CS and the City

My annual Flickr pro account renewal came up last month.  Looking at my renewal history, I can see that every time I’ve renewed it, I’ve never done it proactively.  I’ve always a month or so after my previous year’s subscription had expired.  This year was no different.  I let it expire, only to have to renew it again to unlock some of my older photos that I didn’t have a backup of (silly).  This time around, I seriously considered leaving it unrenewed.  I just don’t use it anymore.

I’m what I would call a long-term Flickr user.  I’m relatively sure I had my Flickr account before GMail.  I payed for the pro upgrade before I ever paid for generic web hosting. Flickr was great and I evangelized it to all my friends, as is evident in all the abandoned accounts on my Flickr friends list.

I was attracted to Flickr for three reasons:

• The ability to publish my photos for my friends
• Hosting photos for my blog
• Getting feedback from the community on the photos I took

But four years later, the world has changed.  Now all my friends use Facebook, because they don’t have to pay for it, because Facebook actually innovated on photo sharing by indexing by the people in the photo, and because it integrates into a tool my friends already use.  For hosting photos, I can use the same web-storage I’m paying for already. Though the reality is that I simply don’t blog or photograph as much, and so neither of those are that important to me anymore.

The more revealing part is that, in those four years, Flickr hasn’t changed at all.  The only event that brought me back to Flickr was the account merger with Yahoo.  The only news I heard was the half-assed support for video and the addition of the Yahoo logo.  Beyond that, it’s stagnated. Where is the Twitter short-links?  Where’s the first party Facebook app?  (Edit: found both after digging through the profile settings, foot appropriately in mouth). I’m asking partially because I’m a geek and I love playing with new features, but also because this complete lack on investment on Yahoo’s part has made it so worthless that almost all of the people who used to engage in the photos have now gone else.  My pro membership doesn’t buy me anything.

Unless something major changes, this will be the last $24.99 (a number that, despite Moore’s law, has stayed constant this entire time) I give to Yahoo. I’m not rushing to Picasa Web either.  They’re just as guilty of price stagnation as Flickr (though Face recognition is very cool).  For now, I’ll stick with iPhoto and Facebook (which maintains their own iPhoto plug-in I might add). There’s plenty to do in this area, so I’ll be waiting for someone to come along and impress me.

Epilogue

For anyone trying to get their photos off of Flickr, take a look at PhotoGrabbr, a tool for downloading entire Flickr albums for the Mac. I definitely won’t be dealing with photo lock next year.

This week I’ve been taking a look at the recently announced pubsubhubbub by Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin of Google. The duo proposed and implemented a protocol for implementing near-realtime notifications on top of RSS and Atom. The protocol describes three roles: A publisher, a subscriber, and a hub. The hub basically acts as an intermediary, receiving subscription requests from subscribers and forwarding update notifications from publishers to subscribers.

One of the first things I noticed about the protocol is that subscribers are required to have an internet accessible URL for validating subscription registration and receiving notification pings. This is not an issue for the Google Readers and FriendFeeds of the world, but this does leave desktop RSS readers out of the party.

Also interesting to note is that there’s nothing that requires the hub to be a separate entity from the publisher. In fact, it could be very desirable for the publish to own the subscription hub. Besides removing one notification roundtrip from the protocol, it would also give publishers more control over how often to ping users on updates. Nothing in the protocol requires that a notification be sent every time, so it would be possible to only notify a subset of users in real time (perhaps the ones that pay), and others on a regular basis.

Depending on how deep your RSS Trivia knowledge goes, this might sound awfully close to the rssCloud element, but Brett points out that the key differentiator here is PSHB’s “fat pings“, that is, the entire updated content is sent as the ping to the user.

To reduce latency and polling, PSHB supports persistent HTTP connections from hubs to publishers, but it could use FriendFeed’s SUP protocol to detect updates as well.

Though solving slightly different problems, it’s interesting to compare the SUP’s and PSHB’s stance on polling. SUP obviously relies heavily on polling, despite drastically reducing the amount required. While PSHB has strong opinions against. Polling is certainly less error prone, in addition to being less efficient. For example, how does PSHB handle dropped pings to subscribers? I admittedly haven’t dug too deep, but I assume a reasonable amount of state must be maintained in the hub to handle these cases smoothly.

Ultimately the most valuable contribution of the entire project might be the two outspoken Google employees behind it. Already they are seeing some adoption. The pubsubhubbub demo at Real-Time CrunchUp announced launched FeedBurner support and showed prototypes of Blogger and Reader support. Having evangelists inside the company puts early adoption in other Google products much more likely, which in turn will give the standard much more credibility.

Without having to use Saft either! (Though I think this will only work on Safari 3.1)

Here’s the magic, just pump this into your terminal, restart Safari and you’ll be ready to go:
defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

I recently had to rebuild my iTunes library to solve some weird situation that was preventing my iPhone from syncing with iTunes after a reformat and upgrade. In the process I managed to add about 25 albums to the library twice. Instead of Apple noticing that the action is simply going to result in byte-for-byte duplicates of entire albums, it decides to continue with the addition and just append ” 1.mp3″ to all of the filenames. Why the genius coders over at Apple decided this was a reasonable outcome I’ll never know, but it frustrates a music library neat freak like myself to no end.

