I have an affinity for long (and sometimes long-winded) science-fiction and fantasy books. A few days ago, I accidentally discovered that the 11th book in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, Knife of Dreams, was released. I would love it if there were a way to get an RSS feed that contained announcements of new Robert Jordan titles. Bonus points for a 1-click kind of interface that takes me to my favorite library or bookseller when a new entry hits the feed. And we're at it, do the same thing for musical artists and movies. If content producers want to sell it, they need to tell me about it, and RSS would be a lot more direct than TV.

The other end of this is that I use the local public library a lot. Jon Udell's library lookup bookmarklets are useful for checking to see if books are in the library, but I would love to have support for the entire "discover a book, get it from the library, return it" lifecycle. A web service that let me access my library account information would be great.

This afternoon I took Abigail to a recital to benefit student scholarships for the local piano teachers association. The performer was Dr. Jody Graves, and the program theme was "The Romantic Piano". We had a very enjoyable time listening to some excellent piano performances. Unfortunately for us, we arrived only a few minutes early so we ended up with seats where we couldn't see Dr. Graves' hands. Nonetheless, the music was gorgeous, and I learned about several composers that I was unfamiliar with, including Edward MacDowell, Carlos Guastavino (I'll definitely be looking into this fellow some more), and Alexander Scriabin.

There were lots of piano students in attendance, and there was some educational and entertaining commentary on the various pieces. One of the best came because we were going to run a little bit over, so Dr Graves gave the audience it's choice of what we wanted to hear. A girl around Abigail's age was sitting in the row in front of us, and her hand flew up immediately. She wanted to hear Rachmaninoff. When she was asked why, she curled her lip in thought, and then announced, "Big Dynamics". And Big Dynamics she got, by way of the Prelude in D Major, Op. 23, No 4.

As we drove him, I was talking with Abigail about the concert, explaining a few things about concert etiquette (standing ovations and encores), and trying to gauge her reactions. It's very important to me that she really be enjoying music and having opportunities to hear live performances, because I feel that the appreciation and enjoyment of music is a powerful inspiration, especially during those moments when music study is more frustrating than enjoyment. Her favorite (as was mine), Debussy's L'isle joyeuse - The island of joy.

A long time ago I posted about the travails of finding clothing that would fit me. The change of seasons always brings the question, "do I have enough good clothes to wear", which inevitably leads to another round of me being disgruntled about the experience of shopping. Julie dug up some links that have some pretty good ideas for clothing for small men. Just in case there are any more of you out there feeling aggravated.

On the first night of Foo Camp this past summer, I was wandering. Julie had decided to go to sleep, since she was talking the next morning. Night owl that I am, I was in no way prepared to go to sleep. So I headed back down to the common areas, looking for, well, I wasn't exactly sure. I ran into a number of people along the way and by the time I got back to the ground floor, it was fairly late.

As I came out of the building I saw a fellow with a big digital SLR taking flash photographs of the boards containing the Foo Camp schedule. Being fascinated, or rather, intimidated by flash photography, I walked a bit closer and asked "Did they come out?". The fellow and I started talking, and it wasn't long before I discovered that I was talking to Stewart Butterfield, one of the founders of Flickr. After I realized this, I waited for an appropriate pause in our conversation. I held up my (still pretty new) Canon Digital Rebel XT and said something like "I don't know whether to thank you or to blame you". Which then took us off onto a different vector of conversation.

One thing I do know is that Flickr truly was instrumental in reigniting my interest in photography to the point where I went from a non-pro account to a pro account, from sharing an economical point and shoot to wanting my own digital SLR, and from taking an occasional picture to hauling that camera just about everywhere. I've become a passionate user. You start spending money. Cameras, lenses, tripods, books, prints, Aperture, Photoshop, etc. Somebody is going to be making a ton of money off the spark that Flickr helped light. Except that Flickr isn't going to see any of that money. Most of it's going to go to Canon, Bogen, Apple, whoever. Maybe Flickr should open a photo equipment store or some kind of affinity program.

