Julian Harris, Social Computing Guy

So this last weekend was really interesting. An experiment in global real-time collaboration inside Google.

My workmate Ade posted a blog entry on the Google UK dev blog.

The gauntlet is down: who else is interested in running a Distributed, Multitimezone BarCamp? I’d suggest try distributed first, then add timezones, as doing both is really hard if you don’t have really awesome comms infrastructure.

For the UK, how about a distributed BarCamp in London / Brighton / Manchester?

I wish I took my video camera!

Inamo is a really fun place to eat. The table is actually a digital projection of menus and nice ambient backgrounds.

You use a little circular trackpad to your right to move the mouse to select menus and food items. It’s all very lively and fun. You don’t directly interact with waiters, you select what you want and it magically turns up, promptly too.

The food was really good — creative and tasty. Above is my wife’s duck dish.

The bill is not a surprise because the menu has a tally as you go — total table cost and your cost.

Inamo’s not the cheapest in the world — mains average at £12-£14 but I got a great veggie pumpkin curry for £9. Desserts are small but perfectly formed. Sake drinks are interesting.

Definitely worth checking Inamo out for a novel and fun evening!

Well, I’d like not to, and these days, 95% of spreadsheet stuff is in Google Spreadsheets, and about 90% in Google Docs. GE’s 12-year CIO Gary Reiner says why better than me in Fortune 21 July 2008:

“If you ask what percent of the documents you create are just for you, it’s almost zero. Almost every document you create is for collaboration in one way, shape, or form. So why not start by building it on the web and providing permissions to people that you expect to view it and edit it and leverage it? So I think that’s going to be a big change over the next few years as well.”

So why has it taken so long for things like Google Docs and Spreadsheets to come out? I swear, every time I’ve launched Word on my desktop, I’ve started typing and I realised that in all probability, someone else will want to see it at some stage, and it’s so much more likely that they’ll change a document, and that I’ll bother to incorporate their changes, if it’s directly editable at the source. I’d deinstall it but I regularly work with parties external to my workplace.

Keep it in the cloud. And with Gears (which uses SQLite under the hood), the problem of ‘occasionally offline’ will be solved as well.

Hi all,

so this blog was updated perhaps 2-3x a day for 18 months then once a month for the last 8 months. I’m now going to upgrade Wordpress from 2.0 to 2.6 now that I’ve despammed it (20% or approx. 500 posts where corrupted with splog links via a dreamhost server compromise).

If this site looks a bit funny while I do this, please be patient!

“September 3, 2008 (Computerworld) Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer lost nearly a full percentage point in market share during August, the browser’s biggest drop in three months, a Web metrics firm said today.

IE’s rivals — Mozilla Corp.’s Firefox, Apple Inc.’s Safari and Opera Software ASA’s Opera — all extended their shares at IE’s expense last month. “

Via Computerworld

I find this fascinating. I think IE8 has some interesting features that makes it a lot better than IE7, but IE8 web app (aka javascript) performance is still very sluggish (note IE8 and Chrome are both beta.)

Hi all,

I’ve not really used Google Reader shared items much but they’re super cool. I’ve added a panel on this blog to display the 5 most recent items I’ve read that I think are worth sharing.

You can also view items I find interesting on this Google Reader page.

Only hassle is that for searchability, the javascript-included content won’t be included on the page, including my own comments. Maybe there’s a way to publish directly to Wordpress from Google Reader? You can post to Wordpress via email, and you can email Google Reader notes, so perhaps that’s the way.

It’s a Chrome day for me today as I can share my thoughts about Google Chrome.

When comparing one product against another, it’s easy to look at functionality. Functionally, Chrome is a web browser. It uses WebKit, shared with Apple Safari. So nothing new there. Actually in fact, if you were to compare features against other browsers, it’d probably have a shorter list.

Usability is key

Enter usability: how people do stuff. What makes people productive. And then Chrome is really interesting. I don’t have external links to studies on Chrome, but there are 2 very, very interesting features that are pure usability: the first, mentioned before, is speed. Chrome’s web app performance (that is, running javascript-enabled web sites) is off the planet fast. The second is more interesting: Chrome’s “autosearch” feature.

