A Day in Paradise

I played with picnik for a few minutes this morning. It was fairly interesting, a but slow and laggy, but not bad. Was a bit disappointed that as a pro member of flickr I don’t get the premium functionality of picnik.

Posted by mobile phone:
I am watching cnbc while on the excersize bike while blogging (multitasking++). They had a very.short piece about how yahoo customer satisfaction has grown 3 percent to pass google who has dropped 3 percent.

When I look at the two platforms, I have very little loyalty to google products.

Google search: I use it, but basically hate it. As soon as there is a viable alternative I am going to drop it.

Gmail: don’t really do the whole webmail thing. Gmail has some nice features, but hasn’t done much new in the last few years.

Google IG: pretty awesome, but for some reason I am not using it as much as I used to.

Google docs: Sweet, I love it. I wish they would add the concept of page breaks.

Adsense: a scam, I hate it.

Analytics: I use it but its not that great.

Youtube: great product, one of the only google acquisitions that has a community. We’ll see how google manages it.

And now some yahoo properties I use:

Flickr: premium member since they started. I love it.

Yahoo mail: great technology, by far the best webmail platform available.

Mybloglog: cool blogging community tool. Unique tool, nothing else like it available.

Stumbleupon: another awesome Y! buy a community based around what everyone does best: websurfing.

Yahoo finance: great product, far more features and more usable than the google counterpart.

Yahoo technologies: we use YUI heavily as well as other webservices provided by yahoo.

So you may have noticed that I hardly mentioned any products which were actually created by yahoo, and only a couple original google products.

Maybe the problem with google is that they merge the communities of their acquisitions with the general google brand. Yahoo does as much as they can to keep the communities intact.

We’ll see how google manages to break youtube and how the communities manage once the next big thig movie sharing site comes around.

Yesterday I read the an article on Network Neutrality on CNN.com. The article was written by Craig Newmark of Craigslist and was VERY wrong.

Here’s part of what bothered me:

Here’s a real world example that shows how this would work. Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That’s not fair, right? You called Joe’s and want some Joe’s pizza. Well, that’s how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others. For them, this would be a money-making regime.

That is a VERY misleading analogy on many levels. Here is my counter-analogy.

Steve runs a Pizza delivery service. When his service started he used to charge per-pizza he delivered. The prices weren’t that high, and since I’m too lazy to go out and get my own pizzas I appreciated the service. I didn’t eat as much pizza as I would like to, because Steve’s surcharge was always in the back of my mind.

Once Steve got enough clients, he expanded his business and realized that he could offer a better service by charging a flat-fee. Using this new business model everyone paid a flat monthly fee, and the cost of people who ate a pizza every night (like me) were subsidized by the people who only ate 1 pizza a month.

Everyone had hot pizzas, everyone was happy.

A couple months ago Gpizza opened, they offer all the regular pizzas, but also offer the GSuper 4-course MegaPizza. This pizza comes in 4 parts which are served by midgets waiters. The midgets waiters need to be transported with the pizzas and then brought back to the Gpizza store.

For the first couple months Steve is happy to provide his loyal clients with Gpizzas, even though it did require substantially more resources for Steve to transport the Gpizzas and midgets. As Gpizzas become more and more famous, people start to complain that their Gpizzas are arriving cold, the midgets were tired from the slow ride and weren’t as enthusiastic with their serving the pizzas.

Ypizza, which has been using Steve for 10 years, sees how much money Gpizza is making and decides to make the Ysuper 4-course MegaPizza and one-ups Gpizza by providing a dancing leprechaun along side the 3 midget servers.

Steve sees that he will not be able to provide any service if more Pizza places start offering MegaPizzas. He has two options:

1.Revert to a Per-pizza business model and charge his clients for the delivery of MegaPizzas
2.Charge pizza places for the delivery of MegaPizzas

Gpizza catches wind of this and prepares the “Pizza Delivery Guy Neutrality” bill which mandates that Pizza delivery guys are unable to charge pizza shops extra for delivering MegaPizzas.

