Laughing Meme

Jasmine has a set of photos up from the short road trip we took with my parents to southern Vermont to see the changing of the leaves.

Some of my earliest photos on Flickr are of going to see fall colors in VT and NH, with our friends Rob and Rima, in October 2004. (whose son Elias was a month old yesterday)

Took the bike out for a spin on what might be the last truly hot and sunny weekend of the year.

Head out in search of the fabled Red Hook ball field food vendors. For 30 years they’ve been congregating on the weekends in Red Hook to feed the hordes who show up to play and watch soccer. And its widely agreed to be the best Mexican and Latin American food in the 5 boroughs.

Last year they had a brush with extinction as the city, in its bid to clean up the neighborhood and make it yuppy/Ikea safe shut down the proceedings citing sanitation issues. Eventually a compromise was struck, and a handful of the vendors are back, now in plumbed trucks. The food is still very very good, but their numbers are reduced. My favorite was the pupusas loroco con queso.

But even before that a flat tire drove me into the The Bike Shop and the Coffee Den across the way, where they serve a decent cup of Gorilla. Need to get those kevlar tires.

From there we walked along the water front, dramatically changed from our last visit two years ago. And found to our glee that Steve’s was still serving their swingles, frozen chocolate dipped key lime pie on a stick.

On the ride back I wandered into Fort Greene park, and wondered if I’d found a portal back to Dolores Park. So startled I forgot to take a photo.

And then, at the end of the 13 mile loop, blocks from home, tripped over a fafi and Koralie piece, paint not quite dry.

“[New York] is the company town for money” - Richard Lefrak

Netflix was pretty much the last place I was Web 2.0 style share cropping, creating value without a way to get it out. The Netflix API has been rumored for a long time, but with today’s release they really did an excellent job.

• REST, Atom, and Javascript APIs? CHECK
• Access to personal information using OAuth? CHECK
• Developer blog? CHECK
• API Explorer? CHECK (though why it’s a Firefox plugin, I can only guess)

Also versioned documentation, and a quite reasonable set of branding guidelines.

The Netflix Web APIs provide the ability for you to integrate Netflix user services into your application. The APIs provide the following capabilities:

• Performing searches of movies, TV series, cast members, and directors
• Retrieving catalog titles, including details about the title such as name, box art, director, cast, etc.
• Determining the subscriber’s relationship to a specific title, e.g, in queue, saved, available on DVD, etc.
• Managing and displaying queues for users
• Providing conveniences such as auto-completion of partial search terms typed by a user.
• Displaying a user’s ratings and reviews.
• Including functional Add and Play buttons in your web application.

Congratulations to Netflix, and Mashery.

You remember those dark days after the first bust?

You know the ones when all the MBAs left, and the people who loved the Web went on building it — building meaningful, crazy, artistic cool stuff, and the ethos of the social web was born, back before when that meant more then widget crazy/Facebook-tulip-bloom-madness. Yeah, that sure sucked.

Just thinking about it in the light of this week’s market silliness is enough to make me want to go back to SxSW again this year (where the torch was kept alight, like Ireland in the Dark Ages). And I’d sworn off it after this last year, but maybe budgets will be contracting again by then. And those projects that got started out in the darkness, say Flickr, and Upcoming and del.icio.us among others, wasn’t it all much better when the market got back involved and they got serious?

At least thats what reading Fred and Jason on “startup depression” reminded me of.

dc offline, originally uploaded by bees.

Cal apparently has instrumented Washington. Somehow not surprised.

Thanks to Simon for tickling my memory on this great blog post from Freebase on their custom tuple server.

Graphd is another good example of the log-oriented append only pattern. This is the sort of stuff I’ve been thinking about for a bit, and wishing I had more time to play with. Disks and disk metaphors might turn out to be our most dramatically parallelizable constructs.

Still my favorite hack is that, because they’re building a wiki-like tool, Freebase can bubble their eventual consistency implementation all the way up to the end-users, who are mentally prepared to deal with write contentions (they’re already dealing with rightness contention after all). We’re living in a post-ACID world.

The only down side is everyone I’ve talked to at Freebase seems pretty solid on this being their proprietary secret sauce, because a good, fast scalable open source tuple store might actually jump start a real semantic (small-S) web after all these years.

Oh, and only tangentially related, Myles published a good high level on our job queue system last Friday.

“And Mr. McCain has a special advantage to bring to any such investigation — many of the relevant witnesses are friends or colleagues of his. In fact, he can probably get to the bottom of the whole mess just by cross-examining the people riding on his campaign bus”. - Thomas Frank

via Lhl

Talk about from the everything-old-is-new-again dept.

Fred’s got a post up talking about the “mainstreaming” of 3rd party comment system. His graph compares their portfolio company disqus, with a bunch of companies I’ve never heard of.

Made me wonder what HaloScan was up to. Remember HaloScan? From back before Grey Matter or Blogger had comments? It popped up in that nasty little window, and generally sucked. And we all received early painful lessons in outsourcing control of pieces of your infrastructure. And then Moveable Type shipped with decent integrated comments (and just about the slickest looking admin interface anyone had ever seen anywhere on the Web) Apparently they’ve been acquired by this (js-kit)[http://js-kit.com] company. And their traffic is still growing!?!?!

Here’s a graph looking at disqus, HaloScan and js-kit:

With those numbers I’m not sure we’re talking mainstream here, though its interesting to see Wordpress picking up intense-debate. I like Wordpress’s corporate culture and they seem well suited for not stifling innovation in acquisitions.

But really all I wanted to say is whether or not this stuff is interesting to mainstream, as a hacker a 3rd party comment system is golden. Because we’ve all rolled our own blogging systems, and you either never built the comments, turned them off, gave up and went back to an off the shelf system, or are running some sadomasochistic social experiment. The great thing about decent 3rd party comment systems is you can go back to your bash/Perl/XSLT/file tree based system, and still have comments. (Leonard was the first alpha geek I noticed doing this)

And Disqus even has to start of a decent API. More focused at “forum owner”, individual commenters could use some love, and of course the whole thing could benefit from a standardized delegated auth model, but those are nits.

(btw. where are the Wikipedia articles on that early blogging era tech, our legacy is being lost! OMG!)

Historical landmark New York Central Railroad 69th Street Transfer Bridge, with Trump Towers looming in the background.