Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Out Now!

And two.

That lay-out still needs tweaks, blogs still need to be created, it doesn't display well on mobile devices yet even though it is supposed to (note the DOCTYPE), but we wanted to launch when we said internally we would.

Friday, November 11, 2005

In This House We Are Not Down With All A.I. Fads

[11:31] deanallemang: Ooooh!  A supporter of Fuzzy Logic just complained indistinctly about something!
[11:33] fjvwing: well, at least he is consistent

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

I'm Not Sure I Was Ready For This...

Oh.          Fuck.





Edit: 1) Thank gawd it hit at US early evening, EU very early morning. This will spread the traffic out a little.

2) This is actually the 2nd time I have made front page with a web property.

Live!

One full day and a half public, one press release together with at least 3 phone announcements this morning, and we're already being being mentioned on Technorati. Yes, that is one of the two sites whose creation and launch have consumed me the last three months. The next one will happen in two weeks. Then we will be switching over in December to new technology so that project-owners and people can update their own web-pages.

I am proud and terrified and relieved at the same time. I have to not just deliver sites, but a system I can hand off, organizationally and technically, in a way that keeps them maintainable after I leave, with minimal effort. It has guided most of my choices and recommendations for software and alliances, and ate up a lot of time.

So here we go. Let's hope the company lets this one grow big.

I already got one real bug report: it doesn't render at all well on IE 5.5. I went to the stats page of exonome.com to check how bad this is. Most hits are from XP and Win2K. I didn't get an account of user agents, but if I add up Win 98 and Win ME as possibly using broken IE 5.5, I am up to 2.3%. If I consider a large part of Win2K users use IE 5.5, I may, may, hit 8%. I can live with those numbers for now, especially considering those stats are for a page that attracts all the web mostly skewed to 12 year old girls, and OpenSource and Research are supposed to attract advanced smart researchers in High Tech.

Will I fix it? Probably. Will I stay awake to do so? Nope. Got other things on the list to occupy that place.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Part I

(This was a restricted entry, but now, in 2008, I have made it public)

As I just posted to my Nokia internal blog:

Subject: A List With Two Related Items

  • OpenSource.Nokia.com is up.

  • I am terrified.

It's like when we first got an aquarium at home. After we set it up I had sudden flashes of fear for days that I'd come home to 40 gallons of water on the floor and a couple of asphyxiated fish. Same thing now. I am waiting for things to go horribly wrong and have the whole Internet point and laugh at me.
Thing is is that due to internal politics, I had to align with technologies and hosters that simply did not get their shit together in time. So I have a website with no search and the contact form wasn't ready. Ugh. All contact requests now happen through a sacrificial mailbox we will shut down when the contact form really happens. Ugh.

And in the end, after all the hard work to blend technologies, all these coals I pulled out of the fire in one day notice or less over the last months (sure I can change all emails sitewide, I'll just write a filter! Sure, I can re-do the lay-out, it is just a template! Sure I have the CMS dump to disk because you have a different idea of how to host this, it is only a buggy inscrutable add-on!) it is just a catalog site right now (will change later) that people in the company a) really thought needed to happen b) couldn't be bothered to make content for. All that work for this? Well, getting it together and approved and refined took time.

This thing will be announced by Jorma tomorrow at the mobile conference in Barcelona in a press release. I had it go live and accessible today to shake it out. One project page owner alreadyw ent nuts on me that they absolutely did not want it up before their own press release. This being the project that has no code to download available, and already gave fucking interviews about their project that got mentioned on Slashdot.

I'll miss these bozos, but I am ready to leave them behind.

Part II will happen Nov 14th.

Home Media

Networked Series 2 TiVos have a feature called Home Media Option. You install a beacon program on your networked computer that has all your music or pictures, and then you can see those pictures or play the music on your TiVo over the network. TiVo opened the API for this network protocol and now other people can make beacon programs. One of them is Galleon, which used to be called JavaHMO. Galleon lets you define all kinds of other stuff on the network server, like webcam URLs and Shoutcast streams, and then you can play all that stuff on your TiVo in the living room.

I have installed Galleon twice now, on two different Win2K boxes, and I have noticed a pattern: I need to install it in a path with no spaces in it, just to be sure, because I know a weather module used to be unable to handle it (so no 'C:/Program Files/Galleon, but C:/Galleon). Then I run the configuration program that lets you set all the options and get the message 'Can't connect to server', which means the configuration program can't talk to the Galleon beacon on the same computer and tell the beacon what to serve to the TiVo. Uninstall Galleon, reboot, install again, and it works. It is worth it, Galleon works better than its predecessor JavaHMO. And boy does my friend Susan look comfy on her chaise on my TV.

I did this so I could hack Galleon to offload programs off my TiVo -- yes, it works both ways -- so I could then attach a webserver to those shows and punch a hole in my home firewall for the webserver and then I could download the shows wherever in the world I was as long as I was very patient. But reading around how to do that taught me that all those steps are unnecessary because I learned something new: Series 2 TiVos with the latest software are already running a webserver. Just point to https://<the ip address of your TiVo on your network>/  and yes, note the 'https' part, not 'http'. It wil ask for a name and password. Name is 'tivo', password is the Media Access Key, which you can find on your TiVo under settings. And there you go: a list of shows on your TiVo, ready to click and download. So if I set my firewall to forward all accesses from the public internet on port, oh, say 9999, to my TiVo's on port 443, I should be able to download the Housewives even when I am travelling... Hmm, I need to enable dynamic DNS again for my home network on No-IP.com or DynDNS.com or something.