Your grocery-store data, shared

Get-rich tip: Be the first grocery store to provide a digital purchase history to customers, for use in household planning.

This would actually convince me to use a frequent-shopper card and provide accurate information for it. Every time I made a purchase, a record (in some open standard format) would be emailed to an address of my choosing. In this fashion, I could build a household food database.

A sufficiently sophisticated grocery chain could even make the purchase history available via Web app, though the email option should still be there so other tools could be used.

An ambitious customer could even use a handheld scanner at home on items as they are thrown away. This would allow you to have an accurate, available-from-anywhere database of what is in your fridge and/or pantry. A scanner would also allow you to scan in purchases from other retailers (i.e. wine from your local wine shop, cheese from the cheese shop, etc).

And of course you could enter data in manually. With the right interface, this wouldn't be such a pain. With one click, for example, you could record the repurchasing of anything you've ever bought before.

If a bar-code scanner were built into an iPhone or Blackberry, one could quickly check whether a particular item is already in the cupboard at home, or even find out if one is being charged a reasonable price.

Photoshop Elements: Truly Awful

Oh God, I finally got Photoshop Elements installed and now (right this second, actually, I'm in the middle of a shift) I'm trying to use it. Oh please kill me. 

Thank god I spent $1000 on this 30-inch monitor so Adobe could fill the screen with its atrocious interface. That's right: There's no way to keep Photoshop from hogging the entire screen! Even if you have a big monitor. 

Of course Adobe doesn't tell you this when you buy the product. One of the Amazon reviews mentioned it, but I read another review elsewhere that implied this setting could be changed. Ars Technica: "the default behavior of the editing workspace is a 'maximized' view..." Uh, no, not the DEFAULT behavior. The only behavior! And the only way I know is this more honest online review.

There's also nothing in the sparse Photoshop documentation, and Barbara Brundage's "Missing Manuals" book is useless on this topic, I guess she couldn't fit in a discussion of the 2560-pixel-wide elephant in the room while gushing about how "cool" this program is.

Not that I'm bitter!

(Disclaimer: I'm bitter.)

Photoshop Elements 6 Support Sucks

I need an image editor for work to do basic things like selectively blurring text in documents and putting a couple of images side-by-side. Not rocket science, but every week it seems like there's more I need to do.

Many people encouraged me to simply pirate Adobe Photoshop. I don't believe in doing that sort of thing, and I've heard good things about Adobe Photoshop Elements, which costs about $80, so I bought it. Out of my own pocket, since I'm a contractor.

Today I went to install it. Here, in full, are the directions, provided by Adobe:

"Close any Adobe applications open on your computer. Insert the installation disc into your DVD drive and follow the on-screen instructions."

Well, guess what? When you insert the DVD, NOTHING HAPPENS.

OK, so I open the Readme file. This contains NO INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO INSTALL THE SOFTWARE. There is a section called "INSTALLING" but -- whoops! -- it never actually explains how to, uh, do the install. It just lists system requirements, some things you're not allowed to do and some things that might go wrong.

Normally, I would just drag the App on the DVD to the Applications folder on my hard drive. But 1. there's a bunch of different folders and icons and 2. Adobe Elements is known to not use this Mac convention.

I go looking through the manual for a phone number to call. There is none. IM? None. Email address? None. AT LEAST A WEB URL?? NO!!

OK Adobe, you don't think it's worth it to support me at $80. Why would I ever spend $800 with you? Oh right, because you're the only game in town. 

Want to buy single magazines through iTunes or Amazon

I stopped my Fortune subscription several weeks ago due to time constraints, but I'd love to buy just the issue with Steve Jobs on the cover (see Gruber and FSJ for details). Fortune's publisher Time Inc. should make buying a magazine as easy as buying a song on iTunes. Better yet, actually sell magazines through iTunes since I already have an account there. Or Amazon.

And yes I'm talking about a physical paper magazine, not a stupid PDF or whatever. Mail it to my house, bill my credit card. This would be much preferable to trying to hunt the specific issue down in stores or signing up for an unneeded subscription that clutters my house, adds a little stress to my life and hurts the environment.

Over the course of a year I may very well end up spending as much as or more than I would have on a subscription. I'm fine with that.

