Older blog entries for bradfitz (starting at number 277)

Thirty.

I'm 30 today. Happy Birthday to me! :)

Come party tonight if you're around SF: http://crush3r.com/page/ytziecxddo

Syndicated 2010-02-05 18:31:46 from Brad Fitzpatrick

Doing Hos is Hard Work

Etch-a-Sketch doesn't involve much hill climbing. GPS-a-Sketch in San Francisco does, however:


Merry Christmas from me and [info] whatever_art to you!

*

In other news: not going anywhere for Christmas. Staying in San Francisco, hosting a 10 person orphan dinner. But then going to the Caribbean on a 7 night cruise over New Year's with parents, Sierra, my brother Cole and his girlfriend. Should be fun. :)

Syndicated 2009-12-24 23:12:56 from Brad Fitzpatrick

Halloween Costume: Where's Waldo?

This year's costume, with [info]whatever_art:

http://picasaweb.google.com/bradley.j.fitzpatrick/Misc#5398929204952872962



I tried to get http://bit.ly/whereswaldo but it was already taken (and awesome!), so I got http://bit.ly/whereswaldo2 so people might discover the awesome version by mucking with the URL. Time to run my own URL shortener... don't trust any of them.

Syndicated 2009-11-01 00:59:49 from Brad Fitzpatrick

Speakeasy pricing confusion

Speakeasy peeps,

Am I over-paying? (I'm assuming yes.)

I currently have:

DSL: Home Plus OneLink ADSL 6.0/768 Pro-Install (C) (activated 12/21/2005) PKG1822837

which is $105.95 (+ $6 fees) per month.

I called to get it reduced and the guy on the phone was super vague and generally useless. Between grunts and burping and "Oh that's interesting!" interjections as he played on his computer, I heard various tidbits which I couldn't connect:

* I'm currently running at 4.0/768 because of noise on the line.
* He could give me $10 off.
* He couldn't give me $10 off.
* There's an unlisted 4.0/768 speakeasy package. Could I move to it? He'd give me $10 off.
* But I thought you were already going to give me $10 off.
* You could move to the 3.0/768.
* No prices are listed on the website. Just the cheapest, slow one.

Apparently no love for long-time loyal customers.

I'm tempted to drop Speakeasy, but where would I go? Cable? Aren't they all dicks? I want to vote with my dollar and not give money to stupid companies blocking/intercepting/rewriting traffic and other lame practices.

Who's the most money-worthy broadband company lately?

Syndicated 2009-10-08 17:19:59 from Brad Fitzpatrick

25 Sep 2009 (updated 25 Sep 2009 at 20:13 UTC) »

Vedomosti article

Don't believe everything (or anything) you read here:

http://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/article/2009/09/23/214519

I'm told that it's horribly "mistranslated" (probably intentionally) to make a more interesting article.

I wish I brought my own recorder to the interview so I could post the mp3 of what I actually said, which is that I'm working on making social networking federated & inter-operable like email. I'm not sick or bored of social networking or LiveJournal. I still use LJ. I do use it less, now that I don't work on it, and it's true a lot of my friends are now on Twitter or Facebook, but that's why I want things to inter-operate.

Stupid media. I'm done with reporters. Or at least I'll start recording everything.

Update 2009-09-25 23:07: apparently the translation isn't bad, some tell me, except for the headline ("All my friends quit LiveJournal", not true), and perhaps the biased selection of some of the quotes. Many people are getting a different idea from the article than I thought I communicated. Oh well. My apologies to Vedomosti, since it doesn't seem like it was entirely intentional.

Syndicated 2009-09-25 13:32:39 (Updated 2009-09-25 19:11:40) from Brad Fitzpatrick

Moscow evening plans

Muscovites, any recommendations on what I should do tonight in your fair city?

SMS might be best, since I'll be leaving work soon probably. +7 (915) 353-36-83.

Thanks!

Syndicated 2009-09-24 14:38:10 from Brad Fitzpatrick

15 Sep 2009 (updated 18 Sep 2009 at 15:07 UTC) »

On PubSubHubbub and rssCloud ...

Are you confused about the difference between PubSubHubbub and rssCloud?  You're not alone.

Here's how the confusion came about:

Dave Winer invented rssCloud way back in the day.  It only distributed lite pings, the callback endpoint was the IP address that you subscribed from, and nobody really ever implemented it, so you probably never heard of it.  We sure hadn't.

