ryan kennedy’s blog

I’m seeking a little help here. I use a dual monitor setup with my MacBook Pro when I’m at work (the laptop screen is one of the two screens). Anyway, when I unhook the DVI cable, sometimes application windows don’t rearrange themselves on the main laptop screen. Instead, they’re somewhere, way the hell out of the visible area.

I can see the windows if I use Exposé, but I can’t move them back to where they’d be visible once leaving Exposé. Anybody have any suggestions on how to get those windows moved back, at least somewhere so I can grab hold of them with the mouse cursor?

Allegedly it hit 113 in Folsom today. It’s been like this the last several days, I think they said we could be looking at 10 days straight of 100+ (including the days from last week and the ones to come this week). That’s just insane.

Mookie pointed out how hot it’s been down in the Bay Area. Unfortunately, since the highs appear to have only made it to the low/mid 90’s in Sunnyvale, I have little sympathy. I actually look forward to going down to work in Sunnyvale during the week because I know I’ll get a couple days break from the Sacramento heat.

It’s 12:25am and it’s STILL 89 outside. I’m Irish/Scottish damnit, my genes can’t take this heat.

Ever since switching to a Mac, I’ve been looking for a replacement music service. I had been using Yahoo! Music Unlimited, which I love. Unfortunately, it’s entirely unsupported on a Mac (don’t you dare tell me to use Parallels). I think Yahoo! and all the other companies doing subscription-based services kick the living hell out of iTunes. Seriously, why spend $1 per song where you can only listen to that song on an iPod or a PC? You could spend $10/month and have access to several million songs from Yahoo! instead (plus Yahoo! will let you listen to it on any PlaysForSure capable device of your choosing). If the price were the same, what would you rather have, 10 songs a month or several million songs a month?

Anyway, as I said, I’m looking for a new music service. All of MP3 looks like the best service around, that is…until you realize that it’s a Russian company pirating music. They purchase CDs and then rip them into the collection and resell the tracks online for bargain basement prices. Even though the long arm of the RIAA doesn’t seem to be able to do anything to stop them (for now), I’m pretty sure they’d have no qualms about going after their customers in the United States. Additionally, I’m nearly positive no revenue generated by All of MP3 is going to the artist. So even if I could get away with using All of MP3, I won’t.

So given all of these choices that keep getting shot down, I continue coming back to eMusic. I like two things about eMusic: 1) they’re legal and 2) there’s no DRM. That means I can do whatever I want with the music. I can burn it to a CD, I can throw it on an iPod, I can drop it on a Creative Zen, I can play it on my PC, etc. It has a pricing model more like iTunes where you pay for a subscription that gives you a certain number of downloads per month, so I’m not 100% in love with it, but I think I’d be willing to pay the extra money for DRM free tracks.

Unfortunately, eMusic has a HUGE problem in my mind…they won’t let you browse the selection without signing up. Granted, they have a free preview, but you still have to give them a credit card number. How am I supposed to figure out if their selection has enough to make me want to pay for their subscription? Every other service I’ve seen will let me browse their selection for free, so why won’t eMusic? Are they afraid that nobody would sign up if they realized how slim the pickings are?

I am willing to concede that it may be possible to browse the eMusic selection without signing up (I swear I was able to do it once before). However, I can’t seem to navigate their site to anything resembling a music catalog without having the sign-up form pop up. If someone else knows how to look over the collection without signing up, please let me know.

Also, if you have an alternative music service that’s supported on the Mac, let me know. I’m talking about music services where you can actually pick the track you want to listen to, so services like Pandora (which I already use) don’t count.

Update: Thanks to the efforts of mookie, I have the answer to the riddle of the hidden eMusic catalog page.

I hate soccer, I always have. I think the sport is boring, slow and stupid. I like baseball, though…odd (it too is boring at times, always slow and frequently stupid).

This World Cup, however, something was different. The difference is Yahoo! Every morning and lunch the cafeteria was packed with people wanting to watch some soccer action (I refuse to call it football). Eventually, I caught a little bit of the bug. There was moments of excitement. If nothing else, you had to admire the physical shape the athletes must be in to run around for 90+ minutes, sometimes at a full sprint.

