Moonwatcher

Really? 96MB for a Printer Driver?

I can't imagine the depth of corporate and engineering depravity that leads to a printer driver download weighing in a 96 megabytes. Where did the printer industry go off the rails?

Give me back my ImageWriter!

Violator? Multitouch?

Why is this image file on the Apple Store site named "violator-multitouch.png"?

Creepy!

Upadte: A reader tells me that a "violator' is a sticker that goes on a product box, like "New Version 1.2". I learn something new every day.

Embeddable Timelines from Dipity

You can now embed interactive timelines created in the Dipity facebook app anywhere you can put HTML:

Nice!

Prepping for MacBook Pro Surgery

I've needed a bigger hard drive in my laptop for a long time. Yesterday (via the most excellent dealnews) I found a Western Digital 2.5" 320GB drive for $160 shipped and ordered one immediately.

When it arrives I'll install it in my MacBook Pro using iFixit's illustrated guide and a Torx screwdriver I ordered a few days ago. The procedure isn't for the faint of heart, as shown in the video below, but I've done a lot of this kind of work (I once installed a modem in a PowerBook Duo 250—yikes!) so I'm confident I'm up to the task.

I might go ahead and upgrade the wireless card to 802.11n while I have the case open. Hmm.

Update: I've completed the procedure, and it wasn't as tough as I thought it might be. Copying all of my data onto the new drive took a lot longer than the physical replacement did. BTW, I've updated the iFixit link above to point to their MacBook Pro guide instead of the version for the plain old MacBook.

Could It Be? An Airline That Actually... Cares?!

A few days ago I wrote a post about jetBlue's new nonstop route between Austin and San Francisco. Later that morning, I got a message from Morgan Johnston at jetBlue, extolling the virtues of the E190 aircraft they're flying for that route. Wow.

I fly a lot, and deal with a lot of airlines. And while there an individual exceptions I can say from experience that as a general rule, airlines don't listen to their customers. When they do, it's under extreme circumstances, like when Vinnie Mirchandani—with 2.5 million lifetime miles on Delta—sends an email directly to the CFO of the airline. But this was different.

As far as Morgan knows, I'm just some blogger banging away at my keyboard in my pajamas. (Which, at the moment, happens to be true. Ah yes, life is good.) I only have 36 TrueBlue points. I'm certainly not Vinnie. And I didn't send an email to anyone.

The fact that jetBlue is listening—and responding—puts them head and shoulders above any other airline in my book. And I can guarantee you this: the next time I need to go to San Francisco, it will be on jetBlue.

Scrounging for a SXSW Badge

OK I waited waaay too long, didn't get on any panels, and now find myself without a SXSW badge. I'm really only interested in the parties and there's no way I'm paying $450 for that.

Anyone out there in Moonwatcherland have an extra Interactive badge?

Tracking Google Tracking You

Google has a nifty feature called Web History that keeps track of not only your Google searches but also some of the pages you visit, presumably those containing AdSense, Google Analytics, or other Google scripts.

This can be useful for finding pages you've visited before and can also provide a fascinating perspective on what you've been doing. For instance, looking over my history I see that in the past few days I've searched for, among literally hundreds of other things:

• best mac cad software for architects (hoping to free my wife from AutoCAD)
• php importStylesheet segfault (PHP 5.2.5 has an XSLT crashing bug)
• "charlie wood" site:zdnet.com (looking for a specific article I was quoted in)
• average marathon footfalls (just curious)

But I must admit, all this creeps me out a little bit. Google remembers every search I've made since June 2005—all 15,662 of them—not to mention thousands of web pages I've visited. I'm sure this makes the quality of my search results somewhat better, but to me that's just too much information.

If you're interested in tracking exactly what Google is tracking about you in Web History, you can subscribe to a feed: https://www.google.com/history/?output=rss. Just enter your Google account name and password when prompted by your feed reader. (If you use Google Reader, which doesn't support secure feeds, you're out of luck. Try NetNewsWire.)

