George V. Reilly's Technical BLog : General

Cozi Mobile is in beta

george_v_reilly — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 07:08:45 GMT

Since the summer, I've been working on and off on a mobile site for Cozi. Chris, one of our interns, did a lot of the initial work. Getting it to a deployable state has been my primary focus over the last few weeks.

I'm happy to say that as of today m.cozi.com is in public beta. Will wrote a little about it at the Cozi Blog; take a look at the promo.

Currently, the mobile site supports shopping lists and the calendar. In the calendar, you can view, create, and edit your appointments. On the shopping page, you can update your shopping lists and cross off items as you move through the store.

Enjoy!

Hardware Lazarus

george_v_reilly — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:21:07 GMT

My formerly trusty Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 camera went berserk one night in September. The zoom lens wedged open and nothing I did would persuade it to retract into the case or take more photos. The zoom had grown a little tempermental in the preceding month, but I didn't expect catastrophic failure.

The other hardware failure was far more upsetting.

From Christmas until August, I ripped most of our CD collection with Exact Audio Copy to FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). Since FLAC is lossless and open source, I figured I'd never need to rip the CDs again. I also wrote a Python script to convert the FLACs to MP3s with LAME, since MP3s are far smaller and all players handle MP3s. I stored the FLACs on a Maxtor OneTouch III drive, twin 750GB SATA drives configured as NTFS on mirrored RAID 1.

A few minutes changing CDs here and there; a few more minutes entering album metadata into Readerware AW. Over the months, it really added up: 775 albums, 250 GB of FLACs, 45GB of MP3s. The MP3s were replicated on several machines, but the FLACs and the Readerware AW database were stored only on the OneTouch's mirrored drives. This drive became my primary backup solution. When I had copied the latest data to it, I'd power it down and store it in the fire safe.

You can guess what's coming next. The OneTouch stopped working one day. Refused to do a damn thing on any machine that I connected it to. I was very unhappy.

I was going to return it to Maxtor, until I read the fine print. They'd replace it, but they'd send me back different drives and would make no attempt to get the data off the old drives.

Well, that was completely unacceptable! I found the Maxtor OneTouch III disassembly guide online, but didn't get around to doing anything about it until tonight. I bought two 3.5" external enclosures at Fry's yesterday. A couple of hours ago, I voided the warranty by prising the case off, extracting the drives, and putting them into the enclosures.

They worked! Both of them appear to be fine and the data is accessible. Until tonight, I wasn't completely sure that I would be able to get the data off the disks even if they were okay. I had visions of having to extract sectors and rebuild the files by hand.

Presumably it's the RAID controller or something else in the Maxtor case that died. I'm going to throw that piece of crap away. One of the drives is undergoing a full chkdsk; the other will get the same treatment tomorrow.

Not only that, but I also plugged the camera in for the first time since it had died. The battery had completely drained and I had to reset the clock. And now it's decided to work too. I'm not sure that I trust it, but should it die again, it's no great loss.

Cozi is Hiring

george_v_reilly — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:36:06 GMT

Cozi is hiring. We have positions for Developers and Web Developers.

We're a small Web 2.0 startup, based in the Smith Tower in downtown Seattle. Our Cozi Central product is groupware for families: it helps parents manage their own and their kids' schedules, shopping lists, and reminders, from computers, PDAs, and mobile phones.

If you're interested, let me know.

Update: we have some non-developer positions too.

Google Transit

george_v_reilly — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 03:11:03 GMT

I experimented with Google's new service, Google Transit.

It suggested this route for traveling from my home to my work:

 Begin by walking
 1   Start at 4XXX 13th Ave S
 2   Go to Airport Way S & S Industrial Way (takes about 7 mins)

 Take the King County Metro 131 (Direction: NORTH)
 3   7:17pm leave from Airport Way S & S Industrial Way
 4   7:24pm arrive at 4th Ave S & S Jackson St

 End by walking
 5   Go to 315 5th Ave S (takes about 2 mins)

This fails badly in two respects.