It ended up taking most of the final match, however, before I really got into it. The Italy vs. France matchup, supposedly the two best teams in the world. The scoring was slow and lame (one accidental goal and another penalty kick), the Euro’s were throwing themselves around the field like they’d just been shot, despite the fact that nobody touched them (Americans do it too, but we weren’t in the World Cup long enough to leave a lasting impression). To top it off, the game was decided by a bunch of professional athletes firing soccer balls at a goalie from nearly point blank range. Yet…I still enjoyed the match. Why?

ZZ Top, that’s why. Zinedine Zidane…my favorite soccer player. Sure, everybody in the world thinks he’s dirty. But I think he’s a hero for a couple of reasons:

• I swear the Italian gives him a nipple twist. Purple nurple or no…that guy’s got to go down.
• If the rumored racial epithets are anything close to what Materazzi really said to Zidane, once again…that guy’s got to go down.
• HE HEADBUTTED HIM IN THE CHEST AND PUT HIM ON THE GROUND!!! If Smokey were in the house, we all know what he’d say.

Finally, some action in the game. Nobody’s scoring, but I can watch someone get headbutted in the chest in slow motion. Know what soccer needs? A sense of humor. Seriously, you can’t toss a guy from the game for that. You give him an award or something. How about the “That’s Using Your Head” award?

While I’m on the subject of hating soccer, what’s up with letting penalty kicks decide the game? Seriously, you played two 45 minute halves and two 15 minute overtimes. You’ve busted your ass up and down the field. Now you’re going to let the game be decided by luck? It’s not like the goalies were using any form of skill to try to block those shots. Half of the shots went one way while the goalie dove the opposite. That’s not skill, that’s luck! It’s like playing Roshambo. May the best…guesser, win. At least in baseball you lose for a good reason when you’ve gone beyond regulation time (usually because your bullpen sucks).

Anyway, I think I still hate soccer. But Zinedine Zidane is most certainly my favorite European athlete at the moment. God bless you ZZ Top (you should grow out the beard).

I was reading Scoble’s post about picking out an HDTV. He’s totally right, in my mind…skip the plasma. My wife and I bought our rear projection 55″ Mitsubishi 6 years ago. It’s a fantastic television (although I’m getting the itch to upgrade just to get digital inputs) and it was reasonably priced (about $3,500). Nowadays, you see the monster plasma and LCD screens. Shame is, they also have monster pricetags to go along with them.

Rear projections, on the other hand, are the sweet spot. You can get a good sized screen without too much green (I can’t believe I just said that). And unlike the rear projection I got 6 years ago, the new ones aren’t 3 feet deep and 4 feet tall. They’ve shrunk them down to the point where they’re not the moving burden they once were (you should have seen us trying to get our TV to the second floor apartment we used to live in). In addition, the picture is fantastic. And with the money you save, you can afford to go big on a good surround sound system (I’m ashamed to say we still haven’t taken care of our surround sound situation).

So, everything was going relatively well with Akismet until tonight. I’m not saying that everything went horribly wrong, but I will say that it had it’s first false positive just moments ago. It wouldn’t be so disturbing if it weren’t for the fact that it chose MY comment as spam.

So now I can’t trust Akismet as much as I had been. I’d been screening everything it was catching before manually deleting the spam, just to make sure there were no false positives. Lately I’d gone into a “quick scan” mode where I’d gloss over comments quickly, looking for the telltale signs of links to pharmaceuticals. But now I can’t do that anymore, I have to keep a closer eye on what it’s flagging.

*sigh*

I’m not 100% positive what came over me today, but I felt inclined to do a little bit of investigation into alternative commuting options. When I say “alternative”, I mean way the hell out there. I’ve already done by train and automobile. By plane is kind of out of the question, just because it would be expensive and time consuming (too much dealing with homeland security checks and all).

