Ben Kahn

Every once in a while you look around and realize that you’re falling behind on life when you weren’t looking.  Maybe your universal all in one remote doesn’t work anymore.  Maybe you broke the counter-weight off one of the windows in your house and it slammed into your hand.  Or maybe the hinge on your gate broke letting your children wander in and out of the backyard and into traffic.  Or maybe you have black widow spiders in your basement.

Black Widow Spider

Now.  I know what you are thinking:  that’s brown.  It doesn’t have an hourglass shape on it.  Here’s a professional photo:

Professional Black Widow Photo. Image By Sturgis McKeever, Georgia Southern University, United States

You can find more information at: http://www.forestryimages.org/browse/detail.cfm?imgnum=1485040

If you think I’m wrong, I welcome other theories.

Well, as my last two posts implied, I own a TiVo again.  In fact, I own a TiVoHD.  Pay per view on the TiVo works through Amazon, so they have the best price.  I’ve been playing with it for 2 days now and I have some thoughts, comments, and a small review.

The TiVoHD is a much different device from the Series 1 TiVo I received 7 years ago. The Series 1 was intended to be connected to your cable box as a pure DVR addition.  The TiVoHD becomes your cable box and your Internet/TV media center.  It’s hard to compare them since they are very different devices.

The Verizon FiOS cable box with DVR is a lot closer, and the TiVo is worse in some ways:

• you don’t get On Demand or Verizon’s pay per view: This is working with Comcast now if you live in the Boston area.  I shed no tears for pay per view, but On Demand had a lot of free content.
• the TiVo interface is almost unacceptably slow: When you press a button on the remote, it takes anywhere from a half second to a full second for the device to register it.  To make matters worse, with a Dolby receiver, the TiVo sometimes doesn’t make a confirmation sound.  This problem makes the device feel cheap and hard to use.  I’m amazed that they released it without solving this problem.  Other people think so too.
• entering text using the remote (for searches) is much, much harder:  Verizon had the ability to use the letter substitutions on the number keys to enter text.  So 228 matched CAT and BAT, but searching was easier and faster.
• the guide doesn’t show which shows will be recorded already: this didn’t work reliably on the Verizon DVR, but it was nice to look through the list of shows and see that The Daily Show was going to be recorded.

It’s better in a number of ways too: the channel guides are much much nicer; scheduling shows is easier and more understandable; fewer bugs; the TV picture seems better somehow (maybe a better MPEG decoder?); easier to use; expandable storage; ability to record shows to DVD or VCR; closed caption support; a better remote; swivel search; and Guru Guides which help you find interesting things to watch.

But the most interesting thing about the new TiVoHD happens when you give it a broadband connection.  TiVo seems to be trying to make their device a full media center.  You can listen to Internet radio stations, (on your stereo!) log into online photo sites and view them on your TV, purchase and play movies from Amazon, etc., etc.  It will also allow you to download recorded shows and movies to your computer, (and then to your iPod, etc) stream photos and music from your computer, and transfer videos from your computer to your TiVo.

And finally, TiVo has released an API to design new applications and do cool and interesting things. And here again things fall down.  There are some developers creating interesting things, but development seems to be slowing or stopping.  A grand community doesn’t seem to have formed.  In fact, the forum is fairly quiet.  Obvious ideas like Youtube videos, Facebook monitors, or networked games aren’t even being discussed.

So, what’s going on?  Is TiVo too hard to obtain now?  Is there not enough of an audience?  Are the hackers all using the open source equivalents?   Is it too hard to install and use third-party software?  Or is this just a community management or advertising problem?  Or am I missing a vibrant community of people? Does it cost too much for developers?  (The monthly price seems to be much cheaper than renting the Verizon box…)

So in the long trip to get a working TiVo with FiOS service, I’ve hit another snag.  Verizon insists on sending someone to my house to install the cable cards.  Why, I ask?  Because they are fragile.  (It costs $100 to replace them if they break.)  Yikes.

So after UPS (and I hate UPS) screwed up the TiVo delivery (and Amazon refunded 10% of the purchase price to ease the pain of that) I had to reschedule the technician visit.  That Friday, I reschedule for next Friday, which was the first possible day available.  *grumble*

On Monday, the technician showed up, of course.  So we sent him away, and I called Verizon again.  They showed no record of the cancellation or the reschedule.  So I scheduled Friday again, which was hard since Friday was actually full now.

Today, of course, no technician is coming.  I just called.  No record of my call.

Now, it’s scheduled for Wednesday the 6th.  But they gave me a confirmation # this time, so I guess it’s really true.

But, at least I’m not as bad off as this guy.

I ordered a TiVO on Tuesday night from Amazon with 2 day shipping.  It was too late in the day, so it counted as being ordered on Wednesday.  Estimated delivery?  Friday.  So, I called up Verizon to order cable cards for it.  They quickly scheduled a technician to come out (?!) and deliver them and install them Monday morning.  Perfect.

Then, UPS got involved.  Check out the shipping history of this package:

This is a UPS screw up.  It happens sometimes, right?  Nothing to worry about.  I’ve seen their ads where you can fix problems and they’ll help out!  So I call them and detail the problem.  I need the shipment before Monday. (the customer service rep mentions the package won’t arrive until the end of day on Monday)

“I need this before Monday, can you change it to Saturday delivery?”

“No, it’s on a truck right now with 5000 other packages.  We can’t pull just one package off, we don’t know where it is.”

“I need this before Monday.  This is your error, I paid for delivery to be on Friday, what can you do?”

“Call Amazon and have them pay for a package intercept back to them.  When it arrives (!) have them ship it again next day air with Saturday delivery.”

