I've Been Thinking About This…

I’ve been thinking about sharing files around an organization (files that are too large to email), and easy ways to sync files between different people in different jobs. We use Dropbox currently, but I’ve been nosing around for anything else. Just bumped into this 14 June 2011 article from Pocket-lint titled “Apple iCloud vs Google vs Amazon Cloud Drive vs Dropbox vs Microsoft SkyDrive”

When something is well done, I must admit I get very critical about the little things that are wrong, since it seems to me it would be so easy to get from there to ‘perfect’. So it was with this article. It’s a comparison of various aspects of the services – space, file types, ease of use, devices, music, offline, cost and availability. There are a few points that are a little misleading:

Space: Since few people are willing to pay for services they can find elsewhere for free, this point should be labelled ‘maximum space incorporating all the different – and sometimes complex – options, many of which you have to pay for’. For the real deal – the space you get for free – jump to the ‘cost’ box.

File types: the summary says ‘anything’ for each of the services, but the description clearly points out that only Amazon and DropBox actually allow you to have any file type there without putting them into an email. Further, if your email connection is through a client such as Outlook, it will prohibit many files from being added without the extra step of renaming their extension.

Ease of use: I’m confused as to why Dropbox’s folder sync mechanism is in any way ‘a little harder to get your head around’. You drag a file into a folder: it syncs to the server. How is that hard?

Music: It’s interesting to see how much emphasis people put on their music collections and where they store them – my opinion is that this is a manufactured desire, with people buying into the idea unaware. And it’s clear that the author has bought into the idea, since this section even exists. For this entry, Google, Amazon and Apple all list ‘your library’, but the support by Dropbox and Skydrive is ‘none’, apparently (and erroneously). I can certainly store my library on either of them, since – in contrast to the file types supported by the other 3 services – I can store any file type. (And the note about ’18 million and 15 million to buy’ has no real bearing on the purpose for which you use the cloud – for storing and/or synchronizing data.)

Offline: I have no real beef with this, except to note that if you’re going to compare products, remember to compare apples. Dropbox was designed to handle storage and syncing; skydrive was designed for storage only; Microsoft intended LiveMesh to be used for syncing and it does that well. However, Microsoft’s Live Mesh no longer supports XP, so that’s a killer unless you’re at least on Vista.

What would have been a useful addition is a box on the ability of each service to share specific files with different individuals. I know Dropbox has it, and I doubt Apple, Amazon and Google have it, since they’re focusing on protecting their music sales more than the pure application.

To me, the clear free winner is Dropbox unless I want to put vast amounts of data into the cloud – which I think is rational only in rare situations.

Here’s how I’d rewrite the table:

I noticed another article in InfoWorld about the upcoming security risks for iPad and iPhone users that might interest some folks.

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Just a little reminder of where you are:

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Not my usual type of post, but here’s a dabbleance with HTML and CSS…

I was building a mockup web site for the church I attend. One of the design decisions was to use a very dark – as black as possible – background, and while I don’t like light text on a dark background (since it’s harder to read as you approach geezerdom), we’re a church with a relatively low average age, so it would work there.

So … near-black background, white or very light text. And I thought maybe a third color for the borders and other bits of styling, such as the bullets in lists. Orange on black is a good standout color.

It’s not so easy in CSS to get text in one color and list bullets in another – it’s one of the things I suspect never occurred to the committees. What you want to be able to do is something like:

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<style>
li  { color: white;  bullet-color: orange; }
</style>

… but that property keyword doesn’t exist. And when the question comes up on the web, it doesn’t seem to be something the forum gurus are too up on either – at various different sites one simply said no, you can’t do it; another said use an image instead, and a third suggested enclosing the text in the list in a span like this:

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<ul>
  <li>
    <span>text</span>
  </li>
</ul>

Now the idea behind CSS was that it manage style in place of HTML, not that it require more HTML to manage the limitations of CSS. So I had a think, and here’s how you do it:

In the CSS, turn off the bullet. Then add the ‘:before’ pseudo class to the li statement with the spiffy color and a snazzy bullet character that you pulled from your favorite HTML entity table (here’s a site with them all). And you get something like this:

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<style>
li      { margin-left: 1em; list-style-type: none; }
li:before   { color: orange; content: "\25A0 \0020"; }
</style>

<stuff> … </stuff>

<ul>
<li>... for <a href="#" rel="external">stuff</a> to click on</li>
<li>Something you don’t click on</li>
</ul>

Don’t forget to add your Doctype at the front for IE or it won’t work.

Demo and code here.

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I think this is clever marketing. In Japan, although newspapers are more widely subscribed to than in the US, the publishers can see an inevitable decline as the next generation moves up. They also observe that the next generation is crazy about manga – a stylized form of cartoon.

Wired Magazine on 'Manga News'

Putting the two together, they are appealing to young potential readers by setting the news into manga – real news in cartoon form. Talk about adjusting your approach to meet the culture!

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I was writing a note to someone just now in Microsoft Word, and typed the words “God’s grace” which the spell check didn’t like. It wanted either “God’s graces” or “God’s Grace” instead. Very cool – and absolutely correct, but who’d a thunk?

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And hopes that your new year will bring a deepening of your expression of His Grace.

