Further examination of Apple's new social network reveals more problems. To review from last night's post: 1. It's awkward, at least, that it runs in iTunes and not a web browser. There's no Back button, no way to copy the address of a page and share it outside of iTunes. Also if it were just a website we'd be able to access it from an iPad now, not some time in the future. 2. There's no way to Like the song you're listening to. In other words there doesn't seem to be any integration with the music-listening app, even though the social network is embedded in it. 3. It's a ghost town. Obviously they're recommending all the musicians they have, because they have nothing to do with my musical interests. Same with users. Now, onto this morning's revelation. Chuck Shotton writes: "It seems that the only way for mere mortals to post something to the timeline is to buy a song, review an album, or commit some other act of commerce on the iTunes Store, which I certainly have never done. "It's unfortunate, because the capability is there to do much more. I followed Cold Play as an experiment and they can post pics, songs, status updates, and all the stuff you'd expect to do with a Facebook-like social media tool. "I'm baffled why Apple has this locked down for normal users. Someone there has to have seen the potential for this to totally upset the social media balance. But if they cripple it at the outset, that critical mass of users will ne

I've got iTunes 10 installed, and have signed up on Ping. My handle is "scriptingnews." You're welcome to follow me. To be clear, they didn't give me a choice of name. That's the name I chose when I got my first iPod or whatever got me logged into their store the first time. (I don't remember.) I never would have chosen to be scriptingnews on a social network. Not at all obvious how to change it, if I can. Here are their first recommendations. They bear absolutely no resemblance to any music I listen to or people I know. Obviously this is very very early days for Ping. One thing I don't like about Ping is that it isn't in my web browser. I keep looking for the Back button. I keep wanting to find a URL so I can publish a link somewhere else. I think this is a big lose. It's the only social network I've ever tried that isn't in the web. Right now I think that's a deal-stopper. So I played one of my current favorites thinking there would be an easy gesture in the iTunes interface to tell my Ping followers that I like it. After all why bother integrating it with iTunes if there is no integration? Well, there's nothing in the right-click menu for pinging the song. No menus, nothing anywhere in the user interface. What the heck were they thinking?? Hello, anyone home at Apple?? Conclusion: There's nothing, at this time, to do in Ping.

This is really puzzling. The OAuthcalypse came and went, and the apps that it should have killed, the ones that use basic authentication, are still running. Two examples: dwcodeupdates and friendsofdave. The only explanation I've been able to come up with is that they made exceptions for these two accounts for some reason. I felt I had to document this. So, it is documented. Any theories welcome. (That aren't paranoid or paranormal.)

Ping is Apple's big announcement today. The one that they'll be adding new stuff onto for years and years. The other announcements are just continuations of threads they started long ago. This is a new thread. They call it a social network "for music." But it won't be "for music" for very long, if it even is just that at startup. It'll be Apple's social network for PR. It'll be Apple's social network for TV. It'll be Apple's social network for developers. It'll be Apple's social network for Steve Jobs. All of Apple's stores will be on the network, so there will be a location angle. How long before Steve announces a new feature for the stores called (what else) "check in." He said it's like Facebook or Twitter but for music, but that's just the opening-day positioning. It won't last. Now the big question for the Scripting News community -- is there an API? Will developers get a hook into Ping? Will I be able to ping everyone when I advance a level in Angry Birds? (for example) One more thing, great name, but they'll never register it as a trademark. Ping is a big word in this space. Long long before any of Apple's competitors were in the space.

I can't imagine there are many people who read this blog who are not tuned in, with Safari running on a Mac or iPhone or iPad, wondering what Uncle Steve is going to pull out of his hat. http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1009qpeijrfn/event

I've never participated in a hackathon, so I can't tell whether they produce anything or not. I'm assuming that at least some of the readers of this blog have been to one or more. What's it like? What kind of software is produced? Is any of it useful? Were any commercial products hatched at hackathons? Were any of them successful? My intuition says that they're pointless exercises. I have at times gone on retreats with the idea of emerging with something useful or marketable, but I have to say the big leaps in software that I've seen or taken part of, come with steady daily work, when you've built up a head of steam over weeks or months. It seems to me that the hackathon idea is more a dream of investors or marketers, that they can get a bunch of programmers in a room to invent something they can make money with. But that's just my impression. If you have a story of a hackathon, please tell it.