Chrome automatically detects how to search a web site

Try this:

• perform a search for a term on this blog using the search box on this web page — it’s guaranteed you won’t have julianonsoftware.com set up as a search engine!

• THEN in your Chrome browser, type ‘juli’ and you should see a drop-down with 2 items:

• ‘julianonsoftware.com/’

• Search julianonsoftware.com for:

Select the second entry and type your search query. Cool! Chrome automatically figured out how to search on my blog! That’s really neat! Chrome has lots of this kind of ‘predictive text’ stuff — using what you’ve done before to suggest what to do now, to great effect.

And hey, look at that, Chrome is open source, so Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla can directly profit from this, straight away, so that as many users as possible can benefit from these innovations.

See a demo of this feature on the press release video, around 19m10s

So Chrome is finally out! There was an internal embargo until last night 8pm BST so it was a little frustrating when news broke out a day or so early as it’s exciting news and I wanted to share my piece on it.

I’ve been using Chrome for many months now internally, and it’s been an absolute pleasure. Agile development really works — rather than a messy blob of features all 80% complete until the last moment, Chrome’s feature set was incremented regularly, and solidly, very early on. Very early builds did very little but render pages, and slowly but surely, menus started appearing and… just working. Chrome amazingly solid. I’ve seen one report of a crash, but I certainly didn’t get any crashes using it fulltime as my main browser since about June-ish. One of the interesting things about working for a Real Software Company is that you encounter this crazy class of bugs you get much less often with bespoke stuff — nasty take your machine completely down crashers because the underlying components have bugs, through no fault of the code your team writes.

I love the comic. It’s such a clear and interesting way of presenting some pretty complex concepts.

Why should I try out Chrome?: it’s FAST

Because it’s really, really fast, particularly for web apps. It was long before working at Google that I used Google web apps daily — gmail and spreadsheets mostly. More recently Notebook. And these guys just fly. And very early on having each page in a separate process meant you didn’t get inexplicable delays reading BBC news because the spreadsheet was updating something.

Won’t it be a drag for web page developers, another browser?

It’s been mentioned before a lot — but the key thing is that it uses the same underlying bits that Safari does, so if your web site supports Safari, it’ll work on Chrome.

This whole open source thing, not really relevant to me is it?

Being open source is an enabler. End users don’t see immediate benefit, but by sharing the exact code that Google wrote Chrome in, other people can use it as an inspiration for their own designs, modify or customise it for their own ends (how would the javascript piece, V8, fare on the server side for instance?), or downright copy the whole thing for their own ends. As it’s designed to be easy to work with, I can imagine that it’ll spawn a whole fleet of custom ‘vrowsers’ (THERE! I said it) — vertical browsers, with accompanying adornments and features specific to a particular domain.

Web apps are the future of the functional web — and this just got a whole lot brighter with ultrafast javascript.

More interesting articles about Google Chrome

• CNET benchmark report: Chrome is off the charts faster than other browsers
• Matt Cutts on how Google Chrome communicates with Google (nothing to be concerned about)
• Matt Cutts on Google Chrome objections
• Chrome is search engine agnostic
• 8000+ diggs about the Chrome launch
• For this morning, at least, Techmeme has extremely good coverage of Google Chrome on its front page

(usual disclaimer — this is the view of myself, rather than my employer. etc.)

PS yes I know about Safari’s ultrafast Squirrelfish and Firefox 3.1 — great, it’s the way to go!

Even though I own one of these damn things, their web site provides no phone contact, even when I’m signed in as a registered user.

Scouring the net, I found the Tomtom phone contact details on a discussion forum, which I’ve copied here to help other hapless Tomtom users.

