Tyler Hunt

Daniel and I have been passionately working on TallyHoh for a while now. It’s an online feed reader at its core, but it has big aspirations to be much more than that. You can “tally” and “folly” items from your feeds to cast votes for them in either a positive or negative light. The votes are use to promote the greatest or most controversial topics of the moment.

For those not familiar with the concept, “feeds” basically provide a way to keep tabs on your favorite sites so you don’t have to visit them everyday to find out if they’ve been updated. Using a feed reader you can then subscribe to multiple feeds at once so you can read all of your blogs and news in one place.

We also made one big opinionated decision when we developed TallyHoh: we’re using OpenID exclusively. If you haven’t heard of OpenID, it’s a technological solution to the problem of user account overload. It lets you use a single account to access all of the sites that you visit. While it hasn’t seen mass adoption yet, it’s gaining a lot of momentum, and we feel confident enough in it to put our full weight behind it.

There’s still a lot to come, but we think TallyHoh has value as it stands today so we’re opening it up to let everyone try it out for themselves. We like the fact that our feeds are always online, and TallyHoh does a good job of keeping track of the things that you’ve read so you won’t see the same content twice.

Try it out, and let us know what you think.

I’ve recently been enjoying a series of articles by Dave Hyatt on the Surfin’ Safari blog about the underpinnings of WebCore rendering. I’ve trudged through his detailed description and accompanying header files (not something I’ve come across since my C days) in the hopes of garnering some insight into rendering technology that might help me as a web developer. This week’s article on positioning has provided just such insight, with its detailed descriptions of each of the position modes available: static, relative, fixed, and absolute. While I’m somewhat familiar with each of these, seeing them drafted out in near-specification form has helped to clarify their differences and intricacies. The first five parts are already up, so I would encourage you to at the very least skim over them. The knowledge gained might just give you an “ah ha” moment of your own.

When prompted by criticism of .Mac at the recent D conference, Jobs confessed “I couldn’t agree more, and we’ll make up for lost time in the near future.” It will be interested to see how this pans out.

There are all sorts of puns I could have used for the title of this post, but I’ll leave such headlines to the experts. I had decided some time ago that I would camp out to get a Wii on release day with some guys from work. Aside from a few coworkers dropping out of the plans, Daniel, Spawn, and I were fairly successful in securing a place in line at the Casselberry Wal-Mart. All was looking well, my place in line when I arrived was 43, but it had since been bumped up to 39 after a few people left. The store apparently had 32 in stock, and a truck was supposed to come with another 40 or so that day, putting the total around 70. Then Wal-Mart finally came out and informed us of the situation: the extra delivery would not be happening that night. Everyone after 32^nd place quickly dispersed to find a new camp site. The CFi contingent decided to call it quits (at my dismay).

Fortunately for me, Melissa had to go to PetSmart, and I had her check the line at Target while she was there. “There are only three people in line,” she informed me. I made the decision to give up on the possibility of a midnight release, and stick it out overnight outside Target. The time went more quickly than expected, and the cold wasn’t too overbearing. Dawn came, and someone from Target’s loss control division wearing black windbreaker pants and a white turtleneck (not your typical Target khaki’s and red shirt) came outside to disburse the magic tickets to the first 24 in line. I was number 5. Huzzah.

I picked up a Wii, an extra remote and nunchuck, and a copy of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. So far the experience has been not only fun, entertaining, and almost magical. It’s amazing how simply moving your limbs about a little can bring you so much closer into the game. Check out Opening the Wii for a close-up look at the system and accessories.

There has been a lot of news in the Apple community lately. I came across two Apple stories today which I want to comment on. Neither are innaccurate, but both could have been fleshed out more than they were.

It was against my better judgement to set up the our SMTP server as an open relay, but I did it because I was told to. Here we are a week later and the server has approximately 25,000 spam messages in the queue waiting to be sent.

To combat that problem, I have set up qmail with SMTP authentication. Quite a task in itself, getting this set up and running properly took longer that it should have. In fact, it should be built-in by now. It seems quite ridiculous that I have to install qmail, vpopmail, Courier-IMAP, and countless other utilities and patches just to get a working mail system. Not to mention the horrid documentation out there that attempts to show how all these things should be linked together.

While there seem to be quite a few tutorials and blog posts out there on this topic, I wanted to post my own notes, as they all seem to miss part of the equation.

First, an IMAP Path Prefix has to be set, but this can’t be done until the account has been created. Doing it after the first synchronization can tend to make things a little flaky. To get around this, create the account profile in Mail, but do not put in the correct password for the IMAP login. Then, go back into Preferences and edit the account information, setting the “IMAP Path Prefix” to “INBOX” and checking “Automatically synchronize changed mailboxes.”

I just wrapped up what has turned out to be a weeklong migration of mail and web services. Considering that my experience doing anything at all with mail servers was practically zero, I suppose the timeframe isn’t too shabby. I took things very slowly to be sure that I covered all my bases, everything from using rsync to keep the copies of the mail and web repositories synchronized, to getting qmail and vpopmail to work together nicely, to executing the final flip of the proverbial switch over to the new DNS server. It’s been a few minutes now, and while the DNS will take a little while to propogate, I’ve flushed my cache locally and everything appears to be up and working just fine.