Scorcha is NY-ese for "hot!" Yeah it's the hottest summer in history. A climate-change denier adds "that we know of." Yes, there is a conspiracy. Back in the late 1800s some liberal limp-wristed Obama-lovers wiped a whole decade off the record. Why? Because it was much hotter than this summer was going to be. They just knew it. And they did it to piss off the idiots of the 21st century. Glad we got to the bottom of that one. Anyway.... 10.84 miles. 56 minutes. When it's this hot, even if it isn't a record, you slow down and take it easy.

First a caveat, as far as I know DailyMile might take a CycleMeter KML file as input. However, if it doesn't... It should! That's basically all I have to say. A little detail. When I go for a ride, when I reach the starting point, I get out my iPhone and reset CycleMeter. When I stop to rest, I hit the Stop button. When I resume the ride I hit continue. When I'm done, I hit Done. At that point it sends me an email with a link to Google Maps that opens a KML file it generates that contains all the info about my ride. I just signed up for DailyMile, which seems to be a Twitter-like service for people who work out. People can follow you and you can follow others. And they post information about their workouts. Like me, people who exercise systematically love these gadgets and community systems, so why not work on the connection! I mean CycleMeter already goes to the trouble to output a standard format. DailyMile should accept that as input. And off we go! BTW, here's what the XML inside a KML file looks like KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language.

Got out real early today cause it's going to be another scorcher. Even at 7:30AM it was in the 80s. But it was a great ride. 50 minutes rolling, 10.33 miles. 6-minute break at turnaround at 99th St. Little or no breeze. The river was glassy. PS: I joined dailymile.com. Wonder if they accept KML files as posts?

Gruber commented on my very brief post on Apple's boycott and how even a user can see it's not working. There's no dispute. You come across lots of stuff, movie trailers, corporate fact sheets, bike route maps, even press releases -- in Flash. You or I may not like it, but the theory that Apple's lack of support for Flash would force them to convert, well that isn't working. That's all I said. Gruber, however, reduced it to the same old boring battle-to-the-death between two titans, in which us little guys are mere spectators. Sorry but that just isn't how I view it. My perspective is that of an iPad user. I like the damned thing. But I feel like a pawn, and I don't like that. Of course I'll get more of the usual boilerplate moral bullshit from Flash haters saying whose fault this really is. I don't care. Maybe if (hint hint) Gruber had comments on his blog, his minions wouldn't feel the need to vent on the sites he points to? Just a thought.

Tomorrow at 8AM Pacific, Twitter will do something that will befuddle many end-users. http://blog.twitter.com/2010/08/twitter-applications-and-oauth.html I can't think of a precedent, a time when a platform vendor deliberately broke so much application software. It's possible that it's happened and I don't remember, but I find it hard to believe that I would not have heard of it. So much app breakage would surely make a loud sound! Twitter says it will mean improved security. I think it means for sure fewer user-hours spent with apps not developed by Twitter, Inc. Some of my apps will die tomorrow. For example, FriendsOfDave and dwcodeupdates. It probably won't be worth it to convert these little apps to use OAuth. It will impact very few people, mostly me. (FOD is like a quick aggregator for people whose updates I never want to miss. Codeupdates helps me confirm that updates made it through the OPML Editor's code management system. Neither are mission-critical, just nice-to-have.) I'm sure tomorrow I'll learn of other Twitter-related apps that will not be updated. If you learn of any feel free to post a comment here.

As an iPad user I can tell you without a doubt, it isn't working. I see new Flash content several times every day when I catch up on the news with my iPad. This isn't stuff that's going away, it's new stuff that creative people are publishing. New stuff, not legacy stuff. In other words, they know we can't see it on the iPad and they went ahead anyway. Sorry.

