You know, if you travel in my august circles, you’d already know about Disqus (pronounced “discuss”). It’s the comment service that everyone’s talking about. Yup, that’s right, in my circles everyone talks about blog commenting services. Don’t be jealous.

I’d been reading and seeing how it was the bomb, most recently a post by Fred Wilson. I’d been avoiding it for a few reasons, mostly because I have a lot of comments on the site already and didn’t want to lose them - Disqus doesn’t yet have a way to import your comments, but I’m told that it’s coming. However, they let me know that installing the wordpress plugin lets you configure it to show up only on posts without existing comments and going forward, so in fact, it’s a non-issue. And with that, I took the 2 minutes it takes to install and lo and behold.

The key feature for me is the email replies for commenting. After you comment any replies to you (the comments are threaded now, remember) are sent to you in an email and the magical part is that you can reply by simply replying to that email… you know… in an email! So it really lowers the barrier to keep things moving in the comments. That’s pretty amazing.

For a lot of other people I think the shared profile is the big noise as well. If you verify yourself to Disqus (it takes like 1 minute, just click the “verify” checkbox when you post) you then get a profile on their site and that gets updated whenever you post to another Disqus enabled site. So it’s a central repository for all your commenting. Personally, that’s a nice feature, but wasn’t a maker or breaker for me - although it’s interesting to see people comments flowing into FriendFeed as a result of that.

If you’ll recall I experimented some time ago with CoComment which offered a similar feature. It had the nice effect of duplicating the content so that all posts stayed in the wordpress system as well as showing up on your CoComment profile which was very nice. But, as a feature, I just didn’t care enough about that and it slowed down and complexified the reply box so I removed it.

One big thing I’m not sure about is the loss of comment text to Google that this creates. Since it’s a javascript google won’t index any of the discussion taking place on the site. That’s kind of sad and time will tell on how big an issue this is. Some other questions I have are how I can get comment numbers into the comments link under each post so folks know if there’s some discussion happening (also in my RSS feeds). Lastly would be how it updates the “recent comments” blurb in my right nav. Once, I actually have some comments, I’ll start investigating this, but in the meantime, I’m pretty psyched to have this in place.

UPDATE: Hm… looks like the javascript sets the (x comments) link under each post on the homepage. Wonder if it also works on the RSS feed. That’d be pretty sweet.

UPDATE 2: Oh, as Mathew Ingram mentions another area that I’m bummed about is the loss of Trackbacks. While, it was a major spam vector, it was also an interesting and useful way to help aggregate discussion. Hopefully Disqus works that out soon.

May 11th, 2008 · · · · · · Tags: blogs · navel gazing · social networks

brian d foy started this Perl meme with a few questions. I haven’t written much about Perl recently, so here’s a little more.

· The person who introduced me to Perl showed me that…
Actually no one introduced me to Perl, I learned about it on the internets in ‘94, maybe I discovered it at a Gopher site?? I heard that it was good for making websites and decided to learn it - lived with that old Camel book for quite awhile. I still have it, pink spine and all, a little worse for wear, but all love.

· I first starting using Perl to…
build some websites. I learned Perl and CGI and started rocking some CGI programming on an Mac IIci running A/UX that me and some cohorts set up in the computer lab. Man, I wish I could remember what it was that I built!

· I kept using Perl because…
it got me my first job. Went to an NYTimes job fair a couple weeks after I graduated and got snapped up by the NYTimes itself for my mad Perl skills. I can remember sweating the “test” they provided - had to write a hello world type CGI script in Perl - and they said I could use cgi-lib.pl! Fortunately I passed and subsequently over the course of about a year helped transition the group from a mix of KSH and Perl to pretty much just Perl. Phew.

· I can’t stop thinking about Perl…
because, well, it’s what I do.

· I’m still using Perl because…
it’s the environment that let’s me get things done quickly and efficiently. And nuts if it isn’t the most fun language I’ve programmed in.

· I get other people to use Perl by…
example. I’m not a big proselytizer, I do what I do and talk about it when it’s brought up. People recognize a good thing when they see it. :)

· I also program in … and …, but I like Perl better since…
Well, at this point, I pretty much do Perl and some javascript. I have programmed professionally in Java mostly, with some C/C++ and Python thrown in for good measure. All fine languages, but for my money, Perl let’s me be the most productive I can be.

And there you have it. Don’t know how widespread this meme is, but here’s another one I found. If you’re reading this and are a Perl developer, blog it! Or post your reasons in the comments. Let’s spread the word!

