My profile URL [profiles.google.com/kominetz] now redirects to plus.google.com/{ugly-long-id}. I’m not sure I like the implication of this, because I use my profile for OpenID, and I’d like to use it as a homepage that links to everything so I can just tell people “go there, and you’ll find me anywhere I am on the Internet.” That URL going away would make me rather unhappy.

Buzz is still a tab there, but it seems totally disconnected from Google+. It might be good to have some separation between Buzz and Posts because they post/notification frequency on Buzz can be pretty high on a Google Reader catch-up day, but Buzz feels too disconnected–and somewhat redundant. Also, oddly, there’s no RSS feed on the Buzz, tab but there is on the Posts tab. I don’t pay attention to things on the web that don’t have feeds.

Finally, I just noticed that the would-have-been convenient “Send an Email” button on my profiles/plus page only works if I’m signed into another Google account. That’s probably a spam avoidance tactic, but it’s still a let-down since I was hoping to use it as my About/Contact page that doesn’t expose my email address.

Reposted manually from Google+ since it can’t do that …

Reposted from Google+.

I’ve been satisfied with the free account so far but haven’t taken Evernote to the next level because tools like OmniFocus, VoodooPad, and Google Docs are more integrated into my daily routine. That might change a little thanks to The Evernote Podcast. A podcast about a single app? I couldn’t imagine having enough to say about Evernote in a long-form podcast; something short form like Quick and Dirty Tips might make more sense. Then again, a show about nothing could be entertaining from time to time. I gave it a try, and it paid off.

Podcast #10 mentioned how to send blog posts from Google Reader to Evernote, a way to archive entire articles without leaving Reader. I live in Reader, so the odds of me using Evernote more–and listening to more Evernote podcasts–just shot up dramatically, especially because I added The Evernote Blogcast to Reader. The feed includes links to the podcasts, so I’ll probably delete the iTunes subscription and listen from the web when a summary catches my attention.

The podcast also mentioned using Evernote data as a screen saver since each note has a thumbnail image rendition. It’s not terribly practical since I can’t imagine anybody (sober) watching their screen savers anymore; flying toasters are so 20th century. Still, it’s a neat hack, and chance picked a relevant reminder about last week’s gay rights victory in New York and tomorrow’s distinctly Philadelphian holiday:

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.

– John Stuart Mill

How to use Evernote as a Screen Saver in Mac OS X:

1. Open “System Preferences”, choose the “Desktop & Screensaver” icon, and choose the “Screen Saver” option in the tabby thingie.
2. Click on the “+” under Screen Savers pane and choose “Add folder of pictures”.
3. Navigate to “{HOME}/Library/Application Support/Evernote”, choose the data folder, and leave that folder selected in the Screen Savers pane.
4. Choose the middle option from the Display Style option bar.

GooglePlus is dominating my RSS feeds today. My excitement about Circles has faded a little because of articles like this:

Google Plus’ Circles System May Not be Sustainable — ReadWriteWeb

I posted an abridged version of the following in the article’s comments:

Good categorization is an expertise most people lack: “Work” isn’t particularly meaningful, but “Coworkers”, “Headhunters”, and “Professional Acquaintances” are. It’s more work to apply and maintain a richer taxonomy, and I’d imagine even fewer people will get equivalently greater value from such effort in social networking. We’ve been trained away from finding exactly what we want by the search-and-browse approach of unstructured searches like Google, so wading through irrelevancy is a more common skill.

Grouping mechanisms in other social networking systems also have upkeep problems; I suspect most people just don’t bother doing it, and the same will probably be true with GooglePlus. Maybe adding a feature to display circles as Venn diagrams would help data geeks like me.  For most people, public versus private might be just enough categorization to avoid social networking faux pas without making the posting process feel like taking the SAT.

Existing social networks don’t have the concept of categorization on both ends, posting and reading, and I wonder if GooglePlus Circles has the same deficiency because it hides the names of circles I’ve been added to. I’d like to subscribe to (and filter out) people’s circles instead of people themselves to control the noise of their posts about unshared interests; I’d probably disagree with how most of my non-professional acquaintances would categorize me. It doesn’t sound like GooglePlus makes the distinction of subscribing to people’s interests or topics instead of people themselves. Relevancy has to be a two-way street.

Or, perhaps, a four-way intersection.

GooglePlus Venn: Relevancy is an Intersection

With all those brainy data geeks at Google, I’m optimistic that they could create a Venn diagram of Circles, Sparks, +1′s, Reader Likes/Shares that could define social graph relevancy in that oh-so-Google statistical way. How many licks would it take to get to the center of that tasty relevancy tootsie-pop?  Lots, probably, but it creates a new kind of payoff that Twitter and Facebook are incapable of delivering.

Hey, Google, are you listening?

On a related note, I tried posting my comment using my Twitter account. Twitter on the web is totally brain-dead about multiple identities, so of course I posted my comment using the wrong account. It’s a perfect example of the mis-post problem I referenced in the preceding post. Then I reposted my comment using Google, and Disqus allowed me to choose from the three Google accounts I’m logged into right now. Google gets the issues of identity and context more than anybody else in the field, so I’m (somewhat) optimistic about GooglePlus.

Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web.

This isn’t just about hiding potentially embarrassing facts from prospective employers; it’s about targeting content to the audiences that are most likely to find it interesting. Current social media systems like Twitter and Facebook don’t get this. With Twitter in particular, I try to work around it by having a half dozen Twitter accounts. I restrict who I follow and what I post by account based on theme–personal, professional, gaming, etc. Hacks like this make for more work and are prone to mis-posts; it’s as discouraging to posting as wading through live-tweeted baseball games or diaper anecdotes are to reading.

Identity is also an issue as services like Facebook and LinkedIn expose our real-life names to the virtual world, something I experience more acutely because of this eponymously-named blog and professionally-oriented Twitter account.  I can’t prevent noise in my professional channel no matter how clever and diligent I am when less savvy friends and relatives can’t remember to use my personal non-eponymous identity for personal messages. Social search, realtime results, and consolidated logins will make this everybody’s problem in a few years.

Google’s social networking track record isn’t great; i.e., Orkut, Buzz, and Wave. It looks like Google+ doesn’t suffer from the lack of look-and-feel sophistication that may have hampered earlier efforts, and features like Circles address some of the fundamental design flaws in established products. However, the better product doesn’t always win, and Google will have to convince people to leave existing services. That’s a Catch 22 because the value of a network depends on its size, and it’s compounded because members of those networks don’t understand issues of identity, privacy, and relevance.

Call me cynical, but I think the odds are stacked against Google+. How many people realize the value of regular backups before losing everything to crashed disks or lost laptops? Those same people won’t realize why leaving Facebook for Google+ makes sense until they lose jobs or spouses for lack of caring. Please, Google, prove me wrong.

I’ve been clamoring for something better than the mouse for more than a decade. My ideal interface would unite action with result to eliminate the perceptual disconnect between moving my hand in one place and seeing the result in another. The iPhone was the first thing in all that time to feel like a real breakthrough along those lines, and I think there’s much personal computer interfaces can learn from touch on phones and tablets. That doesn’t mean copy them verbatim and proclaim previous paradigms completely invalid.

The second half of Erick Schonfeld’s TechCrunch article on Windows 8 [Windows 8 Is Gorgeous, But Is It More Than Just A Shell?] claims the mouse is dead. I beg to differ. Touch interfaces like this have their uses, but they also have limitations because they are content consumption oriented.  It’s not that we’re living in a post-mouse era: we’re living in a post-one-size-fits-all era, i.e., the Windows Everywhere Era.  Touch interfaces will not obliterate mice and trackpads for the following reasons.

IMPRECISION: The finger is an imprecise pointing device when pixels matter.  Although I don’t have fat fingers, it’s rather difficult for me to finger a single pixel on a good monitor with 100 pixels per inch–let alone the Retina Display’s 326 PPI. You can select an image that way, but you can’t draw one.  It’s not just being more precise; pointing devices can transform imprecise hand movements into a variety of precision levels on screen. I love mice that let me dial up the resolution for fine work or dial it down when flailing around in a game.

OBSTRUCTION: With touch interfaces, fingers block sight of a substantial number of pixels during touch activities, interfering with the realization of a realtime respond-where-you-act interface like touch. That’s not an issue when tapping a built-big tile to select something but it’s a big problem for precision movement or tracking.

INEFFICIENCY: Sometimes editing text requires switching between mouse and keyboard despite a keyboard jockey’s mastery of keyboard shortcuts. Current pointing devices live within the same range of motion as the keyboard so it’s a small, less disruptive gesture. Now imagine reaching from keyboard to the screen to drag-select or reposition a cursor; the gods of time-and-motion studies will not be pleased. Maybe laptops would fare better than desktops with Windows 8, but it also might add to the ergonomic train wreck they’ve become.

SMUDGINESS: People touching monitors is a huge pet peeve of mine. I’m a little more smudge tolerant with my iPhone, but I can’t imagine what my monitor would look like after just one working lunch on Windows 8. Just thinking about this makes me want to rush into the bathroom and wash my hands.

Touch technologies have existed for decades, and I think that the iPhone APIs ushered in this new era, not the hardware. Apple created a toolset to help developers deal with the strengths and weaknesses of touch that also provided a consistent experience for users across applications. Mac OS X Lion appears to learn from touch interfaces, not emulate them. Apple realizes that they need operating systems that match the devices they run on, perhaps a wisdom only earned by making both software and hardware. Microsoft should think very carefully about repeating their habitual strategic blunder of trying to make a one-size-fits-all Windows.

(Full article on microsoft.com)

The is a logical evolution of the one thing I like about Windows 7 and use regularly, window snapping. It’s also one step closer to a desktop that works like the Eclipse IDE with various resizable panels for different elements like object browser, code editor, and compilation messages. Apple is also taking a tablet-inspired approach in Mac OS X Lion. It’s about time operating system vendors step up and do something about the sad state of application window management, but I don’t expect Windows 8 or Mac OS X Lion to bring perfect solutions because of their inspiration: Tablets make great content consumption devices, but I need something inspired by a content creation tool as my desktop.

