Archive for June, 2006
Sweet filesystems
Scoble’s got a post where he shares his thoughts about why WinFS was yanked recently by MS. I think the minor shit storm going on in the comments is amusing. Reminds me of trying to crawl my way through Slashdot comments (crap, crap, crap, insightful, crap, crap, etc). But listening to all the bitching in the comments did remind me of one thing: that sweet mother of a filesystem that is BeFS.
Everybody I know has one of two reactions when I bring up my love affair with BeOS. It’s either “what’s BeOS?” or “what’s wrong with you?” Little do they know, BeOS had the sweetest filesystem. Here’s the easiest way I can explain why BeFS is so awesome. Every file on your computer has an associated type. It could be an MP3, an email message, a Word document or a video. Each file type has an associated set of metadata that goes along with it. For instance, an MP3 might have an artist, album, song title and duration. An email message might have a sender, recipients, subject, date and whether or not there are any attachments.
I can hear you all getting bored. You’re all saying, “yeah, so what…everything has metadata.” Yes, the only difference is that BeFS made it incredibly easy to store, access and search metadata. The metadata was indexed so you could search it fast, really fast. So imagine you’re on your desktop and you want to search for something. Let’s say you want to look for all of your Bjork songs. Easy as pie, just ask BeFS to find you all files with a metadata field named “Artist” with the value “Bjork”. Even if the filename is ABCD1234.mp3, BeFS is gonna find it. Filenames are irrelevant. Not only is BeFS going to find it, it’ll find it anywhere. You don’t need to have all of your MP3s in one “Music” folder. Because the entire filesystem is indexed, BeFS can find needles in a haystack in the blink of an eye. Want to find all the email sent from your boss? Come on now, at least make it difficult on BeFS. How about all email on the entire computer sent from your boss with the word “bonus” in the subject sent between 12/1/2005 and 12/31/2005? Just like searching for Bjork, BeFS chews it up and spits it out faster than you can say “refresh rate”.
And because the searches are so fast, you can do some fun stuff. You can, for example, create “smart folders” that are really just a familiar way of exposing these filesystem searches as everyday folders (BeOS did that too). The speed of the filesystem search makes it feel just like opening up any other folder. Remember when you had to download someone’s special desktop search application to do this kind of stuff for you? You’d download it and it would spend the next 6 hours crawling your hard disk to build up a search index and when it was done you’d have to launch that application to perform the search and then another application to open the file when you found it. Well, all that was built into BeFS. BeFS was actively indexing all the time. There was no 6 hour long process to index everything. And if an application wanted to search for something, it just asked BeFS to do it.
This is what I miss the most about BeOS, the beautiful filesystem. I miss some other things, but BeFS is what I miss the most. It’s a shame to hear that MS is killing something (WinFS) that sounded an awful lot like BeFS. If it’s true and the two are very much alike, I’m not quite sure how Scoble thinks the web destroys the advantage a system like WinFS provides. If anything, WinFS provides a powerful tool to make the web experience all that much better. Think of all of the web services that are probably implementing metadata in a database by hand right now. Services like flickr with their plethora of photos, just begging to have all of the EXIF data indexed. Services like Yahoo! Mail/Hotmail/GMail all begging to have MIME headers indexed. Services like WordPress, YouTube and more that have a metric buttload of user data crying out to be indexed so it can be made more accessible. And as long as Scoble’s making the web the lynchpin, what about tagging? Everything on the web is tagable now. Filesystem metadata means you can have a metadata attribute called “Tags” that holds all the tags for a given file. Instantly every file on the computer is searchable by tags and the developer didn’t have to do a thing. Now what web service wouldn’t die to have all of that tagging and searching infrastructure already built for them? That’s a huge time sink for the developers that’s been taken care of in one shot by adding an advanced filesystem to the mix.