May 10th, 2008 · · · · · · Tags: perl · the love

Ok, this is pretty awesome. The Get Out Clause, a Manchester band, decided they ought to film their video using security cams from various places and then securing the clips from their owners using the Freedom of Information Act. Apparently only about a quarter of those requested allowed the clips out, but that was enough. First good thing I’ve heard come out of Britain’s love of surveilling it’s citizenry. Oh and the song’s good, too. :)

May 9th, 2008 · · · · · · Tags: homeland security · music · video

Another couple o’ awesome things happened while I wasn’t blogging - Google launched AppEngine and Amazon released the word that they had rolled out persistent storage to a select few and this would become a regular feature. These are both big noise in the world of cloud computing.

An interesting thing about these two services is that they take such different approaches to the problem. Amazon provides a bunch of loosely coupled services that you can pick and choose from, the flagship of which would be EC2. This directly targets traditional hosting/datacenter environments by providing a system that works quite like hosting servers somewhere, except for what you’re hosting is all virtual so bringing servers up and down is quite easy. In a pre-persistent storage world, the difficulty was worrying about how to keep your data safe in the event that an instance went down. To steal from another genre, that really brings you out of the moment. It’s a problem that you don’t have to deal with in a normal hosting environment and was a barrier to entry. With persistent storage, not only does Amazon remove this barrier, it actually improves fundamentally on the idea by allowing you to move your storage around super simply from instance to instance. Nice!

So, in this world scaling comes very traditionally - you start up more servers and load balance between them. It is very easy for people to transition their learning from the physical datacenter to Amazon’s virtual one. Sure if you can switch your services to use SimpleDB that helps a bundle in getting things to scale, but if the limitations imposed prevent you from going that route, just boot up a MySQL or Postgres or Oracle instance and you’re ready to roll. It’s quick, it’s easy and it’s reasonably cheap and getting cheaper all the time.

AppEngine, on the other hand, goes for a very different route. Ignore, really, that it is tied to Python, they said they’re going to roll out other languages before long, so that’s a red herring. But ultimately, Google’s tactic is a much more prescriptive one - if you think of it more like a framework. They provide you with the structure to build your application, if you can live within those confines you get the scaling for free. That is, theoretically, it just gets bigger and bigger, no managing instances no server maintenance, it just serves more and more content. It’s like a web2.0 cornucopia, runnething over with all your stuff.

AppEngine is much earlier on in it’s development cycle so it remains to be seen how well it actually scales - although, given it’s Googley heritage, methinks that it should scale pretty well. Nor do we see their cost structure, although the free for a reasonably sized set of page views is definitely a lowered barrier to entry. To me its big achilles heel is BigTable. While it has some interesting properties, I believe that it lacks amongst other things join or the use of “OR”, which may make something like a many-to-many relationship difficult to model. Just as an example. And because of that some applications may simply not be able to be built in AppEngine. Unlike AWS there’s no escape clause, at least right now, you are stuck with BigTable.

These are both great options. AppEngine, like any framework (which it isn’t precisely and it will become even less so as more languages are added, but I think it’s similar in appeal) will gain its adherents. It makes certain things easier and certain things harder, a tradeoff that is true for any framework. Big time scaling is a difficult problem and taking away those concerns is quite compelling. On the other hand, AWS, I believe, will increasingly be seen as a real competitor to the big ISP’s like RackSpace. I honestly am waiting for a virtual RackSpace to be setup with whitecoats sitting around some virtual NOC receiving calls and restarting instances and troubleshooting all manner of issues. I mean, really, what difference does it make to me if the hardware is virtual or not? I never even really see my hosted gear… Actually, if you’re interested, let’s talk. :)

Yahoo looks to be entering this field as well, with the Y! OS. It remains to be seen where that will fall in the PaaS spectrum currently defined by AWS and AppEngine or if it will skirt the issue with a more Facebook like approach. I think ultimately there will never be one winner - there’s plenty of room in the world for both tactics to become very successful as they appeal to very different sorts. I’d like to see what services show up and where they fall on this spectrum or if they push the boundaries. Very interesting times, what do you think? I have some ideas for an AppEngine app, just need to dust off the ol’ python book and have google set me up with an account.

May 9th, 2008 · · · · · · Tags: amazon · google · hosting · web service · yahoo

Ok, first just a pair of movie thoughts. First up John Scalzi writes for AMCTV his thoughts on whether or not Guillermo del Toro is the right man to direct the Hobbit (I really like that Scalzi). (via) I just like in his thoughts how he notes Jackson’s free ride through King Kong and Lucas’ through Episodes I-III. He sadly doesn’t dis the Wachowski’s, something I’m making up for right now. I mean, sure I like The Matrix, but the sequels were not only awful, awful movies, they retroactively ruin the first. Although I admit that I am one of the apparently few people who didn’t mind V for Vendetta. But now they’ve got Speed Racer opening today. I’ve been not excited about it since the beginning and seeing more trailers for it leaves me even more not excited. The Wachowskis take themselves waaaay too seriously.

