Naked Conversations – available now in Redwood City, CA
I’ve been pestering the brick and mortar book stores around town, asking for Shel Israel’s and Robert Scoble’s book, Naked Conversations — I’m not a patient man and I don’t want to wait until the 26th for my pre-ordered Amazon copy to arrive. Today, I stopped at the Barnes and Noble in Redwood City, CA and found out they had several copies waiting to be displayed. Snagged one.
If you are also looking for a copy tonight or tomorrow, head over there.
I’m looking forward to really digging in. One really nice ‘feature’ of this book is the online appendix – a clickable list of sites that were mentioned in the book, organized by chapter. Does anyone have an xml reading list for it?
[FYI, I started reading it as a digital e-book(pdf drm) on my Palm TX. It was slow going because the official Adobe Reader for Palm takes a few seconds to go back a page and it won’t do wide-screen mode – 2 issues that really hamper comfortable reading. There is a freeware PalmOS PDF reader-PalmPDF- which is vastly superior to the official app, but it can’t open DRM files.]
The Bui Blog
Thai Bui, my friend and the co-founder and CTO of Homestead Technologies started blogging again today. Have fun, Thai!
The best part of working at Homestead is the people. The people we work for(our customers) and the people we work with(our partners and fellow employees). Thai is one of my favorite people to work with.
Random Thai facts:
- Once a year, he organizes and hosts the Homestead Talent show. We’ll have to put some video clips on youtube and google video. It’s really an amazing event. At each show, 10-20 employees from Homestead’s past show up, in addition to all the current employees and their families and friends. Good times!
- Every other year or so, Thai organizes a scavenger hunt for the developers. It’s a pretty involved problem solving adventure, taking us all over the bay area in teams. It’s like Stanford’s ‘The Game’.
- There is a Thai-oriented Easter Egg on the main screen of all of our SiteBuilder products(SiteBuilder Lite, SiteBuilder, SiteBuilder Classic(retired) and SiteBuilder Online(retired). Credit for that tradition goes to Michael Bender, who lives on a boat.
Anyway, Thai’s a great guy and I’m looking forward to reading his blog.
Adobe Acrobat Reader for the Palm OS – DRM
OK, so my digital download at Amazon finally went through. Then, I had to figure out how to get the pdf processed, my palm ‘authorized’, and how to get the file transferred during hotsync. This was not user friendly. I almost gave up before I figured out how the process is supposed to work.
Here’s how it works:
- Download and install Adobe Reader 7.0.5 (you must use the latest version of Reader)
- Download and install Adobe Reader for PalmOS (or Pocket PC or whatever)
- Start Adobe Reader for PalmOS and choose to authorize your PDA – a hotsync will be required.
- Download your PDF.
- Run Adobe Reader 7.0.5(it should open automatically during the download).
- Reader 7 will unlock the document for your computer.
- In Reader 7, choose send to mobile device.
- Reader for PalmOS will start and will install the document on your PDA.
Now, if only the PalmOS version of Reader would use the full screen 480 x 320 screen, not just 320 x 320. Ugh.
More thoughts on FeedLounge vs Gregarius
Some time in the last 2 days, the cron job I use to update my Gregarius feeds started failing. I noticed the problem fairly quickly. I haven’t had any time to fix the problem, so I’ve been calling the script manually two or three times a day. That’s not a huge inconvenience, but if a worse problem happened and I didn’t have time to fix it, I’d be out of luck.
Feeds are important to me, so it might seem that the unsupported nature of Gregarius would put me in the FeedLounge camp right away. But I’m still torn. They both have pros and cons.
Gregarius is an app that you install on a server of your choice. You maintain that installation. Gregarius is also open source with a fairly active community behind it. If someone else doesn’t create the feature you are looking for, you can do it yourself.
FeedLounge is a service. The feature set is controlled by a individuals selected by a company. On the plus side they also maintain the installation and the database, probably making data loss a non-issue.
What do I want in an aggregator?
- Responsive UI when I’m in a desktop browser. (FeedLounge wins)
- No maintenance issues. (FeedLounge wins)
- A way to read my feeds on my Palm TX pda and my Razr phone. (Gregarius wins)
- Customizability – the ability to create plugins and use plugins built by the community. (Gregarius wins)
Of course, item level read/unread status synchronization would make the choice easy – I’d use both. Dave points out that reading lists will solve the problem of making sure all your aggregators are accessing the same feeds. Definitely true, but I would much prefer the synch to happen at the item read/unread status granularity.
NewsGator has browser based and mobile options, so that’s a possibility, but I don’t recall their online UI being as fast as FeedLounge and they aren’t as customizable as Gregarius.
John Tokash 