He was shot after listening to this song. http://ou.rs/5.mp3

When I wrote a positive review of The Big C, a number of readers told me I should check out Breaking Bad, for a more interesting take on a TV series written around the death of its main character. So I did. I've now watched all three seasons of the show, and while some of it was very hard to watch (how could the characters be that stupid or mean), the last season was terrific. Right up there with The Wire for artfulness and acting. All the characters are interesting, none of them are simple or one-dimensional. The music is great, and the New Mexico desert scenery beautiful. And the last season ends with a real cliff-hanger. Did Jesse do it or not? (I think not.) If you're reading on the home page or in the feed, click through to the story page on the web for a theory about what comes next, and don't click on the little plus sign if you don't want to see spoilers.

First, it's probably not a good idea to ride before eating, but I didn't want to wait because I figured it would get pretty busy on the trails today as it was yesterday. But about 1/2 hour into the ride I started feeling unusually depleted. Who knows what the reason is, but I think I'll pack some nuts or candy for future rides. Even so, it was a fast ride. 13.4 miles, 1 hour 6 minutes. Once again I checked-in at the turnaround point on Facebook. Thinking about getting an iPhone 4 mount for the bike. Also thinking about a heart-rate monitor. They have iPhone apps that use the microphone to measure heart-rate. Wouldn't it be cool if they had one built into Cyclemeter? Then the map could include heart-rate data.

I read this piece on TechCrunch about ageism in tech and nodded my head all the way through. Facing facts, I've been sidelined in tech for quite a number of years. No one offers me a place in new startups. When I was younger things were a lot different. If I can't get into the game, I can't imagine there's much chance for most other people in their 50's to play a role. Which is really fucked up. It's probably the reason why we keep going around in the same loops over and over, because we chuck our experience, wholesale, every ten years or so. And if you think there's much difference between JavaScript and C, you're dreaming. Or between JSON and XML or plain text files. These are gratuitous reinventions. Yes there have been some improvements. I wouldn't know how to build a Facebook server farm. But they could learn a few things about aggregators from work of mine years ago that they've never seen. Or outliners. Or CMSes. Or object databases. If you invest in tech companies, try bringing in some tech experience. It might push your comfort level. It also might make you much more competitive.

Today's ride was in prime time, and everyone was out on bikes, rollerblades, boards, walking, running, you name it. And everyone was hogging every inch of the road, including my bits of the road. Lots of near-misses, cars driving in the bike lanes, and people walking and riding four a-breast. Tomorrow's ride will be at dawn. Let's see if I can get some of the road for myself. Even with all the michegas, I did some serious mileage. Feeling really strong and good. It's hot weather, but heat is very good for riding. And the sun was shining in a very California way, and the Hudson was shimmering and humming with kayakers, the Circle Line, helicopters, shipping and recreational traffic. The map. 10.46 miles in 56 minutes. Turnaround at 99th. Not too many more weekends like this before it gets collllld. PS: There should be a Hacker News for biking.

The map. 51 minutes. 9.5 miles. Light wind, made it up to the turnaround point in 25 minutes, non-stop. Short rest. Came back non-stop. I'm going to need a longer ride tomorrow, this one is too easy. Maybe up to 125th and back. New riding shorts. These are much more sheer, they feel wicked! New practice: Check-in on Facebook at the turnaround point. If you're in NY today, get outside. It's one of the 10 nicest-weather days of the year, for sure.

There's been another round of hype over Diaspora. These guys are seriously good at the tease. Also they're from NYU, and that's pretty amazing, in a Forrest Gump way. They started something near and dear to my heart, about three blocks from 20 Cooper Square. The press is staying remarkably centered on the most recent announcement as if saying that they're unsure of what Diaspora is (they haven't actually said, not even a screen shot of the final product) but they're willing to wait until they get back from Burning Man to decide if it really is the open Facebook-replacement they set out to make. With the shipdate looming so close, they're going on vacation. Now that's confidence! (Or hubris, or inexperience.) Now while it's possible for four talented computer scientists, in a summer, to make a piece of software that's so compelling and attention-grabbing, not just in theory but in actual use -- it's also far from likely. More likely is that they buy into the view of engineering from inside academia where they confuse student projects with working systems that can survive a real-world test. For example, look at my review of Pogoplug, earlier today. I'm sure their engineers are brilliant, like the Diaspora people are. Yet when the software arrived at my desktop, nothing happened. No functionality. Welcome to the user's desktop where complicated technology very often doesn't work. It's unfortunate that the expectations have been set so high f