So today I researched…by water. It’s a little known fact that there is a waterway that leads all the way from downtown Sacramento all the way into the San Francisco Bay. I’m not entirely sure if it’s passable by decent sized watercraft year round, but it’s definitely there. So I wandered over to the Gmaps Pedometer and found myself a water route that would run from downtown Sacramento to the south end of the bay nearish to Yahoo!. It’s a little over 120 miles, which is actually about the distance on the freeway from my house in Folsom to Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. I have no idea how long it would actually take a boat to cover that distance since I’m not familiar with boat speeds.

Well, after I found a route, I had to look for a boat. More specifically, a house boat. See…if I’m going to have to pay for a slip down in the Bay Area, I might as well make it dual purpose and turn it into living space while I’m at it. So I turned to eBay and found a 1989 cruiser with 2 bedrooms and a bathroom. It’s a bit expensive ($20,000+) and I really know next to nothing about owning a boat, so the chances of this leading anywhere is slim to none.

In any case, just wanted to share the lengths to which I’ve been researching commute alternatives. If you think of any good/clever/fun ways of commuting from Folsom, CA to Sunnyvale, CA…feel free to let me know. Who knows, it just might be crazy enough that I’ll try it. Just don’t recommend anything I’ve already tried (I’ve already done the Capitol Corridor train on Amtrak and I’ve done the drive in my truck more times than I care to mention).

I snapped a pic of my MacBook Pro setup at home. I must say, I love having so much desktop real estate. I worked from home on Thursday and Friday using this setup. Browser and iTunes running on the top screen, terminal sessions and IM client running on the bottom screen. I was able to get the screens set up so the MacBook understands that the big monitor is on top and the little one is on bottom, so dragging applications from one to the next works as it should (drag off the top of the laptop screen to see it appear on the Dell LCD). It’s actually a pretty comfortable setup.

I’m using my ergonomic Microsoft keyboard and a 2 button mouse. The mouse has been good, although I’ve noticed it seems jittery on the Mac. Like fine-grained movements just aren’t smooth at all. I never noticed that problem with it hooked up to my PC. The keyboard has taken a little getting used to, mostly because I have to remember what the Ctrl/Windows/Alt key map to in the Mac-verse. There’s also some issues with page up/down and the home/end keys. But overall it’s not been terrible.

I think I’m going to try to switch to an identical setup at work. Unfortunately, since it’s not a company computer, I won’t be able to connect directly to the ethernet. I’ll have to use the company wireless and SSH tunnels, but that’s already what I’m doing from home (although it often seems like my wireless net at home is much better than our wireless net on the Sunnyvale campus).

Anyway, I’m still looking for application recommendations and any other tips/tricks with the Mac that people have found useful, especially developers. I’m hoping at the end of this week, after a full week of working on the Mac, to post a detailed review of it. There’s been good and bad with the good definitely outweighing the bad so far.

Ever since the first Hack Day at Yahoo!, I’ve been wanting to participate. There’s been one or two since the first one and I haven’t participated in them. Why? Well, because I have a day job. But good news is just around the corner. Thursday is the next company Hack Day and yours truly will be right in the thick of it. I’ve cleared a couple of hours of work time to work on my hack(s) (still not 100% sure on what I’m doing, but I have a couple of ideas) and I’ve set up my commute schedule to allow me to be down for the 24 hour hacking session (noon Thursday to noon Friday). So with new MacBook in hand, next week I hack.

Hack Day at Yahoo! has really been dominated by the search folks. That’s not really surprising because they’re the ones who originally put it together. But I think this time we’ll see a lot more involvement from other teams. I already know of at least 1 other person who will be presenting a demo from the mail team. It should be really cool to see the other groups starting to get involved. I think it should generate plenty of new things that actually make their way to the users (several hacks from past hack days are in production now).

On a related topic, I think I already have enough ideas to keep me busy with this Hack Day. However, I’ve been kicking around the idea of taking suggestions from users. I’m not sure how well it would go or if someone within Yahoo! would cry foul, but it might be kind of fun. Imagine, as a user, if you had access to 1 engineer for an entire day. What would you build? Keep in mind it can’t be some huge feature. It would have to be something that could be completed to demo-worthy status within 24 hours (possibly less, I might crash hard at the end so I wouldn’t count on the last 4 hours being quality hours). And, of course, there’s no guarantee that anything shown at Hack Day will ever be seen outside of Yahoo!. Food for thought for the next Hack Day.

