Cafe Bucky

When I was starting to learn PHP and MySQL in 2001, I wanted to tackle a project that meant something to me; a non-trivial web application…

So, being a photographer and programmer with some time on my hands, I decided to write a photo database.

The first iteration of FlexiPhoto had a hard-wired interface.  I rewrote it to support multiple UIs and languages.  Sometime in 2004-2005, I rewrote it again as a PHP5 app.

In 2006, I got distracted by Second Life :)  It was like going down a rabbit hole.  I got good at scripting in LSL [1].  I shelved my web projects.  What a mistake!  Although I have learned a lot of web tech in the last 5 years, I had my attention split by learning a lot about Second Life.  It’s nice to be good at it, but it doesn’t pay!  And, damn, I could use some money about now …

So I am back on the case with FlexiPhoto.  I have a virtual Ubuntu machine running at Slicehost, which I’ll use for the public-facing Demo, Wiki, and Download site.  I’m in the midst of dusting off FP (switching database layer from DB to MDB2, for one thing), and expect to have it available within a week.  It’s going to look clunky and very pre-AJAX, but then, I am a big fan of iteration.

A fun side note about Linux and running virtual machines at home: I still have my old 1U rack server, which hosted FlexiPhoto and other sites back in the day.  The damn thing is loud! It’s running an old version of Debian.  My task today is to mirror my Slicehost OS at home.  I’ve installed Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10) on my iMac, hosted via VirtualBox. That will give me synced development & public environments.  I also am able to dual boot my Samsung NC10 Netbook to Windows XP and Ubuntu.  I’ve got it covered, baby!

Geez, geeking out here big time.

Anyways, FlexiPhoto is a good portfolio piece of mine, and I am stoked to be working on it again.  It’s like an old friend :)

[1] …although, to this day, I really think Cory O should have finished LSL.  It even makes Tcl look good, and that’s saying a lot…

I’ve been thinking about what I want to do, gig-wise.  For way too long, I’d been waiting for Second Life and OpenSim to pop up on the radar as a marketable skill.  I’m good at it, but hell, the average salary for SL gigs is way down there [1]

There is a lot out there in the Tech Landscape that thrills me:

Google Wave, Augmented Reality, and the iPhone (in addition to the Web 2.0 LAMP/AJAX stuff I love doing)

I am waiting for my developer login for Google Wave.  Visualize Email that turns into an IM, which flows into a collaborative document, with full playback of who edited what.  That’s an icebergian tip …

Or you can look at some pretty pictures and get an idea …

I also found it instructive to watch the video on how Wave handles Concurrent Editing.

One imagines Wave dovetailing with projects in SL, Augmented Reality, and all manner of mobile devices.

As for AR (Augmented Reality), three examples everyone should check would be:

• Layar, worlds first mobile Augmented Reality browser
• The Acrossair bit on the BBC
• The biz card demo

Oh, and the ARToolkit running on the iPhone …

Speaking of the iPhone, I have downloaded the SDK and have signed up as a developer.  Objective C hits me as a kinder, gentler take on C++ and Java.  I am digging it so far.

None of this should be taken as a sign I am leaving Web Development.  Far from it!  I am just looking at the likely directions that spring from it, where I think there will be a lot of interest and opportunity.

[1] I  have recent info from Susan, who heard it firsthand from someone presenting from Marketing Truths at SLCC

I just noticed that the Google Maps API has added an overlay control: GOverviewMapControl() — thanks Digg’ers for the heads up!

I’ve updated the iframe file referenced by the post Fave Station. If the map doesn’t do the right thing, let me know.

See the Google Maps API Blog for more info.

Here’s a deliberately exaggerated example — I plan on heading to Amoeba Music sometime in the next week, which is near Golden Gate Park:

Reading the Grey Lady this afternoon took me back to the outrageous real estate prices in Manhattan (see StreetEasy.com for a dose. Sit down first). One example from the NYT Magazine: “995 Fifth Avenue – Half and Full Floors Starting at $10 Million”. Wow. That’s ~7 Victorians like mine. And I have a yard and a pony.

Ok, so I don’t have a Pony. I have two cats that drink from my hands.