If on the other hand you simply want to opt out, Google lets you do that too. Just go to Google Web History, follow the "Remove items" link, and choose "Clear entire web history". This will delete your history and pause collection of any new data until you tell it to resume.

Competition Finally Comes to the AUS-SFO Route

This morning the Statesman carries the news that jetBlue will start flying nonstop between Austin and San Francisco in May. Currently, there's only one nonstop for that route, which makes for an expensive ticket.

Granted, choosing jetBlue means you'll be squeezed into a regional jet instead of the Airbus A320 that United flies for the route, but at least it's an Embraer 190, whose "double-bubble" fuselage is a lot taller and therefore more comfortable than most RJ's.

The new flight's schedule is also a win, departing AUS at 6:55pm and SFO at 8:30am. This complement's United's nonstop nicely, which departs AUS at 8:00am and SFO at 11:00am. Essentially, this means less wasted time on the road.

As an Austinite who visits the Bay Area frequently (with a roughly 50/50 SFO/SJC split) I'm very glad to see some competition come to this route. It should certainly bring prices down. And hopefully the flight will become popular enough to merit a full-sized aircraft.

Update: Morgan Johnston from jetBlue sent me a message in response to this post pointing out that, "the leg room in the E190s is still equal to or better than all but a handful of coach seats across the domestic carriers," and that, "[with] our great service, DirectTV, XM Radio, and the knowledge that you'll never get stuck in a middle seat - the E190s are often the preferred aircraft for our customers."

Morgan's points are all valid, and as I said in my reply, I think the E190 is a fine aircraft. But I'm even more impressed that someone from jetBlue actually responded. Could it be? An airline that actually... cares?!

Great Platforms are Large and Growing

In a post last week about Google as a Platform Partner I listed some of the things that make Google's platform in general, and Google Calendar in particular, attractive to me as a third-party developer. But I left something out. At the risk of stating the obvious, without a large and growing number of users already on a platform, apps built on that platform have little chance of success.

I was reminded of this simple fact this morning as I was reading Paul Buchheit's blog. Paul was the original developer of Gmail, and is now at FriendFeed. (He's also famously responsible for Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto.) In a recent post, Paul quotes Marc Andreessen's Guide to Startups:

I'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure. Why? In a great market—a market with lots of real potential customers—the market pulls product out of the startup.

So how do you find a great platform? (I think it's fair to substitute "platform" for "market" when talking about horizontal applcations.) Using Marc's definition, you look for one with lots of real potential customers. The "lots" part is easy: you're looking for a large number of users. But Lotus Notes has lots of customers and, with apologies to Ed Brill, I wouldn't suggest a startup develop for it. It has few "real potential customers", which to me is indicated by growth.

Before we decided to create Spanning Sync, I had been building various services on the Salesforce.com platform. I was intrigued by Google's new Calendar application and its even newer API, and decided to bet that it would provide fertile ground for application development. I started working on a service that would sync Salesforce.com and Google Calendar. It was a technically interesting project, and was proving to be a popular idea. In fact, Salesforce asked me to speak about GData at their annual DreamForce event.

I didn't know how many users Google Calendar had, but I knew it was a large and growing number. But at some point it occurred to me that Salesforce had fewer than a million users (and perversely, only a fraction of them are even allowed access to the Salesforce API), and while their growth was impressive, that absolute number of users was still relatively low.

The other platform I used on a daily basis—Mac OS X—had roughly 25 million users with growth that CNET called "nothing short of spectacular". So I put the Salesforce sync project on hold (and later passed it off to a consulting firm) and shifted my focus to syncing Apple iCal and Google Calendar. That turned out to be a good decision.

I attribute much of the success of Spanning Sync to the fact that the two platforms on which it's built—Apple's and Google's—are both large and growing. But there's another platform factor that I think was absolutely critical to ours success. I'll write about that next time. Right now I have to fix a bug relating to canceled detached events and refresh syncs.

Quote for the Day

Naturally the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

— Hermann Göring, at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II