As I've said before, the print media business will recover only once publications start paying attention the basics, like how they are sold and distributed.

Improved ecto support for Blogger

Though all indications are that Blogger's API still sucks because it does not allow image uploading, the blogging application I use, ecto, has worked around this by uploading my images to Flickr automatically when I drag them into my posts. This is not ideal, since it pollutes my Flickr feed with random images for my blog, but it's better than no images.

I'm going to stick with Blogger for this blog because I don't have the energy to move it and ecto in version 3 is now much more smooth about working around Blogger's image limitations. It also now supports tagging in Blogger.

If/when Tumblr supports apps like ecto, I will move the blog off Blogger.

(UPDATE: Another way Blogger sucks with ecto and other third-party tools: If you have Blogger set to "convert linebreaks" in the standard online Blogger posting form, that setting will *also* apply to posts from ecto, even though they are sent in HTML via the API. When you change this setting to work properly with ecto, it makes all your prior posts screwy. Dumb dumb dumb. If your blog is short, just republish all your old posts via ecto and you are golden.)

How to get rich with OPML in three easy steps

I continue to be fascinated by OPML thanks to my new job, where I deal with OPML files a lot. Late last night I couldn't stop thinking about OPML-related products. I am now convinced this format will revolutionize search and social media.

Here is how I would beat Google (at search) and get rich using OPML, had I the time:

1. Build an RSS reader that supports "live" OPML subscriptions using OPML URLs, as discussed here, with the ability to pull in arbitrary sections of the outline. It should similarly support "live" OPML export.



2. Figure out who people's friends are and where their friends' OPML files live. We care about these files even if they are not being viewed in the reader in any way. One way to find these files by allowing people to specify their friends ala social networking. If their friend uses your reader, you already have an OPML file for the person.



3. Build a search engine off of this reader that is personalized for each user. It searches all your feeds, of course, but it also searches your imported OPML feeds, then your non-imported friend OMPL feeds, then the cosmos of sites/URLs closely related to all these feeds, then the Internet at large.

The key idea here is to augment Google's PageRank with something I'll call FeedRank.

PageRank ranks pages based on the number of links to each page. FeedRank ranks pages based on how close they are to your feed reader.

FeedRank gives heaviest priority to your feeds, next-highest to feeds of others (OPML) you subscribe to (live OPML folders), then the feeds of others who are like you (OPML of your friends). Only then does it look at links on the Internet.

FeedRank is more resistant to tampering than PageRank, because while PageRank ranks baded on links culled from the entire Web, including tons of sites placed there with the intention of gaming PageRank, FeedRank would contain the crucial added information of who you personally have chosen to trust OPML is key to the concept because it it allows you to increase the number of feeds in your cosmos by an order of magnitude thus providing fuel for FeedRanking. Note that while you'll want to read some of the OPML feeds (ala Dave Winer's Reading Lists idea, which I call "live OPML folders"), others will just be in your account for purposes of building your personal search engine.

Apple lies about AirPort

Here is where Apple lies, blatantly and repeatedly, about the Airport Extreme and how it can share your external hard drive. "Turn your external USB hard drive into a drive you can share with all the users on your network."



Then when you try and actually hook your hard drive up to the $180 router and you get an error message, you find out it doesn't support external drives for the latest versions of Windows like XP, 2000 and Vista (those using NTFS, the modern standard for Windows hard drives). NOWHERE did Apple disclose this, not online and not in the damn manual for the product.



An honest marketing pitch would read, "Turn your external USB hard drive into a drive you can share with all the users on your network by reformatting it and destroying all the data."



Oh and of course they've already obsoleted this product.



Oh and also? This "easy to use" brand new router didn't work with the software that shipped with my brand new Mac. I had to install a second AirPort Utility beyond the one already on the hard drive.



And no I'm not going to format the drive, it contains all the data from my old computer, and from at least two online accounts.





(PS Not even the tech specs of Airport Extreme divulge that NTFS is not supported.)

Blogger sucks with ecto, so I'm leaving Blogger

I'm going to have to move this site off Blogger, I use ecto, which rocks, and Blogger (run by Google) doesn't allow uploading of images from ecto or anything else using its third-party API.



