Moonwatcher

AppleTV Update Adds AirTunes, 3rd-Party Remotes, Video Playlists, ...

From TUAW, AppleTV update 2.3 released:

• AirTunes Streaming from Apple TV - Music can be streamed via AirTunes to Airport Express speakers or other Apple TVs in your house.
  
• Third-party Remote Controls - Apple TV can now learn other remote controls and use them in addition to the Apple Remote.
  
• Playlists - Playlists in iTunes that contain Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, and Music Videos can now be seen on Apple TV.
  
• Music Volume Control - Support for volume control in Music.

Cool! I love my AppleTV, and will probably wind up using all of these features. In fact, I was bemoaning the lack of music volume control jut last weekend while I sat on my deck. Hopefully this feature will make it into the Remote iPhone app soon!

GData Now Compliant with AtomPub

The Official Google Gata APIs Blog carries word that the just-released GData 2.0 is fully compliant with the Atom Publishing Protocol. For feed-heads like me, this is good news.

It's been a while since I've written about RSS, Atom, AtomPub, and GData (which have all succeeded by become "invisible") on this blog but I still spend most of my time writing code that speaks GData on one end.

The biggest change is the use of ETags for versioning, which is just a more elegant way of doing something GData already does, but which finally lets clients override the "optimistic concurrency" versioning system altogether and tell servers "update (or delete) this resource no matter what version exists on the server".

This feature alone will save us quite a few API calls per day. (In fact, I think I'll put a counter on those today so I can see exactly how much this will impact us. I'll let you know what I find out. Update: This change will save us roughly 2 million GData API calls per day. Cool!)

Since Google "recommends migrating to v2 if you can, as any future improvements will be introduced to version 2 and higher" it looks like I'll be spending some time updating my code to speak GData 2.0.

Onward!

Business Planning, Horse, Barn Door

As I was reading John Hagel's post this morning on Pareto Paring (in a nutshell: applying the 80/20 rule to your business to figure out what to cut) a question occurred to me: Do any executives really only plan for sudden downturns after they happen?

Maybe I have a naive view, but I tend to assume that the executive management of any company has a model for their business that can take as inputs various economic factors and has as outputs the adjustments the company will need to make to remain at optimal production. I can assure you that ExxonMobil knows exactly how they would handle $20 oil. And $200 oil. And everything in between.

If you're running a business, do you find yourself reacting to the current economic crisis by looking around and wondering, "What do we do now?" If so, you should consider what you'll be doing when the situation changes dramatically yet again. Because if recent history is any indicator, the only constant we can count on is change. Big change.

No, the world didn't end

I haven't posted anything to this blog since Obama won, but that's only because I've been busy.

I'm getting ready to start my economics degree program at UT, and blogging about it at The 40-Year-Old Freshman. I'm also working hard on some stuff I'm super excited about at Spanning Sync. And, of course, I'm getting ready for the holiday season, which includes my kids' birthdays.

I have a bunch of blog posts queued up in the back of my brain, but they seem to get crowded off the calendar by actual work. The good news there is that I'll have some pretty awesome work-related stuff to share in the not-too-distant future.

Obama Wins the White House

Nicely done, America. Now let's get to work.

Live Election Results

Purchased: AppZapper

Thanks to a tip from @yojibee, I just tried and then immediately purchased AppZapper. Most excellent for uninstalling software that doesn't want to be uninstalled—like the resource-hogging Adobe Reader and Adobe Update. My MacBook Pro now starts up waaay faster.

From the AppZapper site:

AppZapper is for people who want to confidently try new apps while knowing they can uninstall them easily. Drag one or more unwanted apps onto AppZapper and watch as it finds all the extra files and lets you delete them with a single click.

Highly recommended.

Update: Already referred another customer. Where's my commission? :-)

Neal Stephenson on Entrepreneurship

"...the idea being that all the training in the world was of no use, maybe even worse than useless, if you did not know when to use it, and knowing when to use it was a lot harder than it sounded, because sometimes, if you waited too long to go into action, it was too late, and other times, if you did it too early, you only made matters worse."

—Neal Stephenson, Anathem, p. 490

OK, maybe he isn't talking about entrepreneurship per se, but it certainly seems applicable.

Google Groups' Great New Anti-Spam Feature

We use Google Groups for the Spanning Sync discussion forum, and until recently spam had become a serious nuisance. To weed it out, I had enabled message moderation, but I was still spending an inordinate amount of time deleting spam messages and banning users (who were probably using one-time accounts anyway).

Then Google did something wonderful. They added a "Spam" category to the moderation panel, which lets me quickly delete the message, ban the user who posted it from the group, and allow everything else—all with just a couple of clicks. Nice!

Thanks, Google!