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1. I wait a minute before I send a tweet. Did I really want to send that? – once its gone it’s not recallable. I’ve lost count of the number of tweets I typed and decided not to send.
2. I follow selectively:
   1. I don’t follow people who don’t add value unless they are a personal friend or a business associate – in which case they are already adding personal value.
   2. I assume that anyone who follows thousands of people cannot possibly be reading all their tweets, so they’re not reading mine.
   3. I also assume they’re only doing it for reciprocity – to build up the number of people who follow them. (Why would anyone even want this? If you gain 40,000 followers just because you followed them back, that doesn’t say you’re popular – it says you’re desperate!)
3. I don’t stalk:
   1. Responding to a tweet with a witty comment to simulate closeness rarely endears you to the recipient – it just makes you look like you want to be in their circle.
   2. Also: it may be corny and very old-fashioned, but I don’t follow many women, and – unless they are personal friends – I especially don’t follow married women. That just feels all kinds of wrong to me. Marriage is too precious a commodity and a tough enough proposition today without presenting yet another opportunity for its destruction.
4. I try to add value with my tweets. Say nothing nasty, private, deceptive, pointless or destructive.
5. Last year I stopped saying ‘hi’ to people just because they started following me. It seems a bit of an arrogant put-down, like saying ‘I was here first, but I’m so gracious I’ll welcome you too’.
6. I don’t spew a torrent of tweets. When I have a lot of points to make, I blog it and send a tweet about the blog.
7. I will unfollow people who
   1. try to sell me something,
   2. try to sell me on something about themselves to their profit,
   3. continually make up or pass along pithy quotes or
   4. violate points 4, 6 and possibly 3.

… and now I’m down to following 3 people.

Other thoughts:

• I won’t unfollow people just because they use ‘LOL’, ‘ROFL’ or smilies or other idiotic contractions, but it certainly doesn’t endear them to me.

• Twitter connectivity starts like this: ‘I find you; I read some of your tweets; I like them because they meet a need or interest that I have; I follow you’. But for some people the line of thought somehow continues, ‘… so I expect you to follow me back.’ This is then turned into ‘twitter courtesy’.
  This is the mentality that says ‘My self-esteem is built around getting a lot of followers. So I’ll follow a whole bunch of people just so they’ll follow me back – and if they don’t, I’ll accuse them of being discourteous!’ We live to the metric – gotta get those numbers up!
  I don’t get this mentality. If I follow you because I gain insights from your creativity, why should I expect you to follow me for free? I’d better be putting out some tweets that you find interesting too.

Any thoughts?

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8 years ago today, I was in California at the International Tandem User Group. Compaq had bought Tandem and DEC, and HP had bought Compaq, so this was now HP’s show – bigger, but a lot less fun than the old ITUGs. The stock market had begun tanking a year before, and the department that I ran was processing massive numbers of executions per day as people were selling at a frantic rate. Volume was through the roof. I was in the process of rearchitecting one of my main systems to allow for multiple instantiations, which worked well when implemented. And I was at the trade show to talk to vendors about hiring more consultants, or at least to maintain contact with the vendors I short-listed.

When the planes hit the towers and the Pentagon, every consulting house left for home immediately. They all felt – probably correctly – that they would need to be at their desks in order to provide crisis support via more consultants. Perhaps more strikes would come – nobody knew. Since all flights were canceled, trains were at capacity; people were hiring cabs to take them from California halfway across country. And I was stuck on the West coast. There was nothing I could do back at work; I called my 2IC several times a day to make sure things were running as smoothly as possible. The trade show was canceled. I managed to get my room extended, and sat out there and watched the carnage on TV. It doesn’t feel good to sit in luxury and watch helplessly while a place you’re intimately familiar with – I used to work in downtown NY on John Street and Water Street for some years – is being crushed.

It took nearly a week before I could get on a plane and come home.

My company had spent an enormous sum of money to protect their primary building. It had already been developed with disaster in mind – earthquake-resistant architecture, power feeds from different substations, multiple generators, and so on. Now we were going into a huddle about how to maintain the systems under threat of attack. Who would be evacuated from the building; who would be brought in to run the systems? The operators were in this building; developers in a different building. We went around the table; each department head said, “I’ll have so-and-so come over – he knows most about the systems we run.” I was getting more and more bothered. We had a disaster site 300 miles away – why wouldn’t we switch there immediately? This was obviously just an academic issue. But I felt intense pressure to go along with the crowd. These were VPs and SVPs – I was just a director then. I didn’t want to look like I wasn’t a company man. But I also felt that, as department head, I needed to be thinking about ‘my’ people. So when it came to my turn, I said, “All our systems are accessible to the programmers in the other building – we designed it that way.” (Which was true.) “My developers will stay in their seats and run things there – I’m not sending any of my people into harm’s way.”

I never caught any flack from that call, though I was sure I would.

Where were you? – Tell me in the comments.

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I wanted to play around a bit with Sparklines – cool little in-line charts and graphs that run off the jQuery library base. I’d found them several months ago in my regular trawling through the ‘net. So I took some of the CDC stats on N1H1 (aka swine flu) that they Twitter each day, and put this and this little Sparkline together. These are running on this page.

I also liked the Dow Jones Sparkline that they had on the screen, so I wrote a PHP server to get the closing prices from Yahoo! for the last 4 weeks and pass them to a Dow chart like theirs.

Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t let me include server-side scripting, so here’s a screen-capture of it.

I must say I’m pretty chuffed with it all…

[Updated this page 5/22/09]

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I’ve completed the next step on the votd Twitterbot list – the ability to retweet verses to others. Now when you Twitter

@votd John 3:16 esv > @tom, @dick, @harry

votd will look up the verse, send the original back to you, and retweet it on to the addresses you listed.

See the help page here.

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