April, 2009

Ideas — No Comments
20
Apr 09

Quickie Idea: Crowdsource Typo-Correction on Blogs

Here’s what it looks like:

Visitor notices a typo in a blog post. Luckily, there is a “correct typo” button, probably near the “comment” button. She clicks it. She sees the same “edit post” interface as I do when I edit posts. Or, better yet, Ajax magic is employed to turn the body of the post into a stylized textarea, so that the user doesn’t have to translate the position of the error in the rendered post into the position of the error in a marked-up text. Either way, one captcha and one “submit” later, I get an email that includes the output of a diff on the post and the updated post that the user submitted (in other words, i’m told specifically what was changed). I can either click a link to approve or submit the change in my web browser, or i can simply reply to the message with “yes” or “no.”

Someone write this wordpress extension now plz. kthxbai.

Ideas — 1 Comment
20
Apr 09

Rough Idea Re: Free Network Services: Massive Abstraction Layer for Personal Servers

Server Rekonstruktion - SME Server by rudolf_schuba, on Flickr

Server Rekonstruktion - SME Server by rudolf_schuba, on Flickr

The “thing” in FLOSS right now is Free Network Services, and for good reason–proprietary network services are a serious threat to privacy and overall computing autonomy (especially network and data portability and control).

My idea is for a chunk of FLOSS built specifically for personal servers that abstracts the cumbersome process of installing and configuring (and updating or otherwise managing) individual network/web applications, probably through a simple, password-protected web interface. For example:

I want to run a local laconica install on my personal server. I go to parkerserver.com and log in. Similarly to how i would aptitude install from ubuntu, or (more closely) how i would (as of more recent versions) install a new extension to my wordpress blog, I search for packages whose name match “laconica.” Then I click install.

Same for instantiating a blog, a wiki, a web-based rss reader… hopefully even email hosting and webmail. Installing wordpress is extremely simple as it is (editor’s note: parker loves wordpress), but if the piece of software that i’m imagining could make available in a standard format some config options (database login credentials, port config, server type, other server software/web apps installed), then installing wordpress could literally be a question of pressing a button, and the entire install process, including database config, etc, could all be abstracted. Also, the software should be able to itself be updated through its own web ui (seems crazy, but wordpress does this).

Next step: What if this shipped with a specialized gnu/linux distro (maybe Ubuntu for maximum user-friendliness or gNewSense for maximum freedom)? The idea is that you buy a cheapo tower on ebay with no OS installed, pop in an install CD, and then you’re ready to go. Now, this initial config will necessarily be somewhat painful. The software could try to automatically detect network topography and carefully walk the user through stuff like port forwarding… but only so much of this process can be automated. Nonetheless we can get close. Ubuntu Server ships with apache, mysql, php, etc, and it would probably be trivial to add this extra package.

Also, in terms of scalability as well as software freedom, it’s probably a good idea to make information available to the user about logging in remotely. Perhaps ssh, or perhaps just remote desktop … i’m not sure whether or not a normal gui should be installed on the machine… i’m imagining that one shouldn’t be necessary if the web-accessible front-end is robust enough, and it’s easy enough to get the server online and keep it online (probably the weakest link… again, this has to do with network topography). In fact, if other OS tasks, like installing packages, rebooting the server, rebooting the operating system, configuring user accounts and SSH/SFTP/FTP, etc could all be accomplished from an inviting web interface, operating a personal server and running your own network services would seem like a much less daunting task.

Uncategorized — 1 Comment
5
Apr 09

Lyst: Hopefully Something Useful Soon

Introducing: Lyst
This has been a little side project for a while. I kind of gave up on it for a bit when I realized that it had already been done over at instapaper.com.

But recently I’ve been thinking about all the cool stuff that’s going on with Free Network Services like laconica. This project could still prove useful if it’s built as a Free Network Service. The Free alternative to instapaper. Plus I’m sure I could think up some cool features that instapaper doesn’t have :)

So I want to turn this into a FLOSS project. I don’t really know what that entails. To start, I’m going to add a little “about” page and GPL the code very very soon (hopefully). From there, maybe it’s an svn repo, an project on sourceforge, and a wiki? I don’t really know, and to be honest I don’t mind handing this project off to someone else if she has more time to organize it and make it happen. I just want to see it happen.

Please contact me if you’re interested in helping out with this project.

Uncategorized — No Comments
5
Apr 09

Welcome to the No Fun Zone

For immediate release:
Introducing: nofunzone.biz
It’s a .biz because it’s all business, all the time.
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Email us, or comment on our videos. Tell us what you like and don’t like.
We’re making this up as we go along.

Uncategorized — 2 Comments
5
Apr 09

Efficiency Report: recently

Starting Friday, I began failing hard. Here I am on sunday night, trying to get my life back in order.

looking back on the last week:
*I tweaked my contact and calendering systems a bit. I’m using some sort of mix of google sync on my iphone, thunderbird and sunbird, with some scheduleworld sync and funambol sync thrown in there. I’m happy with contact sync in that it’s immediate and invisible. I’m unhappy with calendar sync in that i have to manually sync to scheduleworld, then manually to google from there. also, sometimes stuff just doesn’t show up on my iphone, which is no good.

*i got much better at sending 2-liner emails. good job, parker.

*i’m getting comfortable with using a folded up piece of 8.5×11 paper as my todo list. i still liked using the task manager on my old treo 650 better, but this is working okay for now. i still need to get used to pulling it out and giving it a look-over more often. maybe that’ll be the goal for next week. every time i have a free moment, pull out the list and see if there are fires to be put out, or trivial tasks that can be knocked out.

*mornings are still a MAJOR weakness. like, this is really bad. i lose so many hours for no good reason because i don’t just get myself out of bed.

*i can never seem to be on a good GTD routine and a good workout routine at the same time. I’m not going to push working out quite yet, but this is a goal for if/when i start getting more comfortable with my GTD system. This may prove particularly tough because working out significantly alters my sleep cycles. But it might ultimately improve focus. We’ll see.

that’s all i can think of for now. i’m still moving in the right direction, but i seem to have been progressively slipping since i started ~a week ago. here’s to hoping i can bring it back starting tonight/tomorrow.

sidenote: this post is sloppy, untagged, and not checked for grammar. this may become a trend… it might be necessary to lower the entry barrier created by a high standard in order for me to actually get my thoughts out there more often.