First, four bus routes run along 15th Avenue S, two blocks east of my house: the 39, the 32, the 36, and the 60. The 39 drops me one block from work at 4th & Jackson. The 60 leaves me at 12th & Jackson. The 36 only runs along 15th after 7pm; earlier than that, I a 10-minute walk to Beacon Ave. And the 32 is an express bus that only runs at rush hour.

Second, it suggests that it's a seven-minute walk to Airport Way S & S Industrial Way. Actually, it's a two-mile walk, because I-5 and the railroad are in the way. You have the unpleasant choices of walking north to Spokane Street and climbing down an endless set of stairs at the freeway onramp, or south to the Lucile St bridge. And even if there were a direct route, it would take at least 10 minutes to walk down there.

That said, it integrates very nicely with Google Maps.

The Google Transit page links to Metro Trip Planner, which does a better job. Their disambiguation of addresses sucks, however. Try entering 5th & Jackson. It suggests a short list, starting with 5TH AVE S & S JACKSON ST (in SEATTLE). However, if you actually type that address into the main page, it offers you a long list of suggestions. In other words, it can't consume its own output.

Writing Clearly

george_v_reilly — Mon, 15 May 2006 06:56:00 GMT

I sometimes joke that I must be adopted because my parents have no aptitude for computers. I could make a similar joke about writing. Many of my immediate family, despite decent educations, seem to be incapable of writing a simple English sentence, much less a coherent paragraph.

One relative writes emails that are bereft of punctuation: neither a comma nor a full stop (period) is to be found. Capital letters occur, but too randomly for my liking. And everything is linked into one paragraph, no matter how long or disjointed. Yet, I've received adequately punctuated handwritten letters and postcards from him. I attribute his email slovenliness to a combination of laziness and hunt-and-peck typing. Whatever the cause, it reflects poorly on him.

John Scalzi has some Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don't Want to Work at Writing. Here's the summary:

Speak what you write ... If what you're writing is hard to speak, what makes you think it's going to be easy to read? It won't be. ...
Punctuate, damn you: For God's sake, is it really so hard to know where to put a comma? ...
With sentences, shorter is better than longer.
Learn to friggin' spell.
Don't use words you don't really know.
Grammar matters, but not as much as anal grammar Nazis think it does.
Front-load your point.
Try to write well every single time you write.
Read people who write well.
When in doubt, simplify.
Speak what you write.

Go read the whole thing.

I found some useful links in the comments that follow Scalzi's Tips:

One Simple Rules: Use the Active Voice
Commas, Commas, and More Commas, for when you've mastered the preceding rules.

And here's a few tips of my own:

One thought per paragraph. Run-on paragraphs offend me and annoy me. If a paragraph has more than four sentences, it's probably too long.
Pick up something that was written by a competent writer who you enjoy and analyze a page. Why did they choose to break sentences where they did? Why are the commas placed where they are? Do the paragraph breaks make sense? What about the word choice? Did it clearly and succinctly convey their ideas, their tone? (Hell, just analyze this post.)
Think before you write. Before you dive in headlong, what is it you're trying to convey? This doesn't have to take you very long. A few seconds before a short email is enough.
Reread what you wrote, before you send it off. Revising mistakes is so easy on a computer that you have no excuse for not bothering.

This isn't enough to turn you into a professional writer, but it will make a marked improvement in what you write.

Business Week Covers Atlas On Demand

george_v_reilly — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:38:00 GMT

The latest issue of BusinessWeek covers Atlas On Demand, the product that I've worked on for the last six months, in a piece called TV Eyeballs Close-Up

Ever since the advent of commercial television, advertisers have wondered exactly what they get for the megabucks they spend on 30-second spots. After all, the networks and cable companies offer only a crude approximation of who is watching what. With such thin information, advertisers can't target specific neighborhoods or consumer tastes. As for converting ads directly to sales, well, that's virtually impossible. Yet the Web, with its sophisticated per-click metrics, does all of that billions of times a day. "The problem," says Yankee Group analyst Aditya Kishore, "is that there's not enough math in [the TV] business."