But everytime I torture myself with the Sunday Edition, I go off into Real Estate Lust Mode. All out fire escape hissing steam radiator noisy air conditioner shelves everywhere crammed closet eating pizza on the stoop fantasyland. Even the night that a drunk lady started changing clothes while leaning on our apartment door at 3 in the morning seems funny now [1]. I identify with a couple of subway stations (just looking at a MetroCard puts me in the mood to head over to Oakland Airport and plead that JetBlue will take me “on standby”). They would be Lincoln Center (where I subletted from a B’way actress friend), and 72nd Street (because I always got a charge out of Fairway Market).

[1] Yeah, true story. We’re sleeping on our coolio studio apt. sofabed, and someone starts leaning on the other side of our door taking their clothes off, 8 feet from us. We’re like … WTF!? Go away!

So just to segue into Tech, I decided it was high time I figured out the Google Map thing. That way, I can look back at this post and torture myself some more :-)

Off to San Diego tomorrow. Off on a plane. Up, up, and away. Here’s a bit of musing, as I struggle to explain the “Widening Web Gap” from another angle …

I’m stoked to be going to Emerging Tech once again. It turns out that I hadn’t been to one since 2003, but had made it to OSCon for 2003 and 2005. The years blur.

Every O’Reilly confab turns into a Drinking From A Firehose week. There’s so much to take in. OSCon tends to be programming focused. ETech is more about how people interact with sites and each other over the net. Both are about building.

If someone were to ask me what my focus will be over the next week, one possible answer would be “I’m wondering about all of the people in the middle.”

What do I mean by that? I mean the huge group of net users that are in the Long Tail, but not near the end. I don’t mean the Alpha Geeks and Web 2.0 pioneers with accounts spread over 25 sites, and I don’t mean the luddites on dialup who grudgingly learn basic email so that they can stay in touch with their family. There’s a huge group in the middle: somewhat net-savvy, somewhat interested in what’s going on online, and completely frikken overwhelmed with the Krakatoa Explosion of Choice.

Who could expect the middle group to make sense of some of the sessions next week? Sessions with titles such as:

• “The Internet of Things”
• “Applications for the New Attention Economy”
• “Hunch Engine”
• “Building a Participation Platform: Yahoo! Web Services Past, Present, and Future”
• “Ambient Findability”
• “The State of the Mashup: An Interactive Dialog About Advances in Free Mapping APIs”
• “Shut Up! No, *You* Shut Up: A Pattern Language for Moderation Strategies”
• “Feeds as a Platform: More Data, Less Work”
• “Everybody’s It: Tagging with Identity”
• “An Open Microformat for Syndicating Mashups, Web Content and Ajax Applications”

Sure, the conference-goers get most of these, but Mabel J. Clickstream out there will glaze over in nanosecond. (and I left out some of the tough ones) The Middle Group is primed for revolt! They’re going to get burnt out on the Web 2.0 stuff. Burnt, as in Toasted Attention Span.

So that’s some set up. I’ve been circling around an idea that’s been spread out over a few posts, and I’m still not sure how to express it. Of course, that won’t stop me from adding a nugget whenever I think of one … so here it is:

• Conferences such as Emerging Tech, or SXSW the week after, are firsthand, real-world gatherings where we lose ourselves for a week in an alternate net.reality that’s way out on the leading edge.
• The trick is to figure out how to channel some of the energy and ideas back into the real net.reality, as seen by users, customers, and so on.
• On an interface level, the job is getting easier. In between AJAX and Flash, a lot of the old browser constraints are vanishing. Web sites feel more like desktop apps. The looming roadblock is going to be bandwidth (wait till Web 3D gets started … )
• On a conceptual level, the job is getting harder. There’s too much to pay attention to. Here’s an example: bookmarks. It used to be that it would be nice to store personal bookmarks on a web site somewhere. Can I get to them? Yes? Good. Done. Now we’re tagging and searching them. Now we’re overlapping them with those of our friends. Now we’re seeing them come in through RSS feeds. Now we have 20 different Social Bookmarking Sites (yo! you guys can stop now! we get it already!). Which one do I join? Will my bookmarks be available to some other personal portal that I want to join? Will the site that’s storing my bookmarks be around tomorrow? See what I mean? What used to be simple, static bookmarking has now evolved into a living, breathing, time-sucking monster.

