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Archive for September, 2004

Buzz.

Tuesday, September 28th, 2004

[4:23] * dsandler engages in the time-honored new-office ritual of getting totally fried on Expo Spray Cleaner fumes while wiping the old occupant’s crap off the whiteboard

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I fully expect some sort of shoot-out in Crawford in the near future.

Tuesday, September 28th, 2004

The Lone Star Iconoclast, out of Crawford, TX, has officially endorsed Senator Kerry for president in a scathing editorial. (It endorsed George W. Bush four years ago.) The website is hammered at the moment, so you might want to check out the Daily Kos abridged version of the editorial.

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Never mind those twelve percentage points.

Tuesday, September 28th, 2004

Likely Voter Sample Party IDs – Poll of September 24-26 Reflected Bush Winning by 52%-44%

Looks dire, right?

Total Sample: 758
GOP: 328 (43%)
Dem: 236 (31%)
Ind: 189 (25%)

The Left Coaster has more on this absurdity.

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Bloglines Web Services trades one bottleneck for another

Tuesday, September 28th, 2004

Last night Mark Fletcher spilled the beans, and today we have a press release: “New Bloglines Web Services Selected by FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Blogbot to Eliminate RSS Bandwidth Bottleneck.” Let’s take a look.

Does this solve anything?

I’ve been a huge fan of Bloglines for a couple of years now, but this “solution” concerns me, because the RSS bandwidth bottleneck is now Bloglines. Once more, polling does not scale, and we haven’t solved that problem at all. What Mark is saying is the following: “Content providers are currently complaining about the load imposed by N RSS aggregators polling their servers. So we’ve set up a service that allows those aggregators to poll us instead. We’ll poll the content providers, in turn, but responsibly and as infrequently as possible.”

What this means, in practice, is that content providers will indeed see fewer polls as more end-user apps start polling Bloglines to get that same data. But now bloglines.com will have to satisfy N × C amount of load per unit time: the number of aggregators times the number of feeds. Of course, this is really on the order of N × C; there are some hidden linear factors there, since not all clients read all subscriptions. And it’s possible (likely, since Mark is a smart guy) that Bloglines will send customized sub-feeds to each client, containing only the information that that client is missing, so this will reduce the overall bandwidth associated with this load.

But what we’ve done here is trade one kind of bottleneck for another. It’s not just the bandwidth issue that concerns me, either: this solution is predicated on a dangerous dependency on the existence (and freedom) of the Bloglines service. When Bloglines shuts its doors, or holds out the collection tin, your choices will be to:

  1. pay up, or
  2. start polling feeds directly again

…and now we’re back to the bandwidth problem. The point I’m trying to make here is that computer science has made progress in dealing with distributed systems like this, and this solution doesn’t seem to take advantage of any of that.

More later, when I’m not trying to finish a paper critique for class.

Background.

If you hadn’t heard about the recent RSS bandwidth flap, it gained momentum again with a July InfoWorld piece on RSS Growing Pains. Then, earlier this month, MSDN started retracting some RSS feeds, citing bandwidth issues; Scoble elaborated. There’s a lot of other conversation on the topic, too, but most of it assumes that polling is here to stay, and that the way forward is to make the polling as lightweight as possible (with strict If-Modified-Since adherence, etc.).

Coverage elsewhere on the net.

TechDirt: building the RSS platform; Pedro Melo offers cautious hope; Ed Goodwin also sees the business angle; (more later)

Update 16:30: O’ReillyNet weighs in with an analysis. I continue to appreciate Mark Fletcher’s fondness for dirt-simple Web APIs; I continue to recoil in instinctive horror at the way this concentrates traffic at Bloglines.

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New Office

Tuesday, September 28th, 2004

DH 2062

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Palm OS Cobalt 6.1

Monday, September 27th, 2004

Congrats, folks, on the release of Palm OS “Cobalt” 6.1. But couldn’t you have sent PalmInfocenter some new screenshots? That first one has some seriously out-of-date graphics, including my landscape icon (the portrait icon from that period is just as cute) and my mini-Pulse icon (alongside the extra-skinny battery).

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“I can hardly believe we’re already in another city,” said Ann.

Monday, September 27th, 2004

Brilliant: If all stories were written like science fiction stories.

Do you think we’ll be flying on a propeller plane? Or one of the newer jets?” asked Ann.

“I’m sure it will be a jet,” said Roger. “Propeller planes are almost entirely out of date, after all. On the other hand, rocket engines are still experimental. It’s said that when they’re in general use, trips like this will take an hour at most. This one will take up to four hours.”

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