But aQuantive Inc. (AQNT ) aims to change that. ... Despite the hoopla about advertisers moving online, the $70 billion television ad market dwarfs the Web business 5 to 1. Says aQuantive CEO Brian P. McAndrews, once an ABC executive: "TV is the largest medium out there."

...

That's why aQuantive is taking baby steps. Starting in June, the company's Atlas on Demand unit will begin testing technology that measures video-on-demand (VOD) viewers for Charter Communications Inc. (CHTR ) VOD's Web-like interactivity is what sold aQuantive. Besides, the medium is taking off, with digital cable now in 25 million homes, far ahead of TiVo's 4.4 million.

By gathering data from the same set-top boxes viewers use to order shows and movies, Atlas on Demand plans to figure out how many people watched a show and when, as well as how many watched the ads vs. skipped them. From there, company executives hope to help advertisers determine precisely how much attention their money buys. "You know people watch Lost," says John Chandler, Atlas on Demand senior analyst. "[Now] you'll know if they watch the ad."

...
Proponents of VOD hope the medium will become as interactive as the Web itself, allowing viewers to get discount offers, enter contests, and even buy stuff. Burger King is considering running ads offering drive-through deals to late-night VOD viewers. Such ads could be priced based on the number of leads or sales they generate rather than the number of viewers they attract. "The intersection of video on demand and interactive TV is the next frontier," says Time Warner Cable (TWX ) Executive Vice-President Peter C. Stern. "I look for it to emerge in 2007."

...

Despite myriad challenges, the cable guys have little choice but to become more Web-like. Every other day, it seems, marks the launch of yet another ad-supported online channel. Karl Siebrecht, Atlas' general manager, bets Web video will become a major ad market sooner than VOD, but he says on-demand TV eventually will be bigger. He and the other Atlas folks don't care whether the next great video market is TV or the Web. They plan to make money either way.

Read the full article here.

By the way, the Atlas On Demand team is hiring. We have current and future openings for a dev manager and for senior developers. There are other openings at Atlas in Seattle too: look at the Atlas Careers page.

If you want to send résumés through me, email me at George.Reilly @ AtlasSolutions.com

Are you Ready.Gov?

george_v_reilly — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 03:14:00 GMT

A friend sent me a Word document with a parody of the Department of Homeland Security's Ready.Gov website. I googled and found an HTML copy of the parody here.

If you are sprayed with an unknown substance, stand and think about a cool design for a new tattoo.

Seriously, there is some useful information on Ready.Gov. Which reminds me that Emma and I are long overdue in putting together some disaster planning.

Here are some links that I put together a while back:

If there's any lesson that should be learned from Katrina, it's that you need to have your own disaster plan in place.

16-digit credit card numbers

george_v_reilly — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 00:48:00 GMT

I cannot look at a 16-digit credit card number and tell whether I've mistyped it or not. And neither can anyone else. I can, however, easily examine four separate four-digit numbers and spot typos.

1341329913245890 or 1341 3299 1324 5890? The choice is obvious. Yet most websites will not accept anything but the 16-digit string. It's a trivial matter to strip the spaces and normalize the credit card number, and it speaks to the incompetence of many website developers that they don't do this. The cognitive burden should be pushed onto the programmer, not the user.

On a related note, Irish people write phone numbers as a seven-digit string. I can't parse 6274986 at a glance either, but I can parse the US-style form, 627-4986.

A picture is worth a thousand words

george_v_reilly — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 05:51:00 GMT

See what Thunderbird 1.5 RC 1's spelling checker flags as misspelled words.

Seems to be a known bug.

