false precision

OMMA Real-time Search Panel

Yesterday Greg Keller, Lijit's VP of Product was on an OMMA Panel on Real-time Search. I was originally slotted for this panel but had a conflict so Greg stepped in and did a great job.   Greg tested everyones excitement over "real-time search" taking the position thats its a tool, not a lifestyle.  Probably good I wasn't there as I have an even more contrary attitude.

I wrote a post a while back that I ended up screaming at the computer screen as I watched the panel. After watching the panel, I'm more sure than ever that "real-time search" is simply a "feature of search", rather than the new catagory that people are trying to make it 

Real-time search is simply a human based ALERTING mechanism (usually twitter) tied to a traditional TIME BIASED Search Index. I find this to be a feature, not a phenomenon.

Nothing more, nice work Greg!

2009 Digital Asset Management

This time of year I finish cataloging all our photos and video for the last year. Since 2000 I have kept all our photos in a series of directories in the format \2009\01-2009\01-19-2009-XXXX.jpg. I've tried lots of software that does it for you, but like iTunes I don't really like the way software moves everything around dropping crap in all the directories, etc. Instead I wrote some utilities that just let me throw the photos and video in a directory named as above and the scripts rename everything nice and tidy.

This year we created about 16GB of new assets (blue line), down substantially from 2008 which as 34GB. Our kids are getting older now and I think because of this we are slowing down on the picture taking and video shooting.

Around 2008 we stopped using our DV cam all together and started just shooting video on our Canon PowerShot SD450. The quality wasn't as good but the video we shot was more fun and more reflective our life. About half of all our photos are taken on the SD450 and the other half are taken on the EOS 20D. It is about time to upgrade the point and shoot to something that can take HD quality video (are we there yet in form factor that's small with image stabilization?)

Every year when I'm done with all the cataloging I make sure I have a snapshot on the primary and the backup NAS disks, and then just for good measure I make one more copy on a Seagate FreeAgent drive that lives most of its life in our safe deposit box. The theory is that if either NAS fails I have a complete backup. If the house burns down I have a backup that at most is about a year old. The system works pretty well but I wish the offsite copy could easily be make up to date like the NAS copy. Dropbox is my latest cool thing I don't want to live without and it would be the ticket if didn't have to pay for the storage (I just want to pay by bytes transferred).

I think a cool service would be a digital safe deposit box at my bank. I just plug in a drive inside the safe deposit box at my bank and automagically stuff gets backed up there. I get the freedom of backup in the cloud but I can always just go get the physical drive if I want to.

My NAS drives are about full. Total storage is now at about 110GB for the photos and video (redline). I have 320GB NAS drives but the remainder is take up with digital versions of some our video from the 90's and the rest is consumed by our MP3 library. Both of these are pretty static so most growth comes from the behavior above. This is probably the final year for this process. I hope that I can find a good remote equivalent of my sneekernet backup this year.

Digital House Derailment

Every once in a while I'm forced to make an assessment of my IP network at home. This usually occurs when I selectively upgrade a piece of network gear of something critical to 'the machine' breaks. It always amazes me how many IP connected 'things' I have in my house. It seems everyday another new thing pops up in the MAC address table.

Yesterday morning our house got hit with a power surge. In my nearly 47 years of time on the planet I have never had a device fry from a power surge. As such I don't own any power protecting gear. Well, I guess it finally caught up with me yesterday. When I got home from work my house was crippled. One casualty was our Basement Tivo HD and the other was my Cisco 48 port switch. My Slingbox was dead also, but I think that happened a few months back by natural causes.

I pride myself on forming relationships that allowed me to have a replacement network device available within 15 minutes of concluding the root cause analysis in my house. I won't go into details but I had a new-to-me 48 port switch rocking in about an hour after fumbling with how to uplink the switch to my router (apparently, it only works on port 48). As I was debugging and checking things in the house, I started counting the number of things that attach via IP in my house. Nearest I can tell (I'm sure I missed some) I have 30'ish different devices that contend for bandwidth in Rancho Vernon.

1. Tivo Master Bedroom
2. Tivo Bedroom
3. Tivo Familyroom
4. Tivo Basement (because we gottsta be able to watch any show in any room)
5. Blu-Ray Player (I don't know why it connects to my network, but it did just update its firmware)
6. Sonos Zone Player Family Room
7. AppleTV (to be fair I just shit canned it after 3 years and NEVER having used it, never - ever)
8. Sonos Zone Player Deck
9. Color Laser Printer
10. BW Laser Printer
11. Ink Jet Printer (Inkjet printers suck)
12. NAS Disk 1 (to hold photo library and MP3 library)
13. NAS Disk 2 (to hold photo library and MP3 library - when the other one breaks)
14. Slingbox (recently died of natural causes, meaning to get a HD SlingBox)
15. Mac Server (mostly DNS server)
16. PogoPlug (cool, but I'm really loving DropBox these days)
17. Dell Server (a linux box that does nothing but mock me for not programming anymore)
18. Managed Switch (although I don't intend to ever manage it)
19. Router/Wifi
20. CableModem (don't breath on it, it's working perfectly)
21. Wii (hey, your Mii has to get out once in a while)
22. Xbox360 (because sometimes you need to shoot anonymous people)
23. Darby's Laptop (because Darby doesn't want to share her laptop)
24. Marlo's Laptop (because Marlo's laptop is too small for anyone to want to share it)
25. Lura's Laptop ( because it sits on the kitchen table and she is forced to share it, don't close the fucking browser windows)
26. Todd's Laptop (because he is an only child and refuses to share his laptop)
27. Desktop Computer (because Todd likes to work on big screen computers when he can)
28. Todd's Iphone
29. Lura's Iphone
30. Darby's Blackberry
31. Marlo's Danger (not completely sure it connects to IP but I think so)
32. Darby's iPod Touch
33. Marlo's iPod Touch