Jesus Google, easy images is the single biggest reason to use a third-party app in the first place. Why did you bother even building the API??



Anyway, not a big deal. Blogging is just the single most important medium for human communication in the future. Not anything Google needs to be competitive at. Or, like, build a platform for.

(I am about 2X faster, at least, in ecto than through a Web interface, including Blogger's.)

Google Reader's OPML support sucks, here's how to fix it

At my new gig I deal a lot with OPML files, and Google Reader blows at this, here's how to fix (Chris Wetherell, it's not enough that you lent me sound equipment for my wedding, now I expect you to do custom software work for me too ;->):

• Allow me to view an OPML file on the Web live, as a folder, in Reader. I have an OPML list I have to reimport every couple weeks and it's annoying, I have to delete the old feeds associated with the prior version of the OPML file and then save the file to my hard drive then import the new feed then tag the imported feeds. The person sending me the file should just be able to update it on his Web server and the changes propagate instantly to Reader.



• Tag or otherwise group imported OMPL instead of just dumping into my account with no way to see what's newly imported. This is so basic.



• Allow me to export just a folder as OPML, not everything under the sun. And sharing on the Google Reader network is no substitute for this feature, my buddies/coworkers are not all on Reader.



• Likewise, allow me to import just one (or N) sections of a particular OPML file.



• Allow me to export a particular folder as OPML url, not just as a file.

OPML is one of those things that seems like an esoteric feature until you really, really need it and then you need it bad, working properly and smoothly, full featured.

The blogs I read when time is precious

I have been working very long days and had no time to read for pleasure for two or three weeks. Here are the blogs I read when I had bout an hour to spare, basically my absolute favorite blogs:

• Joel On Software
• Steve Yegge
• Daring Fireball
• Philip Greenspun
• Paul Graham
• Scripting News
• Signal Vs. Noise

I am such a massive nerd.

I'm blogging for Gawker

Read about it on my other personal blog, Covers.

But ignore the part about less blogging; I actually have a ton of stuff lined up for the Hack, and now that I'm using ecto my posting here will probably become more frequent.

How MacBook Air sucks

Though I still think MacBook Air will rule all notebooks, Paul Boutin today raises the smartest argument against its success: it can't get online via cellular networks, as the iPhone can.

Pretty lame for an ultra-mobile product with "Air" in the name and with an easy market in iPhone owners. At the very least, Apple should enable MacBook Air to use an iPhone net connection via bluetooth.

MacBook Air will rule all notebooks

The MacBook Air unveiled by Apple today is generating plenty of geek skepticism, but I predict the following:

• It will become Apple's best-selling notebook by the end of the 2008 holiday season and will rank as one of the top 5 selling notebooks in the U.S.
  
• A disproportionate share of sales will be to women.
• A disproportionate share of sales will be to iPhone owners.
• MacBook Air will replace the original MacBook within 18 months and, eventually, a larger version will replace the MacBook Pro 15.
• By the end of 2010, the MacBook Air will be the best-selling notebook in the country. (It may have been renamed just "MacBook" at that point.)
  

Yes, it costs about $700 more than a regular MacBook, and is less functional since it lacks an optical drive. And a swappable battery, and an Ethernet port, and probably some other things most people don't care about.

This will not matter. People will pay. And then the price will come down, and more people will pay. And so forth.

It's not about the specs, which are good enough, it's about fashion, design and aesthetics.

Babes in userland

The database service rolled out by Amazon last week will prove to be a clunker, despite all the praise it's received. It throws out three decades of experience with SQL and relational databases and demands developers learn more syntax to get less accomplished. It's just cover fire, and pretty intense cover fire at that, demanding a rewrite of the core of your Web application, the model layer.



I don't think Amazon is ill-intentioned, I just think the company made the mistake of thinking a system that works well for Amazon will be useful for the rest of us. The success of the ingenious S3 and EC2 platforms left the company with a surplus of hubris, and God bless them for launching a failure in a market Google and Microsoft don't even know exists. You don't build a market without some stumbles, and Amazon's success in assembling an Internet operating system is stellar so far.



