Inbox Zero

Merlin Mann, who runs the excellent site 43 Folders, gave a tech talk at Google last week called, "Inbox Zero". The talk is about techniques for dealing with large amounts of email. I've been following his related articles on this subject for a long time. I've adopted many of these practices including keeping my inbox at zero messages, processing mail a few times a day, and using filters to keep the noise out of my consciousness stream. Also, for my friends reading this blog, doesn't Merlin kind of remind you of Matt?

Several numbers, different services, one number

This week brought us another interesting Ted Stevens quote:

Stevens: "Let me be just the Devil's Advocate here. Could I just decide I want to keep my wireline and I want to add wireless to it? Can I have two providers on the same number?" Awkward pause: "Um, I don't think that technology exists right now." Stevens: "If I had an IP phone, by definition, I'd have to leave the wire... wireline phone to use it?" Answer: "I think that is the case with the technology today." Stevens: "Is it coming? Why shouldn't I be able to say, just by a little switch on my phone at home that's wired, I'm going off on the wireless now, I want to use this as I ride my motorcycle."

Motorcycles aside, the technology to do what the Senator is asking for does exist in several companies. For example, my employer just bought a company that does exactly this. Take a look at GrandCentral's web site, and you will see that this is exactly what Tedd Stevens is asking for. It's one number that you can put in front of your Mobile, Landline, and VoIP phones. It allows you to determine which calls go to which phones, and gives you a universal voicemail service. It doesn't help with using your phone on your motorcycle, which I think is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of. [via Boing Boing]

Why Congress Needs a Version Control System

I've seen some really great posts coming out of O'Reilly Radar the last few days, and this one by Tim O'Reilly discusses an interesting idea. In Why Congress Needs a Version Control System:

These are really thought-provoking suggestions. I was particularly struck by Karl's suggestion of a version control system for Congress. They say you don't want to see either laws or sausages being made, but I think they are wrong. Imagine how much more transparency and accountability our government would have if it were possible to see what changes were made by whom, who inserted extraneous riders into various bills, and generally to track the influence of various interests by the new visibility into their actual control over the knobs and levers of government!

I'd never thought of this before, but it's an idea that makes so much sense. I can think of at least two different ways that a version control system would be interesting. First, by looking at diffs (i.e. the changes from one version to the next) a congressperson would be better able to know exactly how a given bill has changed before she votes on it. This would essentially end the idea that someone could slip in a last minute amendment to a bill. With a system like this the congressperson could look at only the changes to the last version of the bill she read, just before she is going to vote on it. This would allow her to see things like an new clause, or important one word changes that could change the tenor of the entire bill. This system would make it much easier for our representatives to be well-informed when they vote. Second, this system would be incredibly useful for us. I would love to see any piece of legislation published in a versioned form. That way, I could go through each revision of the bill myself to see how it changed and evolved. A version controlled law would show you every change from the initial text, and it would put a name next to those changes. It's the ultimate ability to fact-check your representative.

Reading Books on the iPhone

I really want to be able to read books on the iPhone. I think it's got a great screen and UI for doing this, but without native file support we'll have to settle for web sites that host books. Peter Meyers recently looked at several ways to read on the iPhone. In his article, Reading Books on the iPhone - Missing Manual Gadgets:

"I took a look at three different kinds of content: a book from O’Reilly’s Safari online reading library, a Web site whose layout appeared especially readable on the iPhone, and a PDF.

The verdict? iPhone-friendly Web sites are the clear winner. Safari books take second place and are readable for about 10 pages or so at time. PDFs are as lame as ever on the small screen. Pictures, comments, and some suggestions after the jump."

For a long time, I've been reading on a Palm TX using books from eReader.com. I've read hundreds of books this way, and find it a great alternative to carrying around a paper book. I'd be very happy if I could read eReader books, and PDFs that are stored on an iPhone.

[via O'Reilly Radar]

Update: I've posted a review of some iPhone 2.0 Book applications here.