Now with silly analogies out of the way, a bit of mythbusting:

The Network is NOT Neutral
Craig says “So let’s keep the Net as it is now: Neutral, fair and free.” The network is currently NOT neutral, it’s free for ISPs to do what they want. Network Neutrality regulation will not free anything, but will restrict the ISPs in the service they can provide.

Bandwidth / Latency costs Money!
High Bandwidth/Latency applications cost money to transfer. The money has to come from somewhere. Creating laws that stop ISPs from charging the Googles, YouTubes and Skypes of the world mean that YOU and I will be paying for it instead.

YouTube/Google/Skype and Craigslist are making money
They can allocate a bit of money to provide good pipes.

When Google rules most of the Cable in the US
How neutral do you think that will be?

The first version of this post was eaten when Y! Pipes decided to take down firefox (seemed to happen a lot when I was hovering over the sources waiting for the tooltip top pop up – FF1.5.0.9)

Y! Pipes is a cool toy. There is a lot of interesting functionality, but a lot that could still be added. My problem is the scalabilty aspects of it. It looks fairly resource intensive on the part of Y! and with every additional feature that’s added more resources would be needed. In the half hour I spent playing with my pipe, I already created a monstor that takes 4.86 seconds to generate. And if I were to do any serious (and add specific tools) then I would need even more generating power.

There are a couple extra things I would like to see right off:

1. It needs an exclusion gate, possibly as an option of the union operator, where I can select all items from feeds a-y which do not exist in feed z.
2. I had some trouble parsing some old google RSS feeds I had. I was about to yell conspiracy but I re-generated the google urls and everything worked
3. I couldn’t see how to extract/interact with information directly from a feed. I want to embed a flickr image into the description of my news article, but couldn’t figure out how that was done.

If anyone wants to clone my pipe and fix it, feel free. Anyway, I loved it… reminded me of ning, but without the code

In the footsteps of a couple good friends I’ve decided to make the first blog entry of the new year yet another year in review round-up for the year 2006.

It’s hard to believe that we’re already done with 2006, this one went by fast. A lot happened, and due to the overflow of work, I missed a lot of what I did last year (specifically LinuxWorld Expo and LinuxTag).

One of the big work-related events is a new venture that I’ve been working on this year. <project-pimping>HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website Creation was officially launched on December 1st, however about 18 months worth of work had gone into the product and building a client list before the site launch. The sprang out of my work with HedgeCo Networks which involved a the development of a high-end statistics/graphing package which generated quantitative statistics for Hedge Funds. After deploying the product on their flagship product, they started receiving request to license the package on various other website platforms, so the package was reworked into a slimmed down edition which can be deployed in smaller sites.

As we started deploying the product we realized the potential, and reallocated some of the design talent that we had been working on other project into creating entire websites and Hedge Fund start-up consulting/compliance packages. Since our Dec. 1 launch we have had a fantastically profitable month (to keep up-to-date with what we’re doing check out the Hedge Fund Websites blog)</project-pimping>

All of the above required me to reallocate my own time away from other projects, until the point that for the last year I have done little else. So as of Jan 1, 2007 I am officially working full time for HedgeCo Hedge Fund Websites… Freelancer no longer! This year I’m also moving my family up to West Palm Beach, Florida and will be working in the brand new HedgeCo offices (will post pics of when we move in later this month).

OK, so now that I’ve spent all my time pimping my current project I’ll skim through the news.

January: Slow month, Sid officially joined our family as “brother”. I weighed in on the PHP Security debate du jour wondering when good security verges on paranoia and the side effects.

February: Traveled to UK for PHPLondon conference. This was a fantastic event (looking forward to next year), as far as I remembered there were about 250 geeks attending the 1-day event. Got a cool new LCD. In defense of PHPNuke (and other applications of low repute whose name starts with PHP*) I responded to Marco’s post reminiscing about how great PHPNuke was back in the day.

March: Slow month… google releases finance portal, barra stops reporting S&P numbers and screws up my webservice. Tom Fox is Executed.

