.

Further, it's got to be an issue for the banks, brokerage firms, credit agencies. If you are a newspaper and you employ reporters and they use a computer, how exactly are you guarding the confidentiality of your sources? If you're a confidential source, don't you have an interest when the reporter gives their computer manufacturer all their data to do with as they please?

Imagine what you would do if it turned out there was a bug in a Netgear or Linksys router that allowed, under special circumstances, a mailicous person to gain access to the full content of your hard disk at any time. Would you have a problem with that?

This is worse than Microsoft's neglect of malware that got me to stop using their computers. In that case it was Microsoft being neglegent. This time Apple itself is the source of the problem. It's as if they planted a virus in their operating system that entitled them, under special circumstances, completely out of your control, to gain access to everything on your disk, with as much time as they want, with no way for you to prevent or even detect the intrusion.

See also: My letter to Steve Jobs.

Re yesterday's post, Apple does not have a store in Shanghai. I assume the customer is sincere, he thought he was at an Apple-owned store. Here's a picture of the place he probably went to. BTW, I'm 100-percent sure that the store in Emeryville is owned by Apple. You can find it on Apple's store website.

Cole: "Apple sent me my new hard drive and instructions stating that I had to send the old one back within 10 days to avoid being charged $250."

Chuck Shotton says that Apple used to return failed drives with sensitive data for an additional cost.

Going to the top

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 22:34:22 GMT

A screen shot of an email I sent to Steve Jobs at Apple.

Marc van der Chijs: "Dave, what happened to me at the Apple Store in Shanghai is even worse. They tried to recover my data, but did not have another HD to put it on, so they copied it onto one of their store computers. Two weeks later I came back to the store and to my big surprise I found all my data still on that computer. Every customer had access to it! No apologies from Apple of course."

Full text of the email I sent.

Holy Hannah it's a Morning Coffee Notes podcast!

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:31:26 GMT

The last podcast of the year, for sure, it's a tutorial on the meaning of the at-sign in Twitter for Dave Sifry. Maybe I got it wrong? If so, post a comment here.

Fix on Feeds page

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 13:07:59 GMT

I fixed a maor bug on the Feeds page in FlickrFan.

You don't have to do anything to get the update, other than leave the app running.

The new version is 0.34.

Sorry for this bug. Glad to have it fixed.

Office and conference FlickrFans

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 16:57:13 GMT

I don't have an office, and I'm not running a conference, so I hope to hook up with someone, hopefully in the Bay Area, with either of these, to try some experimentation with FlickrFan.

First a little background...

My first glimpse of how wonderful news photography and screen savers are together was when I visited Andy Rhinehart at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal on 2/15/05. He had to go to a meeting, and left me in his office to check email, update my blog using my laptop. HIs PC of course went into screen saver mode, and started showing pictures of various political leaders in meetings around the world and sporting events, people digging out of snow storms. It didn't take long before my eyes were fixed on his screen.

Later I found out that everyone at AP does this too.

If you have a folder of new pictures on your LAN it makes a fantastic source of distraction. But it's different from video because it's silent. You can have a conversation about what's on the screen without interfering with it, or try to have a conversation about something else entirely.

This is something we noticed about podcasting too, that sometimes less is more.

Because there is no video you can: 1. Use your eyes for something else, like driving, walking, doing housework. 2. Use your imagination in ways you can't with video, imagine what the speakers look like, where they are, who else is there. Once your imagination is activated in one direction it goes off in others.

So photocasting or picturecatching, whatever it ends up being called, has a similar "less is more" dimension.

So then I tried an experiment, I put an early version of FlickrFan on a 46-inch screen in my den, and when people would come over to visit I'd leave it running and we'd talk about whatever we were going to talk about, and I wasn't surprised to see the attention drift over to the TV. It's captivating.

So I'd like to try it in two new venues to see what happens.

1. In a reception area in an office. Imagine one of the buildings at Microsoft. Or a doctors office, or the lobby of a VC firm. Install a big flatscreen TV on the wall, with a Mac Mini behind it, with a net connection, and let it run. See if people don't gravitate to it. See if people don't want to have meetings in the lobby. (I think some might.)

2. At a conference, like Demo or Davos, scatter four screens around the main lobby (not the meeting room), with one Mac driving them all or each with its own Mac Mini. Again see how it affects the dynamic. You might want to show pictures taken at the conference for a unique recursive effect. Or just use the AP news photo feed. Either would be sufficient to learn how it works. I bet we would learn a lot.

Let me know if you decide to give it a try, and by all means please blog about your experiences, share what you learn with the rest of us.

Playing with Photobucket

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 16:26:47 GMT

Apparently Photobucket supports RSS (good).