Anil Dash and Caterina Fake are having a discussion about whether or not companies like Flickr should be paying the users that put their content up there. It's an interesting discussion, to look at it that way. But it does seem a little strange. I pay (paid) Flickr for a pro account so I could put my content up there (Unfortunately, I'm in no danger of generating enough traffic to get paid for), so it seems a little odd to me to expect that I would then get paid if I generated a certain amount of traffic. But maybe I'm just not thinking straight about all of that. At least for now, I feel that I've gotten quite a bit more than my $29 worth of value out of Flickr, whether I get a reward for traffic or not.

[via Mind Camp Seattle Mind Camp: Sold Out! ]:

There you have it - we officially have 150 people registered for Seattle Mind Camp. Registration is now closed, and we can move on the focusing on planning now that we know that the event is fillwed to capacity. It was a worry, being that this is the first even of its kind here in the Seattle area, and that I am not as well connected as some of the other Seattle locals being that I just moved here. The credit goes to everyone who talked about and blogged about the event, starting from the planners and branching out to the early attendees. This is going to be a blast.

If you are attending, please go to the Session Ideas page and add your ideas. We are looking for panels and interactive discussions as well as regular old presentations. The point of doing this is for people here in the Puget Sound to mix it up and find out what each other are up to, so keep that in mind as you think about your session.

CreativePro posted an interview with Aperture product manager Joe Schorr. A bit more information than has appeared to date, including:

It depends on what you do with Aperture. I mostly run it on my 15-inch PowerBook. That's not to say that I don't enjoy the refreshing wind-blowing-through-my-hair feeling when I sit down in front of a G5 running Aperture. But a PowerBook is fine for what a lot of photographers do in the field with their laptops: browse images quickly and step through the thumbnails. Maybe tag the images they like, maybe zoom in closely on one. The photo edit stage. For that, a PowerBook does take a speed hit, but it's totally usable.

I've put a brief review of Karl Fogel's fantastic Producing Open Source Software up on the OSAF Group blog. I don't want to plaster that blog with a bunch of quotes, but I like to do that with my book reviews, so I'm putting those here.

p. 29 Stability in a project does not come from formal policies, but from a shared, hard-to-pin down collective wisdom that develops over time

p. 65 group-based governance is more "evolutionarily stable"

These two are why I like Apache style communities

p. 68 Think of a veto as somewhere between a very strong objection and a filibuster

A great and succinct description of veto.

p. 84 The ability to write clearly is perhaps the most important skill one can have in an open source environ-
ment. In the long run it matters more than programming talent. A great programmer with lousy commu-
nications skills can get only one thing done at a time, and even then may have trouble convincing others
to pay attention. But a lousy programmer with good communications skills can coordinate and persuade
many people to do many different things, and thereby have a significant effect on a project's direction
and momentum.

It's all about leverage.

p. 103 The more a project grows, the more important this sort of consistency becomes. Consistency means that
everywhere people look, they see the same patterns being followed, so they know to follow those pat-
terns themselves. This, in turn, reduces the number of questions they need to ask. The burden of having
a million readers is no greater than that of having one; scalability problems start to arise only when a
certain percentage of those readers ask questions. As a project grows, therefore, it must reduce that per-
centage by increasing the density and accessibility of information, so that any given person is more
likely to find what he needs without having to ask.

Consistency enables scalability

p. 131 Delegation is not merely a way to spread the workload around; it is also a political and social tool. Con-
sider all the effects when you ask someone to do something. The most obvious effect is that, if he ac-
cepts, he does the task and you don't. But another effect is that he is made aware that you trusted him to
handle the task. Furthermore, if you made the request in a public forum, then he knows that others in the
group have been made aware of that trust too. He may also feel some pressure to accept, which means
you must ask in a way that allows him to decline gracefully if he doesn't really want the job. If the task
requires coordination with others in the project, you are effectively proposing that he become more in-
volved, form bonds that might not otherwise have been formed, and perhaps become a source of author-
ity in some subdomain of the project. The added involvement may be daunting, or it may lead him to be-
come engaged in other ways as well, from an increased feeling of overall commitment.
Because of all these effects, it often makes sense to ask someone else to do something even when you
know you could do it faster or better yourself. Of course, there is sometimes a strict economic efficiency
argument for this anyway: perhaps the opportunity cost of doing it yourself would be too high—there
might be something even more important you could do with that time. But even when the opportunity
cost argument doesn't apply, you may still want to ask someone else to take on the task, because in the
long run you want to draw that person deeper into the project, even if it means spending extra time
watching over them at first. The converse technique also applies: if you occasionally volunteer for work
that someone else doesn't want or have time to do, you will gain his good will and respect. Delegation
and substitution are not just about getting individual tasks done; they're also about drawing people into a
closer committment to the project.

