ryan kennedy’s blog

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.

First, I hate Bloglines. Then, I hate it some more. When it seems like my hate has come to a simmer, it flares up once again. Somehow, I manage to find patience and forgiveness for a product that has mostly served me well.

No more. While this isn’t a new occurrence, it’s been happening A LOT lately. For whatever reason, Bloglines is showing me feed items twice. Not like in the past where I’d read it and then it would show up as unread later on. I mean they’re showing it to me twice right in the app. Look at the screenshot (click it for a bigger view). That’s Engadget. For whatever reason, most of the posts being shown to me are being shown twice.

It’s been going on for over a week now. At first I just thought that something might be wrong with the Engadget feed. I thought maybe it wasn’t Bloglines’ fault. I’d believe that if not for the fact that I saw it in more than one feed. It seems to happen more often in Engadget than in other feeds, but I’ve definitely seen it in other feeds.

So I’m left with a dilemma. I have the tools. I have the talent. I can write my own aggregator. I can take an open source aggregator and install it. I can suck it up and stick it out with Bloglines. I can write my own OPML import for Yahoo! Mail Beta. I hate every one of those ideas.

So instead I’ll sleep on it and maybe something will come to me in the morning.

As I type this, Bloglines is having more issues with language switches (see comment #11 by Robyn, from Bloglines). With all the troubles I’ve had, you’d think I’d be fed up with Bloglines by now and that I’d have switched off. But there’s reasons I haven’t:

1. All my feed are belong to Bloglines. I have 194 feeds being tracked by Bloglines right now. That’s a ton of data. I realize I can do an OPML export and move my feeds to another provider, but once I get there I’m going to have to read each and every feed so that the read/unread state is consistent with Bloglines. That doesn’t sound like fun.
2. 99% of the time, Bloglines is just fine. There are some circumstances when it has some rather nasty issues (remarking items as unread, not updating feeds or showing me the UI in another language). But for the most part, Bloglines hums along without issue.
3. Other aggregators just don’t work the way I want them to. The Bloglines way of reading feeds has become second nature to me now. It feels very natural. Few other aggregators are able to exactly duplicate this, causing me a bit of gear grinding when I try to use them.

So is Bloglines really as bad as I’ve made them out to seem? No, not really. I would say that I’ve probably been overly harsh on them here.

They have experienced growth issues. Who hasn’t? Any successful web site has, at some point, felt the crunch of an unexpected flood of traffic. It’s how you deal with that flood that counts. Bloglines has suffered a few bumps and bruises, but for the most part my feeds have remained intact and the service (in my experience) has rarely been unavailable outside of normal maintenance hours. At past companies and even at my current one, growth has always been painful. So I feel their pain and I’m going to cut them some slack.

The bottom line is, getting my “feed fix” has become very important to me. I easily spend an order of magnitude more time in Bloglines than I do reading my personal email (I won’t count my work mail). So when my main digital-crack supplier is experiencing technical difficulties, I get serious withdrawals that make me cranky.

In all, I still use Bloglines because it’s the best of the bunch. It does occasionally do something to make me mad, but in such times I’ll simply try to be a bit more understanding.

Update: Figures, right when I start talking nice about Bloglines it begins acting up again. As Robyn points out (look at comment #11), the Bloglines language problem is back again. This time I managed to get a full screenshot of it. It’s really odd that most of the UI is in Spanish but the hotkey tips are in English.

NASA’s Stardust project had a happy ending tonight. I actually went outside tonight and caught a view of it streaking across the sky to the north of me. It looked like a shooting star, only it stayed lit up much longer than most shooting stars I’ve seen. I would have snapped some pictures, but it was really dark and the light was very small. Basically I could put up some all black JPEGs and it would look identical to anything my camera would have grabbed.

The project, has been going on for 7 years and the craft has traveled billions of miles. Through the miracles of math and physics, NASA was able to get the craft out to collect comet dust and bring it back to Utah. It looks like the craft was blown off course a little during it’s parachute descent, but in all they have to be fantastically happy.

They’re currently sending the helicopter out to pick it up, but all indications so far indicate that the reentry and landing went really well.

Okay, it’s late…I should go to bed now.

Update: Looks like it landed safely, with 3 bounces at the end. This article has a picture of the infrared camera at NASA picking up the craft on descent.