6 comments June 25, 2006
The ISP dilemma
So I’ve been having issues with my Speakeasy DSL lately. It started on Thursday night and has been continuing since. I called them late Thursday night and they contacted Covad to run some tests. Covad confirmed a loop problem and put in a call to the telephone company. The telephone company told them they’d send someone to take care of it and that they’d have it taken care of by 10am Tuesday. Let’s ponder that more closely. Problem reported late Thursday night, should be fixed by Tuesday morning. Yeah, uh…I don’t think so.
I’ve had enough problems with DSL connectivity in my house, I can’t take anymore. Not for the $100/month I pay for it. So I did what any insane person would do, I picked up the phone and shamefully called Comcast. Yes, that Comcast. The same Comcast that had service so bad they drove me to Speakeasy in the first place. However, unlike Speakeasy, my Comcast connection never dropped when the garbage truck rolled by (I’m serious, it happens).
Now’s when the story turns sad…very sad. I went to Best Buy last night and bought myself a Morotola cable modem. I didn’t want to wait for Comcast to mail me a self-install kit and I wasn’t going to deal with another Comcast installer who’d ask to use my pristine, brand new bathroom and then dirty it up with the most disgusting dookie anybody has ever taken in this house (oh my god, what on earth did he eat?). So today I opened up the modem and hooked it up. A quick call to Comcast and I was all set…or was I?
I hooked up the Mac directly to the modem. I didn’t want my router to get in the way of any initial setup work. I pointed my browser at Yahoo! and got…the Comcast “capture portal”. Okay, no biggie, they want me to set up my comcast.net email address before I go any further. Oh, wait…this requires a download. What the hell? Okay, whatever, download their silly file and deal with it. Hmm…it seems to have downloaded a StuffIt archive. My brand new Intel Mac doesn’t have StuffIt installed. Okay, no problem…switch back to the DSL long enough to get it. Unpackage the SIT file and start the installer. Okay now, this installer is slow. Oh, that’s because it’s a PowerPC binary so I have to load Rosetta to run it. Whatever, just be patient because it’s going to install Internet Explorer. Wait…what? I have three perfectly good (i.e. not Internet Explorer) browsers already. What do I need that crap for? Enhance your calm John Spartan, just go with it. You knew there was a price to be paid with Comcast. Okay, it’s checking out the network and all to make sure we’re configured properly. Hmm…odd, it wants my password so it can change some admin settings. Whatever, it just wants to make sure my ethernet connection is set up for DHCP (right?). Okay, it’s restarting the software. Wow, evidently I didn’t get my own password right. You know, despite the fact that the MacOS dialog would have told me if I got it wrong. Okay, you know what? FUCK THIS!
So I switched over to my PC laptop. When in doubt, go to a platform they know how to screw up. I had to reboot the modem to get it to let the PC get a DHCP lease. Must be some sort of MAC address lock-in or something. I finally got the PC set up, got my account working and everything. Wonder of wonders, I’m able to hit Yahoo!. So after all that, I had to know if it was worth it. So I ran some speed tests using the Speakeasy speed test. The results were pretty astounding.
I pay about $100/month for my 6.0/768 service from Speakeasy. According to the speed test, I’m only getting 3.8/768. That’s pretty pathetic. I’m now on a plan for $50/month for my 8.0/768 service from Comcast. According to the speed test, I’m getting 7.99/713. Let me get this straight, I’m paying half as much money and getting more than twice the download rate. I can’t say I love the service Comcast gives you, but for the price you can’t beat the speeds. As long as I don’t have any of the past issues I had with them, this could work out just fine.
As for Speakeasy, I would like to say one thing. The $100/month is actually worth the service you get when you call them. They’re fantastic over the phone, I’ve never dealt with another company that hires such competent phone support. Unfortunately, I think they’re hampered by inferior technology (DSL) and the fact that they are so far removed from the hardware that they’re unable to fix many problems themselves. I think Speakeasy is a wonderful company and if they were to offer some really sweet wireless package (like WiMax, which they’re investing in) I’d be one of the first in line to check it out.