I wrote a post about Pogoplug last week and they offered to send me one for free, and it arrived yesterday. I set it up this morning, and now am trying to use it. I downloaded and installed the Mac software, assuming that a folder would appear on my desktop somewhere with the name Pogoplug or something like that (maybe the name of the hard drive attached to the device), but there's no folder evident. Tried rebooting. Noticed that there's now something called MacFUSE in my Preferences app. Not sure if this was there before or if Pogoplug installed it. Tried reading the FAQ and looked in the Help system, but nothing was immediately obvious. Tried installing the software again, still nothing. Looked at the web interface, but was pretty horrified. No way, after using Dropbox, am I using something so hard to look at. There is an API. Plan to check into that.

I wanted to grab a picture of the Mona Lisa so I searched for it. http://google.com/images?q=mona+lisa There are all these mashups of the painting, but where's the original? It's at the center of something, everyone's talking about it, visually, but it's hard to know which is the original and which is the mashup.

Part of me thinks links.scripting.com should be on the home page. It's a damn fine little site, that's been going since April last year, but only got rendered for the first time a couple of days ago. Wonder what other little gems are sitting out there undiscovered! BTW, it now updates shortly after I post a new link to Twitter. And there's an RSS feed you can subscribe to. Still diggin!

I'm afraid my ride diary is going to be pretty boring most of the time, now that I've found my standard ride. 1. Get on the Hudson River Greenway heading north. 2. Ride nonstop to 94th St, just after the over-water stretech. 3. Get off the bike and sit on a bench, watch the world go by, take a photo or video. 4. Get on the Hudson River Greenway heading south. 5. Get off at 10th St and head home. Roundtrip is 9.67 miles, it takes almost exactly 1 hour. Looks like that's the daily ride.

A few weeks ago Twitter added a section to their home page with recommendations of people and companies to follow. I've never really liked it, although I was willing to give it a try after it became clear it was algorithmic. But now that I've given it a try I'd like to opt out of it. I find it distracting and tiring. The names don't change unless I click the X next to them, and I feel bad about that, because the people didn't do anything to get me to so dislike them. It's Twitter using their names, without their permission. I shudder at the thought of how many people are similarly irritated by my name in their right margin. Who is this Dave Winer guy and when will he stop begging for me to follow him. Thing is, I'm not begging, Twitter is doing the begging. I'd prefer if they would leave me out of this whole thing, on both sides. A simple setting that says I have enough followers so please no more recommendations. And another that says that I don't want to appear as an ad in someone else's right margin. Please.

Whenever I publish a story with a hand-drawn diagram, people ask how I do it. There's really nothing to it. I draw the diagram and scan it. To illustrate... There are no tricks, but the pens really are fantastic. Highly recommended. I've been using them since 5th grade.

In journalism, politics and business they talk about transparency as a universal virtue. If you disclose your conflicts, or say where your money comes from, or deal with your users openly and fairly -- those are obvious good things. Transparency is different in software. When systems change you want the changes to be without any apparent effects on users and developers. It's like transparency in recording music. I want all the highs and lows and in the right proportions. I want my software to keep working even if you just rocked the foundations. That's what we aspire to. We hope. Anyway, today I made a big change that's virtually impossible to show you because it's so transparent. But I'll try to explain it anyway. When I write a blog post like the one you're reading now, I write it on a workstation computer. It could be my desktop in my apartment in Manhattan. Or on my laptop, or netbook. I write and save and revise and save, over and over, just as you would edit a word processing document on your desktop, with one important difference. The changed version of the document is saved to a content management system running on another computer, running in Rackspace's cloud. This saving process is done with XML-RPC, although it could just as easily be done with a REST interface or FTP. From there, the document is passed through the CMS, rendered and transferred to a server running in Amazon's cloud. That server is the machine called scripting.com. This

