Finally finished choosing a set of photos worth posting from my last trip to Sri Lanka in May.

This was an exciting trip, starting with severe flooding that prevented us from getting from the airport into Colombo until Sanjiva and his Jeep staged a daring rescue.  Marilyn Jones’ superb All-Nighter Writer workshops were a big hit with the whole company, and we visited the chaotic marketplace of Colombo called Pettah for a sweaty, smelly, photo session.

Finally, we took a day trip up to Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage and watched the large herd storm through town for their daily river play time.  As much fun the second time as the first!

Then wound it up with a Desert Safari in Dubai during our stayover.

Sri Lanka photos here, and a few photos and a video from Dubai here.

As you know, I’m a big fan of the iPhone, in part because of the simplicity of the user interface.  You don’t often get lost in a sea of advanced features and configurations – they simply aren’t there!  While this is a relief most of the time, once in a while you run into something tricky.

For me, it’s been syncing calendars between Deanna and I.  We each use Microsoft Office Outlook on separate computers, and view each other’s schedules using the built-in calendar publishing features there.

However, now we each have iPhones, and while the iPhone can handle multiple Outlook calendars, it doesn’t pick up shared ones for some reason.

After a bit of research and some ineffective fiddling with Google calendars, I found a simple and elegant solution:

Sign up for a free account on Plaxo.  Plaxo is a social networking site but you don’t have to use those features to take advantage of a great multi-calendar sync solution.  On my computer I downloaded the Outlook extension that synchronizes my local calendar to one I created on Plaxo called “Jonathan”, and on Deanna’s computer I did the same with a calendar named “Deanna”.  Then I just configured the respective Outlooks to synchronize with these new calendars.  Voila, now we each have a native Outlook calendar synchronized to each other.  In iTunes you can enable synchronizing these now-native calendars to the iPhone.

The Plaxo experience is very smooth, even when I got an error message on the first sync, it automatically tried again after asking whether it could engage a more verbose logging mode (which it will shut off automatically after a few days without further error.)  And it scales out to Google, Yahoo, etc. calendars as necessary.  Two thumbs up so far!

Sanjiva’s post reminded me how amazing our current technology is.  I’m sure he’d appreciate this great clip of Louis CK on Conan.  My iPhone 3G (Google Maps & Pandora while speeding down the freeway?!) is a source of ongoing amazement to me.

For some reason I chose to watch an episode of the old BBC on Netflix last night.  The parallel between the Guide and Wikipedia was striking.  Have a question?  Look it up in the [Guide/Wikipedia].  Foolproof?  No.  Useful?  Take a look at this before you answer – seems to guarantee a practical best-seller to me!

It’s always interesting to see how much travel one does during the year.  At one point it used to be a source of pride, but now it’s becoming a source of carbon and of family disruption.  Either way, without good data you can’t judge yourself against your goals – I predict lifestyle data collection will be a major theme of the coming year.  Dopplr is a site that helps record your travel and look for opportunities to link up with your travelling friends.

This year, they’ve introduced a personalized annual report.  Mine is here.  A total of 61,252 kilometers last year, emitting around 7700 kg of carbon.  Most enlightening to me is the total of over two months - 73 days - away from home during the year.  And I felt was lighter on travel than in the past!

And I’m not off to a good start for 2009 – away 13 days so far and it’s only the 20th…

[Update 22 Jan: If you think this kind of data analysis is obsessive take a look at how beautiful obsession can be with the Felton Annual Report 2008.]

A couple of weeks ago I ran across a fun little program that evolves to recreate an image out of overlapping transparent algorithms.  Although not IMO really genetic, it mutates it’s “DNA” over many generations to reproduce a source image.  I’m still having fun with it, trying to figure out if it could be adapted to glass.  Here are a couple of samples:

Check out Roger’s gallery too.

How does one compete with Google’s home page?  It has a definite design center – absolutely minimal, fast loading, with ample white space.  Microsoft had quite a challenge, and I find the new live.com intriguing.  Keep the minimal aspects, but instead of white space integrate the search box into a gorgeous daily-changing image, from somewhere in the world.  Add a few hidden roll-over nuggets explaining the image and suggesting related searches to find out more.  Simple idea, executed smoothly in all the details (e.g. page is completely useful while the image downloads).