A month ago I reported that my comment spam had doubled from 1,000 to 2,000. Yesterday I hit my second doubling, hitting 4,000+ pieces of comment spam. While none of you truly appreciate the volume of spam I’ve been hit with recently, I assure you that I “appreciate” it (every time I log into the WP admin panel to see how much there is). Anyway, here’s a rough timetable of my spam:

• 12/11/2005 - Akismet goes live on unclehulka.com, counting begins
• 4/1/2006 - Akismet stops the 1,000th piece of comment spam on unclehulka.com
• 5/9/2006 - Akismet stops the 2,000th piece of comment spam on unclehulka.com
• 6/3/2006 - Akismet stops the 4,000th piece of comment spam on unclehulka.com

So, at this rate, I’m looking at a little under a month of doubling time. That’s just insane.

Looking at the Akismet stats page, you can see that 90% of the comments filtered through Akismet since it started have been spam. More alarming than that is seeing the daily numbers showing about 95% of the comments as spam. That jives pretty well with what I’ve seen on my blog. Since October 25, 2005 (when I first installed Akismet) I’ve received 483 “good” comments and Akismet has trapped 2,901 pieces of spam. That comes out to about 85.7% spam (thank god my email account doesn’t get that ratio of ham to spam). I had Akismet disabled for a little bit in October and November, so I likely had more spam in that timeframe, but you get the gist.

Anyway, it just goes to show how much more crap I’d be cleaning out of my comments system if not for Akismet.

A little over a month ago I posted that I had recently crossed the 1,000 spam blocked by Akismet mark. Today, I’ve passed the 2,000 mark and am sitting at 2,134. I’ve really noticed a sharp rise in comment spam as of late. I’m not sure if that’s an indication that spammers are much more active or if my blog is just that much easier for them to find now (who knows, maybe it’s both).

In any case, I’m still relatively happy with Akismet. It has let a couple of pieces of spam get through, which is unfortunate. I think in the case of comment spam I’d actually prefer for it to incorrectly label ham as spam instead of the other way around. That ensures I don’t have embarrassing comments left behind (I’ve had a few too many drug ads and body parts making it through, if you know what I mean). I understand that blocking spam is all about statistics and that the liklihood of spam making it through increases as more spam is flushed through the system. But you’d think Akismet would make quick work out of any comment with the word “anus” in it (there I said it).

A little more than 2 weeks ago, I celebrated my Akismet milestone of 1000 pieces of spam blocked. That’s 1000 pieces from December to April (not quite 5 months). Since hitting that milestone, an additional 402 pieces of comment spam have been flagged by Akismet. Additionally, a rather significant amount managed to get past Akismet (I don’t remember the exact number, but it was more than 50).

With the large load of spam that seems to be flooding in, I wonder if Akismet is having a problem keeping up. I’ve seen a couple of comments put into moderation (maybe 5). I think the Akismet plugin sends comments to moderation when the central servers can’t be reached. But the rest of the ones that got past everything and right into my comments feed were a bit alarming.

I’m still happy with Akismet, but I think this recent flood of comment spam is showing a couple of chinks in the armor.

I know, I haven’t blogged anything in a while (two people mentioned it to me today). When I have blogged lately, it’s mostly been boring and pointless banter that nobody’s really interested in. So…what gives?

• Work. It’s been insanely busy lately and it really doesn’t show any sign of letting up for the forseeable future. While I do work on some really interesting stuff, it’s not the kind of thing I get to talk about here, which is unfortunate.
• Yahoo! Mail Beta. It used to be that I had most-favored-blogger status with the Yahoo! Mail Beta frontend team. Whenever they pushed out a new build, I was sent a changelog that I could post for those interested (in fact, the product managers were actively encouraging me to do so). It’s been a long time now since I’ve received a changelog. As a result, the major source of my blogging and public interest has been cut off. Ultimately, it hurts the users who really like to see that level of detail about the beta. Unfortunately, it’s the reality of the situation and it doesn’t appear that there’s any improvement on the horizon. I have more that I’d like to say about this, but I’d rather not say something I’ll regret tomorrow.
• Hacking. I just haven’t been doing much hacking on the side lately. The last hacks I worked on was my maps hack and a widget for the Yahoo! Widget Engine.

