WATCHING:
Blue Valentine
Starring: Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling

This is a very difficult to watch movie about a couple falling in and – ultimately – out of love.

Williams is a smart, driven woman who wants to be a doctor. Gosling is just drifting along. They meet, marry and after a six or so years things just fall apart.

Williams’ character (Cindy) is – after marriage and child – still driven; Gosling’s character (Dean) is just happy being a husband and a dad. Ebert has a great line about this dynamic in his review of the movie: “Dean thinks marriage is the station. Cindy thought it was the train.”

Brilliant synopsis.

Told with a series of flashbacks, some of which require one to read between the lines – it’s a tough watch. Well made, well acted – especially by Williams. But you just don’t want to watch what happens. It’s too painful; too real.

The one thing I didn’t get from the film was how Cindy always thought – up to the end – that Dean had such potential, that he could do anything. I didn’t see anything to suggest that.

All movies

Well, after about 12 years, my main router sorta died. As in, didn’t work as advertised.

Fortunately, I had a backup router – a wireless G, instead of B – on hand.

Swapped them out tonight.

Painful!!

The main issue was connecting the new router to a switch. Mix of OSs – Mac, Windows (XP & 7), Linux. OK, but the uplink/switch protocol differs from the router I put in 10 or so years ago and today (understandable…).

But the change is not documented! I had to fart around with ethernet cables, host files and so on to get it to work. Frustrating – because I’m not good at same – but fun because I always learn something from this.

I think I currently have both Windows boxes, both Linux boxes and the Mac all connected via ethernet; the wireless (to another Windoze box) was a challenge, but with the new router (supporting 802.11 G, not just B), it’s fricking faster.

Another decade before I do the same again? Doubtful – I’ll have to (gladly) update to faster faster.

Not my idea of a fun evening, but always fun to futz and learn.

Update: I had noticed my connection speeds deteriorating over the last few months, but I blamed Comcast for that. We have had a lot of storms lately, and so nodes were getting overloaded and so on. I expected things to gradually get back to normal. However, at least part of the slowdown now appears to be the router. The new router is – like the old – hardwired to my main computer, so it should pretty much run as fast as the cable modem.

Yet my speeds seem to have jumped since putting in the new router. Coincidence? Doubtful – I guess the old one was circling the drain before it just died. Interesting.

Well, the smartphones wars just up amped up a notch: Google has agreed to fork over $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility, the phone-making arm of electronics giant Motorola. This is Google’s biggest acquisition to date.

Now, a lot of folks are saying this is a move to secure patents in the increasingly litigious smartphone space, and they are right, but I see another target: Apple.

By acquiring Motorola Mobility – and at a premium (63% more than its closing price Friday) – Google now controls the software (Android) and the hardware for a smartphone. This gives Google a really good shot at making as pure an Android phone as they can, like Apple does with iOS.

Yes, Google tried this before with its original Android phone, the Nexus, which wasn’t the greatest (I’ve read), but the Nexus was more of a proof-of-concept phone than a real iPhone killer. Now that Android is more mature operating system, Google can build phones – and hopefully convince the carriers to not put a bunch of crapware on (I blame Dell and the PC desktop for this innovation) on the phones.

This helps and hurts the Samsungs and other Android phone makers. Yes, they will get the same patent protection that Google gets for the Android software, but now Google can compete with them in the hardware arena. And Motorola knows how to make phones.

Will Google fork Android here and there to tie it to a specific – Motorola – phone to have tighter integration with the hardware (and Google properties)? Why not?

Is this bad news for Apple? Not really. Sure, Android is now a little less vulnerable to patent lawsuits, but that doesn’t mean game over on this (stupid) front, by any means.

Apple still has a huge lead in smartphones, and is still the phone all others are compared to (and the iPhone 5 is due to arrive shortly, raising the bar again). It knows how to design and integrate hardware/software. Google just has a bunch of smart people – but with the Motorola Mobility purchase, they just got a bunch more smart people, but this bunch is smartphone smart.

