The proliferation of interesting and useful online applications has put lowcost or free tools at our fingertips that enable us to brainstorm, collaborate, organize, publish, or just play with information, images and ideas. Nobody can say that "the cloud" has not opened up new possibilities for interacting with others around the planet. The marketplace is wide open and, naturally, while some online applications succeed in gaining a customer base and in fashioning a viable business model that will ensure their longevity for some time to come, others fail and fold.

The planet is running out of IPv4 addresses that are used to identify specific routers, computers, and web servers. WashPo's Rob Pegoraro explains it all quite well, without dumbing it down too much and without confusing the hell out of me either. This was not an easy feat when it comes to the topic of network addressing, which can make even the best brain bleed. As a bonus for reading the article,you can click a link to learn what undecillion is.

Today I was mulling, in my no-formal-CompSci-education sort of way, over the eternal data-geek question:
 
What is the best way to model the back end for this CRM?
 
And all the issues concerned:

• do I want separate tables for Individuals and Organizations, or one unified Directory?
• do I want a 1-m relationship between a contact and their street addresses? or an n-m relationship from Addresses to Contacts?
• do I store all phone numbers, email addresses, URLs, etc. in one table or several?
• (the next 200 questions omitted here)

Of course the contact module of a particular solution with known and reasonably static requirements can be easily modeled, but what if, for example, a school decides to start soliciting donations from its alumni who are in a student database that was designed for managing semester/class registrations? Do we export the alumni and import them into a different CRM that is structured specifically for soliciting and tracking donations? Or can we design, up-front, The Ultimate Contact System that can dynamically accommodate all kinds of ways an organization may wish to categorize, interact with, track, and note relationships amongst the people and organizations in their database?
 

How to keep studying an online manual on your Macbook while, for example, sitting for hours in airports or waiting rooms? This is the dilemma I will be facing in a few hours....

A quick web search for a tool to download an entire website to my hard drive turned up SiteSucker as a top hit, and a lucky hit it was:

• clean design
• so easy to use a manual is not necessary for first-time basic use
• yet, an (also clean) online manual is available
• localizes intrasite links so that they work when browsing offline
• "hey, it just works"

SiteSucker is available as a universal Mac application, and there is also a version for iPhone (and iTouch). For frequently accessed sites with reasonably static content (product manuals being a prime example), think "speed and reduced data-download consumption."

SiteSucker is donation-ware. (If you use donation-ware that doesn't suck, Donate!)

I don't know how many times over the years that I've used Macs that I have wished I knew how to close all Finder windows except the one I'm working with. Of course, It's possible to write a simple Applescript to do this, and put it into your Scripts menu. However, the script must be written for every Mac you use, and in my day-to-day life I often need to work on a client's of colleague's Mac.

So today I finally did a web search on "mac finder close all but frontmost" and learned the quick-n-dirty approach that requires no scripting:

In the window you wish to keep open, hit Shift-Command-G. This will drop down a “Go to Folder” dialog. Now hit Command-Option-W—this is the keyboard equivalent of Option-clicking the close widget. When you type this command, every window other than the frontmost one will close. Now just hit Escape to dismiss the dialog, and you’re set.

16 September 2010

In a few short weeks in May of this year, and during a period when problems with personal privacy on Facebook were receiving a lot of media attention, a group of New York University computer science majors launched fundraising for a project on Kickstarter.com. Their goal was to finance start-up development of an open-source web application called Diaspora that will decentralize social networking.

Rather than all "friends" in a social network storing their information, photos, etc. on a huge server controlled by companies like Facebook and MySpace (who then mine our data, and "monetize" it, and who also claim rather broad license to use our content), Diaspora users will connect via a web of smaller servers that are either controlled by a user directly, or are provided as a hosting service by third parties. Diaspora will then utilize push technology so that friends with accounts on different servers will receive updates from each other. (Diaspora servers will be known as "seeds" in keeping with the Diaspora logo of a mature dandelion dispersing its seeds.)

The idea caught on so quickly that the NYU students' dream of raising $10,000 US between the April 24 announcement and the June 1 fundraising cut-off was exceeded beyond anyone's expectations. They hit the $10,000 mark in the first 12 days, and by June 1 had raised $200,641.84 from 6,479 backers. To date, it was the most successful Kickstarter campaign ever. The students moved out to the San Francisco area to work with supporting organizations and individuals who are contributing infrastructure, expert advice, and project management support.

Yesterday, the open source code for Diaspora was released and OS developers invited to participate. The project uses a git server for version control, and Google groups have been set up for general discussions and for developers.

The user-facing alpha release is due to drop some time in October.

Whether the Diaspora project will catch on with users — in the face of the convenience, popularity and external-site integration offered by Facebook — is an unknown as of now. It certainly has got its backers, and developers, and the media interested. "More will be revealed!"

NOTE: Adept Digital Evolution made a small financial contribution on Diaspora's Kickstarter page. We are strong advocates of the project, hope to see it succeed, and therefore make no claim of impartiality when writing about it!

Peripatetic Servoy CEO Jan Aleman tweeted on Sept. 1:

Had a great preso at #linuxconf Brasil. First time in my life to have simultaneous translator. I made the audience applaud for him

Three days ago I posited that shortened URLs are too fragile (i.e., potential perishable) to use for communications other than Twitter, where the character limit makes the abbreviation a necessity. Turns out Twitter was already workin' on it ...

Today Twitter sent out an email to users advising of two changes. The first is that external apps must now use OAuth to access Twitter on your behalf. This is a welcome move, since it means that servers hosting your online apps will no longer be storing your Twitter password.

The second change is very welcome in the world of URL durability:

Update 2: t.co URL wrapping

In the coming weeks, we will be expanding the roll-out of our link wrapping service t.co, which wraps links in Tweets with a new, simplified link. Wrapped links are displayed in a way that is easier to read, with the actual domain and part of the URL showing, so that you know what you are clicking on. When you click on a wrapped link, your request will pass through the Twitter service to check if the destination site is known to contain malware, and we then will forward you on to the destination URL. All of that should happen in an instant.

You will start seeing these links on certain accounts that have opted-in to the service; we expect to roll this out to all users by the end of the year. When this happens, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL.

What does this mean for me?

• A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title.
• You will start seeing links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened links and lets you know where each link will take you.
• When you click on these links from Twitter.com or a Twitter application, Twitter will log that click. We hope to use this data to provide better and more relevant content to you over time.

This new feature will solve another problem with shortened URLs that I failed to mention in my previous post: Now you will know what the hell you are clicking on, and known malware pages will be blocked. Kudos on that point, Twitter.

The prospect of Twitter logging the URLs you click on, though, brings up serious privacy issues. This bears careful watching and analysis of the privacy policy that comes along with the new services.

Years ago we began using tinyurl.com to create redirect aliases with neat, short little URLs to include in emails or on web forums.
 
Enter Twitter with its 140-character limit, and URL shortening services sprouted up everywhere. And now that it's a PR necessity to publish news via multiple channels, once the bit.ly or snip.url or tr.im link has been created it is often used not only in a tweet, but also in Facebook notes, forum posts, and email newsletters ... used, in fact, absolutely everywhere the link is published.
 
This is a big mistake! What's the big problem? Here's a scenario:
 

Yesterday morning Google posted an entry in their Gmail blog announcing, I guess for their North American customers, anyhow, the new feature for making free phone calls from directly within Gmail.

Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail. Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.

The comparison table lines up Google's prices against the "Leading internet telephony provider". Gotta be Skype right? In which case this is very misleading.