Yet another Scoble post on a facebook accounts being closed, this time with the iFart app author.

Facebook is like Disney Land. It’s a nice and enjoyable place, but it has its own special governance. It can decide when to let you in and when to throw you out.

It’s a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to build my house there. Not when the lease can be revoked at any time.

All my data is belong to me. It makes no sense to put a third party in control of it. My photos: mine. My writings: mine. Why would I hand them over to a third party?

I can understand the appeal of easy publishing to the general public – Facebook truly makes it easy for people to establish a presence and communicate. But for the more technically savvy, Facebook should be treated as a copy, not as the source. Data should be originated and owned elsewhere and channeled into Facebook. Write in your own blog. Post photos onto Flickr, with a local and web backup strategy. Funnel them into Facebook.

That’s a bit more like FriendFeed, which may be why Scoble likes it so much.

Inaugration day, and I missed just about all the festivities. One thing did stand out for me: the text of the Oath of the Office of the President:

“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Those founding fathers were smart.

Here’s hoping the new president takes the constitution more seriously than the last one and defends it instead of trying to diminish it.

Parand says:

When attempting to do a two man job with only one man, substitute endurance for raw power.

I’m fascinated by what’s “normal” for people. Example: right now my feet are hurting from the cold. I have a fairly high tolerance for pain, so the fact that I took notice tells me that it’s actually pretty damned cold.

I could put on a pair of socks. I could put on shoes. I could grab a blanket. I could turn on the heater.

But I won’t. I’ll continue to sit here in the cold and ignore the pain. 

That’s strange. But it’s normal for me. In fact the only reason I even noticed was the contrast with last night’s dinner at my parent’s house. They had my aunts and their families over, and like normal people they had the heater on. I was burning. It was driving me nuts.

I think my “normal” with respect to cold comes from my upbringing. Rarely would we turn the heat on when growing up. My dad slept every night, even when snow was falling, with his bedroom window open. 

I don’t know why. For me, it’s something about being able to control my reaction to physical phenomena, mind over matter, and probably more importantly, habit. 

Pretty inconsequential example, but I think these little “norms” have a big impact in how we live. Do I procrastinate or tackle tasks head on? Do I read books? Do I exercise routinely? How do I react to failure? 

Anyway, I’m going to attempt to guide 2009 by tackling my norms, hopefully orienting them to a healthy, happy lifestyle.

Hell, I’m going to go grab a blanket right now.

Ok, I’m going to do one of these memes things – highlight activies you have done from this list. Via Empty Thoughts.

1. Started your own blog

2. Slept under the stars

3. Played in a band

4. Visited Hawaii

5. Watched a meteor shower

6. Given more than you can afford to charity

7. Been to Disneyland

8. Climbed a mountain (eh – I’ve climbed a few hills…)

9. Held a praying mantis

10. Sang a solo

11. Bungee jumped

12. Visited Paris

13. Watched a lightning storm

14. Taught yourself an art from scratch

15. Adopted a child

16. Had food poisoning

17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty (saw it from the ferry )

18. Grown your own vegetables

19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France

20. Slept on an overnight train

21. Had a pillow fight

22. Hitch hiked

23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill

24. Built a snow fort

25. Held a lamb

26. Gone skinny dipping

27. Run a Marathon

28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice

29. Seen a total eclipse

30. Watched a sunrise or sunset

31. Hit a home run (Where I grew up we didn’t play baseball. I once made a game-winning save in a soccer match, if that counts)

32. Been on a cruise

33. Seen Niagara Falls in person

34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors

35. Seen an Amish community

36. Taught yourself a new language (does English count?)

37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied

38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person

39. Gone rock climbing

40. Seen Michelangelo’s David

41. Sung karaoke

42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt

43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant

44. Visited Africa

45. Walked on a beach by moonlight

46. Been transported in an ambulance

47. Had your portrait painted

48. Gone deep sea fishing

49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person

50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris – the line was too long and I too lazy

51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling

52. Kissed in the rain

53. Played in the mud

54. Gone to a drive-in theater

55. Been in a movie

56. Visited the Great Wall of China

57. Started a business

58. Taken a martial arts class

59. Visited Russia

60. Served at a soup kitchen

61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies

62. Gone whale watching – I swam with a few hundred sharks in the ocean once

63. Got flowers for no reason

64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma

65. Gone sky diving

66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp

67. Bounced a check

68. Flown in a helicopter

69. Saved a favorite childhood toy

70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial

71. Eaten caviar

72. Pieced a quilt

73. Stood in Times Square

74. Toured the Everglades

75. Been fired from a job (layed off)

76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London

77. Broken a bone

78. Been on a speeding motorcycle

79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person

80. Published a book

81. Visited the Vatican

82. Bought a brand new car

83. Walked in Jerusalem

84. Had your picture in the newspaper

85. Read the entire Bible

86. Visited the White House (haven’t been inside)

87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating (would you believe, sparrows)

