Flock Blog

Switching gears a bit from my normally tech-related blog, I’m going to blog a bit about making wine.  I’ve been making wine for about 5 years on my own, and have always had a hand in my Dad’s activities for as long as I can remember. This year I purchased a number of varieties; Old vine Zinfandel, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Sauvignon Blanc.

I’ve taken some Sauvignon Blanc and added a tiny bit of Cabernet Sauvignon just to tint the colour a bit.  That’s right, I’m making a Rosé!  I’ve split it 70%-30%.  I’ve never made a Rosé before so this is a completely random experiment.  I’m also making a mix of 5% Sauvignon Blanc, 47.5% Merlot and 47.5% Cabernet Savignon.  I also have Merlot, Cab Sav, and Zinfandel on their own at 100%.

This is just at primary fermentation, so things are not totally set in stone. I can add anything I want at any time really, but this is the general ratio I’m going for this year.

The numbers:

SG (Starting Gravity):

• Sauvignon Blanc – 1.098
• Cabernet Sauvignon – 1.110
• Merlot – 1.100
• Zinfandel – 1.100

I got my loot on Sunday, so all the SG is as of Sunday the 27th.  Two days after initially setting up the barrels, I have the following numbers which indicate a yeast party (fermentation has begun):

• Rosé (Sauvignon Blanc + Cab Sav) – 1.090
• Cabernet Sauvignon – 1.098
• Merlot – 1.095
• Zinfandel – 1.095

Current shot of the yeast party in action:

I cannot believe how much variation there is on the visualizations of the CO2 bubbles generated.  It’s almost as if the yeast in each varietal has it’s own personality.  I’m sure that has something to do with how the wine matures and develops it’s complexty.  The other thing I need to note is just how crazy eucalyptus smelling the Cabernet Sauvignon is.. it might be another really good Cab Sav!  The last time I made Cab Sav was in 2007, and it was *amazing*.  Loooking forward to seeing this one mature.

Wow x2.  Yes, that’s Google I/O day two = wow x2.  Vic Gundotra wasn’t kidding when he had some more surprises up his sleeve at Google I/O 2009.  Wave was amazing to say the least.

Normally in these presentations you get the typical echo-chamber response to events.. lots of hype etc..  but this is really impressive.  Google Wave started 1.5 years ago, and if you think about it – that’s a long time ago to come up with this kind of vision of where the web should be.  Some have suggested that they have looked at Facebook connect and other web properties to guide them over time.  Maybe they did.. It’s irrelevant.  They’ve achieved some really neat stuff, plus they open sourced it.  They are ahead of the curve by a mile, although as they stated it themselves – the web hasn’t moved fast enough hence what they’re doing/releasing now.

To take a page from @anotherjesse, goodbye HTTP – hello XMPP.  The web as we know it is already old school, so welcome the new school of realtime communication and collaboration c/o Googl Wave.  I for one, as I mentioned in my last post, am quite excited.  The web is becoming more like an OS

So I’ve finished my first day at Google I/O.  Man, what a day it was.  The keynote was great and I actually got to sit front row.  To see Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google no more than 20ft away was pretty cool.  Vic Gundotra was the most active of the speakers and I’d say the most well-spoken next to Eric.

They have been really pushing hard for evangelising the next phase of the internet.  I think of it similar of the situation when desktop software became mature.  Multi-threaded apps were necessary, storage, accessibility, API standards for drawing etc.  These are now the things that are translating into the things that Google is trying to promote.  Background workers, pixel-based drawing, and offline mode just to name a few obvious examples.

I’m really stoked for this since I was one that was brought up upon C/C++ and threading and the like is a natural thought process for me.  Initially, coding javascript in the early days was almost a step backward for me – but now it appears that’s about to change.  I’m really happy a large company is behind these sorts of changes.  I really means the web is moving in an incredibly exciting direction.  Kudos Google.

If you want to check out the keynote for yourself, head to Google Youtube keynote for Google I/O 2009.