It was a little stressful along the way, considering the threat of the existing server being shut off could potentially happen any day now without notice. Combine that time crunch with the fact that these sorts of things can be hard to test ahead of time, and it made for a situation that would make any perfectionist a bit squeamish. Now that it’s over, however, I feel like I’ve accomplished something significant and have added a lot of real-world experience to my toolbox and resumé.

I ordered my Airport Express today. They should be shipping in a week or so, assuming that would be Apple’s definition of “mid-July.” I’m a little disappointed that they don’t have an easy way to place orders with the student discount from the web site. You can add items to your shopping cart and create a proposal, but for now it’s easier to just call them up and place the order over the phone.

My mom was getting on her computer today to look at Macs, when her PC completely stopped working and had some very odd symptoms. Microsoft must have sensed the imminent loss of another one of their customers. It’s looking like she’ll be getting an iBook whenever she finally decides to order something. Apple is no longer taking orders on the iMacs until the new ones are released sometime this September according to their web site. After spending several hours tonight trying to revive the nearly ancient Windows box, I’ll really appreciate it when they have a Mac.

Over the years modders have become increasingly clever in their efforts to disguise and mask the appearance of their computers, fitting them into odd containers and generally making them gaudy to behold. Now and then a slick case comes out of the minds of one of the forum-dwellers of the mod community. The Orac³ project happens to be one of the most amazing efforts I have ever seen at case modding. Starting with a standard acrylic case, nearly every wire and component in the system has been modified to some degree, and most to a rather radical degree. It barely even looks like a computer anymore, which I guess is kind of the point of all that effort. You can see the progress of the project through five articles bit-tech: part one, part two, part three, part four, and part five. Absolutely amazing work, and a good source of ideas and information for anyone looking to do some modding of their own.

The handful of days during the year when Apple release a new product are fairly far and few between, so when happens unexpectedly, it’s often a very welcome surprise. Today Apple announced the Airport Express. It’s a portable wireless access point, with built-in USB print server and an analog and digital audio output for wirelessly streaming music from iTunes to speakers or a stereo somewhere else on the network. All of these devices have existed independently before, but it took a bit of Apple ingenuity to cram them all into a package the size of a typical power brick and price it at a very competitive $129. While it’s double the going rate for wireless routers these days, the print server and music streaming capabilities make it well worth the extra dollars. Too bad I’ll have to wait until July to pick one up.

A CNET article on why the FCC should be abolished makes some points that are worth considering. The FCC’s purpose from the very beginning can be questioned once you consider the following:

The FCC rejected long-distance telephone service competition in 1968, banned Americans from buying their own non-Bell telephones in 1956, dragged its feet in the 1970s when considering whether video telephones would be allowed and did not grant modern cellular telephone licenses until 1981—about four decades after Bell Labs invented the technology.

Potentially, “these technologically backward decisions have cost Americans tens of billions of dollars.” The article makes a good case for turning over the airwaves to the free market, and I agree that a lot of good could potentially come from such a move. The digital broadcast flag really irks me, and is currently one of the most pressing reasons I can see for something to be done about the power-hungry government agency.

For the first time ever, the Army is rethinking their uniforms, and building new ones from scratch. Wired is running an article on what has been dubbed the Future Force Warrior. They are being designed to reduce weight, and give soldiers a technological advantage in urban environments. The new suits feature enhancements such as “e-textiles,” where wires are woven right into the fabric, and night vision integrated into the helmet. Bone-conduction microphones are being introduced, as well, to replace the traditional radio headset. One of the most notable points of the article was the mention power consumption, and the mandate that the designers “avoid the use of Microsoft Windows operating systems.” Amen to that. I think I would turn around and run home if I found out my equipment was powered by Microsoft software. Some of their software may be half decent, but I would never trust it with my life.

Apple just recently split their hardware division into two: one part for Macs, and the other for iPods. It’s not clear yet their motivation for making this split, but Robert X. Cringely has been busy speculating. This man usually has very interesting things to say. However, since the cry of Apple dying or moving their software to an Intel-based platform has been heralded for the past decade, hearing it come out of Cringely’s mouth has a little less impact and clout than his words typically carry. He still manages to bring a unique perspective to the situation, and suggests the possibility of Apple pushing the iPod as their primary means of income, and dropping their hardware line altogether and just becoming a high-end software and small peripheral company, à la Microsoft. While the possibility of this happening certainly exists, I don’t see it occurring any time soon, and I only see Steve Jobs pulling that card as a last resort, never as long-term game plan.

In class today, I was taking notes on my laptop and minding my own business when all of a sudden a window pops up alerting me that someone is trying to send me a file. There are some cases where I may not have accepted such an offer, but since the file was coming over Bluetooth, from another student in the room, I accepted. It ended up being a very short message, stating only “bah.” I returned the favor, and in doing so figured out who sent it to me. His phone beeped in a rather noticeable way. In some ways, Bluetooth still seems like such a strange technology.