Blogbody

First: it is a complete rip-off of the Wii dashboard, all the way down to the concept of “channels” and “avatars” (Miis).

But it’s still really good.

A few tidbits:

• Setting up the NetFlix integration was cake. Just download and install the Netflix app ($FREE) and then enter the activation code they provide you on the NetFlix home page.
• NetFlix integration seems “OK”. Titles are still lacking of course, though for a streaming service fast-forward is really quite good. Not sure how they did it.
• The avatars are actually kind of fun - maybe more so than on the Wii. You can even save your clothing styles in to different wardrobes, which I could see being kind of popular.
• There is a new option to install games to the hard drive. This might actually get me to think about upgrading from the 20GB drive. I do wonder how this works in terms of copy protection. I’ll post an update when I learn more.

The overall interface is really clean and seems pretty fast. I’m pretty impressed.

If you haven’t seen it yet, now is your chance. I recommend watching them in this order: Volume 1, 3, 2, 4, and then finally 2.5 (Jack Black is in 2 and 2.5).

Volume 1

Volume 3

Volume 2

Volume 4

Volume 2.5

Really good read. For as much crap as Carter gets, this speech from almost 30 years ago was really spot on. His speech about government, energy, and politics is important, but so is his early identification of the infection that has completely contaminated the American culture:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

American Experience | Jimmy Carter | Primary Sources

Read the whole thing if you have time.

I hate to say it, but I sort of agree with the GOP and Mitt Romney on this one:

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course - the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

Let Detroit Go Bankrupt - NYTimes.com

Sorry, but GM, Ford, and Chrysler built crappy cars and crappy companies. What I don’t agree with is Romney’s argument that it’s because of unions or health care or taxes. It’s because they built ugly, unreliable, costly cars. It’s that simple.

So what can we do? Well, I do agree with Obama that if we are going to do any bailout, it should have strings attached that force them to be smarter, namely improving their fuel efficiency. That at least would give the big 3 a larger market opportunity in countries that have higher minimum efficiency levels (which hopefully includes the USA soon).

But I’m also OK without doing a bailout at all. In fact, I’d prefer we give back all $700B until we can get more competent mangers in place who don’t mislead everyone about what it’s going to be used for.

But whatever happens, please don’t believe this crap:

That extra burden is estimated to be more than $2,000 per car. Think what that means: Ford, for example, needs to cut $2,000 worth of features and quality out of its Taurus to compete with Toyota’s Avalon. Of course the Avalon feels like a better product - it has $2,000 more put into it. Considering this disadvantage, Detroit has done a remarkable job of designing and engineering its cars. But if this cost penalty persists, any bailout will only delay the inevitable.

Sorry Mitt, but that’s crap. Japan has it’s own costs and disadvantages - they have to build cars with higher emission standards, they have more complex distribution processes, etc. The answer is not that we need to simply cut benefits and salaries.

The answer is to build great products. Don’t believe it can be done? Just ask Apple if a business can charge premium prices, provide great benefits for employees, and thrive even in a shitty economy. Sure, it’s easier to blame employee costs instead of building great products, but that’s what really needs to happen.

I’ve been looking for a decent blog publishing tool, but every time I think about it I realize that nothing is likely to be as easy to use as the FriendFeed bookmarklet. I’m completely in love with the FriendFeed bookmarklet and it’s super simple way to add media to your comments. I wish posting to my blog were as simple!

I used to use MarsEdit (back when it was owned by the NetNewsWire guy), but now that it has been acquired and upped to version 2.0 without adding an real new features, I feel a bit raw about it all. Especially considering the 1.0 version is nowhere to be found to download, meaning my purchase is effectively wasted.

So now I’m trying out Ecto. So far it seems pretty good, but the big question will be how easy is it to insert links and pictures in to my posts. We’re about to find out:

Check out Ecto! It apparently has good support for linking to Amazon products too:

“Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series [HD DVD]” (BBC Warner)

(Btw - I am totally waiting for the HD-DVD version of this to drop in price. I figure it has to soon, considering HD-DVD is dead)

But Ecto also claims to be able to support good media, including resizing. Let’s see how that goes. Here’s my dog:

Well that didn’t go so well. Lame. Two problems:

• Ecto didn’t resize/downsize the image, which was from my iPhoto library and fairly large.
• It did automate uploading to the blog, but if it doesn’t actually insert the photo in my post that’s kind of pointless! Instead I just got a stupid link. Bummer.
  

Let’s try dragging an image in to the editor:

Wow, dragging worked way better. It gave me options to create a thumbnail, resize, downsize the quality, etc. I wonder why I wasn’t given these options when I pressed the import media button. Don’t know which button I’m talking about? Here, I’ll paste in a screen cap of that button to see if screen grabs are easy to do:

Now for the final test: let’s upload it and see how it ultimately looks in my blog.