5 comments June 24, 2006
HDTV – by Scoble
I was reading Scoble’s post about picking out an HDTV. He’s totally right, in my mind…skip the plasma. My wife and I bought our rear projection 55″ Mitsubishi 6 years ago. It’s a fantastic television (although I’m getting the itch to upgrade just to get digital inputs) and it was reasonably priced (about $3,500). Nowadays, you see the monster plasma and LCD screens. Shame is, they also have monster pricetags to go along with them.
Rear projections, on the other hand, are the sweet spot. You can get a good sized screen without too much green (I can’t believe I just said that). And unlike the rear projection I got 6 years ago, the new ones aren’t 3 feet deep and 4 feet tall. They’ve shrunk them down to the point where they’re not the moving burden they once were (you should have seen us trying to get our TV to the second floor apartment we used to live in). In addition, the picture is fantastic. And with the money you save, you can afford to go big on a good surround sound system (I’m ashamed to say we still haven’t taken care of our surround sound situation).
1 comment June 23, 2006
Inquirer != Enquirer
I saw a link today to a review of Yahoo! Mail Beta vs. GMail vs. Windows Live Mail. I laughed at first because the site is called “The Inquirer”. Then I realized I was thinking of “The Enquirer” and stopped laughing.
The review is pretty spot on. They focus on Yahoo! Mail Beta as a desktop replacement. I know for a fact that the beta can easily replace desktop software, I’ve been using it in place of Mozilla Thunderbird for more than a month now to handle all of my work email. At the moment, I have 8,485 messages in my Inbox and the beta chugs along as though I had only 5 messages in it. Impressive.
With GMail they point out how GMail was the first to raise the bar in terms of the amount of free storage offered. Let’s face it, if GMail hadn’t come out swinging with 1GB we’d all still be stuck with 10MB mailboxes. They also bring up my primary concern with GMail, what are they doing with my messages. At the moment, they process the mail message into some set of parameters that can be fed into their ad system to generate context aware ads. This might not seem like a big deal to some people, but I see it as a fantastically slippery slope. What other private information will they send out and about their network?
And then there’s Windows Live Mail. I’ve been a beta tester since it was still called Kahuna. I have to say, I’ve never liked it. In my mind it’s a cheap knock off of Yahoo! Mail Beta. They made it look like Outlook, but they kept all the same paradigms like paging through your mail. The article points out the rampant spam problem on Hotmail/Windows Live Mail and I can totally relate. I moved off of my old hotmail.com account when I started at Yahoo! 19 months ago. Periodically I go back to check the inbox and it’s always a flood of crap from spammers. It’s insane, really. Complicating matters for WLM, it’s non-IE support has always been…poor.
The article gives Yahoo! Mail Beta a 9/10 (a fair assessment, we’re not perfect…yet), GMail an 8/10 (I think they rightly rate high on the scale because of some of the features they’ve implemented in webmail that you don’t see anywhere else) and Windows Live Mail an awful 2/10 (I agree, Microsoft must try harder).
In any case, whatever you prefer, it’s great to see the three powerhouses going at it. GMail woke everybody in the webmail world up with their 1GB mailboxes and Yahoo! smacked everyone silly with a desktop replacement. It’s someone’s turn to shake things up a bit again so we can keep this exciting competition for the hearts and minds (and clickthroughs) of our users.
5 comments June 23, 2006
Bad Akismet…no biscuit
So, everything was going relatively well with Akismet until tonight. I’m not saying that everything went horribly wrong, but I will say that it had it’s first false positive just moments ago. It wouldn’t be so disturbing if it weren’t for the fact that it chose MY comment as spam.