Big winner?

The consumer. Patent protection will help keep the cost of phones down; Google entering the hardware market will encourage all sides to innovate. Phones will keep getting slicker and more affordable (I’m ignoring the telecom piece).

Things are getting more and more interesting in the smartphone space…

Update: Over at TechCrunch, it looks like Erick Schonfeld agrees with my take on the purchase. Patents nice, but having the whole package is the end game.

According to this Techcrunch article, the Web turns 20 years old today.

Next year, it’ll be able to legally drink in all 50 states.

From the article:

That’s right – the world’s first website, a placeholder page written by Sir Berners-Lee way back on August 6, 1991 in the then-nascent Hypertext Mark-Up Language, is celebrating its 20th birthday today. And, on this important anniversary, we ask what hath the web wrought?

In the past two decades we’ve been given ecommerce and spam, we’ve torn down the music, news, and publishing industries, and we’ve LOLed at more CATS than we can count. We’ve seen empires rise and fall, the dissolution of the line between public and private, and the end of enforceable copyright. We’ve seen new modes of communication drive out unwanted regimes at home and abroad and we’ve heard the endless howl of a million voices calling out at once, most of them in comments on this site.

— The Web Is 20 Years Old Today

What a short, strange trip it’s been.

From an interesting academic exercise to useful tool (hyperlinks!) through the first (hopefully only) internet bubble, where selling bags of dogfood online seemed like a billion-dollar idea, to the complete integration of the web into almost every facet of our lives.

Though it has “only” been 20 years, it seems, in many ways, like much longer.

For me, I guess that’s because I began working – for a living – on the web in 1996, just five years after its birth. I’ve worked at start-ups (one folded, one – a more corporate effort – still going strong), put together company websites, done ecommerce, put up sites for friends – and myself.

The picture in the upper right is the second browser I ever worked on – the first was, of course, Mosaic. On a store-brand 386 with I can’t recall how little memory. Windows 3.1 (ouch!) But I still remember installing it, swearing “What the hell is a winsock??”

Really, for all the time and effort that has been put into the web, it’s in some ways surprising how little web sites have changed since the mid-1990s. Slicker, obviously, but that’s to a large part due to fatter pipes and speedier computers/browsers. Some elements have changed very little.

• The same menu hierarchy – now DHTML usually, but the same. About Us. Contact Us. Home.
• Copyright in footer; link to top of page in same.
• Depending on the site type, things have pretty much settled into a three-column design, narrow left and right rails (usually navigation of some sorts in one; “similar [stories/products]” in the other), wider middle column for what the page is actually hawking.

There’s really nothing wrong with this – in fact, consistent navigation/UI helped the web gain traction. Flash splash pages? Now a thing of the past. Can you always get home by clicking the upper left-hand text/icon? Pretty consistently. And that’s a good thing. Whenever I had discussions with other designers/developers about how to present some user element, I’d always ask, “How does Amazon do it?” Because – right or wrong – if Amazon does it way A, people will know how to use that element, even if way B makes more sense. It’s like the QWERTY keyboard – not efficient, but here to stay. It’s familiar.

Mobile/touch screens are changing all that, as are a slew of web 2.0+ tools (jQuery, for example) and building out on open-source products (Drupal, WordPress, Joomla – why start from scratch?).

The latter points (tools/open-source products) just help speed development, but the former – mobile/touch screens – are changing the way we interact with the web.

In some cases – smartphone apps – they change the way we don’t interact with the web.

It’s been an interesting 20 years.

Let’s see what the next 5/10/20 years bring!