UPDATE: I’m modifying this post to correctly link to my dog, Chewy, mostly to figure out how to display my iPhoto pictures, but also because Chewy is rad. Here’s another cute dog, but not mine (found him via the Ecto Flickr integration, which is also rad):

I thought Ecto might be perfect for me, but then I just got let down In my last post, the following quote, when pasted in from the original NYT article, ended up with garbled text after the apostrophe in “Toyota’s”.

That extra burden is estimated to be more than $2,000 per car. Think what that means: Ford, for example, needs to cut $2,000 worth of features and quality out of its Taurus to compete with Toyota’s Avalon. Of course the Avalon feels like a better product — it has $2,000 more put into it. Considering this disadvantage, Detroit has done a remarkable job of designing and engineering its cars. But if this cost penalty persists, any bailout will only delay the inevitable.

UPDATE: Looks like Flock can only support photos that are uploaded through Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa, or Piczo, but not a self-hosted WordPress site. Bummer.

UPDATE 2: Looks like Flock does no better. Very annoying that these characters cause so many problems. Anyone know of a solution (short of having to publish the post, then view it, then manually fix any problems)?

I just added the FriendFeed widget to my blog, as well as updating the theme to something a lot nicer. Unfortunately, some weird CSS magic is going on where the widget’s text is way too big. I’ve tried adding CSS rules with !important, but they still aren’t being honored. Anyone care to take a look and tell me what I’m doing wrong?

At the core I can tell my theme’s style.css file has a rule for .entry that defines the font and font size, and that rule is conflicting with the FriendFeed widget, which also has div elements of class “entry”. But the override rules that Firebug is showing me (by crossing through rules that are being overridden) indicates that my !important rules I’ve added are being honored. And yet the right look for the widget doesn’t happen until I turn off a particular rule that is already shown as crossed out.

I’m thoroughly stumped here.

Tonight I wrote my representative, David Wu, of Oregon’s 1st district. It said:

I saw Peter DeFazio on KGW’s evening news pushing back on a hurried bill giving the Secretary of the Treasury such massive power in this bailout. I hope you and he can work together to represent Oregon and all Americans in the face of this massive power grab. We need proper regulation and transparency, but we also need new and innovative solutions instead of the same old partisan politics.

While Mark Cuban can find a way to get on everyone’s nerves from time to time (especially if you’re an NBA fan), he has a really good proposal that would not only open up the process to proper transparency and oversight, but also potentially gives private investors the opportunity to step in in place of the federal government.

Please read Mark’s proposal here.

Something like this should be seriously considered. Right now it seems like Washington isn’t really looking anything but the two extremes (financial crisis vs. no-oversight-bail-out). Let’s find something bette by putting technology and innovation to work and find ways to have regulation, accountability, AND efficiency all together.

Sincerely,
Patrick Lightbody

From Tech Crunch: Don’t Post The Evidence Unless It Supports Your Case.

The emails provided by WL are truly amazing. Take 3 minutes to read through them. I’ve never seen such unprofessional behavior from a company. Just the email name alone (”Evil Genius”) gives most of the story away.

I don’t know Gina Bianchi, the CEO of Ning, (I spoke with her once by phone when she was doing reference checks on a friend), but I already was a big fan given how well she’s done with Ning. But after reading her emails, I’m even more impressed with her incredible level of patience. If I were in her shoes, I would have terminated my relationship with WL a lot sooner.

Truly amazing.

I’ve been playing around with Mule lately, mostly just trying to learn and see if it’d be a fit for a little side project I’m working on (it looks like it won’t, but that’s OK). But one thing that was a bit confusing about Mule integration is that the 2.0 version is very heavily dependent on Spring. That would be nice if I used Spring, but this project uses Guice.

First I tried Google, but only came up with this. Then I tried to see how other containers (Pico, Hivemind, etc) integrated in to Mule, but it turns out those integrations were for 1.x and nothing has been built for 2.x. I’m sure there is a better solution that what I came up with, but for a quick and dirty integration this worked really well:

    <spring:bean name="foo" class="com.bar.GuiceUtil" 
                       factory-method="getGuiceInstance">
        <spring:constructor-arg>
            <spring:value>com.bar.Foo</spring:value>
        </spring:constructor-arg>
    </spring:bean>

    <model name="...">
          <service name="...">
               <inbound>
                    <inbound-endpoint address="..." />
               </inbound>
               <component>
                   <spring-object bean="foo"/>
               </component>
          </service>
     </model>

Basically, you just make a simple utility class (GuiceUtil) that holds your Guice Injector and offers a static method named getGuiceInstace:

    public static <T> T getGuiceInstance(Class<T> t) {
        return injector.getInstance(t);
    }

Now Spring is configured to created a Spring bean named “foo” that actually came from Guice. Then you simply tell Mule to use that Spring bean. I’m sure there are a lot better ways to do this (I am a complete Mule newbie and know very little of the configuration options), but this got the job done for me.