What do I find so great about this?  The daily images are really intriguing, reminding me daily that there’s a wider world out there. It marries the richness of art with the utility of the interface.  It competes with the increasingly-monopolistic Google, but not on Google’s terms. And the implication of exploration of the world reinforces the theme of exploration of the internet in a way that I find, dare I say, kind of uplifting.

I set this as my home page several weeks ago, breaking my longstanding preference for about:blank, and sometimes I even launch up the browser just to see what the image of the day is.  Refreshing job, Microsoft!

This Southwest incident has made me somewhat introspective.  As I started to muse in my previous post:

… it would be nice to have not just Terms and Conditions that allowed the site and its content to be reused freely. …  It’s unfortunate they can’t do this without changing their checkin and boarding procedures in some way.

I really wonder whether in the long term whether Southwest’s procedure can withstand the onslaught of “bots” like mine.  It seems doubtful.  But the consequences of being overrun by “bots” is already causing alarm in some places.

For a very thoughtful look at the risks, the consequences, and maybe some ways to approach solutions, I highly recommend checking out the Long Now Foundation’s excellent podcast featuring Daniel Suarez talking about Bot-Mediated Reality.  Based on that I can’t wait for his book to be rereleased ;-).

I was amazed how many open source advocates at the recent OSCON conference sported iPhones and Macs – notoriously closed systems.  The MacBook Air raffle generated serious excitement.  How many of these open source advocates are motivated more by Microsoft bashing than true open systems?  I guess we’ll find out if this will draw them off into a purely open source solution ;-).

As I posted back in 2005:

The US automakers don’t seem tapped into [the fuel economy] trend at all.  They still seem to think circumventing mileage minimums by pumping out SUVs is the way to sustainable revenues.  Last week Ford and GM were put on notice that they were wrong.  At least the blue half of this country, and I suspect lots of export markets, are willing to invest their automobile acquisition budget in a choice that reduces pump costs, unsightly and unhealthy smog, and reduces our dependence on foreign oil, and maybe even get a bit of value appreciation while they’re at it.  They’re even more motivated to vote with their dollars since their election votes haven’t provided much of a visible return.  Yet despite plenty of urging by the environmental community, Ford and GM seem to have ignored the inevitabilities of the long-term.  More and more of those purchasing dollars will head straight to Japan.  I suspect the next 15 years could be pretty rough as our automobile designers adapt.

High fuel prices have accelerated the timeline beyond what I had imagined, and Prius sales have accordingly boomed. 

I’m proud to at last announce I’ve joined those voting with their wallets for fuel efficiency and low emissions (and unfortunately against our domestic automakers) with my new purchase!

Let’s hope American competitiveness is up to the challenge, and hope that they do a much better job of recognizing and capitalizing on long-term trends in the future.

Some of our Sri Lankan visitors wanted to see a bit more of the Silicon Valley than the inside of our conference rooms where we’ve been working all week.  Follows is a little driving tour I took them on to see some of the local sights, both large and small.

1. WSO2 Mountain View office:  Aspiring to someday be part of Silicon Valley lore, a fitting place to start when looking in the rear view mirror of history. http://wso2.com
2. Fairchild Semiconductor: After the invention of the IC at Shockley Laboratories, mass defections spurred the development of the integrated circuit by the eventual founders of Intel Corporation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor
3. The GooglePlex: Formerly the site of Silicon Graphics campus, Google is the current symbol of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial success.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Campus
4. The Computer History Museum:  Ironically located in the former Silicon Graphics Executive Offices building, vacated not long after occupation - a poster child for the valley’s perpetual boom-bust cycle.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_History_Museum
5. Apple Computer:  Famous for bringing computer technology to the general public through a continuing emphasis on usability.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_computer
6. Stanford University: the intellectual force that anchored Silicon Valley here rather than elsewhere.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford
7. Stanford Linear Accelerator: Not really central to Silicon Valley history, but it is big and impressive and highlights Stanford’s role in attracting scientific talent to the area. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAC
8. Sand Hill Road: the center of VC in the valley.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Hill_Road
9. Hewlett-Packard Garage: considered the "birthplace of Silicon Valley" - the prototype of the garage entrepreneurial culture.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_garage

The tour ends conveniently near to the best Ginger Gelato in the Whole Universe.