88. Had chickenpox

89. Saved someone’s life

90. Sat on a jury

91. Met someone famous

92. Joined a book club

93. Lost a loved one

94. Had a baby (I have 3 sons, but I didn’t give birth to them)

95. Seen the Alamo in person

96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake

97. Been involved in a law suit

98. Owned a mobile phone

99. Been stung by a bee

100. Read an entire book in one day

Interesting video of how Obama’s campaign logo was designed. Via LogoDesignLove.

I used to fire up Chrome once in a while, mostly for compatibility testing, logging into a service with an alternative id (instead of logging off the service and re-logging in in my main Firefox window), or for other esoteric reasons.

Now I find it’s my main browser. Very odd. Not sure how it happened, but somewhere along the way I subconciously became convinced that it’s less of a resource hog than Firefox. Being able to reclaim resources by closing tabs is very attractive.

I do miss having a delicious plugin on a regular basis, and still use Firefox for Firebug. But otherwise, I’m mostly Chrome these days. 

Picking up from Tim’s post, since he has comments disabled:

Solaris: I know that Sun is deeply emotionally invested in Solaris, and that they can point to technical superiority on several levels. Fantastic. Unfortunately that battle is over – no-one outside of Sun cares. Linux is the operating system of choice for servers in small, medium, and large enterprises. It will be a heart-wrenching decision, but Sun has to move on from Solaris, take its best pieces of technology, and bring them to Linux. They can even keep the Solaris moniker if they’re enamored with it, just have it be Solaris Linux. 

Picture a Sun Linux distribution geared for servers, with ZFS, DTrace, and a variety of other advances thrown in, running on reliable, power efficient Sun hardware. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Picture not having to invest so much in competing with Linux, with APT, with the vast river of advances pouring into the Linux train. Picture instead investing those resources into improving Linux, making high-end, enterprise Linux synonymous with Sun.

Put another way: what percentage of hardware buyers are looking at Solaris as an advantage versus a disadvantage in their hardware purchasing decisions?

My own experience: A few years ago I was trying to find a home for a very nice Sun server that I had essentially free access to. To my great surprise no-one wanted the free hardware: “it’s not worth it, we’ll just have to move everything over to Linux eventually anyway”. That was eye opening.

The Hardware: Sun’s strongest attribute, one it’s squandering away rapidly, is the reliability and performance of its hardware. If you talked to hardware buyers 5 few years ago you’d see a deep-seated loyalty to Sun, because the hardware just worked. Sun had nailed operational reliability, saving people from 3am “server down” phone calls. That wins you big points.

Again from personal experience I can tell you other hardware vendors have trouble meeting the same standards; heck, the failure rate from one well known vendor was so shockingly high it was mind blowing. 

Sun is putting too much focus on their other stories, ignoring this crucial advantage. Considering the cost of hardware purchase pales in comparison to the cost of operating that hardware over the following years, why not pouce on this, make it the focus of your story?

The Margins: Margins on servers have been eroding. That’s a fact of life, one that Sun cannot turn the page back on. The sweet spot is, more and more, distributed grids of commodity servers. Sun has to embrace this, realize it means their business will be a different size and a different shape, and move on.

If they have an interest in getting into the startup and small business world, Sun has to realize it can’t sell hardware in the same way anymore. Resellers aren’t going to be part of the equation. I agree with Tim on the sales organization.

Developer Tools: Netbeans may well be the best IDE on the planet. I wouldn’t know, because I haven’t used it. I’d ask my friends’ opinions, but I don’t know anybody that uses it. I’d try it, but I can’t figure out a good reason to pick it over Eclipse (which I use, but I certainly don’t love). They seem very similar, but Netbeans has a much smaller community.

Glassfish could be a fantastic piece of software. To be fair I know people who are interested in using it (if not already using it). But it’s competing with several other pretty decent options, and they’re all free.

Someone needs to explain to me the benefit of competing with free on so many fronts. I don’t buy the idea of winning developers over to your platform; it’s just not working out. 

Instead, find the most popular free tools and provide the best platform to run them on.

MySQL: This is a fantastic piece of technology to draw on, to leverage into selling your other wares. I’m picturing a Sun server (running Linux of course), geared specifically for high-performance MySQL. It may simply be a matter of marketing, but I know if Sun put its substantial technical expertise and reputation behind a MySQL server that was configured to give me great performance, I’d pay a few extra bucks for it. Make that a cluster configured for master-slave with reasonable BCP that I didn’t have to design myself and I’d pay even more for it.