Took advantage of the cold, wet weather to go to the movies today. I wanted to shop for some new headphones, so I went to B&H on 34th and 9th, which left me near a megaplex on 34th, so it was a matter of what movie was playing when I finished with the audio shopping, and it was Eat Pray Love. It didn't get great reviews, but sometimes it's relaxing to go to a movie with low expectations. This one was okay, because it had a message that was simple, one that I was familiar with from my mid-life crisis a number of years ago. It goes like this. Your mind plays tricks on you, and makes you think other people are your problem, and that getting them to do something or be a certain way will unlock some part of your future. The inverse also seems true, their unwillingness to change is holding you back from being the great person you could be if only they would change. It's a trick because it seldom is true. It's a trick because it allows you not to change to become great and happy because you're scared to. The most powerful thing you can do to get through all this messy trickery is to first forgive your ghosts. You can let them off the hook, even if they're still alive, by realizing that the past is dead and can't hurt you or hold you back. And if they're actually dead, you can achieve great peace by not only forgiving them now, but retroactively forgiving them when they were still alive. Try to visualize saying to your mother or father or grandparent or un

I got a lot of snarky comments yesterday when I asked a couple of questions on my blog. This was after posting a proposal for a new kind of commenting system. Most people who commented simply objected to my proposal, liked nothing about it, and told me why they like the current form of commenting. A few people chose this time to make a personal attack, mostly ageist, the one ism you're not supposed to call people on. There wasn't much (if any) discussion of the idea. Nor would there have been if I had open comments on that post. Pretty sure it would have been the same. Some people would say they like it, others would say they don't. Others would write comments that had nothing to do with the post. I'd moderate-out the abuse. Most would be cries for attention. That's what Internet discourse is like in 2010. However, the best posts for comments are the ones that ask specific questions, like how long does it take for alcohol to reach the brain, or where's the missing spacebar on the iPhone 4. It gives people a chance to show what they know, and get a feeling they're helping, which is the best of commenting on the Internet. Why I have comments: I hope I might learn something new from the people who read the blog. It's mostly selfish. I like that there's a side-benefit that it creates a record for other people to learn from in the future. I get a lot out of that on other forums on the net. Esp when it comes to technical problems, these discussion threads c

Been reading comments by Dennis Crowley of Foursquare about Facebook's new check-in feature, and I think he could play it much much better. So this is a friendly open letter to my fellow New Yorker, urging him to learn about and practice positioning. To develop a clear difference between 4SQ and FB, one that makes sense to users, and allows both products to exist side-by-side. After all, there is Toyota and there is BMW. And there are trucks and nimble sports cars and bikes and motorcycles, that all more or less do the same thing. They all have wheels and transport people and things. But they're used very differently for very different purposes. There's lots of room for differentiation, and the products are already differentiated. But to summarily dismiss your huge competitor as "boring" -- well we understand why you would like us to think of them that way, but I don't think people do. You have to explain your product in a way that makes sense to the prospect. Craft a position that has lasting value relative to the competition. Do something they can't do because of their size and who they are. Or where they are. Or their talent pool. Or who they can strike alliance with. Lots of opportunity here. PS: Please no more Wired cover shoots.

Rode up to 94th St on the HRGW and back. It's been a 10 mile ride the other two times I've taken it, but this time the GPS got whacked and came up with something pretty crazy. I rode straight through with only one break at the turnaround point. Took yesterday off because of rain. Had a very positive effect on my biking today. Rest is an important part of a workout. And this time it was a headwind going up and tailwind coming back. That's the way I like it! Riding time: 52 minutes. Couple of videos: 1. The river was choppy today. 2. This is my favorite stretch of the greenway. You're riding over water, very smooth path, perfectly level.