In the meantime, I’m using a little open source app called Shift It to get something like window snapping on the Mac. It uses keyboard shortcuts rather than the Windows-style border collision which the Mac already uses for virtual desktop management, Spaces. Here’s my somewhat-Eclipse-inspired desktop with the Shift It menu exposed:

Dock and Twitter on one side, desktop files on another, and a perfect half-width browser window (with too many tabs as usual) in the middle. Sized and positioned Chrome by shifting it left then center with Shift It.

Shift It isn’t a perfect solution. It has some problems with window size or position being a little off sometimes, and the top/bottom options are practically useless on a widescreen display. Most people won’t mind, but my particular pathological need to organize (also expressed by my obsession with The Container Store) requires precision and symmetry and flexibility.  Steve Jobs has a similar affliction, so I’m hoping Lion will be like digital Paxil for my application window management OCD.

However, I’ve been coming around to V.’s way of thinking about ads in new media lately. I don’t mind as much because ads are at least loosely targeted to the topic-specific sites I frequent; sometimes I’m even grateful when I encounter something previously unknown and personally applicable.  That happens more when I’m willing to make Google privy to my electronic life or tell Hulu when ads are relevant. Old media pushes me further away while new media draws me into its less-adflated, more-relevant open arms.

So I came home from a MarkLogic event at The Palomar–ready to blog about some things they get that EMC is just starting to grasp–to find a new comment on an old post about the iPhone Clock app.  It was an ad (no surprise) but it was perfectly relevant to the post and even got me into iTunes to download the app (big surprise).  A few more things like this might even get cynical me to stop cringing whenever I see “please moderate” in my inbox.

The reward for that relevance is an extra plug.  I haven’t tried the app yet since there’s nothing to time at the moment, but I encourage you to take a look:

So, please do check out http://www.elapsedapp.com – you’ll find it to be a significant upgrade from the default Clock app. Oh, one last thing… its FREE!

I’ve fantasized for years about replacing dm_sysobject with something light weight and implementing things like folder location and versioning as interfaces applied to that type as needed. Pie might not have had hair pulling to do if dm_folder wasn’t bringing along all of dm_sysobject’s baggage.  It’s another example of the junk DNA rife through Documentum’s API and schema.

Documentum did add lightweight objects a few years ago, but they fell far short of my fantasy.  They turned out to be a hack to deal with bulk object creation instead of a fundamental refactoring of the object schema. I wasn’t surprised; implementing something like my fantasy would be an upgrade/compatibility nightmare; every single sysobject would have to be folded, spindled, and mutilated in the process. Just the database part of that upgrade could take days on big docbases, and those upgrades could fail in spectacular ways noticeable only long after the fact. Oh well.

It’s a lesson to inform the creators of new systems like Documentum. Of course there are scaling problems at the database level if those interface abstractions result in lots of separate tables and joins at the concrete level assuming a relational database infrastructure. I think that’s still a safe assumption since object databases haven’t gotten that much better and NoSQL databases don’t seem to be a good fit to this problem space on first blush. I wonder: Did Alfresco learn any of these lessons? Maybe I’ll go take a look under its hood and see.

Related:

• The Cake Folder is a Lie
• DFC has Junk (DNA) in the Trunk

Other languages have always had separate commands to display strings with or without newlines at the end.  Embedding escape codes like \n or using Perl’s smarts around concatenating and contextualizing work fine, so a separate command isn’t necessary like in some of those other languages with print and println or write and writeln.  ”So why now?” I asked.

Some of the semi-glib responses to my follow-up touched on the venerated trait of laziness among Perl programmers and joking about doing more with less (i.e., two less characters from print to say). I say semi-glib because both of these comments hold kernels of truth about Perl that originally drew me to the language and explain my continued frustration with the “newer” languages that I now have to call bread and butter.

Perl has always been a programming language for the lazy, proud, and impatient.  From personal experience, I’m more likely to use print with a “\n” than without, so that little extra work spread out over the thousands and thousands of print “…” does add up. There is some sense in having a command whose default mode includes a linefeed.

Perl has also always been a language about packing–functionally and semantically. That’s earned it a reputation of being hackish or too clever for itself, but anything taken to an extreme can be bad.  My experience supports the perlish idea that less code written is less code to debug or relearn later.  Some languages, especially those fond of methods on literal strings instead of operators, provide flexibility at the cost of verbosity and ugliness.  The idea of packing more capability into two less characters is very, very Perl.

There’s talk of trying to reinvigorate the Perl base and recover some of the mindshare (and subsequent marketshare) that Perl’s lost over the last decade.  I don’t think say will convince legions of .Net or Java programmers to switch, but I’ll definitely use it my next script.

From the Perldocs on say:

• say FILEHANDLE LIST
• say LIST
• say

Just like print, but implicitly appends a newline. say LIST is simply an abbreviation for { local $\ ="\n"; print LIST } .

This keyword is available only when the “say” feature is enabled: see feature.