     

Wow, it's amazing how many things find their way into my MAC address table. Of all this stuff, I think the killer network devices are the Tivo's and the Sonos. Of course the computers need the network to be much fun. On the other end of the spectrum the AppleTV was the most stupid thing I ever bought. No network could make it not suck. To be fair, I have a massive distain for devices of any kind that require iTunes to work. In later releases you could rent stuff directly from the AppleTV (I guess, never found content I wanted) but they lost me by then.

 

Oh and to appease Lura, any would be criminals out there – don't bother most of this stuff is at least 4 years old except the Blu-Ray player which is brand new. But hey you can get those for like $200 now, just buy it.

What, No Mobile Broadband Picture Frames?

It bugs me when I go looking for a product and it doesn't exist.

Yesterday I visited my grandparents and thought to myself how cool it would be to get them a digital photo frame that family members could email photos to. Of course you want it to be dead simple to set up and maintain as you can expect little assistance on the "remote end".

I thought to myself that someone must make a Mobile Broadband Picture Frame. Apparently this is not the case. WiFi yes, Mobile Broadband no.

I actually don't get why? Seems like a really common use case for digital photo frames is the grandparent scenario I outline above. They don't have a computer and never will. If they had one, I wouldn't buy the photo frame. And, it stands to reason that if they don't have a computer it's unlikely they have broadband service. And if they don't have broadband service why would they have Wifi? This strikes me as one of those products that have been designed by nerds for a use case that doesn't exactly solve a problem.

I also don't think this is an idea ahead of its time. I have been carrying different Verizon broadband cards for years, recently upgrading the killer Mifi Mobile Broadband/Wifi bridge hotspot thing. My Kindle (at least before I lost it on an airplane) connects to Amazon automatically and I don't even get a bill for that.

Am I looking at this wrong? Yes I could pair a Mifi puck with a digital photo frame but am I asking for a device that no one else would buy?

It Might Get Loud

The other day when I was flying back from NY on United the featured movie was "It Might Get Loud". I had never heard of it before, but apparently it debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in 2008 and also played at Sundance in 2009.

Basically its three guitar legends, Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White getting together and jamming along with lots of footage of their respective careers. I was totally blown away how awesome it was.

If you like any of these guys Guitar work this is a must watch. View the trailer here. It just became available on Amazon, Go buy immediately.

I don’t like Facebook

It's not popular to say and generally makes you sound old, but I really don't like Facebook. Really.

Once in while I check out the timeline, almost always on my iPhone when I'm a little bored. I get a lot of messages through facebook because I have my twitter feed going into the facebook so people I know comment on my tweets. That's all fine. Some of my cousins are on Facebook so I find I know more about what they are doing which is interesting. One of my daughters is on Facebook and Lura is on Facebook which is interesting.

Outside of those corner cases, I get no value from Facebook. In fact, I find it super annoying. Part of why I find it annoying is its incessant need to connect me to people I don't care about. Just because I 'know people' doesn't mean they are my 'friends'. I once worked with a guy who was one degree away from being a total psychopath. He lied, cheated stole things, misrepresented everything and was generally an immoral turd of a person. He would always name drop about how everyone was his friend. Literally everyone he met was a "Friend".

Some people are "people collectors". They are connector type personalities who enjoy meeting lots of people and connecting them. I'm not a people collector. It seems a little militant to say, but on average I generally don't like people. I like the small group of people I like, the others – I have no need for them. I probably put 30 people in my entire life into the 'friend' category. Some people put thousands of people in that category. I think Facebook is designed for people like that.

I like Twitter but it's because I almost never read it. I tweet because it's kind of fun, but frankly it's just for me – I have no expectation that anyone reads my tweets. I only have my follower list dialed into people who are interesting. Not usually my "friends", although some of the 30 are in there. With twitter it's more about interesting concepts and thoughts.

Facebook constantly crams stupid shit up my ass.

I don't want to play games, I don't want to connect with a dude I once met in Missouri, I don't want a message from "Danny" about the Denver Zombie Crawl (whatever the hell that is).

I'm pretty sure I don't care about ROCKtober !

AND, no IM not Todd Vernon that lived in San Antonio..

Why not just bail out?

Because it's kind of like a phone. You can disconnect the phone but it doesn't serve you well to do so.

