This past weekend really felt like the beginning of summer here in Victoria. The weather was gorgeous all weekend!
The best part was Sunday night in the front yard playing with an inflated ball with family: toddler son, pregnant wife, and in-laws.
This had nothing to do with our network providers, or data centers…
Matt Mullenweg, “Downtime“, WordPress.com Blog, June 14th, 2010
Doesn’t mean that our Systems Lead Barry Abrahamson isn’t going to do everything he can to make sure a similar event never happens again.
Barry is solid, and makes every link around him stronger.
I love working with that guy!
I love spotting WordPress in the wild!
(This is not an endorsement of Go Daddy Hosting. Click here for recommended WordPress hosting.)
With the launch of Gravatar Profiles (mine!), I’ve updated my avatar to a photo Sheri took of me using Matt’s gear at WordCamp SF, May 1st.
I’ve been braced since the beginning of February, and will continue to be for the next two years.
I picked up a Kobo eReader today at my local Chapters (Canada’s mega-bookstore).
The Kobo has a lot going for it. Because the company behind it isn’t an Amazon.com, and so they can’t do it alone, it scores big points by using common technologies and supporting standard formats.
For the Kobo being a 1st edition, and for wearing a much more affordable price tag at $150, than the Amazon Kindle at $260, it can be forgiven for falling short of the Amazon Kindle in a lot of ways.
But the Kobo has only itself to blame for where it falls hardest.
Their (boring) slogan is “eReading: anytime. anyplace.”
It should be “eReading: anytime… eventually. anyplace… eventually.”
It takes over half a minute to power on.
That’s just too long.
Reading is a sacred ritual. Those that read are going to be frustrated, and those dead tree books will also be calling them with their sirens song.
Charlie Sorrel of Wired is correct, the Kobo is a killer, suicidal that is.
I do expect it to do decent in the Canadian market, but this first edition is no Kindle killer.
I’ll be returning it this week.
Note: Chapters Help Lies, Thankfully It Should Be Easy To Return
Contrary to Chapters online help stating “Kobo eReaders must be returned in its original unopened packaging.” I confirmed first online with Kobo customer support, and then in store, that I have 2 weeks to return it open with the original package.
“If the unit is not defective and you simply don’t want it you can return it to your local Chapters/Indigo store within 14 days of purchase as long as you have a receipt”
The information out there makes it sound like you can view PDFs on the Kindle 2 e-book reader
So how do you get your PDFs on your Kindle?
In my experience both Lexcycle Stanza and the Calibre App PDF conversions result in mangled, unreadable e-books.
The solution is Amazon.com offers an email to your Kindle service, [email protected] for a small fee (not quite so small if not in USA).
I just discovered if you send to your-kindle-email@free.kindle.com there is no charge as it’s sent back to the email address you sent it from, not directly to your Kindle.
Although Amazon.com calls PDF “an experimental file format” the results have all been great for me.
Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
Robert I. Sutton, “12 Things Good Bosses Believe“, Friday, May 28, 2010
There are interesting discussions in the comments on that article where people express finding the expression negative, and their need to focus on the good.
My interpretation of the expression is that it speaks to the power of bad to overwhelm good.
I can’t enjoy the good with bad present.
For myself, negative energy causes me to stumble. It drains me. And then I also become a conduit of the negative energy.
For me to reach higher I need to be surrounded by people feeling it, and supporting it.
Only in a positive, empathic environment, am I able to be my best.
"In Flames - Koh Tao june 2008" by Bart Hiddink, cc-by 2008
‘…the ePub format, which is open and freely available for any device, unlike the Kindle’s proprietary format, which functions only for Kindle. The ePub format is used by every electronic reader except the Kindle, and promises to be a big selling point for Google Editions, the search firm’s planned Web-based electronic bookstore scheduled to launch this summer, which will allow buyers to read books and much else on any number of devices. (This may include, by year’s end, Google’s own tablet computer.) It’s through ePub that readers have instant access to millions of books in the public domain, that electronic publishing has a chance to become standardized, and that writers will have more options when it comes to disseminating and selling their books. …’
Sue Halpern, “The iPad Revolution“, The New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010 (future date)
Photo "Electronic Book" cc by-sa flickr user timonoko
e-text and e-books are topics I’ve been passionate about since ~1998 when Boris Mann tried to convince me that reading a book on a Palm Pilot could be an enjoyable experience — I never did get through more than a few chapters back then.
I’ve watched with fascination as audio, and then video, not text have migrated to digital. Although, writing has always been the main interface to computing, and digitization it is magnitudes smaller than the other medians, the reading experience has been much harder to improve upon than the listening and viewing experiences.
Fast forward to today and since Christmas (spoiled), I’ve read a half-dozen books on my Kindle 2. I’m already itching for better tech. I’m continuing to eye where publishing goes next, particularly the free culture implications
Sue Halpern’s whole article is excellent, and provides deep insights into e-reading, where the iPad fits in, and where e-books fit into Apple’s iPad business. Her essay is among the best I’ve read in a while: clear domain expertise, wide knowledge (open source shout out), objective, and excellent prose.
I emailed Sue, and she confirmed for me,
“DRM [(digital rights management) protected] books don’t go anywhere– yet. I think this will change when Google gets into the game. Right now epub on new books mainly benefits publishers, who don’t have to have books digitized in numerous formats in order to be read on various devices.”
For those software developers and companies where open source doesn’t quite fit their business plan, how about a Quake Commitment?
“In conjunction with his self-professed affinity for sharing source code, John Carmack has open-sourced most of the major id Software engines under the GPL license. Historically, the source code for each engine has been released once the code base is 5 years old.”
Wikipedia article: id Software
Photo "cmd.exe" cc by-sa flickr user n3wjack
I think this is a novel approach, and I’m surprised that I haven’t heard of any other companies making this sort of commitment. Fellow open source zealots would warm up to you and you’d earn the love of developer communities everywhere. It also increases the chance that your software has a greater legacy.
Let me know if you’re committing to opening the source of aged versions of your proprietary software. Will it be 2, 3 or some other length of years from now?
My co-worker Michael Adams starts “PHP 5 + Apache 2 + MySQL 5 on OS X via MacPorts” with a great developer tip for Mac Finder:
# Displays all files in Finder. Optional: personal preference.
$ defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
# Relaunch Finder
This is a great tip — Mac .dmg disk images will never look the same.
Here is a reciprocal tip for the Mac Terminal.
In your favorite editor create ~/.inputrc (bash shell) with the following contents:
# http://osxfaq.com/tips/unix-tricks/week66/friday.ws
# Tab key filename auto-completion improvements
## ignore case
set completion-ignore-case on
## list alternatives immediately (bash normally requires 2nd Tab press)
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
Anyone else have tips along these lines, command lines that is?