Company address:

TomTom International B.V.
Rembrandtplein 35
1017 CT Amsterdam, NH
The Netherlands
Phone support +31 (0)20 850 0800

Fax support +31 (0)20 850 1099
Customer support: netherlands-info@tomtom.com

Tomtom contact phone numbers:

TomTom Austria 01546575600 (German) austria-info@tomtom.com
TomTom Germany 01805687483 (German) germany-info@tomtom.com
TomTom Germany help line 0180-500 3842 (German)
TomTom Switzerland 0848803133 (German, French or Italian) switzerland-info@tomtom.com
TomTom United States 312 0850 0800 (English) usainfo@tomtom.com
TomTom USA help desk phone 866-486-6866
TomTom United Kingdom phone 0845 161 0009
TomTom from the Republic of Ireland 1890812008
TomTom from South Africa 0800980670
From outside the UK +31208501004 (english)
TomTom Australia 02 8875 1700 (English) australia-info@tomtom.com remob@tomtom.com
TomTom Australia 1300 135-604 (toll free)
TomTom Sverige 0776620010
TomTom Danmark 0776620010
TomTom Danmark 35256514
TomTom Norge 81556710
TomTom Suomi 03039038
TomTom France 0811025124
TomTom Belgique 078250157
TomTom Suisse 0844000091
TomTom Deutschland 01805003842 germany-info@tomtom.com
TomTom Österreich 0810102557
TomTom Schweiz 0844000016
TomTom Nederland 0208501007 Nederland-info@tomtom.com
TomTom België 078250156
TomTom España 913496508
TomTom Portugal 808781222
TomTom Italia 0245281004
TomTom Svizzera 0844000040
TomTom Česká republika +420 23 90 00 491
TomTom Polska +48 22 34 91 598

TomTom USA Phone 978-287-9555 Fax: 978-287-9522 Email: usa-info@tomtom.com usainfo@tomtom.com
Mail address: TomTom; 150 Baker Avenue Extension; Concord, MA 01742

TomTom Australia Phone +61 2 8875 1700 Fax: +61 2 9889 8856 Tool free: 1300 135-604 Email: australia-info@tomtom.com
Mail address: TomTom; Suite 383; 272 Victoria Ave; Chatswood NSW 2067

Company address - Customer Relations Department:
TomTom Sales BV
Customer Support - Customer Relations Department
Rembrandtplein 35
1017 CT Amsterdam
The Netherlands

UPDATE 24 Oct 2008 How ironic — this post complaining about the Dreamhost compromise itself got compromised! I was trying to figure out why ringtone ads were coming up on my blog and what do you know!

When my blog was compromised from dreamhost it has had hundreds and hundreds of articles polluted with spam links. It’s a tragic affair but I’m not really sure I can easily strip out all the ‘home loans’ content now. It’s screwed up my adwords targeting and basically an all round mess.

There is no way this could have happened unless someone had accessed my dreamhost password.

Damn you Dreamhost!

I shall likely completely redo my blog content.

At the end of Feb the Google Talk team released a version of GTalk that you can embed in any web page. As a Google Account holder who has logged in, you can generate a Gtalk chatback badge very easily. As a ‘chat host’ you must have a Google account, but your guests do NOT have to have one, which is pretty neat.

200px wide, more or less

Currently you cannot have a chatback badge less than 200px as it’s hard-wired for this width. You can add ’scrolling=no’ as a way of sneaking it into a slightly smaller (190px?) space to avoid the clumsy scrollbars that appear.

If you want to try it out, click ‘chat with Julian’ on the sidebar. When I’m in of course!

Customer sales and support for the Long Tail

This is very cool for small businesses wanting to provide a virtually zero cost customer sales and support. With almost no effort you can provide a live connection to potential customers by putting the live chat box at key points in your sales process — using an analytics package like Google Analytics you can set up funnels to identify drop off points, for instance.

What if you want to customize Google Talk chatback look and feel?

See also JTold’s post on how to customize the look and feel of the GTalk badge.

So my site was compromised recently (pwned even? — INCLUDING THIS POST!). The .htaccess file was set to redirect to a spam site. Apologies to those who were looking for my site and got a Canadian online pharmacy! Also apologies to those who have since come here and were in fact expecting a Canadian online pharmacy.

To dreamhost’s credit they fixed it within 12 hrs of my support mail being raised.

Dreamhost cancelled my account with no warning. They said there was an outstanding payment, however I had received no notice of this, and had just renewed a number of domains.