Facebook is like a phone that won't stop ringing. No matter how many stupid calls you get.

People tell me, just don't friend anyone. Good advice, I "thin" the friend herd all the time. But Facebook hates that. Facebook wants to talk about my day and won't let me watch TV while I eat dinner. Facebook is like a bad wife who just sits around talking about senseless dribble all day long. "You know what Annie did today?", "Jimmy just posted a photo of his Kitty".

Now Facebook wants to change the privacy settings everyone so it can send more senseless bullshit into the crap-o-sphere.

That's enough, I have to Tweet this post so it will go into Facebook now.

MacPro Windows 7 Install Success!

I had a nice week long vacation over the Thanksgiving Holiday. One of the many things on my list was to settle once and for all the illusive Windows 7 install on my MacPro at home.

I have bitching about it on my blog for several posts. I tried without success to upgrade the Vista image on my Bootcamp partition several times. Over the break I bit the bullet and did a fresh install on the Bootcamp partition AND – no luck. Realizing I was over my head (or at least past my interest level) I called my neighbor Tom over to help. Tom is my goto IT support for home issues that need a level of commitment that perhaps I lack.

We tried several things that didn't work. We ended up reading the installer log that shows you everything that worked, but failing to tell you what did not work. A more information dialog at the end of the unsuccessful install simply said that "Installer failed". Hmm?

Armed with that information we hit the Interwebs and found a reasonably long dialog about unsuccessful installs on MacPro hardware. It seems that Windows 7 runs fine on a MacPro, but the installer crashes. Really?

Two solutions were outlined on the web. One, install windows on the drive installed in another machine then boot the image and hope you can correct the drivers and get the install to boot. The Second, download Parallels the PC virtual machine software for MacOS and use it to install windows into the Bootcamp partition. After you get Windows 7 running off the Bootcamp partition in the emulator, then boot the image natively and fix up the drivers with the Snow Leopard drivers disk.

Tom opted for number 2 as number 1 was a lot moving disks around and involved some kind of drive slot number magic that we viewed as higher risk than the high wire act we chose to perform.

We downloaded a trial copy of Parallels, installed Windows 7 into the Bootcamp partition, rebooted AND Viola.. Installed the Snow Leopard Drivers and I'm off the races.

Ok, that was a big deal. But Windows 7 runs perfectly and the machine seems faster to me now. If you need Tom to install your Windows don't count on it – he's busy constantly bailing out my family.

You kids get off my yard!

I swear down deep I'm a technology lover. Some stuff is so retarded though…

I think the Mac is great at editing video and making DVD's and surfing the web. Once beyond that it becomes PAINFUL for me to use it. Back when I was more of a programmer, it was a cool platform because of all the Unix like stuff but now I need more traditional things like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. I sometimes imagine how much it must suck to be a programmer on the Apple "Numbers" team. You go to a party and someone asks what do you do? Well I'm a programmer for Apple and I work on "Numbers". The person says, "huh"? And you have to say, "You know, Excel but for the Mac". Rewarding.

This weekend I copied some photo disks to give to Marlo's friends after they went indoor skydiving for her birthday. I did this on my Vista machine and took the disks upstairs to the party still underway. Lura's Mac laptop was on the counter so I thought I would just throw the disk in and start a slide show. Wrong, after 10 minutes of dicking around I never did figure out how to do it. I even imported everything into iPhoto. Still no go. On Vista you just double click a photo and click slideshow. That's a pretty easy and common use case, WTF Apple?

I have been trying to upgrade to windows 7 for a week or so now. Nothing works. The Upgrade assistant says all is good, it does literally everything and in the final minute it says, "This version of Windows could not be installed". Ahh, thanks - that's very helpful.

Today I took a few minutes to Google the error to see what I need to do. No real help was found but I love the advice given by this dude.

I feel silly I didn't think of this myself.

I did finally make it over the hump with the Apple Martini phone. It took a few weeks to give up the stuff on Blackberry that just works SO much better. I think if I had to boil it down to the thing I miss the most about the Blackberry it would be the red LED on top that says I have a message. With the Martini phone I have to wake it up, unlock it, goto the email thing, ahh – no message, put it back to sleep. I do that about 100 times a day, stupid. On the flip side, the voice mail is genius. It took a company with the size and influence of Apple to put enough pressure on the Telco's to make voice mail logical. Telcos hate logical and easy to use stuff. Just goes against their DNA.

Do I sound old? This stuff makes me feel old.

Comscore U.S. Search Market Share

Wow, the chart of the day on Silicon Alley Insider.

How long till Bing crosses Yahoo (or are they asymptotic)?

And when it does happen will anybody care? I know people who use Yahoo but I don't know any human on the planet that uses Bing.

Next time you're in a room with a group of people ask them 1) Have they have ever tried Bing, 2) If they have, do they continue to use Bing.

Based on my observation you may get 10% on the first question, but pretty universally you will get 0% on the second. In my observations about 60% have heard of Bing.

Day 3, Upgrade to Windows 7

Yes, Microsoft does seem to have gotten it right this time…

WTF?