Mark's Tinderbox Weekend West Photos

The gallery of photos that Mark took is up, hosted on my .Mac page. Lots of photos of the participants, including a few of me gesticulating wildly.

Ask me to speak in front of your group, and you, too, can watch the fat man bounce around madly. Entertainment and information - like those traffic wreck films you watched in driver's education.

Later: Doug recaps the location of sample Tinderbox files. One of the best thoughts to come out of the conference was to get lots of sample files out into the public and let people see how it really resembles a Swiss Army Knife for working with information. Get 'em, download the Tinderbox demo, and play around.

I think you'll be impressed. I know I have been.

NYT: Death Puts Spotlight on a Doctor and Regulators

Shooting hydrogen peroxide intravenously is one of the stupidest ideas that you can imagine. Oxidation therapy? Try "free radical" therapy - the inverse of antioxidant therapies - and then shudder at the consequences.

(Think about the last time you cleansed a wound with hydrogen peroxide. The way the bubbles hissed and foamed, tearing the blood off the surface. Now imagine that happening inside your veins. Oy.)

Mark and I were discussed many web-related topics on our way back to the hotel from the TinderDinner. One thing that came up was the amount of bad information, and in particular medical quackery, online. One of my pet peeves is that search engines do not weight information for reliability or safety. This causes some really stupid, ineffective, or simply dangerous crap to float to the top of search results. This can lead to patients to McQueen themselves without a full investigation of their therapeutic options.

There's no excuse for regulators to allow this sort of chicanery to be foisted on the public in the name of health care. For shame.

Susan: Make sure you're not part of the problem

Susan points at Liz Lawley's story of a hotel wi-fi network borked by infected PC laptops flooding the network with crap. A cautionary tale for our time.

Paging the Department of HotelLAN Security.

Rodney Dangerfield is gone

Of course, we all know the reason why: He finally paid Dr. Vinny Boom Batz in full.

S'okay; you'll get it if you're a fan. See ya in the clubhouse, Rodney.

Geek Dinner in PDX

Scoble says he is having a Geek Dinner in Portland on October 19, and for once it's not only on my day off, it's on one of the best days to eat at a restaurant.

Barring an earthquake that brings down the bridges, I'll be there.

"Why should I pay for your security?"

I was chatting with Susan Kitchens the other night, and one of the topics that came up was the perennial about Wintel security. Being the alpha geek at work, I get asked a lot about what they can do to prevent themselves from being victims of malware.

My reply is what you'd probably expect: "Get a Mac." About half of the seekers take me seriously enough to think about it. The others say, "There is no way I am going to switch. Give me another option."

Here's where it gets interesting. When I ask them about what their base setup is, the vast majority are still running Windows 98/ME. They aren't going to upgrade, either. "This is already the most expensive appliance in my house. Why should I pay good money for something that benefits everybody?"

It's a good point. These people are running a buggy, insecure OS on unfirewalled broadband connections. By putting their unprotected machines on the net that we all use, they threaten a basic infrastructure on which our economy depends by keeping it open to all sorts of worm, zombie, and viral attacks. Why should they pay when all they have to do is wipe and reinstall their systems every few months when their system performance erodes enough from malware to become annoying?

Susan had a really great idea. Maybe what we really need to protect us in an era of cyberwar and global guerrillas is a Department of HomeLAN Security.

Hello, RubyCocoa - Who would put *that* name on you?

MacDevCenter has an introduction to RubyCocoa, a bridge between the Ruby language and the Cocoa framework. I heard good things about Ruby from Mark at TB-W this weekend.

A matter of timing

Why does the garbage disposal break and demand your sudden, undivided attention 5 minutes before you're IM'd by a beautiful woman?

Rhetorical question, of course. It's Murphy playing with me.

Again.

Getting things done

One of the ideas I took away from the Tinderbox conference was the idea of making it easier to get things done. I got out my Moleskines and began looking at the notes that I had been taking for months, and realized there were a lot of tasks not only unfinished, but not even started.

One of those things was to do something about the seating at my desk. I have consistently got up from my chair in the middle of a task because it was just too painful to sit another second. Some of this, of course, is just old back injuries come home to roost, but much of it was from the crappy chair I bought years ago to replace the good one that had finally given up the ghost. It was a bad solution to an urgent problem, and it had never been righted.

I am now seated in a mesh chair with good lumbar support that feels like heaven. I am now paying attention to the work rather than the discomfort, and I am plowing through things at a good clip.

Isn't it funny how such small fixes can give such big multipliers to productivity.

Today's Updates to Al's Toolchest

Today's updates include:

• Tinderbox 2.3.3
• Audio Hijack Pro 2.1

Another venting

We're getting another, larger venting of steam and ash from Mount St. Helens. All is good so far, and the wind is from south to north which will send the ash away from the Portland metro area. It is not blowing up.

There is a huge glacier and snow pack on the mountain. As the earthquakes occur, chunks of ice and snow break up, melt, and hit the hot rock. It flashes to steam (think of tossing some drops of water onto a hot griddle) and that steam - along with the hot gases in the rock bubbling out - has the energy to blow ash into the air.

We've lived with an active volcano chain here in the Northwest for a long time. We don't worry much about it, any more than people in the Midwest worry about tornados or Californians about earthquakes. It's part of living here in the Pacific Northwest. No worries, mate.

Those folks that have recently moved here might want to make sure that the air filters on their furnace are in working order, and they might even want to get a N95 mask as well, particularly if they have asthma or emphysema. Getting ready means just that - having a kit in the corner if things get nasty.

This isn't "the big one" that is coming. This is just the prelude, setting us up for the symphony. Should be quite a show.

