Amazon’s Advantage

Posted on November 9, 2006 by

I bought and next-day shipped my new MacBook Pro from Amazon on October 19.

On October 24, Apple announced a new line with Core 2 Duos and other upgrades.

This afternoon, by sheer chance, I noticed that Amazon had dropped the price of the model I bought by a few hundred dollars. I sent customer support a request to refund the difference – why not?

Six hours later, a friendly email arrives in my inbox. Refund granted.

Amazon does something amazing: they combine the purchasing power and logistical expertise of a massive retailer with the kind of customer support you can expect from a neighborhood store. I get my impulse purchases overnight for a few bucks (Amazon Prime), competitive pricing, a monster selection. Except for niche purchases, I’m finding it harder and harder to shop anywhere else online.

Posted in General

In the Water – Week One

Posted on October 30, 2006 by

(Why am I in the water? See Jumping Ship.)

After week one, I’m still thrilled with the new MacBook Pro. Careful chronologers will note that just four days after UPS dropped off my laptop, Apple released its upgraded MacBook Pro line with Core 2 Duos and bigger disks – and FireWire 800, if I ever needed to plug in a big disk array? But no matter, I’m feeling good with my now just-barely-obsolete laptop.

And now to revisit a favorite topic for probably every PC-to-Mac-switching blogger: essential Mac applications, with a developer’s bias.

  • Quicksilver

    • – A mind-reading application launcher and so much more. Get it, seriously.

  • Firefox

    • – The new 2.0 theme looks great next to native OS X apps.

  • Mail.app

    • – Whaa?! No Thunderbird? Not for now. Mail.app is just smoother. We’ll see if it lasts.

  • Adium

    • – Great cross-service IM.

  • TextMate

    • – For single file editing or more involved projects, I’ve been very impressed with TextMate. We’ll see if I find the need for something heavier like Eclipse.

  • VirtueDesktops

    • – Smooth and pretty multiple desktop manager.

  • Parallels

    • – Keeps Debian and Windows XP running in the background. Watch out though, VMWare for Mac is coming.

  • iTerm

    • – The standard OS X terminal is good, but when you’ve got lots of shells open, tabs are a big help.

Posted in General

Jumping Ship

Posted on October 21, 2006 by

On Friday, I said goodbye to my five-year-old IBM ThinkPad A22P and hello to a new MacBook Pro.

Yes, five years.

I’ve been putting this off for a while.

Now, the ThinkPad was a good laptop – great, maybe – and it did everything I asked of it and more. I’d guess 15,000 to 20,000 hours of use, a number of trips around the globe, and more than two drop-kicks in the office parking lot. My daily routine centered around Firefox, Thunderbird, SecureCRT, VMWare (debian), and lately, FeedDemon under Windows XP. It was the only computer I used both at home and at work.

But time had taken its toll. A few days before the three year warrantee expired, the motherboard failed. IBM was happy to replace nearly everything in the system except the screen and hard drive, which I swapped out for a faster model. But after that, the speakers starting failing, suspending or hibernating XP became a gamble, and the built-in ethernet went south. In the end, though, Javascript was the laptop’s undoing. When the web was just a pile of HTML and images with a sprinking of code, my old laptop did great. When trying to parse and execute a few hundred KB of Javascript code every time I fired up GMail, my laptop ground to a halt.

I toyed with the idea of getting a Dell (“dude…”), but fell for the seductive simplicity, fast hardware, and BSD-backing of a MacBook Pro: 2 GHz Core Duo, 2GB RAM. Two days in, I think I’ve made the right choice. QuickSilver is waiting to read my mind, I’ve got Darwin Ports building the latest PHP5, Firefox is snappy, Parallels has a fresh install of debian, and everthing feels right, a feeling I’ve long missed in the land of Windows.

Posted in General

MogileFS Summit

Posted on September 20, 2006 by

Yesterday, Brad Fitzpatrick and SixApart hosted the second MogileFS Summit at SixApart’s offices in San Francisco. The initial response on the mailing list suggested a handful of local users would attend, but in the end more than twenty people showed up from a wide range of companies. In addition to a few folks from Danga / SixApart, there was a small group from Guba, two guys from Bloglines, Matt from WordPress, and developers from lots of other sites both large (in some cases, massive) and small.

MogileFS, for the unanointed, is a specialized distributed filesystem originally built to power LiveJournal. Like its siblings memcached and perlbal, Mogile is open source software. True distributed filesystems are unweildy and complex; Mogile makes a number of assumptions and simplifications that make it easy to deploy, fast, and developer-friendly. Mogile doesn’t mount like a traditional UNIX filesystem (though in the summit, we saw a demo of a FUSE+webdav mount hack) and stores files based on a flat domain / key structure. It’s up to the application using Mogile to add files via a simple API, enforce permissions, map keys to filenames if needed, and query for and cache the locations of stored files. Where Mogile shines is replicating files across pools of cheap, usually non-RAID disk arrays and handling drive and device failures, some level of capacity balancing, and future growth. Mogile really nails a sweet spot for the kind of storage problems many websites face. At Wikispaces, we’ve got millions of files in Mogile and it has been rock-solid since day one.