They use media-rss (also good).

But they seem to only provide thumbnails of the photos, which is not good (if true).

Here's the RSS feed for my newly created Photobucket account.

Update: James Holderness says a link to the full-size image is there.

Insightful review in Wired News

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 19:38:17 GMT

Michael Calore at Wired News writes about something I do too, and love.

Wired News: "The first time I ran it, I let FlickrFan pull just AP photos, then I sat back and watched. I run two monitors here at my desk at Wired, so I can see two photos from the news agency side by side. This makes for some fantastic juxtapositions -- like a picture of Bhutto smiling on one screen and her coffin being hoisted by mourners on the other, or of Iraqi children playing soccer on one side and a center ice scrum from an NHL hockey game on the other."

It's a fun game to play in the living room with just one monitor, but with two (Macs work very cleanly with multiple montors) you get some special kind of magic.

People who focus on the software miss the point. It's about the photography. The software just facilitates.

Update: A Flickr set that illustrates.

A feature a day...

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 17:33:27 GMT

I'm going to try to add one feature to FlickrFan every day.

Today's feature: How to find a user's feed, if they have one.

Bottom-line: On the public list, there's now an XML icon next to every user who has a feed, who hasn't opted-out.

Thanks Lifehacker!

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 17:55:54 GMT

A simple no-nonsense writeup of FlickrFan. Thank you.

However, the product does much more than what they say.

We'll continue explaining and enhancing the product here.

Pride of Cucamonga, Day 2

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 18:56:30 GMT

Still listening to this classic Dead song.

And writing about it on Twitter...

It's an MP3 that I ripped from the Mars Hotel album. Which I bought on CD many years ago.

I've listened to this track about 1000 times. When I play it it puts a smile on my face. Because Cucamonga is a place with no pride, imho.

It's a joke, kind of like Truckin makes fun of New Orleans, a town that done the Dead wrong, once, a long time ago.

Now if it were on vinyl I would have wore it out a long time ago. I'm sure there was a copy of the song on the disk Apple stole from me.

There you have it RIAA. You can go after Apple. I'll support you because they stole from both of us. They have no right to listen to PofC.

I imagine Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller sitting around smokin a doobie listening to Phil Lesh sing, thinking "Dave has good taste in music."

BTW, Cucamonga is a suburb in southern CA. Near Ontario. Probably very non-descript. Might have been interesting 70 years ago.

And that's your bedtime story for Saturday, boys and girls. Have a nice day, don't hit your brother (or sister) and be nice to the sitter!

Update: Frank Zappa lived in Cucamonga.

Flickr search for Cucamonga. Lots of hits!

Recommendation for Flickr

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 04:38:47 GMT

I've been emailing today with photographers who use Flickr to manage their sets and collections. They like it that people can view their pictures publicly, but they want to control how they're used. RSS, used as a way to distribute pictures, is a new idea for many of them.

Based on these conversations I think it's important that they have a way to:

1. Turn off the RSS feed for their pictures.

2. To have their pictures not included in RSS feeds based on tags and searches.

3. To include their pictures in RSS feeds, but only links to them, and the titles and descriptions, but not as enclosures.

Of course this recommendation isn't just for Flickr, it's a good idea for any photo-sharing site.

FlickrFan, day 2

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 08:00:00 GMT

Good morning, lots of discussion on many weblogs about the new product, FlickrFan, announced here last night.

I'm going to write about it here, a lot, over the coming weeks and months, but first I wanted to link to some of the comments about it.

Michael Markman: How to Use FlickrFan with AppleTV.

Don Park: Dave's New Thingy.

Rex Hammock: Dave's cool new thing.

I guess it's a "thing" eh?

Phil Jones: Platform Wars.

Michael Gartenberg: FlickrFan first thoughts.

Scoble (yesterday): The MacMini HDTV revolution.

Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet have been using the software for the last month or so in a variety of forms.

Loren Feldman marks the moment in history.

Om Malik came for a visit last month, we took a walk in the hills, and of course I talked about FlickrFan and did a demo.

There were other articles and reviews, you can find them on TechMeme or Technorati. One thing I've learned is that takes a bit of time to find the right mix of personal pics from Flickr and news pics from AP. It's an unusual app because whole families can use it, and they have different preferences and expectations. The tech blogosphere tends to rush to decide about things. I find they sometimes miss the mark, widely and I was sure this would be one of those times, which is why I didn't roll it out the usual way.

I wanted to get a base of users going, and learn and evolve the software, so far it looks pretty good, so the next step is to evaluate, listen, fix the most serious bugs I can find, think, and then move forward.

Watch this space (below) for new features and fixes...

Change Note #17: List of newly-installed FlickrFans.