So like I said, conferences are DemoVille, and make us think about what’s down the road. An interesting notion is that many users are happy to park on the side, and they’re not into any more traveling (and that’s fine, for the moment, as the web works on many levels). They think a mashup is something you order in a Southern Restaurant. I think one of the real challenges over the next year will be to do web sites with varying levels of complexity. Think of a Personal Portal as an example:

• Grumpy Old Man Mode (get those dang heewhaw flashy things off of my screen, and just let me see a picture of my granddaughter and some sports scores … yeah, I know my zip code, what’s it to ya?)
• Hip Mode (If I can do it in 3-5 minutes, I’ll arrange a few extra things on my personal portal – but give me an easy list to choose from)
• Cuisinart Mode (Give me all of the data feeds I want, and I’ll arrange them myself, and come up with some personal skins … and give me an API or some GUI thing so that I can make up my own new widgets)

More over the next week!

Ah, how remiss of me to go so long without posting …

Early rising commute bus work get home at dark blur.

My other excuse is the Olympics.

The post that’s been percolating in the noggin for a while is about the Widening Web Gap. It’s not quite brewed, but the gist of it is:

• When I started looking at the web around 1993, it was a very simple place. We didn’t even have frames or tables, and AJAX was merely a cleanser. The gap between the simplest web page and the most complex wasn’t that wide. User expectations were low. We were all just flat out fascinated to see pages from far flung places.
• The types of sites, and those using them, has absolutely exploded, and will continue to do so.
• The gap between those who barely use and understand the net, and those who are pushing the boundaries every day, is widening by the second. The 20th Century Web crowd are happy with bare minimum functionality — they’ll be damned if they have to learn a new concept, such as making use of an RSS feed, or rearranging options on a default start page. The Fast Forward Button crowd can never get enough. Pity the designers in between who try to appeal to both.
• I think we’ll see an increasingly tiered web. Some sites will consciously punt on the entry level users. Some will keep things so stripped down and basic that they’ll make AOL look like rocket science. Some will try to appeal to everyone and have the toughest job of all.
• I’ll be paying special attention to ETech next week, and am hoping to get the time to lay this out in a coherent way. There’s a lot of experimentation going on out there (check out any 10 sites from Kottke’s “The secret to Web 2.0″ post.) I am thinking we’ll hit a sort of saturation point soon, and that the next major bit will be “Web 3D”. More to come on all of this …

A friend pointed me at GTalkr.com, which is a flash-based desktop/home page. It’s great in the way it imports Flickr slideshows, YouTube videos, and GMail. It’s basically a personal portal. It’s easy to add new RSS feeds, such as a personal del.icio.us collection.

There was one obvious thing I didn’t see right away: how do I make a simple list of bookmarks? (as in, drag a link into some module in GTalkr) Sure, I can just add it to del.icio.us, and get it through a feed. But I’m talking about a simple list of links. Aside from that, it’s pretty usable, looks good, and it seems reasonably stable.

I’m not sure if the site will “stick” for me. It’s a bit heavyweight – really gets the PowerBook fan going. The AJAX variation on this idea is Protopage, which I like for its freeform approach.

I’m pretty happy to say that I have started a gig with Friendster. It’ll be great to delve into a well-known web site and be able to make a contribution.

I’d been picky about where I was going to go. I didn’t want to help some advertising agency send out spam more efficiently, or work on something that would never get seen. It had occurred to me to move back to NYC, because that seems to be where a lot of cool gigs are located. Friendster is moving to SF/SOMA pretty soon, which will give me the option of bus or ferry commute (podcast catch-up time). I also believe in what they do, and what they will be doing. I like the people, and it’ll be a fun challenge!

Until we move, the office is in Mountain View. I’ll be going there 1-2 days a week. Driving down on 280 brings back a flood of AOL-era memories: the route, the traffic, and the “programmers at every other table at the lunchtime chinese restaurant” vibe. Although a Silicon Valley Office Park has its own sort of industry charm, it’ll be much better to be in the City, and to see the positive effects of the move. On the surface, it’s a bit comparable to the AOL/Moviefone folks in White Plains, versus the AOL people in Rockefeller Center in Midtown. Give me the City buzz! (alternating with the quiet of country/home)