After trying to convince various AppleScripts to make iTunes clean itself up, I stumbled across these instructions on the blog of Todd George on how to find and remove byte-for-byte duplicates from iTunes. It saved my sanity. Note that this simply removes the files from the filesystem, and not the entries from the iTunes library itself. Thankfully, Todd provides a link to a great method of finding the now dead entries in your library and removing them WITHOUT any additional scripts or programs.

iTunes is happy again!

Well, to be fair, it’s pretty slow, and some other people have ran into some instability, but the iPhone SDK works just fine on my old iBook G4 allowing me to put off that inevitable new hardware purchase just a little bit longer.  Thanks to Gordon Turner for the tip. Looks like this WWDC ticket just paid for itself!

How-tos are located here and here (do both, the second is a little bit of clean up detail omitted from the first).

Transmission has been a favourite BitTorrent client of mine for a long time. Its compact design, complete feature set and small memory footprint are much preferred over the bulky Azureus. Unfortunately, somewhere after v0.7, it lost its high-performance ways and I had to switch back to Azureus just to get my downloads to work. I’m happy to report that it’s back, better than ever post-v1.0 (Now at v1.10).

I recommend any Mac owner check it out for their BitTorrent needs. It’s now also available on Linux/*BSD so I suspect they can experience the same joy

When Apple announced their SDK for the iPhone, I immediately got caught up on Apple’s insistence that all applications must be distributed through their App Store, not only because developers have to pay $99 a year to put any application (free or not) on the store, or that Apple gets a 30% cut of any profits made, but also that they get veto power on any and all application.

Apple says this is for your own good. It allows them to protect you from any malicious applications. Of course, they can also block any SIM unlock programs. They got a little fascist with their “No Porn” declaration, and they left the door open to turn away any “unforeseen” application that doesn’t meet their high standards.

Turns out Music apps fall in that category. iPodNN reports that Music functions are off-limits to iPhone SDK developers. This means that I can’t use anything but iTunes to listen to my tunes, even if I’m not satisfied with the client (I’m not BTW), I can’t use anything but the iTunes Wireless store, even if Amazon wanted to open their store to the platform too, and I can’t use any interesting musical support applications like Last.fm to track my usage. That’s a whole lot of can’ts for something that’s supposed to revolutionize the platform.

I’m looking forward to the day when I can replace my iPhone with something Android-based and not feel like I’m being herded for my own good by Apple.

News on the Microsoft front today is Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online business group, getting the boot. His replacement: this guy. His name is Brian McAndrews. He’s the former CEO of aQuantive, that big ad agency MS bought months ago.

Brian has a Forbes.com profile, no Wikipedia page.

I cannot imagine how a company full of such delightful and intelligent folk can be led by management so disconnected with reality. I’m a generous guy, so I’ll wave the consulting fee this one time.

Microsoft, the reason your online division isn’t profitable is because your products are mediocre on a good day and no one is interested in using them, and not because you don’t have enough ads on them already. Putting an ad executive at the top of the division is about the worst thing you could possibly do.

Now those people protesting the merger on Flickr have something to be genuinely concerned about.

Besides yesterday being the most undeserved snow day in Waterloo history, it was also MS’s turn to drop a mighty news making bombshell: Microsoft bid $44.6 Billion for Yahoo. I figured Dr. Evil would be appropriate.

This is the sort of news that gets my geek blood pumping. An event like this sends millions of different wavelengths of possibility flying in every direction, interfering constructively and destructively in peaks of likely outcomes. The analysits are doing their absolute best to help point them out too: Will Google bid too? Maybe News Corp. will. What does Microsoft gain? Is this the end of Google’s dominance? Will Yahoo employees even want to work for Microsoft? It might be better than getting canned outright.

To be fair, Yahoo has some great properties that Microsoft would be well guided to leave the hell alone. Let’s see here: Flickr, Upcoming, Yahoo Mail, Finance, Music, IM, etc. Of course, this would only compound the absolute most frustrating thing about working at Microsoft: If you’re working on a project, chances are there are at least two other groups in the company doing the same thing. Adding a parallel internet product offering stack is not going to make the situation better. Even if Microsoft’s essentially admitting defeat in the race for internet viewer keystrokes, you can be sure it’ll be Yahoo products that get the axe before equivalent Microsoft ones.

What I wouldn’t give to be back at Google when Marissa Mayer gives the “This is our position” talk to the PM corp. Or to be a fly on the wall as Jerry Yang decides what to do with the offer, or Steve Ballmer waits for the response. It’s hard to under emphasize the effect this offer will have on the tech landscape. I’d be wise to actually make the effort to organize my thoughts and the ones on the other news site. Somebody will write a book about this and make a whole lot of money. Might as well be me. I sure as hell didn’t make any when Yahoo!’s stock jumped 50% yesterday.

I’ve found that Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) isn’t always ejecting mounted DMG files in the usual methods (i.e. dragging to trash, right clicking and choosing eject, you know, the way it should work).

I found the following command works until Apple fixes the bug. Next time, I’ll also try using Disk Utility (thanks to the guys on Apple support forums for both tips).

Open up a terminal, cd to /Volumes, get the name of a mounted DMG file, and try like this:

(in my case the volume was /MailTags2.2b4):

maggie:Volumes blloyd$ hdiutil detach MailTags2.2b4
“disk1″ unmounted.
“disk1″ ejected.

Link to specific message