MySQL itself is a very nice, growing technology, one of the bright spots for Sun. I’d invest in things like Drizzle and orienting it for cloud operation. 

Looking forward: I largely agree with Tim here, and hope Sun can pull it off.

Disclaimers: I don’t speak for my employer, my uncle, or your friend’s poodle. These are opinions held at a particular point in time, subject to change in the face of relevant and convincing arguments. Enlighten me with comments below.

Peter Schiff calls the recession, standing firm against all the other pundits, at times literally getting laughed at. Even if you consider it luck or statistics (with so many pundits one of them has to get it right), his fortitude in sticking to his position despite everyone else going the other way is admirable. Via Signal vs. Noise.

Simple but very effective visualization of the exit poles.

My wife’s passing comment gave me the most profound understanding of what tonight means.

A few months ago she said of my son’s 5 year old african-american friend: “that kid is so smart, I feel like he’s the next Barack Obama”.

Not the next Michael Jordan. Not Tiger Woods. The next Barack Obama.

And just like that, the outlook for generations to come changes.

I’m trying to setup ad-hoc small mailing lists using GMail. They have a contact groups feature that mostly does what I need. However, the interface for adding contacts is quite limited – you pick from a list.

It’d make a lot more sense to allow addition of contacts to groups based on searching – eg. look for everyone labeled “tester” and add them to the “tester” contact group en-masse, or for any message containing the term “paintball” and add all the senders/recipients to “paintballers” group.

So there you go GMail group, please get to work.

I’m using Yahoo Live to get a look at the Yahoo UCSD Hack Day event, and I’m quite surprised at how well it works.

Seeing someone’s face via their webcam is an absolute waste of time, particularly on on video conference calls, but here I’m looking at a view of the room in the larger window, and at several of the hackers in smaller windows. This is actually a pretty workable virtual office. I can see Paul eating Pizza, Rasmus helping people, and the group I was sitting with mostly still there. I half feel like driving back over and re-joining the group.

Why is this useful? Well, for one, I can see people working, and it motivates me to stay up and work. Compare this to having no communication, just email, or IRC, and you’ll see it provides a much more tactile, real-world feel. I can see and hear the activity.

I could actually imagine a technology like this being useful for virtual office. Kind of like hanging out on IRC/IM, but with a more human feel.

My laptop suddenly stopped working, throwing me into panic – what if it’s a problem with the motherboard, the same problem that killed my last laptop?

It turned out to be the power adapter, fairly easily remedied, but it got me thinking about backups.

I realized I actually don’t have a lot to backup. All of my important work stuff is already under version control, available from another server. Losing my pictures would suck, but the majority of the ones I like I’ve already put on Flickr.

My email is already on gmail and Yahoo mail, as are my contacts and calendar. My personal documents are mostly on Google docs, and the others are available from various servers here and there.

Just about everything I do is already in the cloud. Which makes it very nice – practically speaking, if I had to rebuild my working environment the majority of the effort would go into setting up the various development tools instead of recovering things from backup.

Quite nice, and quite different from 5 years ago.

Is it me or does Palin struggle to say “nookiller” instead of nuclear? It seems like she knows the correct pronunciation but goes out of her way to say it incorrectly. Some sort of Bushism or republicanism maybe?

Actually it’d be interesting to draw party lines along pronunciation. I say potato, you say potAto.

Here’s a lazyweb question for you: what’s the best way to convert my flickr photo stream into facebook albums on an automated, continual basis? I much prefer dealing with flickr than facebook for photos, but many of my lazy friends are on facebook, keep asking for photos, but are apparently unable to click over to flickr or subscribe to the RSS feed.

There should be an easy way to have my photos automagically show up in facebook, right? I tried the top 2 flickr apps in facebook but they don’t seem to do this.

As you may know those Apple ads annoy the crap out of me. And I actually like the new Windows ad:

And just to stay with my general Apple disdain, do you have any idea just how closed and crappy the iPhone development process is?

How exactly did the linux crowd turn into Apple fanboys? 

How’s this for a productivity tip: leave your power cord at home. I’m in this situation now, and I’ll tell ya, it does bring a razor sharp focus to what you need to be doing with those precious few minutes you have of computer time.

(Of course if I was being really productive I’d be working instead of posting this)

I’m surprised to find I use Chrome pretty regularly already. It’s mostly my interface to Gmail, Google Reader, and GCal, and sits quietly in the task bar until I need to check email. Lack of firebug and various other extensions prevent me from using it for everything, but it’s part of the regular line-up of apps.