Slug: no-time-to-post-imagine-a-blog-post-here-about-why-apples-core-supporters-are-mystified-andor-up-in-arms-over-the-ipad-and Date: 2010-02-01 Title: layout: post

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Slug: on-ports-and-crumbs Date: 2010-01-31 Title: On Ports and Crumbs layout: post

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Slug: ipad-as-creators-platform Date: 2010-01-28 Title: iPad As Creator’s Platform layout: post Tim Bray tweeted today about the iPad as a content delivery platform:

the iPad looks cool. They’ll sell a ton. I might get one. All I said that is it’s a delivery platform not a creator’s platform.

I can see Tim’s point, but I’m also already getting ideas for creative apps that would be awesome on an iPad:

• DJ-ing, ‘natch. The iPad’s large touch surface is ideal for a next-generation DJ app. Anyone remember that music composition app that used physical objects on a projection surface a few years back? Hello, iPad. (Anyone got a link to that I’d love to add it here.)
• Photo montage/composition: Imagine an app that lets you pick images from the Photo app, then montage them, using your fingers to wipe out or blur edges, apply effects, re-order the photos in the overlay.
• Diagramming/mind-mapping: OmniGraffle on the iPad - select shapes from a menu/sidebar, tap to select, pinch to resize, rotate, drag from one to another to connect with arrows.
• The above, but for interior design/space-planning. Bonus: drop perspective-scaled images of products onto pics of the client’s home/space and pinh to rotate/resize to fit. I imagine interior designers falling all over each other for an app like that - easy to carry, show to clients.

These are seriously the result of 2 minutes of thinking. The iPad is going to be HUGE for creators and creative work.

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Slug: why-leslie-harpolds-sites-disappeared Date: 2010-01-21 Title: Why Leslie Harpold’s Sites Disappeared layout: post

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Slug: between-kaos-and-kontrol Date: 2010-01-21 Title: Between Kaos and Kontrol layout: post My family is about to move into a new house, which has me pondering my management of the two parts of the house I can legitimately call mine: my office (at least during the times I’ve had one) and the workshop. This house will be the third house Jodi and I have owned, and it will be the first with both of these features as separate, properly delineated spaces. And I’m practically giddy about it. Both these spaces in the past have suffered due to quirk of my personality: I fall at about the midway point between design nerd and geek. This means that I am simultaneously driven to order and categorization, and so easily distracted from same as to drive my orderly wife up a wall. And yet I’ve realized that there’s some kind of method to my madness. Take the workshop, for example. In our last house, I took the time to hang several sheets of pegboard on the wall above the workbench, and anything that could conceivably be hung there, was. Over the span of about a month I tweaked and tweaked the layout of tools on that pegboard until I could put my hand on the tool I wanted almost without looking. It stayed like that until we moved out. You would assume that this meant that if you had stopped by sometime and poked your head into my garage, that you’d find it a marvel of organization. Actually, you’d be lucky to find the workbench surface under the collection of recently used and not-quite-put-away tools. So why did I let things get into this state? Because 1) I’m crap at putting things away, because I’m usually distracted by something else that needs doing, or is at least more Shiny. And 2) I knew that it would take me less than 20 minutes to return that workbench to a known “clean” state on a Saturday morning. I had the system down - I could put tools away with both hands independently if they were in reach. In the meantime, I had a good sense of where I’d last used each tool and where on the bench it had landed. I’m sure there’s a technical term for this, but I don’t know what it is.

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Slug: openid-connect-standards-and-solutions Date: 2010-01-20 Title: “OpenID Connect: Standards and Solutions” layout: post Chris Messina recently wrote a post asking if we need an “OpenID Connect” that packages the various Open Stack technologies into a single solution that can compete with Facebook Connect. (There are good follow up posts from Dare Obasanjo and Johannes Ernst). Chris describes it thusly:

for the non-tech, uninitiated audiences: OpenID Connect is a technology that lets you use an account that you already have to sign up, sign in, and bring your profile, contacts, data, and activities with you to any compatible site on the web.