Apologies for the outage — this site was out for 2 days which I’m sure has affected usage.

This tutorial covers Rails 2.0 under the Rails that is built-in to Leopard. You do not need to use Locomotive or any other tool for a basic Ruby on Rails platform under the Mac.

It took me about half an hour to find the page on Using Ruby on Rails with Leopard but here it is: Developing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard. The nice thing about this tutorial is it shows you how to upgrade Leopard Ruby on Rails to Rails 2.0 (which of course, is just gem update --system).

MySQL doesn’t come with Leopard by default (SQLite3 does) so the tutorial doesn’t cover how to do MySQL. If I have time I’ll document how to get the Leopard Rails to work with MySQL and link from h ere. .

Side note An old Mac fan… maybe a new Mac fan?

For the record: I was an avid Mac user and developer for nearly 10 years, from around 1987 to 1997. I used to spent most of my weekends hacking Resedit. I know the trap address of the Finder. My favourite Resedit resource module was the ‘CODE’ type (MC68k was actually quite sensible). I bled 6 colours. Then Apple really pissed me off once too many times and I moved to java. But with Mac OS X, things have just been getting better and better. Sheesh every day I see another reason to upgrade my PC to a Mac… the multitouch track pad, built-in time machine for seamless backups, and now Rails is built in… very nice!

So what with the snow and everything on Sunday, what better way to spend a Sunday than at the OpenSocial Hackathon in London hosted graciously by BT — they really have awesome premises.

The objective was to try and do some work against OpenSocial and do some demos.

Highlights

Last.fm inside hi5.com and myspace. A bunch of really smart, nice guys, built a Last.fm gadget with only glue code as they’ve already exposed all their interesting stuff via developer APIs. So a t-shirt winning demo showed last.fm playing inside hi5.com and myspace. Neat!

Xing OpenSocial Proof of Concept Xing showed what Xing could look like if it used OpenSocial. They used Shindig — Apache’s reference OpenSocial container and put a Xing skin on it. Not mindblowing but it was nice to see.

OpenSocial extends the Google Gadgets API

OpenSocial is designed to work within Google Gadgets. So a typical OpenSocial hello world app does this:

• Create empty Google gadget
• Add a line of code to say it depends on open social
• Cycle through all the friends you have on the site the gadget is hosted

… which is precisely what I did. I copy/pasted the great tutorial and tweaked it a bit to explore the model.

Go to the OpenSocial Gadget tutorial for 0.7 of OpenSocial API.

Steve, Chewie, and myself talking about how to socialise Steve’s site. Image courtesy of fellow Googler Jason Cartwright. See more OpenSocial London Hackathon photos by Jason.

Learn more about OpenSocial.

This is the body of the test message.

Those long time readers will have noticed that my posting patterns have, er, changed somewhat. Google has punished me for this reduced frequency and now this site is only pagerank 5. Boo hoo.

Julian On Software is a research stream

Anyway. In general, Julian On Software is where I capture a trail of my research and thoughts. For a while it was Social Computing. More these days it’s changed a little to be more on Google products. It’s not an official Google blog though, even though I’m a Googler now.

You can also see my more transient thoughts and observations on twitter. I’ll wire it up to this blog one day even.

Thanks for listening!

There, I said it.

Amazon! Wohoo! Credit card! Get one! Yay!

So you have this glossy veneer presenting the credit card as … well an AMAZON credit card. With the Amazon experience. Reasonably friendly interface. Reasonably clever and innovative.

But this all falls through a cavernous hole in the ground called the HALIFAX VENEER. Not only is it a Halifax credit card, but you’re instantly relegated to the sense of a second class credit card holder — normal channels don’t work. Half the numbers your paper statement are wrong — and you have to be directed to a number that is carefully hidden on their help page. It, in a word, is utter rubbish. And yes I’d use stronger words.

What really annoyed me was that once I’d activated the card, TRY and find the login screen! Nothing on Amazon’s site allows you to log in! I had to spend 10 minutes with Google scouring the web. (Link provided above).