So I have a scheduling conflict.  I’ll be heading down to SF on May 26th for GoogleIO.  It’s Google’s largest developer gathering so it should be pretty exciting!  Unfortunately that means I can’t run DemoCamp Victoria #3.  I need people to take the reigns!  DemoCamp isn’t really *that* rigid or complicated, but to make it easy for people I’ll outline the basics:

• Welcome everyone to DC3.
• Explain what democamp is in very brief form, take some questions.
• Explain the format, get the list up and get those names on the board
• 30-second intros, vote on the best 4-6,  followed by the presentations of such. (again, not a hard rule, let the crowd decide
• Let the presentations rip and ask questions, engage.. don’t just sit there and watch!
• Enjoy the event, go out for a social afterwards

There should be a photographer going, but in addition we should have someone tweet the event (you #victoriatweetup ppl should come), and lets get more people blogging about it.

I’ll follow the hashtags while I’m in SF, good luck!

SEO eBook

I’ve wanted to learn more about SEO and how it can help drive traffic.  I’ve managed to get my hands on the following SEO eBook.  I was expecting a lot of complicated details which were difficult to figure out, hard to implement, or otherwise take me more time than actually worth it.  I was pleasantly surprised!

The book clearly defines the area to target, why you want to do it, and how.  If you’ve made a website before, you’re certainly capable of understanding this and making a big difference to your page rank.  Reccomending this to anyone who wants to enhance their SEO without investing a ton of time.

DemoCampVictoria

Hey everyone, that’s right.  We got another democampvictoria coming up May 26th, 2009!  We’ve got some really interesting demos in the pipe so I’m really looking forward to this one.  It’s at the Canadian Pacific Lawn Bowling club.

Barcamp page here:  http://bit.ly/67pHX

Facebook event page here:  http://bit.ly/12v7YZ

See you all there!

In the search for E.T. life, and a linux distro that works *well* on the eee pc, I’ve found Easy Peasy.  My first thoughts were “With a name like that, it’s a joke right?”.  My experience with lame-named linux software apps has been comical at best.

I sourced the screenshots, felt it was worth trying so I made a liveCD for my USB stick.  Sure enough, WIFI works out of the box, webcam works out of the box, and holy crap I didn’t needed to install ANYTHING ELSE.  Skype, openoffice, pidgin, etc..were all there.  So I decided to get rid of the atrocious Xandros P.O.S. setup and go for Easy Peasy.

There was only one bug that was incredibly annoying and I’m quite surprised it made it past QA:  Ubiquity – it’s the annoying liveCD startup dialog that asks if you want to install easy peasy on your device even though it’s already there.  Easy enough tho, apt-get remove solved that real quick.  Kudos to Easy Peasy, you’ve made a great distro!

Easy Peasy Main UI

My ex-co-worker Erwan Loisant blogged yesterday regarding the recent "Flock is/is not moving to Chrome" brouhaha. He sums up with the following statement:

At its early days, Flock decided to be a browser instead of a set of extensions. This choice makes sense for Flock's general strategy, but today I can't help but think that if Flock was an extension company, it could just have released a Chrome version along with versions for other browsers.

The monetization conundrum:

The problem Flock, and Round Two, it's predecessor faced with being an extension is unique to them. It's the standard problem of extension monetization. I'm not sure how Yoono or Foxmarks make money, but discovering how to reliably make more than just a pittance off an extension has been a recurring question and dilemma for extension developers. I feel this is the primary reason that we haven't seen more than a handful of companies emerge who specialize in revenue-generating extensions. Most companies creating extensions appear to author them as tie-ins to their existing revenue-generating product (ex: Facebook, NitroPDF), providing some revenue and brand awareness. Other companies (ex: Brand Thunder) seem to exist entirely on this brand awareness idea, creating extensions to skin the browser much like ads wrap city busses (at least in America and Canada). Note that out of the current top ten Firefox extensions listed on addons.mozilla.org as ordered by downloads, only number 10, CoolIris, appears to directly create revenue for the authoring company. Solving this is hard.

It's hard to compete with Free:

If, as an example, Flock were to be implemented as an extension and attempted to say, overwrite the affiliate tags for the search box in the chrome with it's own to redirect revenue, I think they'd be vilified and perhaps even blocked. Adding some sort of "shopping" functionality as Yoono has, or selling occasional ad space in the media bar as CoolIris does might be an option, although some (myself included) might find that a bit too blatant, feeling like egregious movie product placement. (ex: Apple in Independence Day, Cadillac in The Matrix, Dell in Ocean's Twelve) Instead, explaining/evangelising and providing some unique value to consumers would need to drive the downloads, similar to how Foxmarks provides unique value, and follow with some "pro" account feature users would be willing to pay for. However, then companies face the prospect of one of the Internet giants (ex: Google, Yahoo!) or Mozilla itself (ex: Weave) providing the same functionality, but for free, obliterating the market overnight. Flock took this idea to an extreme, adding value, but in order to not need a "pro" account fee (which would be a death knell in the browser space) they repackaged the entire browser with their added features, so they could legitimately drive their own search box revenue.

