michael’s thoughts

I had an unofficial New Years resolution for myself to update this site more often.  So far I’m not off to a great start in 2009.  I have created a Google profile for myself, as Google now includes profiles in their search results.

It’s funny; I don’t have a particularly common name and yet results about me never come up at the top of searches on my name.  I blame the Canadian librarian who I apparently share my name with.  He seems to be interviewed a lot.  One of these years I’ll have to work on pushing up my PageRank.  But it doesn’t look like it’s going to be this year.

Amazon recently launched an iPhone Kindle application that allows you to read your purchased books on the iPhone.  In fact, you don’t even need to have a Kindle to use it.  It seems to me that the next step would be to launch a desktop or web based Kindle interface.  I can think of a lot more use cases where people would want to have access to their Kindle purchases from a computer when they might not have their Kindle available.

In other Kindle speculation, Tim O’Reilly mentioned the idea of marrying the Kindle with O’Reilly Media’s Safari book subscription service.  I think this is a great idea.  In fact, it’s such a great idea that if they do it I may buy a Kindle.

Call me old fashioned, but I don’t really love the idea of buying digital copies of novels, biographies, etc.  I really enjoy having a printed book.  I think a better model would be a “dual use sale”.  If I cold buy a physical book on Amazon and pay a small charge, perhaps $2, to also have it available immediately on the Kindle that would interest me.  I still want to have the physical book and I’m not interested in purchasing the content twice for different formats.

Barring a business model change in the publishing world that would facilitate that, I would love to have a Kindle for reading technical material.  Books, journals, conference proceedings, etc.  If Amazon can get the PDF support on the Kindle to the point where a PDF technical document looks as good as their proprietary e-books, I would buy one.

Having Kindle access to the Safari library would be similarly appealing.  So much so that I expect I would buy a Kindle and subscribe to Safari if that integration were available.

After being a satisfied Dreamhost customer for almost 4 years, I’ve cancelled my account.  I’ve moved my hosting over to GoDaddy and I find the whole experience very frustrating.  While there’s nothing wrong with GoDaddy’s hosting, they don’t offer all the features that Dreamhost does.  Frankly nobody does.  Which is why I stayed with Dreamhost even though their availability has suffered through periods of flakiness.

Unfortunately, I had to pull the plug last week.  There was apparently a problem with the file server that my account was hosted on, so they moved my shell account to another system.  Not sure that I really follow that logic, but whatever works for them.  Unfortunately, they never actually copied any of my content.

I opened 2 or 3 support requests last week and none were answered.  I followed the status updates on dreamhoststatus.com but they kept saying all problems were resolved.  Obviously mine was not.  So I finally pulled the pin and moved everything over to GoDaddy.  Amusingly, after I did that I sent one more email asking if Dreamhost planned to ever address my support requests.  I received a reply back stating that everything looked good from their end.  Of course, what they were seeing was my domains hosted somewhere else.  I again checked my shell account and…nothing there.

I’m really frustrated because some of the features I have been using on Dreamhost are just not available elsewhere.  Subversion support.  Using the auth_mysql Apache module.  And others.  Yet, what value are all those features if I can’t have the site up?

I don’t mind a little down time with budget hosting, but I don’t like being told that everything is up and operational and then having my support requests actively ignored.  So I’ve had to move.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do about the missing functionality.  It may be that the GoDaddy move is an interm step before going to a dedicated server.  But I really don’t want to spend the money on that right now.  So I’ll stay in a holding pattern and see how GoDaddy works for me.

I tend to split my time using Twitter and blog reading tools between mobile access clients and desktop web tools.  Unfortunately for most of these activities there is no way to keep the view consistent between the mobile and desktop views.  This could be solved by adding a “last read” value to the APIs and databases of these services.

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I have been involved in the Second Life community off and on for several years.  For a time I was very bullish on the project and I really thought it might take off and realize Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse concept.  But it doesn’t seem that it is going to get there.  I thought that if Linden Labs kept innovating they might make progress in that direction, but upon logging in recently I’ve realized that the whole architecture is flawed.

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When I redesigned this site’s WordPress theme, I decided I wanted to show the most two recent posts at the top followed by the next 8 posts with just the title and a link to the post, so that the front page does not scroll forever.  That’s simple enough to do with the template tag query_posts(), but I ran into an unexpected problem with my initial approach and the Twitter Tools plugin.

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With several Twitter apps on my iPhone I’ve found that lately I’m on top of tweets but not reading blogs any more. I find that I have down time in my day to catch up on reading but not necessarily when I’m in front of a computer. So I thought I’d check out the RSS reader options for the iPhone.

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I have finally gotten around to changing the theme for this web site.  It’s still a work in progress, but it got to the point where I just didn’t feel the old theme appropriately reflected the tone of the site.  So I switched to my work in progress custom theme.

Obviously the new design is very spare and minimal.  I do plan to add to it a bit, although it will remain on the minimalist side.

While I tend to think that content is more important than asthetics, this is a personal publishing platform so it sort of behooves me to have a design that is at least somewhat reflective of my preferences.  Perhaps that was true of the previous design at some point, but time has moved on.

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The latest version of the Sync in a Blink iPhone app supports Google Contact Groups.  This is a wonderful feature addition, as Google adds all correspondents to its “Suggested Contacts” group which then sync down to the iPhone which probably isn’t desirable.  I don’t really want all the mailing lists and support email addresses I correspond with to show up as contacts on my iPhone.  By creating an “iPhone Contacts” group, I can avoid that problem.

Unfortunately, the way contact groups are supported on the iPhone and their interaction with Sync in a Blink is not entirely intuitive.  After configuring Sync in a Blink to only sync the “iPhone Contacts” group, I found that newly created contacts on the iPhone were not syncing back to Google.  I initially thought this may be a limitation of the iPhone, but it’s not.  There is a way to make this work.

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The latest news I’ve heard is that Barack Obama’s administration is looking for between $850 billion and $1 trillion in infrastructure spending over the next few years to address aging transportation infrastructure and help jumpstart the economy.

While I tend to be fairly fiscally conservative, I’m not completely opposed to the idea of spending some money to bring our nation into the 21st century.  I do hope it is spent well, however.  Gas prices have come down a lot in recent months, but the ultimate trend over the next fifty years is clearly up and to the right.

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