So now I can’t trust Akismet as much as I had been. I’d been screening everything it was catching before manually deleting the spam, just to make sure there were no false positives. Lately I’d gone into a “quick scan” mode where I’d gloss over comments quickly, looking for the telltale signs of links to pharmaceuticals. But now I can’t do that anymore, I have to keep a closer eye on what it’s flagging.
*sigh*
7 comments June 21, 2006
Flock – up to the task?
So, I’m always needing 2 browsers. I have two Yahoo! accounts: one for work and one for personal use. Why? Well, my work Y! account has all of my work mail. My personal account has my personal mail, my MyWeb links and so on. During the day, I find it necessary to be logged in to both accounts.
Unfortunately, I can’t do that with Firefox alone. I need a second browser to be able to be logged in to a second account simultaneously. When I was on my PC, I used Internet Explorer. I used to think IE was the worst browser ever, until I bought my Mac. Lately I’ve been using Safari as my second browser. As it turns out, Safari is the worst browser I have ever used. I don’t even care about the fact that so many whizzy sites don’t work with Safari. I’m more concerned about the fact that it crashes if I so much as breathe on it.
So, Safari is fired (I removed the launch icon from my dock)…now what? I tried Flock a while back when it first came out. At the time it looked neat how it was hooked into everything. Unfortunately, I was too invested in Firefox. But now it just might fit the bill…so I downloaded it.
It’s okay. It’s Firefox under the hood, so much of it is familiar. It has some neat tricks. For instance, I’m writing this blog post using Flock’s blog editor. I tried seeing what the Flock aggregator would make of my massive OPML file…it choked. It choked hard. Unfortunately, it also sucks with bookmarks in the toolbar. I have a few folders set up in my Firefox bookmark toolbar. That gives me quick access to my most visited sites without having a really cluttered bookmark toolbar. Plus I use the “Open in tabs” feature of Firefox’s bookmarks folder to have a “Good Morning” folder in my toolbar. Well, as it turns out, Flock won’t let you have a folder in your toolbar. It won’t let you have a folder in any folder at all. That…sucks. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it certainly is annoying.
Anyway, I’ll continue giving Flock a try. Who knows, maybe I’ll learn to get past the bookmark thing and maybe the aggregator will some day get up to full speed.
Now, the real question is, when I click the “Publish” button…what’s going to happen?
technorati tags:browsers
Blogged with Flock
1 comment June 20, 2006
You know your commute is crazy when…
I’m not 100% positive what came over me today, but I felt inclined to do a little bit of investigation into alternative commuting options. When I say “alternative”, I mean way the hell out there. I’ve already done by train and automobile. By plane is kind of out of the question, just because it would be expensive and time consuming (too much dealing with homeland security checks and all).
So today I researched…by water. It’s a little known fact that there is a waterway that leads all the way from downtown Sacramento all the way into the San Francisco Bay. I’m not entirely sure if it’s passable by decent sized watercraft year round, but it’s definitely there. So I wandered over to the Gmaps Pedometer and found myself a water route that would run from downtown Sacramento to the south end of the bay nearish to Yahoo!. It’s a little over 120 miles, which is actually about the distance on the freeway from my house in Folsom to Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. I have no idea how long it would actually take a boat to cover that distance since I’m not familiar with boat speeds.
Well, after I found a route, I had to look for a boat. More specifically, a house boat. See…if I’m going to have to pay for a slip down in the Bay Area, I might as well make it dual purpose and turn it into living space while I’m at it. So I turned to eBay and found a 1989 cruiser with 2 bedrooms and a bathroom. It’s a bit expensive ($20,000+) and I really know next to nothing about owning a boat, so the chances of this leading anywhere is slim to none.
In any case, just wanted to share the lengths to which I’ve been researching commute alternatives. If you think of any good/clever/fun ways of commuting from Folsom, CA to Sunnyvale, CA…feel free to let me know. Who knows, it just might be crazy enough that I’ll try it. Just don’t recommend anything I’ve already tried (I’ve already done the Capitol Corridor train on Amtrak and I’ve done the drive in my truck more times than I care to mention).