So, now what? I never feel like posting here just for the sake of posting (okay, that’s not entirely true). I’d like to find my “thing”, something that I’m passionate (and informed) enough to write about. I just haven’t found “it” yet.

I could blog about Yahoo!, but really, Jeremy’s got the internals covered while Chris and Joe have the externals pretty well covered.

So that leaves me wondering what to write. I’d rather this not simply be my periodic, personal diary because, really, who wants to read that? I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing reviews of publically available APIs. Everyone knows I’m good at having an opinion about everything (especially other people’s software), I might as well share it. I think my earlier comparison of the Google and Yahoo! maps APIs was fun to do. I could see picking one API a week or something and writing it up (of course, I’ll have to discover some of that elusive “free time” to pull that off).

Anyway, now you know why it’s been so quiet around here. If you’ve been waiting patiently for an update on the Yahoo! Mail Beta, you’re far better off subscribing to the Yahoo! Mail Group or watching the Unofficial Yahoo! Weblog. Both of those are good places to get in on the external discussions about the beta. In the meantime, I’ll be brainstorming for something new and (hopefully) exciting to talk and read about.

Just this morning, Akismet went over the 1000 pieces of spam blocked milestone. Despite the earlier problems I had with Akismet, it’s been smooth sailing since I made some tweaks to the plugin.

In the 1000+ pieces of blocked spam, I’d say there were maybe 1 or 2 false positives and it let fewer than 5 to 10 pieces of spam through. That’s not bad considering what I used to deal with (see this, this and this).

So kudos to the Akismet guys, keep up the good work. If you’re running WordPress, get Akismet. In my opinion, it’s a fantastic, transparent way to keep almost all of your comment spam under control (of course, I can’t speak for how well it does on higher traffic blogs).

I get a fair number of people who leave comments on my blog. I think it’s great. I read them all, screen out the spam and respond to the good ones. But there’s a rather disturbing trend, people leaving their email addresses in the comment body. I’m not talking about the field that explicitly says “Email Address” (or “Mail” or whatever else your blog calls it). I’m talking about the actual body of the comment. The part that everybody else gets to read (if you put your email address in the email address field, then only I get to see it).

The problem is, I get a TON of comment spam (relative to the amount of non-spam). That means spammers know about this blog and are actively scraping my pages looking for places to submit their
“materials”. That means they’re also very likely to come across your comment and find what? That’s right, your email address. So think long and hard about whether or not you really want to be putting your email address out there for the world to see.

On the other hand, if you need a cure for ED or some late night entertainment, by all means…feel free to leave your email address here.

A recent blog post on the unofficial yahoo weblog (Hey Yahoo! Mail beta team. Why don’t you ever call?) recently called me out. No, not like that (they don’t want to meet out on the playground at 3).

the only actual mail beta information has come from the personal blog of a user-savvy backend developer, Ryan Kennedy

That’s probably the nicest thing anybody has said about me in public (my wife has said some things about me in private that I won’t share here). I like to pretend I know something about users, it’s nice to have some positive feedback.

On a related note, I happen to completely agree with Joe about the recent note sent by Yahoo! to the Yahoo! Mail Group. The note he refers to left me with some serious “WTF?”.

Can you let me know what specific topics you would like us to touch on in the
future Yahoo! Mail Updates?

For starters, how about some…updates? The last post on the updates blog was back in December and there have only been two posts total since the blog was started in late November. Anything at this point would at least give some indication that it hasn’t been abandoned. Also, if you’ve bothered reading the Yahoo! Group you’d already have a pretty good idea of what kinds of updates they’re craving. In my personal opinion, the most likely bits of information they’d find really useful are:

1. What was in that last release?
2. What’s in the next release (or two)?
3. Is there a list of known issues? (the group has actually started their own list)
4. When will they get an invite? (for those who haven’t gotten one yet)

It’s not brain science, just pay a little attention.

