Design by Committee

Today I officially launch http://jonathanmarsh.net, which hosts my podcast, my album sales, and now this blog (http://jonathanmarsh.net/blog).  I’ve disabled comments here to foil spammers but am leaving the archives in place.  I’m gradually migrating archived posts to this new home so you can leave comments there.  Please update your blog rolls and links!

As you know, I'm a big fan of the iPhone, in part because of the simplicity of the user interface.  You don’t often get lost in a sea of advanced features and configurations – they simply aren’t there!  While this is a relief most of the time, once in a while you run into something tricky.

For me, it’s been syncing calendars between Deanna and I.  We each use Microsoft Office Outlook on separate computers, and view each other’s schedules using the built-in calendar publishing features there.

However, now we each have iPhones, and while the iPhone can handle multiple Outlook calendars, it doesn’t pick up shared ones for some reason.

After a bit of research and some ineffective fiddling with Google calendars, I found a simple and elegant solution:

Sign up for a free account on Plaxo.  Plaxo is a social networking site but you don’t have to use those features to take advantage of a great multi-calendar sync solution.  On my computer I downloaded the Outlook extension that synchronizes my local calendar to one I created on Plaxo called “Jonathan”, and on Deanna’s computer I did the same with a calendar named “Deanna”.  Then I just configured the respective Outlooks to synchronize with these new calendars.  Voila, now we each have a native Outlook calendar synchronized to each other.  In iTunes you can enable synchronizing these now-native calendars to the iPhone.

The Plaxo experience is very smooth, even when I got an error message on the first sync, it automatically tried again after asking whether it could engage a more verbose logging mode (which it will shut off automatically after a few days without further error.)  And it scales out to Google, Yahoo, etc. calendars as necessary.  Two thumbs up so far!

Jason and I are again performing as the “opening act” for the Placer Nature Center’s 4th Friday lecture series this week.

This lecture is on ABC: Arthropods, Butterflies & Climate, Dr. Arthur Shapiro and will be presented by Dr. Arthur Shapiro Friday April 24th.  Music starts at 7PM, lecture at 7:30.  See you there! 

In celebration of the new WSO2 Mashup Server 1.5.2 release I’ve been looking through some of my old mashups and maintaining them and adding some new features where appropriate.  Here is a summary:

1. Sri Lanka Incident Mashup – the page I was scraping changed (factored into multiple pages) so for older history I had to update my scraping code.  I added unique identifiers for each data point and an operation to add a manual override in cases where the English-to-integer parsing was insufficient, and added controls from the UI to make it easy to add these corrections.
2. National Geographic Picture of the Day Mashup – I added operation safety to make it easier to use from as a RESTful service, added a global variable to hide the test operations when not in “debug mode”, fixed the links back to the picture-of-the-day page, updated the internal logic to use the Feed object (I wrote this before the feed object could handle media modules), stripped some script tags from the description, and added a format parameter that determines whether the feed format should be returned in RSS 2.0 or in Atom 0.3.

These still are pretty useful mashups to me.  (Along with my southwest agent which I’ve improved a lot but can’t offer publicly.)  Too bad they both rely on scraping, which makes regular maintenance a necessary to prevent bit-rot.  We need more Web services alongside with Web sites!

Sanjiva and I went on a hike yesterday, from the confluence to home, and despite this being my own backyard, we discovered some new things – especially doing some cross-country and bouldering around the abandoned Auburn Dam footings and the newly restored river and kayak park at the former China Bar Rapids.  And after the rain of the past couple of weeks there are quite a few full-fledged waterfalls along the route.  Very cool!

Flickr set here.

Sanjiva’s post reminded me how amazing our current technology is.  I’m sure he’d appreciate this great clip of Louis CK on Conan.  My iPhone 3G (Google Maps & Pandora while speeding down the freeway?!) is a source of ongoing amazement to me.

