August 2004 Archives

I never knew that the Moon wobbled about so much. I hope it doesn't fall off the sky. (via SEB)

I've been using it more, and it's growing on me. I still think there's a space for a web-based feed reader that works differently, but I'm doing a lot of my feed-surfing through Bloglines now, mostly because the advantages of a web app outweigh the inconveniences of its reduced flexibility compared to SharpReader. Internet Explorer, in terms of performance and features, is a complete dog, and I think that any application that embeds it has to work uphill to overcome its inherent problems. The irritations have become too great, and I haven't opened SharpReader in several weeks.

I'm finding it hard even to give these damn things away, and they keep giving me more. If you want an invite to Gmail ("Like Hotmail if it was uncrippled!"), contact me in any of the usual ways. It's pretty good -- I've been using it for mailing lists and stuff.

Update: They're all gone, sorry. If I'm giving any more away in the future, I'll post again. Don't bother adding your details to this entry now -- I'm not making a waiting list, and any future invites will be given out on a first-come, first-served basis to those who inquire after I make the offer.

I noticed today that if you happen to subscribe to my RSS1 feed in Bloglines, you'll see no entries made since February. I have no idea why this is the case, since the feed is certainly up to date.

And on a related note, I had to recreate my Bloglines account today, since the service had completely forgotten about me. I lost all my feeds, which was only trivial because I'd barely used the service. If I'd really invested time into setting up the service, I would have been peeved. Nothing like cutting off a user with no notice or explanation whatsoever. I assume it's because of inactivity, although it's only been a couple of weeks since I last logged in. There's no mention, either on their news page or in their FAQ, of account deletion.

Everyone else seems to be giving no end of praise to Bloglines. I guess my experiences are just anomalous and unlucky.

It's nice that after months of saying 'no' to any prospect of saving the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's top brass have finally come to their senses and said 'yes' to a robotic mission.

The prospect of losing the Hubble to inevitable mechanical problems without the possibility of repair was a devastating one to astronomical scientists. The HST has been an amazing scientific asset that has shown us things that ground-based telescopes could never show, not only once or twice, but on innumerable occasions throughout its 14-year mission. In terms of scientific return, it may be the single most lucrative instrument in the history of mankind's scientific endeavours.

And the HST has opened our eyes to the beauty of the cosmos. Hubble's images are not the greyish, blurred photographs of 1970s astronomy textbooks. They are crisp and complex and colourful, simultaneously products of science and works of art. How can you see these and remain unimpressed?

If repairing the Hubble is the main goal, the projected repair mission itself is a massive side benefit, calling for a robot to be orbitally deployed to perform delicate operations that have previously been tricky even for astronauts. This, if achieved, will be a huge step forward for teleoperation technologies in space -- a difficult and expensive task, but one which will be absolutely necessary for the future exploration and colonisation of the solar system.

Let's hope that NASA isn't just playing politics again, and really intends to tackle this difficult engineering challenge and reap the practical rewards both in orbit and here on Earth. For the sake of the Hubble, for the sake of science and for the sake of space colonisation in my lifetime, I'm crossing my fingers.

The Chapman brothers (no relation) over at H*R have released Peasant's Quest, an adventure game in the vein of the old Sierra "*'s Quest" games (EGA-era graphics, PC speaker sounds and all). This isn't the trailer that they did a few weeks ago... this is the real deal, a fully functional, playable game that's a spot on pastiche as well as being an entertaining game in its own right. It's done entirely in Flash, an impressive technical achievement (it even has a save/load feature).

I'm continually amazed by the volume and quality of the stuff on homestarrunner.com, and the fact that they put it on the web for free without a banner ad in sight and still make a profit through merchandise sales. A real Internet success story.

(current Peasant's Quest score: 78/150)

If I ever get around to creating my own feed aggregator, I have a name for it: AMPERSSAND.

(Well, that or KissMyRSS.)

Using this blog to pimp commercial products or services is not something that usually gives me much satisfaction, but occasionally I'll make an exception because I'm so impressed with something that I can't stop myself spewing forth torrents of enthusiasm in as many simultaneous directions as possible. I feel this way about LOVEFiLM, for simultaneously providing a nice service that's new to me and exposing through contrast the absurd profit margins of high-street rental outlets.

Imagine one such hypothetical company... let's call it 'Spockduster'. Spockduster has 700 stores around the country, renting out DVDs for £3.75 for a single night.