So, I’m minding my own business, logging into Bloglines to see what’s happening in the real world. Suddenly I realize, I can’t read a damn thing. What are all these squiggly lines. They look like…like…SPANISH!

Chalk up yet another reason I need to get a new aggregator. I can’t even locate the feedback link to tell them their stuff’s broken. Evidently I should have taken Spanish in high school, instead of French.

You know how sometimes somebody leaves your company and you’re like, “enh…whatever.” Or sometimes you’re like, “THANK GOD THEY’RE FINALLY GONE!!!” Unfortunately, Toni Schneider leaving Yahoo! isn’t like either of those. This is more like one of those, “awww crap” moments.

I’ll start by saying that I’m really happy for Toni. He seems really excited about where he’s headed and that’s always a good thing. I’ll follow that by saying that the Automattic guys are really lucky. Toni is a lot of fun to work with. Fortunately Toni stocked up the Yahoo! Developer Network with a bunch of great people. We’re really lucky to still have Jeffrey, Eleanor and Dan and I know they’ll continue doing a great job with YDN.

Scoble spotted something neat at CES. It’s a box and you look at the sky through it. When you look through it, it will tell you what particular astrological body you’re pointed at. It can also tell you what items of interest are currently out and about.

Maybe now I’ll actually know where to point my telescope when I’m looking for something. It would be really neat if they’d make one into a telescope eyepiece.

Almost exactly a year ago, I bought a Tablet PC (Toshiba M205).

It’s fun and I’m sure I’ll be finding lots of neat uses for it.

Yeah…um…no. As it turns out, I didn’t find any neat uses for it. As a laptop, it’s only okay. For the money, I could easily have bought something else. None of the Tablet PC features are of any interest to me. My primary use for it has been browsing, coding and reading email on the road. I tried gaming on it. It works okay aside from the turbine fan inside that requires earmuffs if you want to be within 20 feet of it.

So I’ve been looking to replace it. Coincidentally, since I stopped gaming I’ve been looking to replace my OS as well. I’ve been looking at a bunch of different options, but all of them have drawbacks to them:

• Apple: They’ve got the sexy marketing, the sleek looking hardware, a polished user interface and…hmm. I think I ran out of things to talk about. Oh, except for that hefty price tag and the performance penalty. I do like having access to a bash shell, though. It’s just a shame that the market for Macs is still so small that two of my favorite applications (Yahoo! Messenger and the Yahoo! Music Engine) are either not available for the Mac or lack the support they get on Windows (more about the music engine later).
• Linux: Linux has virtually no marketing, you bring your own hardware and you can pick from a couple decent user interfaces (Linus says to use KDE). That might seem like a bad thing, but I don’t care. I used BeOS (which most people never heard of), I like building my own machines (I haven’t bought a pre-built since high school) and my user interface doesn’t have to look snazzy (it just has to work). Unfortunately, Linux suffers from the same problem as the Mac: none of my favorite applications work on it.
• BeOS: Yeah, right…a kid can wish, can’t he? There is, of course, Zeta. But come on, it still has some hardware compatibility issues (good luck getting your off-brand USB TV tuner working with it) and it won’t run my favorite applications.
• Windows: This is where I’m at today. Windows supports all of my hardware, all of my software and it’s the only platform I know of that supports subscription music services. Additionally, what few games I have been playing (I’ve played Battlefield 2, City of Heroes and Diablo II in the last year) will only run on Windows. I absolutely refuse to give up the Yahoo! Music Engine. I get all the music I want for $5/month. And don’t even start on the “he’s just in love with it because he works there” crap. If we hadn’t released Yahoo! Music Unlimited, I probably would have signed on with Napster. I refuse to do the iTunes store anymore. Who on earth wants to pay $1/song when you can have access to over a million songs for $60/year? While it may sound like I’m totally in love with Windows, I’m not. Stability isn’t guaranteed (although it seems to have gotten better) and since it has the largest market share it’s still by far the most targeted platform for viruses and other malicious software.
• Dual boot: Pardon the language, but fuck that. Any solution that requires me to reboot to get to some feature I want is going to piss me off.
• Remote Desktop: Yeah, I could run two machines and use them both at the same time. It seems like kind of a pain in the butt, but with some networked storage it might be a bit easier. Although, if this is supposed to be to replace my laptop, it’s not going to help me out so much when I’m on the road (which I am for more than 50% of the working week).