XML Scripts -- for the theatre

george_v_reilly — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 14:55:00 GMT

For the last three years, I've been involved with The Wild Geese Players of Seattle, an amateur group that does readings of Irish literature, particularly the works of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. Our big event every year is Bloomsday, June 16th, commemorating Joyce's Ulysses, which takes place on June 16th, 1904. It's a tale of a Jewish everyman, Leopold Bloom, wandering through Dublin one day, and of the young writer (and Joyce's alter ego), Stephen Dedalus. We're working our way through the book, reading a chapter or two each year. In this, our eighth year, we'll be reading Chapter 11, "Sirens" at the Brechemin Auditorium in the School of Music at the University of Washington, on Thursday 16th and Saturday 18th. Congressman Jim McDermott will be reading the part of Bloom on the Saturday.

Last year and this year, I have been the assistant dramaturge, helping to turn chapters into a script to be read by 15-20 readers. In previous years, the director made a photocopy of the book, wrote attributions ("Narrator 1", "Bloom", "Stephen", etc) on the paper, then photocopied that text and handed it out to the readers. Since the script was a moving target, everyone ended up with a set of scruffy, tatty, inconsistently hand-annotated sheets. It was a mess.

I knew there had to be a better way. Now, we've adapted the etext of the 1922 Paris Edition, prepared by Project Gutenberg, which saves a lot of typing. The script is marked up in XML and styled with XSLT to produce an HTML page. After a rehearsal or two, when it's apparent that the script isn't quite right, it's an easy matter to make a few changes, render fresh HTML, and print new scripts.

The XSLT required is fairly straightforward. About the only mildly interesting thing is defining one template in terms of another; e.g., I want all the speakers to share the same styling, so I defined a parameterized speaker template:

    <xsl:template name="speaker">
        <xsl:param name="name" />
        <div class="speaker">
            <span class="speaker"><xsl:value-of select="$name"/>: </span>
            <xsl:apply-templates />
        </div>
    </xsl:template>

which is called thus:

    <xsl:template match="bloom">
        <xsl:call-template name="speaker">
            <xsl:with-param name="name">Bloom</xsl:with-param>
        </xsl:call-template>
    </xsl:template>

The real challenge in preparing the script is dramaturgical. Ulysses is a notoriously difficult and dense text, woven through with Bloom's stream-of-consciousness interior monologue. Each chapter is written in a different style. Sirens, for example, has musical themes running through it, and we'll be accompanied by a piano player this year.

What would you do with this?

Bloom heard a jing, a little sound. He's off. Light sob of breath Bloom sighed on the silent bluehued flowers. Jingling. He's gone. Jingle. Hear.

Here's what we came up with:

N1: Bloom heard a jing, a little sound.
Bloom: He's off.
N1: Light sob of breath Bloom sighed on the silent bluehued flowers. Jingling.
Bloom: He's gone.
N1: Jingle.
Bloom: Hear.

Or with this paragraph?

--Yes, Mr Bloom said, teasing the curling catgut line. It certainly is. Few lines will do. My present. All that Italian florid music is. Who is this wrote? Know the name you know better. Take out sheet notepaper, envelope: unconcerned. It's so characteristic.

We chose this:

Bloom (Aloud): Yes.
N1: Mr Bloom said, teasing the curling catgut line.
Bloom (Aloud): It certainly is.
Bloom: Few lines will do. My present.
Bloom (Aloud): All that Italian florid music is.
Bloom: Who is this wrote? Know the name you know better. Take out sheet notepaper, envelope: unconcerned.
Bloom (Aloud): It's so characteristic.

We ended up with three narrators in this chapter: N1 deals with Bloom, primarily; N2 is mostly for Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, the siren barmaids; and N3 handles the other characters.

Lest I scare you off, much of the chapter is quite clear and often very funny, even for people who are unfamiliar with the book.

The James Joyce Portal is a good starting point for matters Joycean.

dasBlog vs. Community Server

george_v_reilly — Mon, 16 May 2005 11:45:00 GMT

I've set up a new personal blog at www.georgevreilly.com/blog. I'll be posting non-technical stuff there and I'll be cross-posting on technical matters to Weblogs @ ASP.net. Here's how I ended up running dasBlog on the new blog.

In the spring of last year, I attempted to install both .Text and dasBlog on my XP Pro laptop. I failed, signally, to get either one working. The details have mercifully faded with time, leaving me only with a residue of frustration.