10 comments June 18, 2006
Hack Day…t-minus 14 1/2 hours
Hack Day is almost here. Am I excited? You bet. I busted my hump all day to clear some of my “day job” stuff out of the way so I don’t have to worry about it during Hack Day.
Chad’s got a good writeup of what’s going on tomorrow and what’s happened in the past couple of hack days. Yes, I’m one of the hackers he mentions who’ll be spending the whole night down at Yahoo!, hacking my brains out. I thought it would be a really cool throwback to the all nighters I used to pull in college.
Oh, and that trophy in the picture on Chads website…that’s mine. They just haven’t engraved my name on it yet. 
June 14, 2006
My home Mac setup
I snapped a pic of my MacBook Pro setup at home. I must say, I love having so much desktop real estate. I worked from home on Thursday and Friday using this setup. Browser and iTunes running on the top screen, terminal sessions and IM client running on the bottom screen. I was able to get the screens set up so the MacBook understands that the big monitor is on top and the little one is on bottom, so dragging applications from one to the next works as it should (drag off the top of the laptop screen to see it appear on the Dell LCD). It’s actually a pretty comfortable setup.
I’m using my ergonomic Microsoft keyboard and a 2 button mouse. The mouse has been good, although I’ve noticed it seems jittery on the Mac. Like fine-grained movements just aren’t smooth at all. I never noticed that problem with it hooked up to my PC. The keyboard has taken a little getting used to, mostly because I have to remember what the Ctrl/Windows/Alt key map to in the Mac-verse. There’s also some issues with page up/down and the home/end keys. But overall it’s not been terrible.
I think I’m going to try to switch to an identical setup at work. Unfortunately, since it’s not a company computer, I won’t be able to connect directly to the ethernet. I’ll have to use the company wireless and SSH tunnels, but that’s already what I’m doing from home (although it often seems like my wireless net at home is much better than our wireless net on the Sunnyvale campus).
Anyway, I’m still looking for application recommendations and any other tips/tricks with the Mac that people have found useful, especially developers. I’m hoping at the end of this week, after a full week of working on the Mac, to post a detailed review of it. There’s been good and bad with the good definitely outweighing the bad so far.
1 comment June 10, 2006
Hack Day looms
Ever since the first Hack Day at Yahoo!, I’ve been wanting to participate. There’s been one or two since the first one and I haven’t participated in them. Why? Well, because I have a day job. But good news is just around the corner. Thursday is the next company Hack Day and yours truly will be right in the thick of it. I’ve cleared a couple of hours of work time to work on my hack(s) (still not 100% sure on what I’m doing, but I have a couple of ideas) and I’ve set up my commute schedule to allow me to be down for the 24 hour hacking session (noon Thursday to noon Friday). So with new MacBook in hand, next week I hack.
Hack Day at Yahoo! has really been dominated by the search folks. That’s not really surprising because they’re the ones who originally put it together. But I think this time we’ll see a lot more involvement from other teams. I already know of at least 1 other person who will be presenting a demo from the mail team. It should be really cool to see the other groups starting to get involved. I think it should generate plenty of new things that actually make their way to the users (several hacks from past hack days are in production now).
On a related topic, I think I already have enough ideas to keep me busy with this Hack Day. However, I’ve been kicking around the idea of taking suggestions from users. I’m not sure how well it would go or if someone within Yahoo! would cry foul, but it might be kind of fun. Imagine, as a user, if you had access to 1 engineer for an entire day. What would you build? Keep in mind it can’t be some huge feature. It would have to be something that could be completed to demo-worthy status within 24 hours (possibly less, I might crash hard at the end so I wouldn’t count on the last 4 hours being quality hours). And, of course, there’s no guarantee that anything shown at Hack Day will ever be seen outside of Yahoo!. Food for thought for the next Hack Day.
2 comments June 10, 2006