Anyway, thanks to Joe for the compliment (yes, I took it as one…whether you intended it to be a compliment or not ;)) and thanks for calling Yahoo! on the updates blog. I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s good to have someone with more visibility bring it up.

I totally forget who to thank for pointing this out. I caught it in one of my feeds, but it was a couple of days ago. Anyway, I finally got my invite code to use Feed43 (Feed For Free). It’s awesome. I will say that it’s probably not for novice users. The interface requires you to know HTML and a bit about pattern matching. So it’s unlikely my mother will ever use it.

But…if you have the tools and the talent, Feed43 will let you take any feedless web page and generate a feed for it. You can find individual sections of the page or repeating segments and turn them into RSS items. This is great for me because there are several sites I find myself occasionally polling to see if there are any updates (because they don’t publish a feed). Now I can easily set up feeds for whatever and just add them to my aggregator.

It will be interesting to see how web site operators handle this. This is obviously a really simple way to screen scrape sites that use ads to generate money. You could easily set up Feed43 to scrape a site and send you back the bits you want, minus the ads. I imagine this will prompt some people to start randomizing their pages a bit or to simply ban traffic from the Feed43 systems. Hopefully there are a few smart people out there who will see this and get a hint to start generating feeds of their content. They could start generating feeds with embedded ads and it would make an easy enough route to get the data that people wouldn’t bother with Feed43.

There’s nothing I can see in the terms of service that would prevent users from generating new feeds and then sharing the URLs with others. Maybe I’ll see if I can come up with some slick ones and post them here.

Update: Reading is good for you. I found the Feed43 FAQ:

Q: Can I share my feeds with others?

A: Of course you can. Just send them a link to your feed, or even place this link on your web site.

There’s quite a buzz lately about our CFO and her recent statements regarding search:

• Yahoo Cedes Search to Google and So Do I - Steve Rubel
• Yahoo quits? - Things that make… you go hmm

People are totally blowing this out of proportion. Everybody thinks this means that Yahoo! has conceded that we don’t want to be the best search out there. Crap. Total crap.

There’s a very large difference between being #1 and being the best. Apple zealots know what I’m talking about. Linux fanatics know what I’m talking about.

Just because you use the product with the highest market share doesn’t mean you’re using the best product. Steve Rubel of all people should know this, seeing as how he’s a recent Apple convert.

A recent post by Jon Oltsik titled “What the heck is Yahoo thinking?” recently crossed my radar…and not in a good way. It seems his wife was sent email letting her know that her Yahoo! Mail Plus account is set to expire. Aren’t we polite? She wasn’t sure if it was a phishing attempt, however, so she sent her husband (Jon) in to investigate.

Jon says, “Yahoo sends its subscribers a billing e-mail from a cryptic domain, cc.yahoo-inc.com, with absolutely no prior warning.” I’m sorry Jon, next time we’re going to send you email, we’ll send you an email warning ahead of time. Oh…and we’ll be sure to send it from a yahoo.com domain instead, because you know…we don’t just give those out for free. So you know it’s legit.

Jon goes on to say, “The e-mail of course asks you to verify personal information and supply your credit card number–an Internet taboo if there ever was one.” Someone should tell those Amazon guys that their entire business model is taboo. Those stupid gits, do they think we were born yesterday. Who on earth would give out their credit card number over the internet?

Of course, the whole time Jon thinks there’s a possibility someone might be phishing him. He doesn’t bother to point out that every URL he’s been accessing has been a yahoo.com URL. Nor does he point out that the ordering system is served entirely off of an HTTPS URL with a certificate, signed by Yahoo!

Jon’s entire post feels like a flame. Like something just happened to him and he’s so mad he has to tell everybody about it. Without sharing any details of the email message or the URL flow his wife went though, he dumps his emotions into bytes on a page and voila!

If you get email from Yahoo! telling you that your Plus subscription is about up and you’re not sure if the email is legit, head over to https://billing.yahoo.com/. You can see everything you’re being billed for, when your next payment is due, what the amount is and what payment method you’re using.