So, they can’t find the package unless Amazon (I can’t do it) pays them to find it.  In which case they can get it back to Amazon in time to reship it to me at GREAT expense for Saturday delivery.  Yes, that’s the case, although the original delivery charge would be refunded.

Awesome.

I hate you, UPS.

(Yes, I called Amazon to suggest this insane scheme, and they refused for some strange reason.)

So I haven’t blogged in a while.  Not for lack of subjects.  My TiVo died.  We got a great new camera.  I flew to Ohio for $10 each way.  I ran over my cell phone, but it still works except for the screen.  I helped release some pretty interesting software.  I’m looking at the Zimbra plugin for Evolution.  Our 6 month old is still not sleeping through the night.  Our 4 year old is teaching himself to read.  Amy is working again.

None of those things were actually enough to make me blog, for some reason.  But finally something got my attention.

We hired a baby sitter  take care of  Josh, the above mentioned 6 month old since Amy and I are both working.  She’s very nice and arrives on time, and seems great with both boys.  But today she was late.  On a whim, I looked out the window and saw her car trying to get up our 100 foot driveway.  (Which is icy and snow covered even through our neighbor spent a ton of time clearing it after the snowstorm — which I also didn’t blog about.)

I threw on clothes and ran outside to get her salt so her car could get up the driveway, but she met me at the door.

“My car is on fire!”

Well, it really was.  Lots of smoke — both white and black.  Flames.  Melting things.

I called the fire department.  I got everyone out of the house.  The fire trucks arrived 2 minutes later.

The car didn’t explode.

I didn’t think to get pictures until the car was towed away.  I’m not sure why.

Do not try this. It’s not a good idea. I don’t endorse it.

That said, I have a Google Calendar that I want to view in Evolution (if just for the nice reminders) but I don’t want to make public, and I can’t use the private URL. I need Evolution to authenticate to Google, and download the calendar. If you can use a private URL, there is already a good solution.

To that end, I made a terrible, horrible, no good patch to allow Evolution to authenticate to Google so I can download my calendar. The trick is to pre-auth with Google, get the auth token from the result, and store it in GConf. From there, the patch will make evolution-data-server recognize Google Calendar URLs and send the auth token in a special header.

Before I get to the patch, here are the problems:

• Seriously, it’s an ugly patch
• You have to recompile evolution-data-server
• Adding an auth token to GConf?! What are you, nuts?
• Evolution may not be able to understand the appointments set by Google’s calendar
• The calendar only updates every once in a while
• You can’t edit the calendar in Evolution

Here’s how to make it work:

First authenticate with Google to get your auth token:

curl -D - https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin -d accountType=HOSTED_OR_GOOGLE \
-d Email='username%40domain' -d Passwd='password'  \
-d service=cl -d source=evolution-testing-0.0.0

Replace username with your email username. Replace domain with your email domain — this will usually be gmail.com. Then replace password with your google password.

This will return three lines, the last one will look like this: Auth=DQAAAGgA...dk3fA5N

Then run:

gconftool-2 --type string -s /apps/evolution/calendar/gauth authstring

You’ll need to replace authstring with the 180+ character string returned by the previous command.

You should only have to do the above once. Or whenever the auth string
expires which seems to be very rare, if at all.

Then quit Evolution and kill the data server with this command:

evolution --force-shutdown

Start evolution after applying this patch.

Go to the calendar component and add:

webcal://www.google.com/calendar/ical/username@domain/private/full.ics

as a web calendar. You’ll need to replace username with your email username and domain with your email domain, usually gmail.com. You’ll need to check “Use Secure Connection” and I recommend that you cache the calendar locally.

Happily it works for me until the real solution is available.

I really enjoy the way Google’s Gmail displays related messages (or threads) as conversations. David Morrison has been working on a plugin for Evolution which tries to replicate this behavior. The last news items was on August of 2005 asking if he was done.

I think it still needs a little bit more work, so I’ve written up a specification for Gmail’s conversation feature.

Of course, once you do all that, it always turns out that someone else has written something similar already and for the same reason.

Hmm…  31.

So I guess there is a big GNOME announcement today at noon Eastern Time today. On IRC, people were trying to guess what it could be. Here are some of the ideas, which are all very funny:

• the board decided to release gnome 2.20 as gnome 3.0
• we are migration gnome desktop to web 2.0 on google
• they are passing the power to a supreme chancellor
  • to start the clone war
    • jeff has passed to the dark side
• GNOME will become the default environment for Macintosh
• GNOME will be the successor of the vista GUI
• The HIG was a huge mistake and we’re switching the button order back
• we are going back to the old gnome stone logo
• we’re releasing GTK+ 3.0
  • with support for Qt as a scripting language?
    • QScript, actually
• there won’t be widgets anymore, the whole desktop is a large interactive SVG
• GNOME switches to windows as the target platform
• all applications are now required to have notification area icons
• all applications will now be 50% transparent by default
• all applications should be inside an applet
• we’re adopting the ms office 2007 ribbon everywhere
• we migrate our documentation system to .doc
• We’re changing our name for trademark reasons to “Dwarf”
• we are changing our name to GMAE because it’s a DOUBLE ACRO-BACKRO-NYM
• Nautilus is getting support for animated desktop backgrounds
• Eazel comes back to life, as well as Eazel services

Edit 4/19 @ 2:15 pm ET: Oh my.  Some of the comments are great!

It’s easy to create an automated staging server for content that doesn’t need to be compiled (like most web content.) The trick is that CVS has a very flexible logging system. All you need to do is have your CVS server send an email on each check in and have the staging server take that email and check out the files that changed.

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