Delegation builds trust, which builds community.

There are also some great ideas/wishes for tools on pages 40, 44, and 173. The whole topic of tools is good for another (series) of posts.

As a followup to yesterday's post, here are two scripts for getting stuff from NetNewsWire to del.icio.us.

1. selection to del.icio.us - send the currently selected news item to del.icio.us.
2. tab to del.icio.us - send the current browser tab to del.icio.us

You will have to edit the scripts to point to your del.icio.us account.

Last week was interesting for applications. Apple announced Aperture, and Flock launched their eponymous browser. I think that the two applications demonstrate an interesting contrast (at least for me) around what makes for a compelling application. The dimension that sticks out the most to me is around the notion of "workflow", the pattern of interactions with the functionality embedded in the application.

Aperture has a bunch of functionality related to working with photographs. Considered by themselves, these pieces of function are interesting, but not compelling. I've read a number of lukewarm reactions to Aperture, which seem to be based on looking at the list of features as opposed to watching the movies on the site, which demonstrate how the features combine into workflows that closely mimic the way that photographers want to work. I as I've mentioned before, the Aperture workflows correspond very closely to workflows that I want to use.

Flock is basically Firefox with extensions to support blog posting, bookmark management and tagging via del.icio.us, an interesting interface to Flickr, and a few other features, like a full text index of your past browser history and a shelf that can be used as a parking place for information found during browsing. Flock is its own browser for non-technical reasons. The difficulty that I have with Flock is that it doesn't really augment the workflows that I actually use when dealing with web data.

The problem pretty much starts at the very beginning. Flock assumes that the browser is the center of your experience when dealing with the web. That's no longer true for me. The RSS aggregator (specifically NetNewsWire) is now the center of my web experience. So from the get go, Flock is a poor match for my workflow. There's nice support in Flock for creating a blog post from the current page. Except that when I create a blog post from a web page, that page usually got delivered to me via NetNewsWire. I wasn't in the browser at all. And I can send that web page right to Ecto, which I prefer because I can save the drafts and work off-line.

How about bookmarking? NetNewsWire doesn't do bookmarking, but it does have AppleScript, so I have an AppleScript which takes the current post and sends it to del.icio.us. It ends up in Firefox, so I have to switch apps, which is a pain. It would be nice if there was a deli.cio.us style bookmarking interface built into NetNewWire.

I'm doing a lot with photography now, so it seems like Flickr support would be something to get excited about. I'm taking lots of photographs so I want a good way to get them into Flickr. I also use Flickr as a source of ideas or inspiration, as well as for keeping up on what my friends are up to. So let's look at my workflow for Flickr. The creation workflow involves using FlickrExporter from iPhoto, or posting a picture via Ecto. The consuming workflow just involves RSS. I created a subscription group in NetNewsWire and dumped a bunch of Flickr feeds into it. All that photography goodness is just part of my daily river of news.

There are two pretty nice features that Flock has that I wish NetNewsWire and Firefox had. The first is the free text search of your browsing history. On the Mac, this could (and should) be integrated with Spotlight. The other nice feature is the shelf, a place to drop content that you find during your session.

Even if I use a browser, I use it in a very different way than I did a few years ago. Today, stuff ends up in Firefox if I need to bookmark it, del.icio.us it and so forth. I also end up in Firefox if I click a URL in Mail.app or some other part of the system. The other time I end up in Firefox is when I use the Google search bar. Oh, and printing. NetNewsWire can't print yet, but Brent is working on that.