We spent the majority of the summit talking about what’s coming in Mogile 2 – which is already partially running in production for LiveJournal – and what’s on people’s minds for future releases. Aside from a number of code cleanup and performance enhancements, big changes in Mogile 2 include a new plugin architecture and pluggable replication rules. In Mogile 1.x, replication was controlled by a “mindevcount” setting, the minimum number of devices that a file had to be stored on. In Mogile 2, you can write a replication ruleset that mandates files span racks, datacenters, a certain number of fast systems, etc. Best of all, Mogile 2 is API-compatible with Mogile 1.x, so we can drop it in on the fly.

To Brad, Junior, and everyone from SixApart who’s hacking on Mogile, memcached, and friends – thanks! It was an awesome summit.

Posted in Webdev, Wikispaces

Helping Teachers 100,000 Wikis at a Time

Posted on September 7, 2006 by

I’ve been quiet lately here in blogland, but I’ve got two great excuses: the summer sailing season in San Francisco and all the things we’ve been working on at Wikispaces.

Today we’re thrilled to announce a program to give away 100,000 wikis (usually $5/month) for use in K-12 education. For free. No strings attached.

We’re doing this after hearing amazing stories of teachers trying wikis in their classrooms over the last year. There’s a huge demand for simple technology in education, not bloated and complex software that scares away teachers and students alike. Better still, we don’t want to put price pressure on educators – too many teachers already have to make impossible choices about the tools they can afford to bring into their classrooms.

For a small company, 100,000 is a big number – and we need your help. Help in telling teachers, journalists, school staff, and educational technologists about what we’re trying to do. Email them our blog post, post one of our progress trackers on your blog or website (like the thermometer to the right of this post), or just share our story with a friend. With any luck, we’ll look back at 100,000 as just the beginning.

Posted in Wikispaces

BlackBerry Wiki

Posted on July 16, 2006 by

This past Christmas, I was lucky to get a BlackBerry 7105t under the tree. This was, I thought, a great phone. Nice and small, good bright screen, and a well-designed address book with Outlook syncing. SureType is nothing short of magic and email via a cheap T-Mobile account worked pretty well.

BlackBerry 8700g

Four months later, the 7105t met a watery grave at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay after a nighttime sailing mishap. I got sad. Then I got an 8700g.

Now I understand crackberry addiction. The full keyboard is a big part – SureType is very good, but just doesn’t compare. Whatever Intel xScale processor they crammed into this thing is fast, far faster than the 7105t. Web pages scream via EDGE and T-Mobile’s unlimited data plan price is right – $19 a month. But with both the 7105t and 8700g I struggled to figure out what apps I needed to get, what my best option was for setting up email forwarding, and what tricks I could use to be more productive. I read forums, I read blogs, I scoured search engines, and I came up with only a few answers.

What’s still missing on the web is a great reference site for all things BlackBerry. BlackBerry Forums is the closest thing – a great discussion site, but reference information is lost in a sea of comments and sticky posts.

So I’ve started a wiki over at Wikispaces to gather links, pictures, tips, and anything else BlackBerry users deem important in one easy-to-edit spot.

Got a BlackBerry? Join in.

Posted in General, Wikispaces | 2 Comments

Embedded Media in Wikis Done Right

Posted on July 15, 2006 by

This week over at Wikispaces we launched support for embedded media. This means you can put YouTube videos, Google Calendars, Odeo podcasts, Flickr slideshows, and just about anything else you can imagine in your wiki page.

Now you might be thinking: “well, duh – I can do that with any wiki that supports HTML.” But we chose to do embedded media in a smarter way.

If you’re just pasting HTML in your wiki page, you’ll see something like this when editing your page:

<embed
style=”width:400px; height:326px;”
id=”VideoPlayback”
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
src=”http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-8224040487342942414″>

Not so pretty, and really confusing for other people who might be editing your page. Put ten of these on a page, and you’ve got a real mess.

Here’s what the same embed looks like on Wikispaces:

[[media type="google" key="-8224040487342942414"]]

YouTube?

[[media type="youtube" key="UnFV-fvgOu0"]]

Nice and clean. Paste in a URL instead of the embedded HTML code and we’ll convert it automatically into the correct tag. Paste in something we don’t yet understand and we’ll add it to our database for the future.

Long-time Wikispaces user Sean FitzGerald has a great demo page showing what happens when you unleash media on wiki pages. Awesome!

Posted in Wikispaces