Sometimes you have to get a little burned

I went back and read the TinderDinner review earlier this evening and shuddered - it was an early draft that I had dashed off and saved to my iDisk to work on at later time.

When I looked at the rest of what I had written, the problem became obvious - when I changed from Gromit I (my trusty old Powerbook that journeyed with me to Tinderbox West) to Gromit II (the G5) I downloaded the old version from the iDisk and republished it over the version I had with links. Did the same with a couple of other posts that I had authored over at the conference as well.

Shuffling between two machines, keeping document versions synched, is a real challenge. The answer, of course, was literally right in front of me when I got home. My wife had used the time while I was away to clean around our desks. I found that she had returned my little USB Flash RAM drive. This is the device where my Tinderbox documents should live. This way they can be easily transported, independent of the machine upon which they are currently being massaged.

This was a cheap lesson. Hardly even raised a blister.

WWDN: Going full text

Wil Wheaton's RSS feed is going full text, rather than excerpting.

I guess I hadn't done this in the past because I wanted people to actually visit my site, but I don't care about traffic any more. Now I just want people to enjoy what I write, in whatever format they prefer, including offline newsreaders.

It's really hard to leave your web site stats page behind. But the hard truth is that what you have to say - whether by weblog, RSS feed, or audio enclosure - is a helluva lot more important than how you get those words out.

Jarvis: Looney Town!

Jeff Jarvis returns to San Francisco and finds it much changed since he was a reporter for the Examiner.

I'm glad it wasn't just me. I roomed in one of the struck hotels this weekend. Bloody awful, though the staff that was still working did their best to make it more bearable.

I found a pair of earplugs on the nightstand by my bed, and a big bowl of them in the lobby. It was at this point that I began to get worried. The protesters left at 2200 as promised, but shouted out to their friends as loudly as possible as the came and went from the picket line. Enough to be annoying, not so much as to get busted.

He's right about the scruffiness and filth. The roads are in disrepair, and it's impossible to use a map to get to anyplace because the routes that appear don't exist. "You can't get there from here" seems to be a city-wide meme. Don't even think about driving a private vehicle if you visit; the experience will produce more misery than you are prepared for even if you have driven in LA.

I remember reading of people's love of SF over the years, and it didn't jibe with what I saw this weekend. It seems that the city is dying; not with a scream, but a demonstration. Too bad, because I remember the raves that were written about it during the .com boom, and it seems quite different from it's current state of decay.

The conference - and the people who attended it - made it all worthwhile, and by a lot. But it'll take another gathering of such quality to get me back in that city again.

Jim: "Steve Ballmer can kiss my ass"

Well, that pretty much says it all - although I would have chosen the phrase "Unfuck you".

I might add that almost all of the music in my iTunes library comes from legal CD purchases. Granted, most of them were newly purchased prior the Sonny Bono Act, but I can still pull platters out and show that the music was acquired above the board. Accusing me of theft after the RIAA drove me, through the legislation they pushed, from the new music market is idiotically insulting.

I wish we lived in the day when you could challenge a person to a duel...

More Seth in Moscva

Seth continues to blog from Russia, where he is teaching them about weblogging and RSS while getting used to the lifestyle. A blogger in a far-off land. He's got a story or two to tell.

He shot a really beautiful desktop photo and wanted to share it. You'll see why.

SS1 in flight

The X-Prize is won. An Apollo moment, people.

A moment, please, to contemplate the wonder of it all.

Apples in flight

Note from flight home from SF.

Notebook computers seen in use: 4

Apples: 3

PC: 1

Tablets: 0

Significance: None. Just another data point; no real information.

Tinderbox weblogs: thoughts in progress

I'm going to be doing some entries about Tinderbox weblogs, and in particular what seems to trip people up when using Tinderbox as a weblogging tool. Some of you who went to the conference may find this repetitive, and if anybody thinks I've missed a point please yell out. "This is Liberty Hall, where you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"

One of the things that struck me while listening to the group was a yearning for understanding about the very basics of weblogs. The weblogs chapter in the Tinderbox book doesn't go into the details, the minutiae, of weblogging at all - nor should it; there are plenty of books on the subject, as well as web sites. The problem is that most of the blogging books focus on applications that live on remote servers, like MoveableType and pMachine. That can leave a gap in the memespace regarding how to implement a weblog in TB, an application that sits on your desktop and renders the page locally to be uploaded to a server at your convenience (assuming you aren't writing directly to a web server, of course).

Another gap is the use of templates. Most weblogging systems have all their templates predesigned and hooked together in fairly rigid coding schemes. Tinderbox comes with some pre-built templates, but invites - practically begs - you to design your own. That whole concept of a unified web page built from small pieces (templates) is something that most webloggers never have to deal with. TB, with it's enormous ability to manipulate the information within the template note through an interface other than the writing of code, once again presents a paradigm-busting way of building web pages and sites. You may have to work a little to find the right check boxes and buttons, but they are there - waiting for you to exploit their power.

As much as I love to blog using TB, it has so many other abilities that calling it a weblog tool is like calling it an outliner - it does those things, but that is not what it is and to look at it in that manner blinds you to seeing the whole elephant.

I do not envy Mark and his crew. Being a pioneer means spending a lot of time pulling the arrows out of your chest while trying to make it across the frontier to the Promised Land.

Glad to be in Gladstone

After an unnecessarily difficult time in getting out of San Francisco, I am back at the House of Healing. Brain is stretched, both from exposure to plenty smart people and lots of new ideas.

Tomorrow. It'll wait until tomorrow. Thanks for thinking of me, Commander - we missed your presence. I'll consult with you at the earliest opportunity.

Tomorrow.