On the whole, I'd be perfectly happy if I could live inside NetNewsWire. Even as just a tabbed browser, I've found it to be much better than any other browser on my system. I can open up 600 tabs, and NetNewsWire keeps going (although it does slow down). I can quit with those tabs open and when I restart, the tabs will all be restored.

When I look at Flock, I see a grab bag of small UI improvements. Nice blog posting than a regular web form. Nice integration with del.ici.ous, and nice support for Flickr. But what I don't see is how it streamlines my web experience.

Streamlining or enabling new workflows saves me time and makes me happier. Good desktop apps do that. The promise of web apps as platforms or API's is that we can hook them together and create new workflows or automate the ones that used to be manual. So, you see, it really is all about the workflow.

Julie pointed out that there might be some folks out there who aren't subscribed to my Flickr photostream, so I'm going to post some pictures from there every now and again.

Lee LeFever and his wife Sachi are taking a year off to travel around the world. Unfortunately, he's going to miss Seattle Mind Camp (for unrelated reasons), which is a bummer because Lee is one of the folks that I've been talking to on and off about doing something like this. So it's disappointing that he's going to miss it - hopefully the camp is going to turn into a regular thing. On the bright side, Lee and Sachi have set up a cool site so that we'll be able to follow their travels. It's called The World is Not Flat.

My drooling over Aperture produced some other thoughts.

In the wake of this month's Web 2.0 conference, there's been yet another round of "all applications are moving to the web". Aperture is an application that would be very hard to do on the web. I'm trying to imagine Aperture's multiple display support in a web app. I suppose that I can, but it's pretty unpalatable. My XT can shoot 3fps in RAW mode. Each one of those RAW's is 7MB. Now imagine any decent sized gallery of them, including some stacks of bursts. That data is not going to move over the web anywhere near fast enough to be responsive.

The attention to UI is one of Apple's strengths (when they remember to do it) and from what I've seen, they pulled out the stops for Aperture. Good UI does matter. And it takes a certain kind of skill and taste in order to make that happen. It's more than the flashy visuals. Aperture appears to work the way that I wish I could work with my photos. The designers took the time to understand the work needs and patterns of their target audience, and then built that in.

While I was watching the videos, some part of my brain overrode a bunch of things that I've spent a bunch of time writing about on this blog. Did I care that Aperture is written in a low level, mostly static language like Objective-C? Nope. Did it bother me that I couldn't get the source code, or access the community of developers? Nope. I'll probably change my mind about that once I return to my senses. But the visceral reaction that I had to Aperture is a big reminder that the final result matters a lot, not just the process and technology.

As I said, it looks like Aperture will be very fun to use. I can't say that I feel the same way about the tools that I use day to day for writing programs. Where are the incredibly fun programming tools? I did Emacs, Eclipse, some IntelliJ, WingIDE, and a few more. None of them are really all that fun to use. Many of them take out some of the tedious tasks associated with programming, but none of them give me that feeling that they are enhancing my creativity or thinking. Computers should extend the mind, hands, eyes, and ears.

Recently, I've felt kind of down on Apple, because of some difficulties I've been having with my hardware. I was also quite happy with my Ubuntu experience, and I was sort wondering if getting off the Mac and onto Ubuntu would be a mart idea. Aperture is not an app for everybody, but it is for me. More importantly, it represents the spirit of the Mac, which is a spirit that I think is still missing from the Linux and Windows communities. It is hard to get me really excited about a piece of software, and my reaction to Aperture is one that I haven't had in a long time.

I am torn between the two cultures: the innovative culture of the Mac that has brought forth apps like Aperture and NetNewsWire, and the culture of open source, which emphasizes participation and liberty. When will an open source project produce an app that's at the level of NetNewsWire or Aperture?

Maybe I've just been drinking too much Kool-Aid.

At OSCON, I was asking James Duncan Davidson about photo processing software. He told me that he had tried most of the programs available for the Mac and that they were all inadequate. That was yesterday. Today Apple announced Aperture, which they describe as "the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers". After watching the videos on the Aperture pages, all I can say is Wow.