Fast forward 5 or 6 years.  Brett Slatkin and I want to fix the polling problem and we're annoyed that all companies seem to have an internal pubsub system, but none of them work on the Internet, and XEP-0060 just isn't getting adopted, probably because XMPP weirds people out.  We start sketching out PubSubHubbub.  From day 1 we do all development in the open, on pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com.  Initially we only target Atom for simplicity until we got a prototype working.  We work on PSHB for about a year, during which time we hear about rssCloud and are impressed at the foresight but reject it as not satisfying our design goals.   After a year of working on PSHB, we demo it at the "TechCrunch Real-time Stream Crunch-Up" event.  We add RSS support a few days before the event because it's trivial at that point.  It's unfortunate that both Atom and RSS exist, but that's reality, so we support both.

Right after we present, we get a request to call Dave Winer.  He wants to "do voice", so Brett and I hop on our cellphones and the three of us have a conference call, with Brett and I outside on the street trying to find places to stand with less road noise.  Over the next 15-30 minutes, we slowly walk him through PubSubHubbub, repeatedly, explaining why webhooks and fat pings are important (no thundering herds DoSing publishers!), explain all of our design goals (pushing complexity to the hub, keeping publishing simple, decentralized, using HTTP, etc, etc...)

Dave Winer writes an article praising PubSubHubbub.  Great!

Dave Winer reads the PSHB spec and notices it still says "Atom only, not RSS".  Shit.  We forgot to update the spec after we added RSS support.

Perhaps due to our RSS documentation omission, or perhaps because he realized pubsub was finally in vogue, he's now gone and dusted-off and augmented his old rssCloud protocol that's RSS-centric.

The arguments in favor of rssCloud go something like this:  'we can't have BigCo control the spec.  We should have an independent spec!'  Or, in his words: "Google sux".  To reply to that specifically: This isn't even a Google-initiated project --- it's Brett & my 20% (or 5%?) time project, trying to fix something we find annoying on the web. We've been transparently working on this in the open from day 1.  Yes, we happen to be Google employees.  We have no internal docs or project plan on this.  If Dave wants something different, he's just as welcome on our mailing list as everybody else (many individuals and companies, working together to build consensus....).  Instead, he's heavily promoting the largely-unchanged rssCloud and not wanting feedback. Seems silly, but that's that.

Unlike rssCloud, which Winer says is frozen and a "done deal", the Hubbub protocol isn't frozen.  It's in development so far as we'll make changes and additions that are good and useful, and try hard not to break backwards compatibility (especially on pinging).  We have a few major things yet mostly untackled (including distribution of private content).  The rssCloud mailing list says "This is a mail list not a standards body".  If you'd like to work on a standard, join the PSHB mailing list.

Some of the good articles on the technical differences between the two protocols:
Anyway, I apologize for all the confusion.  I feel like had we only promoted RSS more heavily in the 0.1 draft of the spec, I wouldn't be writing this blog post today.

Hopefully this is the last I'm going to say on this topic.  Back to doing productive things....

Syndicated 2009-09-15 18:22:08 (Updated 2009-09-18 14:54:18) from Brad Fitzpatrick

Announcing "Squeezer" for Android

Open sourced as promised earlier... Squeezer!

Control your SqueezeCenter (aka SlimServer) and all your synchronized SqueezeBoxes, receivers, Booms, etc from your Android....

http://code.google.com/p/android-squeezer/
http://android-squeezer.googlecode.com/files/squeezer-0.1.apk
http://github.com/bradfitz/android-squeezer/tree/master
http://groups.google.com/group/android-squeezer

Very rough still, but coming together fast. That's two nights of hacking.

Oh, I should have screenshots. Later. Not on the Android Market until I'm happier with it.

Syndicated 2009-08-12 09:16:46 (Updated 2009-08-12 09:17:21) from Brad Fitzpatrick

10 Aug 2009 (updated 12 Aug 2009 at 10:18 UTC) »

Android Squeezebox Remote!

Fun project of the evening: start of a Squeezebox remote control app for Android. And it works! Well, at least play/pause/stop. Much, much more to go, but just fun at this point....

Will be open sourcing it as soon as possible tomorrow.

Update, 2009-08-12 2:23am: Squeezer is born.

Syndicated 2009-08-10 05:23:27 (Updated 2009-08-12 09:23:30) from Brad Fitzpatrick

Messing with survey people

I just got a call from a survey company, asking me to rate the quality of some service phone call I'd made recently.

First she asked if I had five minutes to complete a survey about a phone call I'd made recently. I thought that five minutes was longer than the phone call itself, but I felt bad for her, and I was amused, so I agreed to the survey.

"How would you rate the overall quality of the call? Please answer with a number from 1 to 5 where 5 is excellent is 1 is poor."

I answer, "4.6"

[pause....]

"Sir, would you say 4.6 is closer to 4 or closer to 5?"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.

I was chuckling the rest of the call, just saying "5." because I didn't want to confuse her.

Syndicated 2009-07-20 00:39:36 from Brad Fitzpatrick

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