Here is, in no particular order and just off the top of my head, an incredibly incomplete list of web highlights of the last 20 years (for me):

• Mosaic
• Netscape 2.0 – Frames/Javascript. Huge.
• Pointcast (ran over port 80, I believe). Remember push?
• Browser wars, Netscape surges, Netscape purchased by AOL for billions
• Microsoft attempts to co-opt the web; to a degree, it succeeds.
• Netscape dies a slow, painful death under AOL’s watch; IE use skyrockets. The damage to the web (ActiveX anyone?) cannot be underestimated
• Burn rates – pre-bubble, how companies used to brag about how much money they were burning through. More was better. Bragging rights. Yeah, insane.
• Amazon – ’nuff said.
• Google – any questions?
• Superbowl commercials by dot-com companies. Really??
• Javascript – client-side programming. Awesome (getting more important every day; today, it is front and center of many web efforts).
• All the Apple events live-blogged that killed so many sites.
• Linux, Apache, mySql, Perl/PHP – free. Dominating the web.
• IBM gets internet religion
• Sites that changed how we use the web: YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr, Twitter (Google +? Probably too soon to tell)
• Mozilla/Firefox. Not so much Thunderbird – Mozilla’s Outlook-like browser-based email client. Solid, but Gmail just killed all browser-based email clients, from Yahoo Mail to Thunderbird.
• Gmail – Gigs of storage? Free? Flexible interface, highly searchable? Killer app. Changed all the rules. (I think this launched in 2004. Today it’s amazing; back then…[disclosure: I was a Gmail beta tester] )
• Sites/products that have fallen on bad times/died: Netscape, IE, Yahoo!, Novell (remember NetWare? No one else does, either), GeoCities, MySpace
• APIs – yes, data wants to be free
• CSS – the spec is always ahead of full browser support, so frustrating for (forward-thinking) developers, but now a cornerstone of web development. And getting better every day. Just an awesome concept.
• Animated GIFs (I pronounce with soft “g”; you?)
• VRML – I played with this a couple of weekends off a book I got at a book sale by Mark Pesce, it’s developer/inventor. I think it required a Cosmos plug-in from Sun.
• SVG – How cool, how unsupported by browsers. Yet, with HTML 5, it’s back. Yay!
• Windows 95 launch – yes, an OS, but it moved MS from 16-bit to 32-bit processing, and paved the way for a much better web experience. Start it up!
• Google Chrome (the browser, not the OS – Google sucks at naming stuff). I develop on Firefox (thanks Firebug!), but moving to Chrome for browsing in a big way. (Test in IEs, Safari obviously)
• Google Wave – it always sounded cool, but I could never get a clear answer from articles/Google documentation about just what it was/did. Google Wave is now dead.
• How difficult – even today – to design a web page vs. doing a print page in QuarkXPress or InDesign. Web pages are still ugly, even the best of breed. The web still has growing pains (like the aforementioned CSS support).

I’m sure I’m missing a lot that’ll be obvious to me at some later date; I will update without any update notices. Hey, just a list. Not like I’m predicting elections.

Happy Birthday WWW!

After months of heated negotiations and failed attempts to achieve any kind of consensus, President Obama turned 50 years old Thursday, drawing strong criticism from Republicans in Congress…. According to White House officials, Obama attempted to work with Republicans right up until the Aug. 4 deadline, but was ultimately left with no choice except to turn a year older.
— Obama Turns 50 Despite Republican Opposition

Skirting close to the truth…

(h/t Steve Benen)

I was just listening to a song from David Darling & The Wulu Bunun’s Mudanin Kata album, and it was then – as part of iTunes shuffle – succeeded by a Radiohead song.

Very similar sounds, but very different sources. Both atmospheric and lulling, but in different ways.

Darling, with his cello and local groups (in this case, the Wulu Bunun people of Taiwan), is very lush and real.

Radiohead is more stoner/techno.

Yet they are remarkably the same. Interesting. *shrug* To me…

Thanks, iTunes shuffle! One of the unknown (at launch) benefits of same.

©Republic

The death of Amy Winehouse over the weekend was, unfortunately, really no surprise. There’s an autopsy scheduled for today, and if the cause of death is not in some way drug-related, well, the Vegas oddsmakers just took a hit. (Update 8/23: Only alcohol in her system; that’s a surprise.)