Let's estimate that a single, new release DVD can be rented out, say, 100 times on average before somebody's either scratched it to unplayability or it's thrown in the ex-rental sale bin (or both). I don't know if this figure is realistic, but I reckon that unless it's made out of cheese or something, a DVD should be able to easily survive 100 viewings.

That's £375 in takings, but the cost of the DVD in the first place has to be deducted from that. Rental-market discs are pretty expensive but I'm sure Spockduster gets a hefty discount, especially on some releases since they're part of the same company as... uhh... Baramount Bictures. Spockduster probably makes £300 easily on each copy of a DVD, and with at least a dozen copies of a new release movie, that's a lot of money. And I've ignored the most lucrative of Spockduster's sources of customer income -- those sweet, sweet late return fees.

Of course, Spockduster has costs to cover which a postal service does not, like paying the rent on their premises and training their staff to scowl. But... uhh...

Well. I thought, erroneously as it turns out, that that train of thought would end with some sort of point. Doesn't matter. Back to LOVEFiLM...

I had my reservations about a DVD rental service that operated by post, not least the fact that I had no real comprehension of how the hell it was going to work. The answer is "pretty smoothly, actually". They send you discs in a sort of reusable envelope thing, and when you're ready to return one, you tear off the flap with your address on it and stick the rest in a post box. Discs are well protected in a tough but slim plastic case.

Payment is a flat monthly fee. There are no late fees because there is no 'late' -- you can keep DVDs for as long as you like. The only restriction is on the number of DVDs you can simultaneously borrow -- when you return a DVD, they'll immediately send you another from your wishlist.

The catalogue is impressively complete (21,000 titles covering seemingly almost everything -- not just movies -- ever released on Region 2 DVD) and the turnaround is such that after posting a disc back to LOVEFiLM, you're likely to receive another two (working) days later. Their default tariff, costing £15 per month, allows three simultaneous rentals.

All that talk about profit margins earlier was spectacularly irrelevant. What really matters is value for money. For £15 you can rent 4 DVDs from Blockbuster. For £15 a month from LOVEFiLM you can get through an 'unlimited' number (because of the inherent delays in the post, the practical limit is somewhere around 30, although getting through that many DVDs would present a challenge in itself). LOVEFiLM's selection is better, and the movies come straight to your door. It's not even a close contest (unless you really have a thing for getting overpriced Haagen-Dazs with your movie).

But the clincher is that you get to watch things that you would ordinarily never bother to rent. You can be adventurous and experimental in your choices, in the secure knowledge that you won't waste any money if the film you choose is dire.

Yep, I'm definitely loving the hell out of this service, and I can recommend it without any trace of shame or dignity. If they only rented Xbox games as well as DVDs, my life would be more complete than I or anybody else deserves.

LOVEFiLM offers a two week free trial, but as an existing member I can give referrals that double the trial length. Contact me if you're interested. In the worst case you can cancel before the trial is over, and you'll get free DVD rentals for the better part of a month.

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

-- George W. Bush, 05/08/04

I've been thinking about feed aggregator software, and playing with Bloglines. I'm a SharpReader user, and before that I used Syndirella, but the more I think about it, the more a web-based, serverside aggregator makes a lot more sense to me. I don't need an aggregator that embeds a web browser. I already have a web browser which is always open, and the fact that SharpReader embeds IE while I use Firefox just causes me grief (if popups are irritating normally, they're doubly annoying in an RSS aggregator -- and they seem to make SharpReader unresponsive for several seconds at a time).

Bloglines is a free service that offers a web-based aggregator. It came to me highly recommended, but the more I used it, the more I disliked it. Oh, the interface was polished on the surface, but it didn't seem to do anything I expected an aggregator to do. I added MetaFilter to my list of feeds -- it showed 3238 unread entries. I clicked on the feed name and Bloglines proceeded to load all 3238 entries in the right hand frame -- a 1MB HTML file that brought Firefox to its knees. Then I realised I couldn't mark individual items as read, or delete them. No, it was all 3238 or nothing (and they'd all been automatically marked as read when I opened the feed, anyway).

