Category Archives: Tech

Technology, gadgets, software, and the industry around them.

Frustrating Amazon

Rant, Tech

Some days Amazon just drives me batty. Part of it may be the fact that I have 3 distinct accounts on Amazon, all with the exact same login, but which one I get depends on on what password I use when I log in. One of these accounts gives me the discount for using A9, the rest don’t. Depending on which one I logged into last, my A9 search history is hosed. The wishlists are in various states of upkeep, and all different. It’s confusing and frustrating and really turns me off from Amazon. I wish I could just delete all those accounts and start fresh. (If they let me export my wishlist first.)

How Flickr Was Made

Tech

Everybody I know loves Flickr and it’s one of the slickest web applications most of us have seen in a long time. I recently found out that Cal Henderson, the lead developer of Flickr from Ludicorp, is going to be giving a workshop called Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget – How We Built Flickr on June 20th here in San Francisco. It’s also fairly cheap for what you’re getting, so if you’re in the Bay area or can make it here for June 20th I’d highly recommend coming out, I’m planning on going myself. It’s put on by By Designers for Designers who also use WordPress.

A Calendar Problem

Ideas, Tech

So here’s the scenario: I have a work calendar on Outlook 2003 which gets all the work meetings. I use iCal on my Mac to keep a calendar with mostly personal events and it syncs via DAV online. I would love to combine all of these and sync them together and to some sort of web interface, and make all the events and alarms go to my phone, a Motorola RAZR. Is this even possible? Update: Groupcal looks like exactly what I need.

Braindead Finder Behaviour

Rant, Tech,

Because of what I consider totally braindead behivour in the OS X Finder I appear to have lost about 60 pictures from my trip. When I offload pictures from card I generally drag the 100PENTX folder from the card onto my desktop and I leave things in that folder until I have a chance to compress the pictures, divide them into days, and upload them. Well OS X does this crazy thing where when you drag the folder onto the desktop it asks you if you want to replace the folder with the same name. On Windows I always say yes and it just adds the new pictures to those already in the folder. In OS X it apparently means delete the folder that’s already there with no way to recover it and replace it with the one you’re dragging. This happened to me a few times and I couldn’t figure out what was happening, luckily though I had backups on my iPod. Unfortunately going back over the pictures from the trip it seems a day is missing. Fortunately it was a day of mostly travel so I’ll live, but still a bummer. Updates: John Gruber weighs in, and here’s the exact message in Windows.

New update: Robert Scoble put me in touch with Bob Day who had this to say:

If the question is just “Why do merge by default?”, there are lots of
answers.

1. Because it maps well to operations that users are likely trying to
accomplish (see the scenario of dropping a picture folder from a
camera).
2. Folder replace can be done by deleting the destination folder first,
and then copying. If you have replace be the primary method, then merge
becomes a very tedious process.
3. Because it is less destructive?
…

Please realize that having a camera that uniquely assigns picture
numbers until you reset them becomes very important with this merge
behavior. If your pictures are all uniquely named, the default of
replacing files with the same name will allow you to not lose any files.

Also realize that this is a complicated scenario for most users. Almost
any choice is going to be bad for some users.

And yes, the behavior is a concious choice. We had to implement this
feature in Windows 95.

I followed up that “So before that [Windows 95] folders were deleted and
overwritten?” Bob responded: “I need the source code to Windows 3.1 to confirm. Anybody remember “File
Manager”? wow, that is old.” And dug up:

Ok, archeological discovery over. (wipes the dust off his sleeves)

Win3.1 would say the same thing for folders as it did for files:
“Replace file with file ”

And if you said “yes” for a folder, it would try to delete the
folder first, which would error out if the directory
wasn’t empty. Not sure what the error message is there.

I would love to get similar background for the Mac OS X behaviour.

TypeLockPick

Tech,

With all the fuss and bother over TypeKey, you’d think it was the end of the world. It’s being called the Patriot Act of Weblogging because it’s an over-the-top reaction to a problem. People are saying they’ll never comment on blogs that require TypeKey. I haven’t seen this much commotion over vaporware since… MT 3. The FAQ tells you everything you could ever want to know about TypeKey, except whether it’s free for commercial use. I think as someone intimately aquainted with many of the technologies surrounding weblogs I can set things straight.

Calm down. There’s no need to worry. You can leave comments like you always have, TypeKey or no Typekey. TypeKey is basically a centralized authentication

It’s just like the old days, when you could comment on anything you wanted without hassle.

(WordPress only accepts trackbacks sent through POST because according to the spec, “TrackBack pings should now be sent using HTTP POST instead of GET. The old behavior is deprecated, and support for GET will be removed in January 2003.” It’s 2004 and Movable Type and TypePad GET trackbacks, so if you’re in a pinch you don’t have to use the trackback post form.)

But what if you don’t care about making people sign on to a centralized system, you just want to keep those odious spammers off your blog? Check back, I’ll have something for you tomorrow.

This is all in good fun, what Tantek would call “pulling pigtails.” I met some SixApart people at SxSW, including Mie and Joi, and they were delightful.