A Random Pattern

Questions on best way to deliver Palm Pre apps

Earlier today Andrew Shebanow, a developer with Palm, posted an intriguing set of questions for potential developers.  How would they prefer their applications to be distributed on the Pre platform?

A popular and influential Mac Blogger, John Gruber of Daring Fireball, linked to this post and caused the usual huge influx of traffic.  Unfortunately this was apparently more than Andrew and his bosses had bargained for.  As of now the post has been removed.

I think it was reasonably (though maybe not perfectly) clear from the original post that this was a developer being allowed to have his own voice rather than speaking for the company.  It also was a refreshing break from Apple’s absolute control over messaging (even if that control was considered partly responsible for their success now).  It was even more refreshing since this topic, app distribution and control, is the sorest subject for Apple devotees right now.

Here is a chance to capitalize on Apple’s mistakes, Palm.  Think carefully, but think quickly.  Don’t let this opportunity get away.

Strange billboards and  another attempt at good-ol viral marketing: Why do I care?  Because when you enter into the murky world of viral marketing, guerilla marketing, you need to realize one thing: You lose control of the message.  It will become whatever it will become, but it is not under your control any longer.  I’m not suggesting it’s a bad thing to do, but you better know you’re playing with fire when you do it, and it’s a good idea to be as prepared as you can.

When bloggers talk about Transparency, they aren’t just spilling ink.  Things have changed, so don’t go into this with your eyes anything less than wide wide open.

Back on the Billboard topic:

THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS
THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES
THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA
THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSEY

Follow the link if you want to know (sort of) what it means.  Otherwise, feel free to speculate here about The Algorithm.  I’d suggest that the algorithms not only need more work, but that they aren’t the only answer. 

Hi!

So . .. yeah.  Kind of overdue for an update around here.  This is just a quick note to let you know that I haven’t disappeared or been eaten by a giant purple monster or anything like that.  Updates are coming . . . sometime.  It’s holiday season, though, so don’t expect a return to daily updates for a while. 

Quick weblink of the day: new dream vacation location (here’s a video from Plitvicka Jezera National Park in Croatia) – and yes, I would like that print for Christmas!

Watch this neat little video blast from the past as the Animaniacs take us on a quick tour of the world:

Oh, and go to this Google Map of Belgium to see where I was last week.

Sorry for the startling lack of content. I haven’t been sleeping much, so when that gets back to normal so will my posts. I’m traveling again a little this week, but hope for a chance to recover after that.

Posting has been light the last week, after a last-minute trip up to Virginia.  I’ll still have a full schedule for probably the rest of the month, so don’t expect daily posts.  I do plan to schedule a few good reads over the next week, though.

Subscribe (big orange button on the right, or by email) if you haven’t already, and you’ll be automagically notified when I do write something new!
Quick notes from my week:

Most exciting news: Apple’s big Showtime announcements hold great potential for the future, as well as some fun for now.

Most active community: My Dream App, where I’ve been hanging out the last two weeks while they unveiled the 24 finalists.  It’s been fun, and the American Idol-esque voting segment over the next several weeks ought to be even more fun!  I’m hoping to put up another post on this tomorrow.

On the home front:  Last week we started the balcony railing, the piece necessary to complete our loft (well, besides re-carpeting).  With the kitchen now (almost) completely functional, it’s time to finish up lots of little trim areas, as well as putting in the appliance garages.  Pictures will appear in a week or so, unless I convince Sara to put something up.

Well, that was an interesting week.  I don’t know about you, but I am SOOOO GLAD the three-day weekend is finally here.  Sorry non-U.S. readers, but then again you get a ton more holidays than us anyways.

Wednesday was an interesting change of plans, and Thursday I went to Utah, fixed a system, and came back.  Let’s just say it was a long day.  :)  Thankfully it was a very successful trip.

Between Wed and Friday I probably spent upwards of 12 hours on the phone for business – that’s in addition to the flights to Utah and back (4 hours each) and several hours at a customer’s site.  So if I talked to you, and was a little short, sorry about that.

Now the question is “What to do with 3 days?!”  I’ve got a lot of things that need done around the house, and several things I’d like to work on with my website, not to mention a family that definitely needs some attention.  Plus it seems like it’s been awhile since I’ve had this much time to do stuff besides work. 

Anyways, pictures coming soon.  Have a good holiday weekend, or if you’re working Monday, well, I won’t be. 

I finally got the WordPress software (that I use to publish this website) installed on my local computer.  It’s in a nice sandbox, so I can turn it on whenever I want.  The issues I ran into were mostly permission-based errors, so I’m going to be learning more about setting and managing permissions.

Full write-up will come later.  The good news is, I can now test changes without subjecting you, my imaginary readers ;), to being the guinea-pigs!

It’s worth noting that command-line-use really makes things easy – if you already know what you’re doing!  If you don’t , welll…..

So I found what looked like some good instructions for setting up a WordPress (WP) sandbox on your local Ubuntu machine.  Unfortunately, the instructions I found are only good if you DON’T SCREW ANYTHING UP AT ALL.

That includes if, before you found the instructions, you had already tried some other instructions and sort of already maybe done some of the stuff (looks innocently away…)

I would provide helpful tips on how to recover here, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet myself.  What seems to be the key, though, is to get MySQL set up properly, then don’t mess with it and DEFINITELY don’t delete it and try to start over without fully cleaning up.

More to come once I figure out how to recover….

Hopefully by the time you read this I will have uploaded the newly cleaned-up Rubric theme. Changes are minor:

• Vkaryl came to my rescue again and fixed the navigation issue on single post pages, which was due to a few missing styles in the stylesheet.
• extra images (not related to the theme currently) were removed.
• sidebar has been added to single post pages.

I’m really happy to have a widgetized Rubric theme.  There’s a lot of work to be done to get my blog set up exactly how I want it, but that’s part of the fun too (at least for a geek like me). 

What do you think? Do you like it? Is it too complicated? What information do you want easily available on the front page. I’m all ears.

List of what’s fixed, what needs to be fixed, and other changes to my blog:

Fixed:

• Sidebar now displays (mostly) as intended, with each section / widget displaying in it’s own floating white box.
• Sidebar shows up on single (post) pages.
• Unfortunately, I think that’s it. But I *felt* productive!

Need to be fixed or added (please add to this list in the comments!):

• Make sure Sidebar doesn’t extend past/over footer.
• Next / previous hyperlinks on individual pages too close to header title.
• Better integrated “pages” functionality (in header?).
• rotating header capability.
• more code cleanup, such as pulling out the sidenote javascript and extra images from the package.
• Figure out how/if to have a different Sidebar (shorter, simpler?) for single post pages.

Other changes:

• I created a cool widget, see it at the bottom of my sidebar. It has links to subscribe to my blog, and to explain what “subscribe to my blog” even means. It’s also got a way to get my new posts in your email, automagically! Yay for magic internet stuff!  (This was partially motivated by a reminder of a post from Robert Scoble, whose posts I keep running into lately.)
• In order to make the cool stuff above happen, I cleaned up my feeds and autodirecting for my feeds. If you subscribed to this blog before tonight – No Worries! It will automagically forward you to the feed I want you to use (grin) so I can count how many people are (not) reading my blog. This means you don’t have to do anything! But I’m still excited about it…

I think that’s it, at least that’s all I can remember.  If the blog doesn’t look or work much differently as far as you notice, that should mean I’m doing a good job.  And if something’s broken, please tell me.  I’ll fix it if I can.