Okay, so the size of the page is a relatively minor UI complaint, and I don't actually want to use Bloglines to read the Metafilter archives. But that situation is different only in scale to one where I was reading 8 new entries from somebody's weblog or the New York Times, but didn't want to read them all in one session. That's not unusual behaviour. And what if I wanted to keep an entry around in some fashion for later reference? Bloglines fared a little better in this respect, allowing me to add entries to a 'clippings' folder, inside which I could create subfolders. Actually, that feature is pretty cool :)

But still, why all the love for Bloglines? My initial impressions, based on the first session, were that it sucked. But I think the problem isn't Bloglines, but my expectations for what I should be able to do with an aggregator.

I realised that there are two models for RSS aggregation software. The first, employed by most desktop aggregators, is to treat the software as an interface to a database of entries, where the entry is the atomic unit of RSS -- a single news story or weblog post. They're organised into feeds, but the user can perform operations on individual entries similar to those that might be performed on emails in a mail client -- marking as read, deleting, and perhaps moving them into user-created folders (though I'm not sure many aggregators support this last feature).

The second model is the one employed by most web-based aggregators including Bloglines, and serves the user well if their intent is to check site updates and little else. Little to no control is provided on individual entries -- the atomic unit of this aggregator is not an individual entry, but a feed. In Bloglines, if you click on a feed, it's assumed you've read all the articles it displayed. There's no way to mark only some of them as read, and once you click on a feed, no way even to preserve the entries that were marked as unread a moment ago -- so you'd better read them before you do anything else! And there's definitely no way to delete entries from a feed. Why would you want to do that? It's not your feed!

By now you'll realise that I'm an entry-based aggregator kind of person. I like to read one article at a time, and when I've read it, decide either to delete it from the database or keep it around. I browse feeds in small chunks of time throughout the day while doing other things, not in one big session, so I don't want to be forced to read a whole feed at a time. And I like to keep interesting entries around for later reference (because I couldn't access one of the links the first time, or because I want to refer to it the next time I'm discussing subject X on IRC, or just because I liked the entry a lot... the reason varies). I use SharpReader not only as a viewer, but as a database -- an archive of interesting material in a convenient and organised format that would otherwise use dozens of browser bookmarks. I keep or delete RSS entries like I keep or delete emails -- I don't think the two are all that different in any significant way (which is why, all this talk about server-side aggregation aside, I'm quite excited about Mozilla Thunderbird adding RSS support in its next release).

I think that the power of RSS goes largely to waste if it is just used as an update notification mechanism, something with only transitory utility, useful only at the time of retrieval. I've always seen it as a means to feed a continuing (if sporadic) stream of information into a database, which can then be put to uses beyond simple notification, like search and archival.

I've Googled until sore, and it appears that nobody's made a server-side aggregator of this nature. I'm surprised by this, to the point that I think I must have overlooked one or several such programs. Here's my wishlist for the perfect web-based RSS aggregator. Please, if anything close to this exists, let me know.

• It should be freely available and licensed for personal use, because a personal RSS aggregator is exactly the kind of software people want to run on their own machines and intranets.
• It should be ultra-liberal about feed parsing, because the fact that somebody's feed is broken is of no interest to a reader who probably has no opportunity to fix it.
• And it should understand RSS0, 1, 2, and Atom, obviously.
• It should give fast response times, because a laggy interface is really irritating.
• It should have a friendly and aesthetically pleasing interface, and be easy to use. I feel that Gmail has set the bar for a good web interface for complex functionality, and that the ease of use of Gmail is something to aim for and aspire to.
• It should use no popup windows anywhere, because I hate them :)
• It should be web-based, so it can in theory be accessed from anywhere, and it should be able to operate on the level of individual entries, so a user can start reading where they left off when they finished work an hour earlier.
• It should offer plenty of control over the contents of its database, to appease both the user who is happy using their aggregator merely as a notifier for new content, and the user who also views their aggregator as an information repository. The aggregator should be an interface to a personal database of entries drawn from feeds, and whether and how the user stores or organises this data is up to the user.

Or, Bloglines meets SharpReader meets Gmail. Wow, putting it like that makes it sound like such a straightforward job :)

Would anybody find something like this useful? Or am I in a minority in using an aggregator for anything more than update notification?

I just noticed that, after a two-year hiatus, my favourite streaming radio station is back online!

bluemars.org broadcasts a blend of ambient spacemusic that was the aural backdrop to many an hour of coding when I was at university. I find that it's great music to work to -- energising but not distracting, not intense enough to steal my concentration, but aggressive enough to keep me focused. Perfect background music for a busy day.