Hey I don't know why it took me so long to think to do this. http://links.scripting.com/ What it is -- Every link I've pushed to Twitter since April 2009. How it works -- I don't call Twitter to get these links, so when Oauthcalypse Day comes, this little app might survive. I store all these links in a database on one of my servers. I have a bookmarklet I use to create each link, even ones I create on my iPad, and because it needs to record info about the link to maintain the Top 40 list, the data is around, and I never delete it. So it was there. What's interesting is how much it looks like the early days of Scripting News. Lots of links to stuff with snarky comments. We go so far just to come back to where we began! The earth is round, so is time. Big wheel keep turning. Etc etc. It gets built at least once a night. I might have it rebuild every time I add a link.

I wanted to search for "alcohol metabolism rate" on my iPhone, but where is the spacebar? It isn't on any of the alternate screens. What am I missing?

I'm at lunch with Arikia at Cafe Tasia on 8th St. She ordered a strawberry mojito and offered me a sip, which I took. Less than 30 seconds later I already felt a buzz. She said that's not possible, that alcohol couldn't make it through the stomach to the blood and to the brain in that short a time. She thinks it's a placebo effect. I think it's the real thing. Who's right? (Please cite your source.)

I was sitting around eating food and working my way through Season 2 of Breaking Bad and got itchy for some bike action. Looked out the window and saw it wasn't raining. Looked at the street and saw people walking by normally. So I put on the helmet, started my Cyclemeter and hit the road! Short ride, great energy -- down to the Battery. Stop, take a picture of the harbor in storm mode, when big fat drops start pinging my helmet. Ping. Ping. Ping. Strap up and head out. No problem. It's summer heat and summer rain, so we all get soaked, everyone, but who cares. A short ride, up and back. Here's the map and the stats: 4.6 miles, 27 minutes. Here's the song.

I'm almost 100 percent sure that scripting.com was the first blog to have comments. And I'm equally sure that it was the first to have its comments flame out. The flameout was a good thing, although it didn't feel like it at the time, because it created the first wave of blogs. And when their comments flamed out, there were subsequent waves of new blogs. Once the blogosphere had grown sufficiently that the central role scripting.com played was largely forgotten, I brought comments back. I've been mostly satisfied with them, but certain subjects evoke predictable and futile "arguments" in response and unless moderation is applied, they will spiral into a flamy back and forth that you can find in any of thousands of different places in the blogosphere. So I moderate according to a few basic guidelines. 1. Keep your responses focused on the piece you're responding to. 2. No ad hominem attacks. 3. Add value, a new idea, perspective, point of view. Simply saying "I disagree" is not helpful and likely won't get approved. 4. When moderating I'm always mindful of whether the comment needs to be tacked onto my post or if it would do better as a post of its own on the author's blog. I think a lot of people post comments just to get attention. If I get the idea that's what's going on, I don't approve the comment. That's a misuse of the comments, and disrespectful of the community, and of the blog's author. So all this has led me to an idea that comme

Here's how it was explained to me by someone who says they understand what I saw at the 5th Ave Apple store this morning. 1. The people lined up there were employees of resellers, companies who buy iPhones and resell them overseas and online at higher prices. 2. They line up there every day, in case there are any they can buy. Most days there aren't. 3. They come back the next day, because there's money to be made. These people aren't there to buy phones for themselves. 4. The line went round the corner and down the block. 5. This would be a good story for a business reporter to dig into. Imho. Click on the pic below for a blowup. Sorry for the lack of clarity in the picture. I might ride by there tomorrow morning to see if I can find out more about what's going on.

And Christians and Jews, athiests, agnostics. Men, women, boys, girls. Bike riders, walkers, runners. Tourists. No one seemed offended. Or in any hurry to get anyone away from anywhere in particular. It was a sweet, relatively quiet summer morning in NY. I rode past the Fifth Avenue Apple Store and saw a huge number of people lined up. I asked what they were lined up for. iPhones. They were almost all, if not all, Asian. Many did not speak English. I asked why, now, after all this time -- they're lined up. I was told it's been this way ever since the product launched. I took pictures. The map. 13.5 miles, 1.5 hours.