Secure browser-based email

In my earlier post, no warrants needed to monitor web use, I mentioned that you could use PGP to encrypt the contents of your email messages. In the comments to that post someone pointed me to a site that you could use to do client based PGP email within a browser. I thought that was pretty cool, and deserved a post to point it out to others. This lead me to look for a similar solution for Gmail (my preferred email client), where I found this page on Gmail Encrypt. Gmail Encrypt is a Greasemonkey script that will add PGP to the gmail interface. Maybe this is something that should be added to the Better Gmail firefox extension.

Origin of everyday punctuation marks

Netorama has an interesting article on the origin of punctuation marks and symbols. It is quoting heavily from a book called "Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader":

?: When early scholars wrote in Latin, they would place the word questio - meaning "question" - at the end of a sentence to indicate a query. To conserve valuable space, writing it was soon shortened to qo, which caused another problem - readers might mistake it for the ending of a word. So they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercased q on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and the q to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.

This reminded me of a site called The Word Detective, which has similar content about the origin of everyday words. Finally there is the Online Etymology Dictionary, again great for learning about the history of a given word, but not so great for symbols.

No warrants needed to monitor web use

Last week the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the police do not need a warrant to monitor the web pages and email addresses a person contacts:

In Friday's ruling, the court said computer users should know that they lose privacy protections with e-mail and Web site addresses when they are communicated to the company whose equipment carries the messages.

These kind of rulings can be expected in the current political climate, and even if a warrant were required there is no guarantee that your ISP wouldn't just give the data to the Government. You can, however, take precautions to protect your privacy online. You can use Secure Shell (ssh) to create encrypted tunnels for your mail and web browsing. You can use PGP to encrypt the contents of your email messages (although your contract addresses aren't protected). You can use Onion routing to obscure your actions on the internet.

Degradation in virtual sites

This weekend Marc Hedlund has a post on O'reilly radar, that made me think of a conversation I had several years ago with some friends. The post was about the new launch of They're Beautiful, an online flower service by the folks at Jackson Fish Market. They describe the service as:

a lovingly detailed virtual flower delivery service. As with online greeting card services, users are encouraged to send greetings to their loved ones. However, instead of sending a card, the person sends a one-of-a-kind bouquet of flowers that the recipient can keep “alive” through attentive care.

In essence, when you send someone flowers through the site, that person can create a greenhouse account where she will see all of the flowers she has been sent. To keep the flowers looking nice and fresh you have to water them every once in awhile. This is a form of degradation in the virtual goods delivered in this site. It marks the passage of time, and is an indication for the user (and the company) of how often the site is used. Back at the radar post, Hedlund said:

I wrote an article at the time called "A well-worn staircase" about how the virtual world was missing some of the signals the real world gives us about how many people have been somewhere or used something before us: stairs that have been worn down by years of use, books with dog-eared pages and coffee stains, that sort of thing. The only way a newcomer to the Star Wars site would know someone else had been there was if the site was slow.

My friend Ben Olander later used a similar idea on the Pleasantville movie site -- like the movie, the Pleasantville site switched from black and white to color images the more you used it.

I always wanted to do something similar, but had thought of a site in slight different terms. In my idea a sight would stay clean and spiffy the more it was visited. Kind of like a metal railing on a stair case is always well polished.

So my idea for virtual degradation was to add dust, cob webs, and small graphical signs of disuses gradually the longer a page in a site was quiet. So, over time, the page would start to break down, fall apart, and give the visitor a visual indication that it was no longer being maintained.

I'd love to see more work done in this area, I think that the web increasingly needs better metaphors for freshness and well worn paths.

Weekend posts on Culture Shock

You may know that Jenna and I blog about our experiences in London over at Culture Shock. The blog was quiet for awhile, but we are both trying to spend some additional time writing on that site. This weekend, has two posts that my readers might be interested in:

• The best Pizza we have found in London
• An account of two instances of violence over the weekend
• One man Star Wars - Live

I know, they don't really go together, but what can I say.