This is not to make light of her life or death – rather, it’s just to set the stage for an odious article that ran in the Huffington Post about Winehouse. Posted Sunday, July 24, 2011, the article is titled “Amy Winehouse’s Untimely Death Is a Wake Up Call for Small Business Owners.”

WTF?

The author, one Tricia Fox, is touted as an Award Winning Entrepreneur & Marketer. OK…and what does Ms. Fox have to say about Amy Winehouse?

It would be terribly remiss of me not to blog about the untimely death of the 27 year-old British singer Amy Winehouse today.

Unlike others, I won’t be picking apart her chosen lifestyle, nor will I be judging her.

The article then goes into detail about how the choices Winehouse made hurt her “brand” – in other word, Fox is judging her. Not as a person, but as a brand.

Again, WTF?

And performance artists and their brand are tightly intertwined the way other artists are not. Faulkner and Hemingway were famous drunks, but that was between them and their typewriters. The books stand alone.

And why would Fox be remiss if she didn’t blog about Winehouse’s death? I’m at a loss.

The Huffington Post gets a lot of flack for not paying for all of its articles, but I can only hope this is one that came without compensation. Just sleazy and self-serving. I am breathlessly awaiting Fox’s next article explaining the lessons for entrepreneurs from the recent bombings/shootings in Oslo.

Postscript: Someone sent me a link to the Gawker article that shows even more contempt for Fox’s article than I do. When Gawker.com is making fun of you, you’ve gone round the bend…

WATCHING:
Sideways
Starring: Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh

With Church’s wedding coming up, the divorced Giamatti – a vinophile – decides to take the groom-to-be for a tour of the wine country in Southern California.

However, once the trip begins, it’s apparent that Church has a very different idea of what this last getaway will entail. He just wants to party; Giamatti just wants to drink.

Church is the guy who really doesn’t have a lot going for him – he’s an ex-soap actor who is now reduced to doing commercial voice-overs. Yet he always lands on his feet – he’s coated in Teflon.

Giamatti the the exact opposite: An English teacher pretending to be a writer (who can’t get his book published), divorced, he is really just a wine lover to give himself an excuse to drink. He stops by to visit his mother just so he can steal money from her.

I re-watched Sideways this weekend, and I remembered it as funnier. It does have some great comedic moments, but overall this is a very sad movie.

In one of the best scenes in the movies, Giamatti explains to Madsen why he loves pinot noir, and as he discusses the grape etc, you realize he’s not talking about the wine/grape, he’s talking about himself. Very poignant.

All movies

No, not the crappy Jennifer Lopez movie.

It’s about finally getting around to rewriting some backup scripts on my home boxes, so if a hard drive does go down, it’s only a little painful.

I have – mainly – two Linux boxes and a Windows machine. The latter is my primary box for work; the Linux boxes are servers and used to host local versions of my web sites (development environments), as well as a host of homegrown tools I’ve built over the years to help populate my web sites and so on.

I’ve had backup scripts in place for a decade, but I really haven’t revisited them for some time.

This week, I spent some time deleting some scripts, modifying others and creating new scripts. All to reflect how my environments have changed over the years.

Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Windows box:

• There are two areas of this box – photos and documents – that need backing up. Two scripts, each with the same basic algorithm:
• FTP to backup folder on Linux box
• FTP all appropriate files (i.e., for photos, .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .png, .psd etc.) to this backup folder.
• Using those same file-type params, zip into a YYYY-MM-DD.zip file.
• Delete all non-zip files.
• Get list of all zip files, ordered by date descending. Keep first 10 zips; delete any others.
• This could work for X areas; same concept, just change directories and and so on.