And Howard Dean and Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Send them to overseas to a country where they don't have our Constitution and tradtiion of tolerance for diversity and freedom of religion. Where they can learn the lessons of history on their own dime. Make them wear yellow stars, as my ancestors did, as a show of good sense and courtesy. So everyone can know they are Americans who weren't good enough to live in America. I was thinking deportation might be the final solution for the problem, when Karen Hughes wrote a positively Nazi rationale for "moving" the Park51 community center, as a show of national unity. Like so many Americans who have spoken out on this, she needs a refresher course in civics. Or a lesson in 20th century history. You can't single out people who practice a specific religion to be persecuted, just because a majority thinks it's sensible to persecute them. What other rights would you like to deprive them of? Due process? Habeas corpus? Maybe we should just re-settle all American muslims to camps far away from New York, so the people still grieving over 9/11 don't have to think about them? After all why should they be in New York at all? If two blocks from our hallowed ground is too much to bear, why should we put up with 20 or 200? (And btw, in the US, there is no such thing as hallowed ground. We are not a country that's based on a religion.) Obviously this whole idea is ridiculous and un-American. In a way it would be better if

When my Windows servers reboot I'd like them to go all the way, to log on and run the startup apps. This happens all the time, when they automatically update themselves, which is a good thing. Unless I'm awake and around when it happens it means my servers are off the air for a while. Sometimes hours. There must be a setting somewhere?

I'm having no luck getting through to the web admin interface for the new cable modem Time-Warner installed here. I need to get in there to adjust the config so I can get to my desktop remotely using a dynamic DNS address. It worked fine with the old modem. It's a pretty simple matter to program the routing table so things work properly. But you have to be able to get through to manage the configuration, and I can't get to the login screen. The instructions in the manual are pretty clear. They say to connect to http://192.168.0.1/ and enter cusadmin and password as the username and password. But when I go to that address, it says it's connecting, then sits there for a while and times out. Here's a photo of the plate on the back of the modem with the MAC addresses blocked. Any ideas?

I read this review of Pogoplug and then the reviews on Amazon. Sounds really cool. Not quite sure what it is. Do you have one? Do you like it? Should I get one?

Couple of items. 1. Logged into Twitter for the 187th time this morning, and was greeted with the message: Sorry, that page doesn't exist! Problem is the page that doesn't exist is http://twitter.com/. Don't get all existential on me now. 2. I had to log into my pharmacy's voicemail system to renew a bunch of prescriptions. After the second presscription, the voice seemed very familiar. By the third I knew who it was! It was the male voice from the "I don't care" viral iPhone 4 video. Made the rest of the experience a lot more fun. As a sidebar, I can't hear the name iPhone 4 without thinking of the idiot customer.

I'm on the east coast, with a car and a bike, and a week to spare starting on Tuesday next. Looking for a place with (here's the kicker) with 1-week rentals available, relatively flat (for biking), and good swimming. Doesn't have to be salt water. I want to bike on country roads, do some writing and reading, maybe have a couple of friends join me from elsewhere on the east coast. Got any ideas?

For some reason I decided to re-watch There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. I didn't care for it the first time, but the second time, wow I really did. Especially the music. And he's a great actor, and the movie is more like a painting than a plot. A few scenes, a few characters, they interact, there's a little drama here and there. But mostly it's the music and the scenery and the sets and the acting. Especially the music. So the title of this piece is a play on the title of that movie. Another title that would have worked: No Country For Old Software. What am I talking about? Twitter's Oauthcalypse, of course! I promised that I would not convert my Twitter software. I plan to keep that promise. But now I can see how much I'll be giving up. I have lots of little systems that depend on Twitter, here and there. You hardly notice them, but they will be noticed, when they're gone. I suppose I could convert them. But then they have promised to rip up the pavement again when the next version of OAuth is finalized. They say that one will be easier to support, but sheez, I already did the grueling work to support the first one. Whatever. The Twitter platform is going the wrong way. Deprecation is bad software culture. I've never liked it. Once I broke my users in a transition that involved changing the names of API routines that had clearly been labeled as toys. They screamed, and they were right. You pick a name, you stick with it.