My guess is that I’ll go for some beefy desktop replacement laptop. Maybe an Alienware system or some high-end Dell like the XPS (leaning more towards Alienware). If I get that, then I could turn my home XP desktop into a Linux box. When I’m at home, I could use the laptop directly with my 20 inch Dell LCD and redisplay my Linux apps using X. I think that’s about the only way I’m going to get the best of both worlds.

Anyone out there in a similar predicament or have a better suggestion?

As I sit here, typing…it’s POURING outside. Don’t believe me. Have a look for yourself. It’s supposed to get worse too. Evidently it’s been raining up in the Sierra’s all day. That means we’ll get not just the runoff from today’s rain but also the snow melted by that rain, most heading down to the Folsom Dam (about 5 minutes from my house).

I’m not concerned, my house (in Folsom) is above the water level in the lake and I’m way above the American River, which is fed by the dam. But there’s a lot of people downriver from me who stand to get pretty wet. Sacramento is a big flat piece of land with the American River running right down the center. They’ve been letting water out of Folsom Dam, which feeds Lake Natoma. Nimbus Dam (blocking Lake Natoma) has been letting water out, which feeds the American River. There’s some more traps downstream and I hear they’re going to let out enough water to drop the American River about a foot (last I saw it’s at 26.5 feet and 31 feet is the flood stage). Anyway, that means there’s a metric buttload of water heading downriver to the delta at the San Francisco Bay. I hear people living down there are taking on a fair amount of water. I can only imagine that will get worse in the coming days as some of this water hitting my house right now makes its way down there.

Let this be a lesson to you when buying a house. Find out if you’re looking in an area that just happens to be a flood plain. My house in Folsom is at the start of the foothills, so I’ve got no problems. But if you head as little as 10 miles west of me you’d be in a world of hurt in the event of a flood along the American River.

Remember when I said it was pouring outside at the beginning of this post. I take it back. NOW it’s pouring.

This article over at RealTechNews caught my eye. For those of you who don’t know me that well, I have a 130+ mile commute from Folsom to Yahoo! in Sunnyvale. I’m fortunate, really, that Yahoo! lets me work from home two days a week. I work from home Monday and Friday and I’m in the office Tuesday through Thursday, staying with family on Tuesday and Wednesday night in nearby San Jose.

I’ve been doing this crazy commute for two and a half years now (since May 2003), so I can honestly say that I’ve experienced telecommuting first hand. When people hear that you work from home, they think it must be so wonderful. You get to go to work in your pajamas. You don’t have to leave your house. It must be the greatest thing ever. Right?

Wrong. Telecommuting fails any time you’re dealing with a company that isn’t set up for it. My wife spent 5+ years with Sun Microsystems. They were set up for telecommuting. They were completely transitioned to a decentralized phone system, a decentralized desktop computing platform and everybody was expected to work from home some of the time. Since everybody worked from home, everyone understood that meetings were hard with bad speakerphones. People who were in conference rooms understood they had to speak clearly towards the phones so people miles away on the phone could hear you.

In my last two and a half years at EarthLink and Yahoo!, I’ve learned that most companies aren’t set up for this. They don’t have the decentralized network. They don’t have a culture who understands what it’s like for the person on the other end of the phone who can’t see the whiteboard. They don’t understand that during a 3 hour planning meeting, the person working from home without a speaker phone is getting a very sore ear and a tired arm from holding their handset. If you’re the only person telecommuting, you’re also the only person missing out on hallway conversations, technical talks, fun lunches and more. You miss an entire half of the work experience.

This isn’t to fault EarthLink or Yahoo! Quite the contrary. I think there’s an enormous benefit to being in the office. Hallway conversations that turn into great brainstorming sessions as nearby cube dwellers are pulled into fun topics just aren’t possible over IM or the phone. Missing out on personal life chit-chat during lunch makes you less in touch with your coworkers. Not being at your desk when an emergency outage occurs deprives you of visibility in handling touch situations.

Telecommuting only works when it’s done within a culture that has adopted and fully supported it and very few companies have made telecommuting a company-wide way of life (and thank god for that).

Back before my honeymoon, I got myself a real credit card: an MBNA Visa with a rewards program. I figured, we’ll be spending all this money…we might as well get something back for it. Anyway, tonight I was looking around on the MBNA website to see what my points would get me. I noticed that there’s a cash option where you can basically convert your points to cash at a rate of 1% (100 points = 1 dollar). Seems fairly reasonable.