I actually think that the value that users see in using their Facebook identity (and the value developers see in Connect) is actually that the user is connecting their activity to Facebook, not the other way around. They’re not connecting their Facebook friends to your site, their connecting their activity on your site to Facebook. This concept was the driving idea behind a proof of concept Mark Paschal and I worked on some months ago. This service used an extension to the OpenID login process to tell the OpenID provider that the consuming application (the site being signed into) could provide activity stream updates back to the OpenID provider. This would allow the user to sign in to a new site with their OpenID, and have their activity from that site aggregated back to their OpenID provider, exactly how a Facebook user’s activity on a Connect site can be aggregated back to their Wall. This, I believe, is where we need to get to in order make something like OpenID Connect work - I’m pretty convinced that the value for the user is in 1) bringing your full identity to the new site, and 2) aggregating their activity to their community of friends/followers. The other features Chris mentions - access to your contacts via Portable Contacts, etc., should definitely be part of the package, but the key is the connection of identity to activity.

Why hasn’t it happened yet?

I believe that this has always been the vision of the Open Stack community, but I think that in the effort to develop standards that will be implemented most widely the individual components have gotten all the attention. Eran Hammer-Lahav, however, has been targeting the “connection point” specifically with his awesome work on XRD, LRDD, host-meta, WebFinger, etc. These technologies are the core of linking an OpenID or email-like id to the other services Chris discussed in his post (contacts, activity aggregators, etc). If you’re working in one of these areas, please review the work Eran is doing and ask if there’s a way to help. To get from here to there, we’re going to need developers working on implementing more of the connecting technologies; until then we’re only going to have standards, not solutions.

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Slug: goodbye-userland Date: 2010-01-20 Title: Goodbye, UserLand. layout: post For several years, from about 1996 to 1999, Dave Winer and UserLand Software were a huge portion of my daily life. I was creating websites and scripting tools in Frontier, reading Davenet, Scripting News, the frontier users’ mailing lists. I’m pretty sure I dreamt in usertalk a few times, and I was well indoctrinated with the culture of outlining. Dave writes today about the final resolution of what remains of UserLand.

It’s been a very long ride, but I think finally it’s coming to an end. UserLand Software was founded 22 years ago, with the goal of opening up applications to be programmed by users. We didn’t fully achieve that goal, but like many other things in life, the goal we did achieve was even more interesting.

Dave, along with former UserLander Jake Savin, is working to make sure that all the old archives from radio.userland.com are saved, as are the Radio and Manila and usertalk docs. I’m so glad this this part of UserLand and Frontier’s history is being preserved. Thankfully the code has already been preserved in open source form via the frontier kernel project and in product form in Dave’s OPML Editor (an app that runs on the Frontier kernel). While I’ve long since moved on from the Frontier community and tools, I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for the software the the amazing people that made it what it was. I won’t remember everyone, but special thanks to Dave, Brent, André and Jake, and the many members of the community that made those years so special.

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Slug: bring-back-the-filibuster-httpwwwhuffingtonpostcomaaron-zelinskysave-the-senate-bring-bac_b_414964html Date: 2010-01-20 Title: layout: post

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Slug: im-collecting-samples-of-sci-fi-noir-and-cyberpunk-film-concept-art-on-httpmonkineticenjoysthings-as-source-material-fo Date: 2010-01-11 Title: layout: post

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Slug: mad-eddies-lab Date: 2010-01-04 Title: Mad Eddie’s Lab layout: post One of my Christmas presents this year was the LEGO® Café Corner (now discontinued and gone from the LEGO site) set. After spending 5 hours building it with Jodi’s cousin’s husband (it’s a big set!) I tore it down and built this:

Mad Eddie’s Lab

Mad Eddie’s Lab (he never finished his education so he isn’t really a mad scientist) has grown over the years - from a humble basement operation to the unease-inspiring victorian/tudor/gothic/modern shape at the end of the street that it is now. Eddie never could afford the scary hilltop property he had been eyeing.

You can see the progression in Eddie’s Lab, starting with the now-inaccessible basement, the stony Gothic level he added after his first few “successes”, the Tudor-styled lab he built when trying to impress that Evil Duchess, and finally his current Victorian+glass “Mad Science Pad”.

Look around, you may catch a glimpse of Mad Eddie’s latest project through the pitched roof hatch…

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