People used to say Google was building an Internet Operating System, but as it turns out they were building Office for the Web. Which is fine. But Amazon is doing something much more empowering, and in the end I think they will have created more value outside their walls than Google ever did, even though they probably won't reap Google-scale profits.



Amazon's success is no small feat. Microsoft has been talking about Web services for years but in the end the two definitions most people heard were "a single sign-on system owned by Microsoft" and "a complicated message interchange system designed to sell copies of Windows Server." Google has crippled virtually every API they have launched. Apple and Yahoo have been focused on a Hollywood vision of the Net (both companies were run by studio chiefs for most of this decade) and are effectively out of this particular business entirely, by choice.



As it turns out, Amazon is not really in the business by choice either. It is in it by necessity. Yes, Amazon surely put some real work into turning S3 and EC2 from internal tools into public utilities. But it built those tools because it needed them -- reliable systems built on easy-to-grok open standards, capable of scaling quickly, just the sort of thing for a company as large and busy as Amazon. As it turns out, once you've built that sort of tool, you're more than halfway toward building something for the entire world.



Again: Amazon built some Web services because it needed them, then realized the rest of us would need them.



Amazon is a company that sells books and a bajillion other things over the Internet. That's what it does. Retail. It is not a software company, not even today, despite EC2 and S3, despite the fact that it has had kick-ass coders since its launched, despite what it may yet become.



Amazon is a user selling the software it made for itself.



This is important. This is new.



Microsoft and Google have always dog-fooded their own software, but that's the exception that proves the rule, which is this: Software companies make software to solve other peoples' problems.



And software companies never understand the problems they are solving as well as they understand the problem of making software.



So now their customers are taking matters into their own hands and building their own software.



This interests me personally because the same thing is happening to my industry, the news media. A reporter will never understand a beat as well as his sources and readers. A chump journalist at a tech magazine or business journal will never be able to write about software as well as Joel Spolsky or Philip Greenspun, who actually make software and actually run businesses. My only consolation is that most programmers -- and most people in any domain -- do not have half the writing talent of a Spolsky or Greenspun, a Graham or Shirky, a Yegge or Wall.



And so it is with software. Most software buyers are utterly lost at the sight of a command line, much less a compilation error.



But we're starting to see some cool users swimming against the tide. Call them babes in userland. An Amazon here. An Adrian Holovaty there. And, back in ancient Web history, a now-defunct online magazine launching the software that served you this page.



Then there are the chumps like me, learning scripting languages and server administration in my spare time, building a random collection of tools, and fervently hoping that Clary Shirky was right.

Reconsider the bonds in your 401k

Today I logged in to my 401k account, which I hadn't checked for about a year.



The returns are fine, but when I drilled down into my bond fund on a whim, I was horrified:





See that there "MBS Passthrough," where I have 34 percent of my bond money? Those are Mortgage Backed Securities. And CMBS? That means "Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities." And CMO? "Collateralized Mortgage Obligations."



In total, nearly 60 percent of my bond money is exposed to the mortgage market. The CMBS and CMO categories are the most worrisome to me, because as I have written and blogged and read (and read and read and read), huge chunks of those markets have turned illiquid. In other words, it is hard to sell these securities, because it is hard to find buyers.



And it is hard to find buyers because people realize the ratings assigned to many bonds by Moody's, S&P and Finch were simply wrong -- there was far more risk hiding in certain types of debt security than was reflected in the ratings.



The short version: the bond market is broken.



And now the government is expected to intervene.



Do you want to be invested in a broken market where, when you go to sell your bonds, it may be impossible to find a buyer? Do you want to be in a market where the government is about to rewrite all the rules?



When you opted to put some of your 401k in bonds, did you do so to increase the risk and volatility in your portfolio, or did you have the opposite in mind?



For most people, the bond portion of the 401k is intended to provide lower risk and volatility than the stock market, along with diversification -- returns not correlated with the stock market. Heavy exposure to mortgage backed securities undermines these goals.



Your bond fund probably looks a lot like mine, since my bond fund is designed to mimmick the entire bond market.



Check your 401k and reevaluate your bond holdings and whether to reduce them.



I personally sold half my bonds, reducing bonds to 15 percent of my 401k.