On the other hand, check out this shelf complete with LED read outs that can scoop up rss feeds as well as SMS messages! That thing is awesome, plus it’s all bendy so you can shape it the way you want, I wonder if it’d be smart enough to sense the direction of each screen? Man, I wish A) those were available, B) they were not super expensive and C) there is no C. Damn these concepts.

And yet another artists damn concept is this little action figure of Xenu! (via) With Kung-Fu Scientology Action! You gotta love that, when you become a Cleared Theta Clear the figure actually begins talking to you. It is not, ahem, clear, if that’s because you have super thetan powers or because you’ve gone quite insane. Either way, though, right? I’d love to have one of those, it’d go with my Li’l Cthulhu.

May 9th, 2008 · · · · · · Tags: breakfast links · movies · sci-fi

Video, yeah, I heard it’s the big thing on the internets. I get it. YouTube gets a bazillion hits a day and Hulu rocks your socks. But seriously, video has it’s place and the things it is good at. It is also very bad at many things. Let me splain my position on this.

First let’s look at vlogs, video blogs, where instead of posting some text and pictures, or even text with a little video to highlight difficult topics, it’s just a video. Scoble posts a lot of these videos - typically they’re on an interesting topic and they’re fairly long. I hate this. I just don’t have the time or inclination to watch most of those videos, even though I’d love to hear what he has to say on the topic. In the 10, or 20 minutes the video goes on, I could go through a couple hundred blog posts instead.

Most of the time it doesn’t really add much to the information trying to be conveyed. It would have been just as informative as a regular post with some pictures or short videos. I simply don’t understand why. Sure it is easier to convey some personality, but really, that comes across in writing as well. It isn’t even the case where they’re like podcasts - I likes me podcasts because audio is great for commutes and just generally more accessible than video. Video requires too much attention.

The same thing goes for video commenting. TechCrunch just released the hounds and I’ve seen it spring up some other places as well. Amazon, for example, allows for video reviews. Video reviews? On very rare occasion I can see why that would work, but for most reviews? Why? What is the advantage? Do I need to see you laugh out loud to really believe that you did? It’s slow and a lot of these on a page will slow down the load time. And I won’t watch them, because I have better things to do.

What better things to do, you ask? Well, I could watch otters holding hands! Seriously, videos on the web are great for that, short silly bursts to distract you for a minute. Or else longer form programming, like TV shows that you’re used to watching. Switching standard internet things built for ease and quickness disrupts the flow of information without providing any measurable benefits most of the time.

I mean, I’m just saying. I truly hope this stuff dies down and we can all get back to an alphanumeric representation of the world. :) What do you think? You lovin’ the videos? Did I miss some great something or other that makes vlogs so much more awesome the blogs?

May 8th, 2008 · 3 Comments · · · · · Tags: blogs

The last time I went to Japan it was with the express purpose of finding a bar that hand carved a chunk of ice into a sphere to put into my whiskey glass. They do it because a sphere would have the least surface area and thus would be the least melty ice shape. Because the japanese do not fool around. Sadly, the closest my sister and I found was a nice bar that served their whiskey with a very large square chunk of ice. But now, chiggity check it - you can now get your own ice sphere making machine! No more hand carving necessary, although the hardcore amongst us will always prefer that… Seriously, I really want one of these. I’ve got a silicon sphere mold for ice, but it’s gigantic, I’d need to be drinking a lot of whiskey for that…

If, for some reason, sphere’s of ice do not interest you check out WTF_Nature - mefi suggests is like Cute Overload for natural oddities. It’s very educational, you’ll see what happens when lightning strikes the plume of ash over an erupting volcano. Or a fiber optic sea mouse. And lots of other stuff, it goes off script, unfortunately, by not featuring an image in the summary of each post. Lame. But press on and you’ll find some in the body.

And I know it’s been a long time since last I pointed you towards a flash game, so here you are. Dino Run! Gather DNA while running as fast as you can to avoid extinction! It’s like a cross between Super Sprint and… um… dinosaurs? Go forth and play.

May 8th, 2008 · · · · · · Tags: booze · breakfast links

During those dark days when my blog was down Microsoft launched the tech preview of their Live Mesh platform. Much blogging ensued. Scott said, and to a pretty good point I agree, that Mesh embodied everything that is wrong with Microsoft. By taking an idea, and building and building and building it into some overly complex, difficult to explain beast that can’t support itself.

A lot of the reporting has been generally neutral to negative. Steven breaks down the misconceptions.

Now I went through a lot of emotions around Mesh, I know, I know, what can I say, I’m an emotional guy. I cried alligator tears when Goose didn’t make it, don’t try and play like you didn’t. Moving on, when Mesh was just a rumor I was really curious to see what they’d do in the space and when it was announced I was seriously disappointed. At a time when Amazon’s building their AWS out like crazy and Google was launching AppEngine, Microsoft comes out with a sync system? Then I was annoyed, why is this so ridiculous? Why is Microsoft so dumb? Finally, though, I kind of came around on it.