Linux boxes

• On each Linux box, there are multiple directories and a mySql database to backup. The backups I perform use the first Linux box as backup for the second, and vice-versa: Data swap
• mySql backup – Here my concern is just restoring the DB if the hard drive goes south. History is not an issue.
• On first Linux box, hotcopy all files to a mysqlbak directory.
• FTP into second Linux box; loop over databases and copy all files from mysqlbak to remote mysqlbak-firstbox directory.
• Document directories – there are a handful of directories that I want backed up each day, including those directories that hold tools, web roots and so on. For each the process is the same:
• Tar up given directory to YYYY-MM-DD-[backup name].tar
• Gzip this tar
• FTP this GZ to appropriate directory on Windows box (larger drive; also has RAID).
• Loop over GZ files in this Windows directory, keep last X .gz files.

Is this a lot of work for something I might never need?

Absolutely!

Will it be worth it if I have to recover something – even once?

Absolutely!

One part of my backup scheme that I tested this time was something inspired by a guy named Boris whom I once worked with. He said something like, “You don’t need backup, you need recovery.” I.e., you can have all the backups in the world, but if you can’t recover them, well, what good are they? Sage advice; I’ve worked at more than one place with backups that…could not be recovered. Ouch.

So I wrote some test scripts to “recover” my data. (Docs and databases)

Damn. It all worked.

Perfect system? Nah.

But better than I had before: More robust, more redundant and I can now sleep knowing that what I have backed up can be recovered.

Allthingsd had an interesting article recently detailing how big the internet is and how it’s growing: Cisco Reminds Us Once Again How Big the Internet Is, and How Big It’s Getting.

The article is based on an infographic produced by Cisco detailing some info about the internet past, present and future.

It’s worth looking at, but one nugget in the graphic – if true – just blows me away.

Cisco says that by the end of 2011 – this year – 20 average households will generate more internet traffic than the entire internet … in 2008.

That’s just frickin’ amazing. The internet was pretty robust in 2008 – 20 households = everyone’s traffic!?

OK, there’s plenty of over-the-top rhetoric on both sides of the aisle with regard to raising the debt ceiling, what Democrats should/shouldn’t give up to get it raised and so on.

But today’s Erick Erickson’s column at RedState.com is just blisteringly vile.

He’s advocating that Republicans don’t blink, to stay in the game to try to get as much as possible out of the negotiations. OK, that’s a valid point of view.

But his premise is just, well, partisan idiocy.

Now is a time for choosing. Now is your time for choosing. As I pointed out to John Boehner yesterday, despite what the pundits in Washington are telling you, it is you and not Obama who hold most of the cards. Obama has a legacy to worry about. Should the United States lose its bond rating, it will be called the “Obama Depression”. Congress does not get pinned with this stuff.

— Dear House Republicans, This is Your “Time For Choosing”

He’s advocating playing a game of chicken with the economy – which he admits may send us into a depression – because Republicans won’t get blamed for the depression if that does occur.

How craven is that?

Sure, potentially crater the economy, have unemployment soar, risk a global meltdown, hurt untold millions of Amercians – no biggie, ’cause we won’t get blamed for it!

Wow.

Update: Steve Benen weighs in:

But [Erickson’s assumption that the White House will get most of the blame is] not what’s important here. Indeed, the notion that elected officials should choose, or at least risk, a depression on purpose, based solely on their expectations about blame, is among the more offensive things I’ve seen from the right in this entire debate.

What actually matters is that Americans will suffer. The economy will get worse. The standing, credibility, and stability of the United States will be negatively affected immediately and for years to come. All of this can be easily avoided.

That’s what matters. Not polls, not spin, not which soundbite resonates. The principal concern should be over whether the public is forced to endure pain in order to satisfy the ideological whims of madmen who don’t belong in public office, but who nevertheless yield enormous power over our collective future.

— In 18 days, blame will be the least of our troubles

OK, Google+ is the shiny new tech tool out there that all the kids are talking about.

I finally got an invite (thanks A.B!), and last night was the first time I fired it up.

