web2.0

Silicon Valley Code Camp October 27-28

malloc(); — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 04:20:01 GMT

Time to register again for this years Code Camp.

Technorati tags: .net, code camp, silicon valley, programming

Why do people think Google maps is the best?

malloc(); — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 20:54:03 GMT

Here is a simple example, lets try and find the following address: 240 St. Joseph Ave, 94115.

Live Maps / Live Local / Local Live / Virtual Earth finds it with no errors or warnings.

Yahoo Local Gets the right location after using the closest match "240 Saint Josephs Ave, San Francisco, CA 94115".

Web 1.0 Mapquest can't find the address but it does suggests the correct location.

Ask Maps & Directions can't find the address but focuses the map on the correct zip code.

Google Maps can't find the address, the closest possible match is someplace in Missouri.

I believe that all these mapping sites get their data from the same place, NAVTEQ, but some are better than others at using that data.

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Technorati tags: maps, mapping, directions, Google Maps, Google, Microsoft, Virtual Earth, Live, Yahoo Local, Mapquest, NAVTEQ

No confidence in Farecast.com

malloc(); — Fri, 25 May 2007 05:23:41 GMT

More than a month ago I wrote a post about trusting software and what it tells you. I ended the post on a tangent about farecast.com and if I was going to trust it with its prediction.

I have been keeping track of the prices listed for a flight from San Francisco, CA to Newark, NJ and their confidence value since then. You can check out my graphs below, Blue == Confidence, Orange == Price. You can click here to view the price graph on their site, but they do not show their past confidence levels.

Well it looks like distrust (untrustingness? disgustingness?) seems to have paid off. On 4/9 the price was $348 and a confidence of 80%+, and as of today the price is $443 with a confidence of 58%. A $100 price increase in a month, and all the time their confidence is pretty high telling you that the price will be dropping.

On 4/22 I bought my tickets, for $373.80 after taxes and fees. I did not use Farecast to buy the tickets, I used Priceline, and I am happy with decision to buy then. I will continue to follow the standard advice: buy plane tickets as early as possible for the cheapest tickets. Hope this information helps some people out there.

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05-01-2007 - "HD-DVD Night" and Digg

malloc(); — Wed, 02 May 2007 05:37:02 GMT

Anyone visiting digg tonight was definitely in for a surprise. There are a few (hundreds? thousands? tens of thousands?) users that are angry with digg and their decision to take down a post earlier today. The post that was taken down contained the HD-DVD decryption key that can be used in Linux to watch HD-DVD movies. The original submitter has his story in more details here.

The users have now flooded digg with fake stories, each one attacking digg's decision to remove the story/key, and also publishing the key hundreds of times in the story and comments.

Is this the beginning of the end for digg?
- I doubt that. If you remember digg really became popular when Pairs Hilton's cell phone address book and pictures were released onto the web. That drew a lot of hits to their site, this will do the same.
Do I agree with what the digg admin did?
- Sad to say, but yes and no.
- One part of me knows that it is digg's site, the content of the posts are on their servers using their bandwidth, they have a right to restrict it how ever they want. They have to worry about being sued and losing their funding from investors.
- Then the other part of me wants stick it to DRM and the MPAA and go write some script that will auto digg up and post that contains that HD-DVD key in it.
Will the users really leave?
- This is the hard one (which is why I left it for last). My guess is that some will stop posting, digging stories, and being as active on the comments; but they will still read the stories as they come in on their rss feed.
- Others will not change their digging at all, they were just along for the ride. Mob mentality is always fun.
- There will be a very small number that never return to digg again. If only because there is still no good competitor or rival where you can get the broad range of news that is 'AMAZING', or 'GREATEST * EVER',

Tomorrow will be an important day, lets hope that digg does not do a
DELETE FROM stories WHERE text LIKE '%09 F9 % 88 C0%' or text LIKE '%09-F9-%-88-C0%'
I hope they leave every single post up there, with the number of diggs they received, as a reminder that their site is dependant on their users. That this can easily happen again, and that if they anger enough users, the site will suffer.

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Trusting your software

malloc(); — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 03:00:00 GMT

When you first use a new piece of software do you trust it right away, or does it need to earn your trust? The same goes for the code you write, are the kind of person who just re-reads some code and says "it will work" or do you doubt yourself until your unit tests are complete and all passing?

I'm the untrusting type, and when it comes to my code I rarely trust my unit tests at first. If I can't write perfect code on the first attempt (like all people), how can I think that my first attempt at testing that code would be perfect?

Some software I trust: Money, TurboTax, and Outlook. There are some things that these three apps have in common: they are desktop apps, they handle sensitive data, and they work both online and offline. When it comes to trusting web apps, I am must less trusting. There are still too many possible problems that happen with web:

when you have their email lost or deleted
when you get the very helpful 404 error message
when you try and visit any WordPress site that has just made it on the front page of Digg
when a website gets hacked to distribute a virus
when the server’s datacenter’s network goes down
when your cable/dsl does down
etc.

This brings me to Farecast. A relatively new website that claims that it can tell you the best time to buy airline tickets be studying historic price fluctuations in ticket prices to and from certain locations. As someone who has to make 5 trips back to NY this year (3 weddings, a graduation, and Christmas), I am visiting this website daily. Here is a screenshot of Farecast from today's search.

It wants me to wait for these tickets, but should I trust it? It does have the very popular 'Beta' tag on its logo, so that gives it free reign to make mistakes and say "It is Beta software, what do you expect". I will continue to check the site for these tickets for another week or so. Who knows, maybe after that week I can add another piece of trusted software to my list.

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and Yahoo gets better in my book

malloc(); — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 04:41:00 GMT

Like most people I have multiple accounts with the big three email services (Hotmail/live, gmail, yahoo). For my older Hotmail accounts, I still have the ability to use Outlook to connect to them for free. Gmail gives POP access, and reads everyone’s email, so my gmail accounts are setup in Outlook. Yahoo gives me nothing.

Can you guess from the previous paragraph which accounts I use more? I like Outlook, I use it more than any other app. It holds my to-do list, my shopping lists, my current tasks, calendar, contacts, etc. Always syncing with my HTC Apache, always syncing with the exchange server, always having its PST's and OST's backed up to both the Windows Home Server (on-site) and to Mozy (off-site).

For me to use an email account seriously I need to be able to have it show up in Outlook. That lets me have my emails backed up and archived with the rest of my emails. It lets me search over them using Windows Desktop Search. It lets them get pushed to my phone. It lets me easily forward them to other people using different email accounts, which is key when you have certain emails for certain tasks. Bringing these emails into Outlook makes them truly exist to me.

Yesterday Yahoo announced that it will soon offer unlimited email storage, excellent news for all people who use Yahoo mail. But today the news that the Yahoo Mail APIs, both SOAP and JSON will be free and available to all developers. This is very cool good news. First because Yahoo is still supporting SOAP web services, unlike others, and hasn't been completely overrun with web 2.0 madness. But secondly because this can (and hopefully will) bring in a lot of new developers to code against their API. T

I can't wait until someone writes a nice little .NET Outlook add-in that can connect to Yahoo and make it seem like Yahoo mail is being accessed through POP or IMAP. Have access to the storage of unlimited emails through Outlook and Desktop Search. I hope I don't have to wait for too long, because that is the kind of project that I might add to my list after my current one is completed.

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Greg the Architect - SOA This. SOA That.

malloc(); — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 02:33:00 GMT

Saw this at the latest Bay.NET user group meeting. Might as well start this blog off with something already popular.

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