See recently I’ve been on a kick, I want to get all my stuff synced up everywhere, n’sync, if you will. I want my calendars and my contacts and my todo lists and everything sync’d at my desktop, iPhone and in the cloud at the service of my choice. Simple right? No. I was searching and finding Spanning Sync to do some of it, but not the rest, Plaxo pulse, again some of it, etc. I still can’t two way sync my Google contacts list with my desktop. Apparently syncing is a pain in the ass.

Here’s where, I think, Mesh steps in. It acts as, to steal a concept, a syncing virtual machine. An intermediate form, an abstraction layer. So if you are a service, say Google Calendar or Remember the Milk or what have you, you just need to write an interface that two way syncs you to the Mesh in some pleasant form. On Mesh all calendars look like Mesh calendars and all todo lists look like Mesh todo lists and I can just sync that all to my Desktop and my iPhone and my washing machine.

I think as we have more and more sophisticated stuff being developed, this could be a very useful setup. All this is not to say that I think Mesh is a slam dunk, very far from it. Not because there’s no mac or linux version or because it’s just a file sync’ing platform now - all that is easily fixed. Microsoft shows its weakness with its inability to explain it to people, partially exacerbated by launching with so little in the way of different examples of how they envision this going. Creating generic intermediate forms that work for most is also a daunting process (see the NewsML behemoth as an example). And with all the lack of anyone really talking about it right now, I wonder if it will get the developer momentum it needs.

What do you think? Is Mesh the future? Or just another Microsoft mess.

May 7th, 2008 · · · · · · Tags: microsoft · web service

Well from the ashes of disaster perhaps WiMax springs, renewed? Apparently a new consortium is in town, with Google, Intel, Comcast and Time Warner throwing their lot in with Sprint and Clearwire. Normally, I’d be concerned that Comcast and Time Warner were coming in, what with them increasingly in competition with the telcos, but A) it’d be nice to have more competition once WiMax actually exists and B) of the $12 billion, all the new partners are only contributing $3 billion with Sprint and Clearwire presumably footing the other 9. So I guess that makes for a whole bunch of junior partners. Who knows what’s going to happen, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed that this actually happens.

UPDATE: SAI is reporting the details, turns out just one partner Sprint has 51% of the consortium. Nice!

Ah well, in the meantime, you should be able to go and grab the latest Nine Inch Nails album, The Slip, fo free! With that last free album so successful Trent’s at it again, which is seriously kick ass if you ask me. Ask me, go on, I dare you. This in complete contrast with the lame Radiohead notice that their flirtation with the free was just a stunt that won’t happen again. Ah well, I’m sure all the major labels’ eyes will be on how many gold doubloons NIN pulls in with their sophomore attempt. In the meantime enjoy sanctioned free music!

And last but certainly not least and even more certainly not shortest check out what LEGO’s gone and done for their 50th anniversary. That’s right, they built a 100 foot tall LEGO tower. They had to use 500,000 bricks to build it and sadly it isn’t structurally sound, you can see the suspension wires they needed to add. Man, they should have cranked another few hundred thousand bricks and made some flying buttresses. I love a flying buttress. But anyhoos, you’re going to have to travel to the land of paranoia to see this bad boy, since it’s in the Legoland Windsor theme park. Or you can just look at the pretty pictures.

May 7th, 2008 · 1 Comment · · · · · Tags: breakfast links · music

Well, my first tabs post since the great crash. Sniff. Sniff.

· Sun Introduces MySQL Tech Support for Amazon EC2 - mysql.com
Certainly interesting, but kind of anticlimactic given the buildup from gigaom. Especially given that I recently wondered about MySQL support and stayed on hold for 45 minutes, twice, just trying to get to talk to someone to see about it. And I never spoke to anyone, just hung up.

· Twitter: IRC with a new shade of lipstick - WinExtra
It’s a very interesting point - I think, though, that fundamentally there are differences in the two - the lack of channels, for example and the not-necessarily two way connection between a follower of someone who hasn’t followed back. But Steven makes some interesting points about Twitter looking at IRC for some learnin’.

· Perl must decentralize, diversify and colonize - Perl Buzz
Some tips on what can be done to help defeat some of the perceptions that plague Perl.

· How Nokia Users Drive Innovation - BusinessWeek
In many ways the opposite of Apple’s innovation. I’m curious to see how well it works out.

· Sky Marshals on the No-Fly List - Schneier
On the sad state of our air security. I can say it no better than Bruce, “If this weren’t so sad, it would be funny.”

May 6th, 2008 · · · · · · Tags: tabs