The Firefox App Store?:

The problem of extension monetization is one that many would like Mozilla to take on and provide a solution to. Perhaps there is a market for a browser that takes Firefox or Chrome, builds a slick App Store into it, promotes it among developers, markets it well with consumers, and then can sit back and make a pretty penny for their VCs. Maybe, but I don't feel that is the job of Mozilla, nor are they well-suited for it. While there are folks within Mozilla who are business-savvy, or who are charged with business-like functions (ex: marketing, PR), the majority of long-term employees are interested in the technology, and the opportunity of changing the world so dramatically with the amazing leverage they and Firefox have been lucky enough to find. You find examples of this throughout the product, where good-for-the-public ideals won over business goals. The latest that comes to mind is Firefox 3.1's native support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis. By shipping this, and motivating web authors to use these formats, Mozilla can do an end-run around the Adobe/Flash Video vs. Apple/H26n vs. Microsoft/Windows Media codec battle, and provide value to users, and even better, one that isn't tied to a particular company's balance sheet.

What it comes down to is that there is no easy solution for monetizing extensions, just creative ones. It's not Mozilla's responsibility either to come up with a solution, it's the responsibility of the market.

So if you are on twitter and you’ve seen the “Don’t Click: http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6″ status message, seriously.  Just don’t click it.  @apeatling was first on my list to state that it was a bad thing to do and it got me into investigative mode.  Besides viewing the source, I found a site explainin how all the so-called “magic” happens, and if you can read French check it out:  http://www.korben.info/petit-cours-de-twitt-jacking.html

It’s quite simple actually, it relies on an embedded iframe that visits the url: http://twitter.com/home?status=”http://tinyurl.com/amgzs6″.  Now everone that’s following you will see the same message you on on that friend and who konws who’ll click on it and propogate the badness.

Twitter needs to (and I’m sure by the time most people read this it should be fixed) check the referral on any API call, of course this is just *one* way to help fix the problem.

I then looked into the rest of the site and see how I could exploit DM messages and anything else (on the advice of @quaelin).  I theorize that you can use XHR to grep the twitter ID of any user you’re following and then DM them message.  The same idea applies, use “http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/xxxxx” (where xxxx is the twitterID of a particular twitter account) construct an http POST, pushing in the authentication_token value, and wham you got your script sending DM’s to everyone.

I’m deliberately leaving out a lot of details, but in short this sucks.  The same methods could be applied to many other sites, it’s not just Twitter that has to worry about this.

Follow me on twitter here: http://twitter.com/marklise

I just read a blog post about recycling entitled: We Can’t Go On Like This.  It talks a particular event arising at the recycling depot in Oak Bay.  The writer goes on about some people who came to return 100’s of coffee lids that are not recyclable via the Municipal Recycling Program.  The inference was they did the right thing to recycle, but they really should have thought about buying a Go Mug.

I couldn’t agree more, we can’t keep going the rate we’re going.  It prompted me to leave the following comment:

That is brutal.. Something Timmy’s could do is to push and promote the use of a Go Mug for a discount at the till on their coffee. Many coffee shops offer discounts if you bring in your own mug – but I have yet to find one that advertises this.

The failure not only resides in our thoughtless consuming of goods, but the ones selling us those goods are not exactly helping the issue either! Has a grocery store ever suggested you buy a re-usable bag? Thrifty’s even gives you $0.03 rebate per re-suable bag you bring in at the till, but they don’t even advertise that either.

There is one exception, Superstore. They ARE the superstore, they do not give out plastic bags or anything. You must bring in your own transport. Not only have these guys taken the lead on this particular bag problem, but they’ve absolutely crushed it! When will others follow?

Varied reports suggest that 4% of the world’s oil consumption is for making plastic bags.  I find that astounding.  What are you doing to be green?