I've been meaning to put some photos of mine up on the web for a while. A week ago, I went to download nGallery, as I remembered hearing good things about it in the past. I learned that nGallery is now part of Community Server (as is .Text). After navigating through the somewhat confusing portal, I downloaded a copy of Community Server 1.0.

Then I spent several frustrating hours trying to get it running on my laptop. Community Server requires a SQL Server back-end, but you can also use MSDE, the standalone Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine, which comes without a GUI. I downloaded MSDE and the SQL Web Data Administrator, as well as MSDE Query. I can spell "SQL", but that's about where my knowledge of SQL stops. I tried to follow the instructions to create the database tables. I did manage to create the master table, but I could not figure out how to set the various permissions that the instructions demanded. I googled extensively and looked through the archived forums at CommunityServer.org and SqlJunkies.com, to no avail.

Really! If I can't figure this stuff out, most people are never going to get Community Server running on their own systems. Don't get me wrong. Community Server/.Text is a good blogging system, if you can surmount the barriers to entry. I'm a competent, skilled developer, but I've never needed to learn SQL, and I wasn't motivated enough to dig further.

(I've since realized that my hosting package at iHostSites includes MySql, but not SQL Server, so this would have been all for naught. I think. Double aargh!)

I gave up on Community Server in frustration, and decided to fall back to nGallery. I got nGallery installed and running easily enough. Alas, it was flaky and it was all too easy to get ASP.net throwing unhandled exceptions back at me. I spend too much of my life troubleshooting other people's bugs, and I wasn't prepared to invest any more time on this avenue.

At this point, I googled for "web album software" and came up with JAlbum. I'm much happier with JAlbum. It worked flawlessly as soon as I ran it and it's versatile. Photos will start appearing on my personal website, www.GeorgeVReilly.com, soon.

Yesterday, I decided to give dasBlog another try. That was altogether more successful. I did not manage to get it running on my laptop, but I did get it running on a XP Pro desktop system, as well as on my public website. I did have a little difficulty getting it to run on my desktop system, but that went away as soon as I ran aspnet_regiis -i to reset ASP.net.

I'm not sure why it doesn't run on my laptop, but the enormous amount of stuff that I've installed on this system surely plays a role. Indeed that may have been the reason why nGallery puked on my laptop. Someday, I'm going to have to flatten the system and reinstall only the important stuff.

Net results:

Album software: JAlbum 1, nGallery 0.

Blogging software: dasBlog 1, Community Server 0.

The Curse has been reversed

george_v_reilly — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 22:27:00 GMT

I was at the Seattle Opera on Wednesday evening, to see Rigoletto. It's the tale of a hunchbacked jester who is put under a curse for tormenting an old man.

During the intermission, a voice comes over the PA, saying:

Ladies and Gentlemen! At least one curse has been reversed! The Red Sox just won the World Series.

Welcome to my new blog

george_v_reilly — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 20:33:00 GMT

Welcome to my new blog. I had another blog at EraBlog, but it sank into disuse several months ago.

I've been attempting to get dasBlog up on my laptop, before moving it to my website, but I've run into all sorts of configuration difficulties.

I've given up on dasBlog for now, as I'm off on vacation. Instead I decided to take advantage of my status as a former Microsoft employee who worked on the IIS dev team for seven years, and get a blog hosted here on weblogs.asp.net. Thanks to Scott Watermasysk for setting it up for me.

I had some difficulty in getting w.bloggar to post here. I found Scott's w.bloggar configuration instructions, which got me started, but was missing some details, so I couldn't post successfully. I figured out how to fill out the Custom tab on the Accounts properties, then found Scott's Desktop Blogging Article, which confirmed my findings. I could now post, but my test posts were not showing up in the front page of this blog; only in the admin interface. If I used the Advanced Options to set the Published flag, they appeared on the front page. Some email to Scott elicited the fact that I needed to use the Post & Publish button, not the Post button that I was used to from EraBlog.