Dublin

I went to Dublin on Tuesday to visit a team at Google's offices there. I didn't get a chance to see much since I flew in a 7am and back to London at 5pm, but there were a couple of things that I thought were interesting. First, all of the signs in Ireland are written in Irish with English translations. I hadn't realized, until this trip, that Irish was the first official language of Ireland with English being the second. I also hadn't realized that the name Gaelic isn't the correct name for the language spoken in Ireland. It can be referred to as Irish Gaelic, or Irish. Which a helpful taxi driver explained to me. The other impression that I took away from Dublin was construction. It seemed that no matter where you look there was construction marked by huge cranes dominating the skyline. One of my drivers told me that Dublin has undergone a sea change in the last 30 years. That today it's becoming more and more prosperous and younger. He said that the Dublin he moved to in the sixties is almost gone today, and that the new back office jobs have displaced the docks and the waterfront. He seemed really excited about the future of Dublin. Dublin, and to whatever extent this can be extrapolated to Ireland, has a great dependence on back office jobs and tourism. They had signs all over the city that said tourism was a big part of the economy and it was up to everyone was needed to help keep the tourists happy. It was an interesting trip, and I'm looking forward to more trips to Ireland in the future. Hopefully on the next trip I'll get more time to see the sights.

Authors@Google: Cory Doctorow

There are many great benefits to working at Google, but one of my favorite is that we are able to bring in authors and thinkers from all over the world to speak at the company. It's one of the things that gives Google that university feel that I love so much. Back in May we had Cory Doctorow in to speak, and he delivered a really interesting talk.

Apple sells over 500,000 iPhones

Over the weekend I observed that most Apple stores were reporting available iPhone stock on Sunday. I asked:

The question that comes to mind for me is this: Did Apple just do one of the most successful ultra-hyped consumer electronics launches in history, or did they overestimate the number of iPhones they would sell on day one?

Well, it looks like I now have my answer. It seems that Apple has pulled off one of the worlds most successful gadget launches in history. According to several sites, Apple is estimated to have sold 500,000 iPhones over the weekend.

Concert Hall on Lake Lucerne

Concert Hall on Lake Lucerne 4, originally uploaded by Allen Hutchison.

One of my favorite photos from our trip to Lucerne in April. I love how calm the water is with the posts in the foreground. In some ways this makes me think of a Japanese scene.

Aperture to Picasa Web Albums plug-in

Übermind has released a new plug-in for Aperture to export photos to Picasa Web Albums. I've been using it for a couple of days now to upload a backlog of pictures to my Picasa Web Album. Overall this plug-in works great. The only issue I've seen is that it takes a long time to get your initial album list, but once that is done the application is very responsive. I've been waiting for a Picasa plug-in for Aperture for quite a while now, so I'm really pleased to see this one and find that it works so well.

Tree Outside The Wall

Tree Outside The Wall, originally uploaded by Allen Hutchison.

Another picture from Lucerne that I really like. This is a tree outside the old city walls. The day was pretty cloudy, but as we were walking along the walls, the clouds broke and I got this shot.

Smoking ban starts today

Today is the first day for England's indoor smoking ban to take effect. From today it's illegal to smoke in any enclosed work place including pubs, bars, night clubs, etc... It's going to be interesting to see how this effects pubs around the country. Our local pub has an outdoor patio, so people will still be able to smoke there. However, the rest of the building will be smoke free. I think Jenna and I are more likely to head over to the pub in the evening now. Jenna has always been very sensitive to smoke, and has usually avoided smokey places. The fact that indoor smoking was allowed was probably the biggest single difference that we experienced on a day to day basis when moving from California to London. It's played into several decisions that we make on a daily basis. Often we'll skip going to a pub or restaurant because we don't want to come out smelling of smoke, or more importantly, we don't want to take that smell home.