Today a minor release of the WSO2 Mashup Server went out.  Nothing dramatic, but a few nasty bugs have been fixed and annoyances addressed, including:

1. A memory leak that some of us experienced when running periodic page scrapes over a long period.
2. Case insensitive searching.
3. An “ignoreUncited” annotation to allow the HTTP binding to POST parameters in the body instead of as URI parameters – which have a 2K limit in IE, and limits in other browsers as well.
4. Recent Activity queries on a specific mashup now work – a typeahead helps you identify the mashup you want to track.
5. Feeds and getXML now support basic authentication.

This clears the way for the larger project – bringing mashup capability into the WSO2 Carbon platform.

Enjoy!

For some reason I chose to watch an episode of the old BBC Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Netflix last night.  The parallel between the Guide and Wikipedia was striking.  Have a question?  Look it up in the [Guide/Wikipedia].  Foolproof?  No.  Useful?  Take a look at this before you answer – seems to guarantee a practical best-seller to me!

There’s a title for a new song, don’t you think?  Jason and I are performing as the “opening act” for the Placer Nature Center’s 4th Friday lecture series this week.

This lecture is on The Environmental Legacy of the Gold Rush and will be presented by Dr. William Murphy Friday Jan 23rd.  Music starts at 7PM, lecture at 7:30.  See you there! 

It’s always interesting to see how much travel one does during the year.  At one point it used to be a source of pride, but now it’s becoming a source of carbon and of family disruption.  Either way, without good data you can’t judge yourself against your goals – I predict lifestyle data collection will be a major theme of the coming year.  Dopplr is a site that helps record your travel and look for opportunities to link up with your travelling friends.

This year, they’ve introduced a personalized annual report.  Mine is here.  A total of 61,252 kilometers last year, emitting around 7700 kg of carbon.  Most enlightening to me is the total of over two months - 73 days - away from home during the year.  And I felt was lighter on travel than in the past!

And I’m not off to a good start for 2009 – away 13 days so far and it’s only the 20th...

[Update 22 Jan: If you think this kind of data analysis is obsessive take a look at how beautiful obsession can be with the Felton Annual Report 2008.]

My favorite story of the week: Hayduke Lives: Tim DeChristopher’s Heroic Act of Creative Civil Disobedience.  In short – a University of Utah student posed as a bidder in one of the BLM’s parting-shots mineral-rights auctions, bid up the parcels by about $500K, and walked away winning $1.8M worth of leases around Arches National Park.  Of course, he had no intention to actually pay, was detained and now faces federal charges.  But until it’s resolved, those leases are protected from exploitation, and the process of the auctions is undergoing greater media scrutiny.

What else is inspiring though, is that he is trying to raise the $45K initial payment in order to keep his bid legitimate until the end of the Bush administration, and then there’s a good chance the new administration will keep them off the books.  In just a few days, he’s attracted $37K – plus a bit from me - and I’m hopeful that he can fill the rest in the remaining two days.

Bush, our turn to prescribe “two of these”!

A couple of weeks ago I ran across a fun little program that evolves to recreate an image out of overlapping transparent algorithms.  Although not IMO really genetic, it mutates it’s “DNA” over many generations to reproduce a source image.  I’m still having fun with it, trying to figure out if it could be adapted to glass.  Here are a couple of samples:

Check out Roger’s gallery too.

Our Christmas tradition is to enjoy the (so far) inevitable few days of gorgeous California Christmas weather to scour the American River canyon for trash and bring back as much as we can carry.  We have no problem finding plenty of cans, bottles, towels, flip-flops and sunglasses.

The light in the canyon was amazing this year – here’s a quick panorama I took.  Dare you to find any trash in there ;-).

It’s been a busy fall – not much time for taking pictures.  Or uploading them promptly!  Now that we’re in vacation mode, I’m looking through some of this falls photos.  Here’s a small set from a hike with family members up to Donner Peak in early September.  Some amazing rock formations…

Funniest thing I saw all week ;-).  Is this a parting shot at Bush, or is Bush giving the American people a nasty parting shot?  A bit of viewer discretion is advised (uptight conservatives have been warned.)