I understand that the Google+ of today is probably a work in progress – so is Facebook, but Google+ in a different way. They’re just rolling it out; some missing features are probably already written and are just waiting for complaints/comments to roll in and stress testing to complete.

That said, first impressions are important; here are my first impressions of Google+:

• This is not a different type of social media (as is the case with Facebook and Twitter). This is pretty much a Facebook clone. Don’t believe me? See the screenshots below – just different skins and some rearranging, for the most part. If you are familiar with Facebook, you can easily use Google+.
   



• Right now, there are not a lot of people on Google+ – Google’s doing the slow roll out so there are as few “Fail Whale” Twitter outages as possible. Good idea. But since there aren’t many people on the service – and so few of my friends – it’s tough to get a real feel for the flexibility and robustness of the site. Yeah, I know, be patient.
   
• The Circle feature is brilliant. Basically, a circle is a bucket into which you add a friend. Relatives, Friends, Workmates – build your own buckets, and put people in one (or more). In that way, when you post/share, you can target only people in whatever bucket(s) you want. People at work might want to know that I’m messing with Google+; relatives won’t. Relatives would want to hear about the niece’s birthday party; workmates won’t. It’s brilliant. And the drag-and-drop interface to adding friends is HTML5 sexy. Very slick.
   
• Hangouts is another outstanding feature that kicks Facebook’s ass all over the place. It allow video chat (via your webcam) with more than one person right in your browser. It’s free video conferencing. I believe the Facebook/Skype agreement allows video chat, but only one-on-one. Very interesting feature – but, from the little I’ve played with it, the least polished.
   
• On Facebook, it’s the News Feed (the Wall on your profile); on Google+ it’s the Stream. And on Google+, you can switch between viewing everyone’s posts in the stream or filter to view only posts for one Circle. Currently, you can only filter by one Circle – you can’t view College Friends and Workmates at the same time. I expect this to change moving forward.
   
• Sparks are areas of interest (movies, cycling and so on). They are populated with articles, but it’s unclear to me how that data gets there. For example, I selected the Movie area in Sparks, and there are headlines/blurbs with links to ABCnews.com, YouTube and so on. Who’s curating these areas? It’s really not spelled out here. I’m guessing it keys off the (fairly) recent “+1” button from Google, which mimics Facebook’s “Like” button. But if that’s the case, how does Google classify a +1 click? How does it know it’s a tech or movie article/YouTube clip? Some of it could be site-specific, such as all articles from TechCruch are tech, but what about movie reviews from CNN? I just don’t know. Oddly, I don’t see the +1 button in the wild right now. I wonder if it’s overwhelming Google, or they’re doing something with it so they have just turned it off. Hmm…
   
• I really don’t have anything of interest with regard to Google+’s privacy. Seems to be structured a little better than Facebook’s, but I didn’t pay that much attention to it. Could suck; could be pretty damn good (feels like the latter).

OK, that’s my initial reactions. It’s a very well made site, very intuitive, and the Circles concept it so obvious it’s a wonder it’s never been used before in a social networking site (or has it?).

I guess the real question is the following: Will people use it?

I don’t see Google+ as a threat to Twitter at all, but it’s a full-on salvo at Facebook.

But Facebook has 700 million+ users. Are these users going to throw away years of postings on Facebook to jump to Google+? Doubtful. Will many users maintain both accounts? Sure. But at the end of the day, both sites are so similar that one will, inevitably, be posting – for the most part – on just one.

Which one will that be?

I guess we’ll have to see how Google+ evolves and if it gives users a compelling reason to make Google’s offering a user’s primary social media site (for this type of social media).

At the same time, this’ll keep up the heat on Facebook to continue to evolve and give its millions of users a compelling reason to stay put for the most part.

One final thought: If Google were to buy Twitter and somehow embed that in Google+, that would be compelling. Google’s got the money, but Twitter doesn’t seem too interested in selling.

Still, that would be a juggernaut!