I also noticed that you could get gift cards. I figured the gift cards might have a greater yield than 1%, because otherwise what’s the point of asking for a gift card when you can have cash? Unfortunately, the folks at MBNA don’t agree. Instead, they’ll offer you a Mastercard or Visa gift card at something around 0.77% (32,500 points for a $250 card). Does this make sense to anybody else? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Even gift cards for specific stores have worse yields than just asking for cash. A $50 card is 6,500 points (0.77%). You’d think that they could offer better rates for buying a specific gift card since it guarantees you’re going to spend your money at that store. Certainly you wouldn’t expect a WORSE rate than just taking the cash equivalent.

Lesson learned…take the money and run.

I finally got my invite to the Yahoo! Publisher Network. The publisher network lets you set up ads on your website. I originally applied for the beta several months back. I’d pretty much forgotten about it until I saw mail from them this morning informing me that I’d been accepted to participate in the publisher network.

So now I have a real dilemma. Am I seriously going to make what few readers I have look at ads? It’s not like I have a lot of compelling content. Really, the only posts that get any serious attention are my posts about the Yahoo! Mail Beta.

I’m thinking I may try starting with ads on the main page and see what happens. More than anything, I’m just curious to see what the ads look like in the page and to see what kinds of ads YPN serves up for my site.

What do you think? Is it stupid to put up ads when you have little of interest to share with the world in return?

I really don’t like Flash. Actually, I really don’t like the way most sites use Flash. Most sites use Flash to do things that can be done using DHTML. Justin (a fellow Yahoo!) uses Flash to do some sweet stuff with maps. Why just mashup the data when you can use some of the advanced features available in Flash to do some really neat client-side stuff? The “pirate map” is fantastic. It doesn’t do anything special, but it does look neat.

Back in May I posted about the Germans who factored a 200 digit number. Feeling as though something had been missed, that same German team went back and factored the 193 digit number in the RSA challenge. For those of you not counting, that’s worth $30,000 so far.

No big whoop…there’s still $605,000 to be collected if you can factor the other numbers. Of course, those remaining are much larger than the two that have been factored so far.

Yeah, I was busy watching movies this week. Serenity on Wednesday and Jarhead on Saturday. Jarhead reminded me quite a bit of Full Metal Jacket (that’s a good thing).

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Anthony Swofford, a young kid who got lost on his way to college. Before long, Anthony is recruited into sniper training by Staff Sgt. Sykes (Jamie Foxx) where eventually he and a handful of others would emerge as an elite Marine sniper team. Of course, no war movie is complete without the war. Shortly after completing boot camp, Iraq invades Kuwait and hundreds of thousands of US troops are deployed to the Middle East, including Swofford.

Once deployed, the Marines wait. It takes more than 4 months for any significant combat to begin. Boredom and problems on the homefront set in and the Marines have a difficult time coping. When war finally does begin, the ground troops are mostly left to sit and watch as the bombs fall from the sky. Even when there is ground action, it’s all in the dark as the Marines plod through a desert covered by smoke from burning oil wells while being rained down upon by oil showers.

I really enjoyed Jarhead. It isn’t a feelgood movie, much in the same way Full Metal Jacket wasn’t. Don’t expect to come out of the movie holding hands and singing coom-bye-ya (or however you spell that). It also isn’t gory, so don’t expect Braveheart or Saving Private Ryan-esque scenes of battle. Instead, watch this movie and appreciate all the things our troops endure in the name of preserving our freedom.

PS - I predict “welcome to the suck” will be one of the more popular quotes from this movie. It works in so many situations.

PPS - Marines are a proud bunch (perhaps to a fault), so I’ve updated the text to reflect the fact that the characters in the movie are Marines and not soldiers.

In an interview with MarketingProfs.com, former Excite founder Joe Kraus was asked if there was anything he wished he had done differently at Excite. Part of his answer really came as no surprise:

[We] built our whole company on SUN hardware and EMC disk drives. That meant that it was very expensive to make our search index bigger. If you look at successful architectures today they are all Linux and Intel-based. They are very, very cheap.

This didn’t apply only to search. When I worked on Excite Inbox, we used incredibly expensive hardware. Front end web servers, for instance, were Sun Ultra 5 workstations. They were incredibly expensive (I want to say something like $20,000 a pop) and packed a scrawny amount of computing power, even by 2000-2002 standards. In contrast, about that time companies like Dell were offering dual CPU Intel rackmount servers at about $3,000 a pop (in the configuration we wanted). That’s just on the frontend.