Microsoft, Google, and others have just launched the Information Card Foundation, to promote awareness and interoperability around InfoCards.  This is great news - I think InfoCards have the potential to solve some real problems with managing identities and securing them against theft.  Despite the client-side technology being available in Vista for a year plus, we’re still slow to see installations emerge in the marketplace.  The only use I make of InfoCard (and then still pretty rarely) is in the WSO2 Mashup Server, which has both InfoCard and OpenId support (though you can use an old fashioned username/password).

Managing identity and security without complicating the user experience is still a challenge.  I’m hoping the Information Card Foundation can encourage broadly useable solutions as it gets rolling.  And I’m hoping some large properties (PayPal is a member) may actually start putting stronger identity management technologies in place on a broad scale.

It should be no surprise with our products supporting InfoCards and OpenId that WSO2 is now a member of both the Information Card Foundation and the OpenID Foundation.

I was pretty excited to try out Microsoft’s new "personal cloud" computing initiative - Live Mesh.  I signed up right away and it looks great and offers some very neat features.  Yet I have one problem with it, and that’s an unfortunate tie with Vista that makes one or the other virtually unusable.

Live Mesh, for some reason unknown to me, requires that User Account Control to be turned on.  Vista users will know User Account Control (UAC) as an annoyance that comes turned on by default.  It prevents unauthorized and potentially dangerous changes from being made without an Administrator’s approval, which I concede might be beneficial in some circumstances (a classroom?) but is incredibly annoying if you are used to being the Administrator yourself.  In that case all it does it pop up a regular stream of annoying modal warnings, to which you become accustomed to clicking through without reading in about 10 minutes, thereby rendering any protection useless.

But it’s worse, these warnings actually prevent you from doing useful work when you really want to.  Like renewing your IP address.  Or adding or removing files in the Program Files folder - if you’re editing them through an IDE, you don’t even get the warnings, skipping directly to failure.  You might have to reorganize your file system a bit to work around UAC.  And some stuff simply doesn’t work.  I could not under any circumstances get Adobe Flash 9 to install for me under UAC.

You can see I’m an anti-fan of this non-feature of Vista, which promises security but provides no real benefit and quite a number of headaches.

I don’t really understand why UAC would be required to run Live Mesh, but how important could it be if I can run Live Mesh on Windows XP, which has no such concept?  Is this just a UAC marketing?

In any case the effect is that a serious Vista user (the kind who might be an early adopter of Mesh) is significantly disadvantaged.  For me, the benefits of Live Mesh aren’t worth the pain inflicted by UAC, and I’ll generally restrict my Mesh use to non-Vista platforms, or extraordinary circumstances where it’s worth doing a reboot to access the Mesh.  What a shame.

Listen to this, and then check out this.  Wow.

Just got my first yearly bill from PG&E, reflecting the performance of our solar array.  Good news - right about where I expected it to be!  Here’s the stats for those that need encouragement to take the solar plunge:

• Power generated: 13,315 kWh
• Power bought from PG&E: 3,358 kWh
• Annual bill from the power company: $348.00
• Sum of monthly minimum payments for connected meters: ~$50
• Savings: $3,221.14 [1]
• Actual rate of return: 8.95% [2]
• Total payback length: 11.2 years [3]
• Extrapolated payback date: 11 Oct 2017

Notes:

1. This calculation takes into account the sliding price scale for energy over the baseline, and actual changes in the rates and baseline during the year.  Some straight-line averaging was necessary to correlate the readings taken from the meter with those from the power company.
2. Tax free!  And calculated only over the payback period - once the array pays for itself, I will continue to get free energy for many years.
3. Straight-line extrapolation based on assumed fixed consumption, and fixed energy prices.  It is virtually impossible that energy prices won’t rise substantially in the next 10 years, shortening the payback period and increasing the rate of return.