Interesting piece with a simple point by Marco. He shows how the smartphone market was transformed in 2007 by the introduction of the iPhone. He's right that the lack of a removable battery and slots did not hinder the adoption of the iPhone. But I don't recall people saying it would be a failure because of its lack of expandability in hardware. However I do remember criticism for its lack of expandability in software. Marco then extrapolates that the same is about to happen in netbooks. I agree with his conclusion, but I don't agree with the reason. And as with the iPhone, we're losing something important if the transition we agree is happening actually happens. The key difference: There was no bottleneck for software in the pre-iPad netbooks. It matters. I just read an article about the Republican party running sexist TV ads, on my iPad, but had to get up and look at the same page on my Mac so I could watch the video. I uploaded a video to Flickr from my iPhone 4, looks fine on my desktop but the video is postage-stamp size on the iPad. I wanted to set the location on the map but Yahoo's mapping software doesn't work on the iPad. We're entering an era of deliberate degradation of the user experience and throwing overboard of software that works, for corporate reasons. That said, I'd prefer to read a book like Computer Lib/Dream Machines on an iPad than on paper. But I don't want a corporation deciding what software I can and can't

Every time I head north on the Hudson River Greenway, I go a little further. All the while my eye was on the huge milestone looming in the distance. The George Washington Bridge. Well, today it looms no more. It has been acquired. I ownz the GWB! Me and my Giant blue bike. I knew great things were up when I mounted the bike and warmed up between the Village and the Intrepid. Then I paced myself through Riverside Park, and felt strong as I approached 125th St. I knew I would go all the way. And I did. Then I turned around and man did it get tough. The funny thing about a good tailwind is it makes you feel macho and all the while you aren't aware that there's a tailwind at all. But when you retrace your steps the tailwind turns into a headwind, and there's no mistaking that. What was free and fun on the way up becomes arduous and painful hard work on the way back. But I survived. And now that it's over, I feel grrrrreat! Here's the map and the stats: 1 hour 58 minutes. 18.56 miles round trip.

I was in the middle of watching the first episode of The Big C, the new Showtime series starring Laura Linney and Oliver Platt when I saw that I could watch The Zuckerberg Show on Facebook. Things were all flipped around, because Zuckerberg was a rerun. On so many levels. It was a rerun in that here was a huge tech company doing something that was interesting only because of their hugeness. And it was a rerun because it had all been done before, by Foursquare. It was also a rerun because it's just another loop around the tech circle. Every feature shows up in everyone's product. You can see there are three companies, Apple, Google and Facebook, at least, that are largely cloning each other. And to the extent the Facebook announcement was interesting, it was equally sad that Yahoo and Microsoft, two passed-over tech giants, couldn't put something like this together now, if their corporate lives depended on it. And they do. So after about 15 minutes of nauseating product annoucement from Channel Zzzz, I switched back to The Big C, which answers the question: Can you make death by cancer funny? with a resounding YES! What a wonderful show. You know why it's so funny -- because it's original. There are all these themes that have never appeared in a 1/2 hour sitcom because they were never willing to approach impending death this way. A character with less than a year to live can do and say things that other characters just can't, believably. A

Asus says the iPad is cutting into netbook sales. I'm not surprised. Asus's response to the iPad has been to stop improving their netbooks. The product they're shipping now is in no way different from the one they were shipping six months before the iPad shipped. It isn't even cheaper. Maybe the battery lasts longer, but they maxed out that spec when they hit 7 hours use per charge. They knew the iPad was coming, and they had nothing in the pipe. That sales are dropping is no surprise. What possible reason would anyone who has one have for buying a new one? Meanwhile this leak re a Google/Chrome OS/Verizon tablet shipping in November sounds like just what the doctor ordered. I'll buy one for sure if it's less than $500. I love buying new cool gadgets. Too bad Asus isn't offering any. Update: Lots of interesting comments on Hacker News.

Makes sense that I have to cut back a bit the day after pushing to a new limit. Today's ride: south to the Battery, turn around, north to the Intrepid, and back to the West Village. 9.73 miles. 1 hour exactly. Feel good, but not so much energy as yesterday. I'll get some good programming work done this afternoon.