I never really looked at Final Cut Pro (not even the web pages), because I'm not a video guy. But I am a budding photo guy, and I am really impressed with what I saw. I have tried to do many of the workflows that were demonstrated in the Aperture videos - they are painful or impossible in iPhoto. The user interface appears to be well thought out, and there are definitely features that will really be useful - stacks, picks, rejects, the light table, the management stuff, versions against a master RAW "negative". And it supports the Digital Rebel XT (finally). I haven't spent any time adjusting my photos, so I don't know if I really need Photoshop grade manipulation facilities. But I'm already drowning in lots of photos, trying to do selects, trying to do decent library management. I have all the problems that Aperture is trying to solve. I'm sure there will be bugs, and quirks. But on the whole, it looks like it will be very fun to use.

After I get the hardware, that is. My PowerBook just makes the cut for systems that can run Aperture. The hardware requirements are why it made (some) sense that Apple also announced their hardware speed bumps and price cuts today. When you are working with lots of RAWs, then it's easy to see the need for dual or even quad G5's. Doing image manipulations? Then you need fast GPU's for CoreImage. If you're using your computer to replace/simulate a light table, your thoughts start to stray to 30" Cinema Displays. And so it goes.

This is when it's painful to know that there's a product transition to Intel. I was already in pain waiting for the Intel gear. I have a feeling that Aperture is going to make that wait excruciating. At least Apple should be able to do the quad core thing on Intel as well. Only 10 more months of pain...

If you're the kind of person that leaves things to the last minute, and you are interested in attending the first (we hope of many) Seattle Mind Camp, then don't wait any longer. We had a planning meeting tonight (I attended via Skype), and we are over half full.

People are starting to put ideas for sessions up on the wiki, and Andru has posted a few pictures of the awesome space. The wireless for the event is going to be done by Seattle Wireless, and I heard that they are really stoked to be doing this. They hope to surpass the record for the largest olsr mesh network.

Events like this are only as good as the people who come, so please register if you are interested in attending. If you are already registered, please pass the word to your friends.

[via Ubuntu ]:

Last week the Ubuntu folks released their latest version, which had the code name "Breezy Badger". A few weeks before I switched my Hoary box over to Breezy, just by changing the sources in my apt sources list, and letting apt-get do its thing. I expected the upgrade to be painless since that's been my experience on the various Debian boxes that I am running. One thing that I didn't expect was the the sound on my Shuttle box started working after I did the upgrade. I didn't even have to re-run the installer.

Did that get your attention? Good. ApacheCon US 2005 will be in San Diego, CA from December 10-14. The Super Early Bird Registration price ends this Sunday, October 23. ApacheCon is a great, small, working conference, and it is one of the highlights of my year.

Susie Wu and Ian Holsman from the Apache Public Relations Committee have started a new blog on "marketing, economics, and trends within the open source software ecosystem. If you are involved in marketing or PR for an open source project add feather to your reading list...

[via Macworld: News ]:

Apple is having another press event, ahead of this weeks PhotoPlus Expo. There'll probably be PowerMacs/Books, but I am more interested in whatever announcement merits placement ahead of PhotoPlus. I've read some rumors that Apple is planning to launch it's own Pro photo program, which I suppose would compete with Photoshop. That would be interesting. Even more interesting would be an update to iPhoto that knew how to talk to the Digital Rebel XT....

The only TV in the house is an ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 8500DV that is sitting in my mostly unused Windows box. Today was the first event of the figure skating season, so last night I booted up the machine to make sure that the TV stuff was still working. Windows installed a pile of XP security patches, and I had to upgrade the device drivers. When I finally shut the computer off last night, the TV tuner and DVR software appeared to be working.

This morning I got up and booted up the machine so that it would record the broadcast while we were out for the morning. Unfortunately, the TV Tuner input disappeared, and no amount of rebooting and haggling would get it working before we had to leave. In fact, no amount of fussing with it has been effective at getting the TV Tuner input to reappear.

There are perhaps 4 regular (non-cable) broadcasts of skating events this (Olympic) year (USFSA sold out to ESPN just like last year). Windows made me miss one of them. Microsoft is creating the wrong kind of passionate user in our household.