April: Gearing up for the world cup 32Cards PHP-based card game is released. I start using backpackit to organize my life (note to reader, I stop using it in a couple months, when it stops scaling with my needs). I spent 10 days in Florida, unfortunately missing PHPTek by 10 days.

May: I question open-source for highly specific niche applications (more specifically my statistic package). I enjoy Scott Sigler’s “Infection” which is in full swing. I start watching theshow with ze frank.

June: DSL CRASH!!! I try to “upgrade” my connection by switching providers which turns into 3 weeks on dial-up. During this time I camp at friends houses during all night product launches, and drive everyone around me insane. I finally return. World cup is in full swing, and Germany is World Cup CRAZY! I take pictures.
I travel to Norway for the eZpublish conference & PHPVikinger. Ammar Ibrahim comes to Frankfurt, we watch some football!

July: A slow month… I try Fedora Core, only to get frustrated when I can’t mount my ntfs external drive with the correct permissions (worked fine in root, was able to find no usable explanation). Infection ends. Put out a notice for css code monkeys get more response than I can handle. Macs Rock? During one of the hottest months on record the kids have chickenpox and we are confined indoors.

August: I subscribe to Gail Orenstein’s Flickr feed during her trip to Israel. cool pictures (quite possibly NSFW) with political commentary. Two talks are accepted for ZendCon. I manage to squeeze into the PHPConference schedule at the last minute. We take the kids on a mini-vacation to Legoland and then visit some friends in Switzerland.

September: Catch Mark Nemcoff on in a 5-minute-review. I deploy a site using eZpublish, blog about lessons learned. RIP Lilo. Do some myspace defending.

October: The Pear book is out!. I speculate about google world domination, and yahoo opens up the login api. Spend a week in WPB Florida, then fly to LA and drive down to San Jose for Zendcon.

November: Conference season. Meet Scott Sigler!!! Give talks at Zendcon, fly back home and give tutorial at IPC2k6. After seeing that the Zend Framework is more than hype I take a look at it and start my Zend Framework Hidden Gems article series. I dump backpackit for google docs (which I am still happily using). When is it a good time to rewrite your platform?

December: HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website launch. Fantastic month on the work front, however not a whole lot of time for anything else. David (CPUNerd) on the other hand has way too much time on his hands, and immortalizes me in kilt.

And that’s about it… probably the longest blog entry ever! I’m looking forward to this year as being the craziest yet. I’ll be flying to WPB next week, and for this first quarter will probably spend more time on that side of the pond.

A big THANK YOU to my readers (let’s make that anyone who made it this far into the blog entry). And most of all thanks to Stella, Annie and Mia for putting up with me during this hectic time.

Nice free enterprise search solution from IBM and Y! The 5 minute flash walk-through shows some of the neat features. There aren’t a whole lot of technical details other that it’s Lucene based.

As seen on UB

Yahoo! announced that it’s opening up its signup system to allow external sites authenticate their users using yahoo.

You build great web applications. We have millions of users who store their data on Yahoo!. Browser-Based Authentication (BBAuth) makes it possible for your applications to use that data (with their permission).

BBAuth also offers a Single Sign-On (SSO) facility so that existing Yahoo! users can use your services without having to complete yet another registration process.

I have a couple of problems with this:

• Yahoo only accepts Yahoo email addressses. If people signup to yahoo for the authentication or YIM they will probably not check their yahoo account very often (I know I don’t). If I have a service which needs to alert people via email, I want to be able to contact the user at any email address they want, not just their yahoo email address.
• Until the Yahoo! Single Sign-On is widespread, it may be confusing to the users to get shuttled back to yahoo to authenticate / sign in.
• Using Yahoo! to remove “yet another signup form” works if you require only the information that Yahoo! requires, if you have to bounce the user back to another signup form to get some more information, it would be even more confusing. Of course, it would be cool if Yahoo! allowed you to require more information and then stored that as well.

Now the disclaimer, I have read no more than the introduction article, so if this is FUD then I apologise. There is PHP example code available, hopefully I can make time to check it out.

Thanks Kventon.