everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2004

  • Web as Platform

    In the initial post that kicked off this blog, I said that I would focus on how the promise of the ASP/Web Services vision is being realized with the connection of various web-based APIs into a new type of platform which lives on the internet. One way to experience the power of this vision is using outputs of each of these services and embedding them into your weblog template. Once you learn how easy it is to pull together a page of contextually related information that updates every time it’s refreshed, you start to think how other things can be connected together.

    Outputs of one service can act as inputs to other services to further process and refine information via relationships that we set up in advance. It’s basic programming but using web services instead of self-enclosed objects, classes and libraries.

    Jason Kottke brings the meme up-to-date with some of the latest services out there and thinks how a bundle of them could make for a comprehensive personal information management system:

    TypePad for weblogs
    Flickr for photos
    Upcoming for your public calendar
    iCal for your private calendar
    Gmail for email
    Feedburner as an agent to look for updates to any of these services

    Kottke goes on to say:

    Think of it like Unix…small pieces loosely joined. Each specific service handles what it’s good at. Gmail for mail, iCal for calendars, TypePad for short bits of text, etc. Web client, desktop client, it doesn’t much matter…whatever the user is most comfortable with. Then you just (just! ha!) pipe all these together however you want with services (or desktop apps) handling any filtering/processing that you need, and output it to the file/device/service of your choice. New services can be inserted into the process as they become available. You don’t need to wait for Gmail to output RSS…just pipe your email to Feedburner and they’ll hook you up.

    One other benefit that comes to mind as I move my identity from one PC to another and one ISP to the next as part of a job change and relocation – distributed data is ubiquitous and never needs to moved from client to client.

  • Temporary Space

    We left Pennington, our home of four years, in the early morning fog to catch our flight to California. The limo driver said that he’s been taking a lot of people out to the airport for their moves out of New Jersey. This echoed what our mover said in that they’ve been extremely busy because Sony just shut down their New Jersey campus and have moved a lot of people out West. It seem like those involved in the relocation business have a good sense of the economy and from talking with them, it seems like things are picking up. The tide rises and the boats start to drift around.

    We’re now in a furnished apartment in Alameda, where we eventually want to live. More house-hunting this weekend but at least we’ve got a rental contract that we can take to the School District office so we can get Tyler enrolled in the local Kindergarten.

    I’ll try and get the digital camera hooked up so I can post some pictures from our various goodbye parties. Lots of tears and I think it really hit Tyler pretty hard in ways that we will not fully appreciate until we see how things go at his new school. It’s always sad to leave friends behind.

  • 350 boxes on the wall. . .

    Just got through packing up 350 boxes of stuff that’s all going on a trailer truck tomorrow. When we moved here four years ago we had 150 boxes on half a container, my how we’ve grown.

  • Krugman v. O’Reilly

    Caught the tail end of the “gloves come off” debate between Paul Krugman and Bill O’Reilly on CNBC tonight. The sparring melted down to the point of name calling with Krugman, The New York Times Op-Ed columnist dutifully trying to read choice quotes from a transcript of choice O’Reilly quotes while the conservative host from Fox chastised him for taking queues from Media Watch.

    Not sure if this got us any closer to the truth but it was a highly entertaining political cat fight in which host Tim Russert wasn’t even able to get a word in edgewise. I sense, as did Mr. Russert, that this debate will be continued.

  • Breather

    We took some time off from the house hunt today to spend some time enjoying the beautiful weather with the kids who were fraying at the edges after three solid days in which we must have previewed over 20 homes around the Bay Area.

    We first headed over to Alameda to check out the 20th Annual Park Street Art & Wine Faire. We then caught a ferry over to the Ferry Building in San Francisco to peruse the shops and the weekend farmer’s market. We then hopped on the F line, with it’s historic trolley cars, up to Pier 39 to see the fishies in the Aquarium of the Bay which I highly recommend for it’s two 300 foot glass-walled tunnels which give you a unique view of the fish. We wrapped up the day with a meal at the No. 9 Fishermen’s Grotto, one of those totally tacky 1950’s era SF attractions that is actually quite good.

    Tomorrow is open house day so we’re back in the saddle for another day of looking at how other people live.

  • Toilet Tank

    Toilet Tank

    Don’t worry, the toilet flushes without disturbing the fish and you have to admit, it’s something to look at while relieving yourself. What’s interesting is that Aquariass was covered by Popgadget, which advertises itself as a personal tech site for women, who will not be able to enjoy it’s beauty in quite the same way as men.

    Order yours today

  • Bush’s Blog

    article2909.jpg

    You know your industry is getting into the mainstream consciousness when The Onion does a parody piece on it.

    In other news, this blog got it’s first Comment Spam this morning, in a strange sort of way, I feel that I’ve arrived.

  • Touchdown

    We took JetBlue from JFK to Oakland for a change of pace. And what a pleasant surprise! The people were nice for a change and seemed truly happy to have us aboard. Our fellow passengers also seemed generally jovial and it’s can-do cheekiness reminded me of the early days of Virgin Air. Our arrival in Oakland was painless and Izumi was amazed to see that people actually seemed civil and polite, holding open a door here, thanking us for something there, and waving and smiling even when the situation didn’t call for such niceties.

    We stopped in at the Six Apart offices so I could pick up my laptop and other Six Apart-branded goodies (notepad for written notes, USB key for electronic, kit bag to hold it all) and my sister was there to moblog it all.

    Tomorrow we visit the first of our scheduled realtors and start looking for a place to live in earnest.

  • Bloggers and the DNC

    A lot of people are reading about weblogs and bloggers for the first time in the media coverage of the recent Democratic National Convention. While the debate in the traditional media over what exactly qualifies as a jounalist comes off sounding a tad defensive, it’s instructive to read some of the coverage of the convention from a blogger’s point of view. I particulary enjoyed Jessamyn West photo blog coverage which turned the camera on the cameramen with clever meta commentary on the side.

    DNC Day 1
    DNC Day 2
    DNC Day 3
    DNC Day 4
    DNC Day 5

    I particularly liked this shot which shows Moveable Type in action (on a Mac and a PC as well!) at the convention.