The backend was more insane. Piles of Sun E4500 Enterprise Servers hooked up to large EMC storage arrays. Several of those E4500’s were running Oracle, a (very expensive) requirement of the backend mail system we were running. I’m pretty sure that Excite was almost single-handedly funding Sun to survive the dot-com implosion.

My friend Charles finished the Ironman in Hawaii today. 2.4 miles of swimming, followed by 112 miles on a bike wrapped up with a short jog of 26.2 miles (yes, that’s a full marathon) in a bit under 10 hours. That’s good enough for 340th overall and 11th in his age group (18-24).

I have a hard time getting to the gym 3 days a week, so this guy makes me feel REALLY lazy.

You know you’ve succeeded when people show up in droves when you throw a party. I’m sad I didn’t get to attend the flickr fiesta, but it looks like they had plenty of people to pack the place in.

I’m pretty sure webmail will never be sexy enough to draw the devote following a product like flickr has, simply because of the community nature of flickr. But if our webmail ever did become so popular that we packed the cafeteria full of users who truly enjoy what we’ve built for them, that would be awesome.

It’s been a…hectic week. We finally released the beta to a subset of the world. Since the release, the reviews and the praise have been pouring in.

Something that strikes me in reading what people are saying is the comparisons to Gmail and Hotmail. While I certainly think it’s perfectly valid to compare webmail to webmail, I think there’s a missing comparison: us against the desktop clients.

During early development, the beta used to pop out into a separate, chromeless window just like Oddpost does. We eventually scrapped this for several reasons. However, while it was in a separate window, I would always move it to the same position as my Thunderbird instance in the upper right corner of my desktop. On more than one occasion I would Alt-Tab to our beta, mistake it for my Thunderbird instance and use it as though it WAS Thunderbird. Only after examining the contents of my mailbox did I realize what I was doing. The look and feel as well as the responsiveness of the beta was close enough that I could mistake it for a native desktop application.

Which brings me to my main point…web applications are nearing the point where they can compete with native desktop applications, both in terms of functionality and performance. Much of this should be credited to the teams who build the browsers. Without their hard work, no browser would be fast enough to handle the DOM manipulations or the JavaScript requirements necessary to accomplish what we’ve done with the new beta. Even more credit has to be given to the engineers who push the browser to accomplish things it was never meant to do. Because of these engineers, we have applications such as the Yahoo! Mail Beta, which make you begin to wonder why on earth you bother installing a mail application.

Web browsers are becoming a commodity. You’ll be hard pressed to find any machine connected to the internet that doesn’t have one. Conversely, not every computer you find is going to have a mail application installed. If you’re visiting an internet cafe or a library, you won’t be allowed to install one yourself. The mere presence of a browser, however, means that a browser-based application will almost always be available to you.

The software update process for web applications is (mostly) a very simple affair. Reloading your browser is often all that needs to be done to receive security patches, bug fixes and new features. Desktop software typically requires action on the part of the user when it comes to updating. Making matters more difficult, some users may decide not to update…leaving you in the unenviable position of supporting old versions of software.

In web applications, your data follows you everywhere. Data is stored on a central server, meaning your information is available anytime, anywhere you have access to the internet. Desktop applications may pull data to the local machine, possibly separating you and your data should you ever find yourself away from the computer containing the data you want.

So as web applications begin narrowing and overcoming the performance gap between them and desktop applications, ask yourself how your desktop application compares to a competing web application.

More examples of web applications looking to replace their desktop counterparts:

• writely: the web word processor
• Zimbra: mail, calendar and contacts
• meebo: AIM/ICQ, Jabber, Y! Messenger and MSN Messenger
• Backbase AJAX RSS Reader
• Google Maps

Someone covered my post about the new Yahoo! Mail Beta and called me an “insider”. Excellent.

Update: As it turns out, “someone” is actually Rafael Ebron, Product Marketing Manager for the Mozilla Foundation. Serves me right for running off like a giddy schoolgirl and posting that someone covered my post without bothering to give them any attribution aside from a hyperlink.

Man, those black boxes I threw in the screenshots to cover up personal information are really ugly. I should redo the screenshots with a test account or something.