blog

Somewhat ironically, I’m too tired to boil this down to something that fits in less than 140 characters, but it seems worth noting that right now there are several Twitter micro-climes where I’m getting the same rush of positive interaction “these people REALLY GET IT” energy that I was getting from weblog cross-talk in the 1999-2001 time frame. Also worth noting is that a substantial part of this is reinforced by (at least the potential of) actual face-to-face interaction with a subset of these folks by virtue of them being relatively “local” to me; there’s something interesting there about how “real” communities reinforce and support virtual ones, that I’m just a bit too tired to tease out at the moment.

There’s more than a whiff here of the thing Dan and I (and others) keep kicking around, this idea of “OK, what’s next?”, that needs a bit more exploration…

There was a teapotTwitter tempest at this year’s OSCON regarding the Perl-specific badge banners that ORA provided, which read “Desperate Perl Hacker”.

Here’s some Twitter conversation on the subject. Tim Bray provided some more context for the origins of “Desperate Perl Hacker”. Piers Cawley weighed in and chromatic provided some advice on writing maintainable Perl.

(If you read nothing else; read what Piers has to say. Rafe, I tried to add a link to Piers’ post in a comment to this post of yours but your comment system apparently hates me.)

I’ve been wearing a Fitbit for just about a month now, and I’ve been meaning to blog something about it — particularly after Raster spoke up about the lack of a documented API and Fitbit’s recent move towards “premium” features.

First, let’s get the good stuff out of the way: it’s pretty cool, it Just Works, the battery seems to last a pretty long time, it recharges pretty quickly, it’s very unobtrusive, hanging on your belt, and did I mention it’s pretty cool getting stats on stuff like how active you are over the course of the day and how much you’re sleeping versus how much you’re thrashing around not sleeping? (Here’s my public profile page, if you’re curious — there’s more stats than that available to me that I’ve chosen to not share.)

Next, the slightly dodgy stuff: mine was back-ordered for quite a while (over a month, and well past when they originally indicated it was going to ship). It finally shipped after I started tweeting about it semi-daily, including @fitbit, bitching about how I wanted an update to the shipping status. (I’m not saying that’s what got my unit shipped; it’s possible things would have worked out the same without me doing that — but maybe not.) Finally, the color on the unit they shipped me wasn’t the same as what I’d ordered — not a huge deal, but at the time of my order, they were showing a black model with a silver highlight; the one I got has a turquoise highlight instead. Didn’t bother me enough to return it, but your mileage may vary. (Their Wikipedia page indicates that they’ve got a bit of a history of not delivering stuff on time, so I guess my experience was par for the course.)

And finally, the ugly: as Raster does a good job of pointing out, the way they have the system designed, all your data gets shipped back to the mother ship in the cloud — their cloud. You seem to have access to all of it through their flashy (and Flash-y) web interface, but if you want access to the actual numbers, you’re pretty much out of luck unless you’re willing to dig into one of the unofficial libraries that have reverse-engineered that Flash interface to get access to the XML feeds that are providing the raw data. The part about that approach that makes me nervous is that those XML feeds aren’t documented anywhere, and there’s no guarantee they won’t be radically changed or blocked off without any notice. (Disclosure: I’ve been hacking on one of those libraries myself…)

Finally, another bit of ugly that deserves a special mention: Fitbit has recently announced “premium” fee-based subscription services. They’ve been somewhat aggressive about pushing and up-selling these through their web interface — which, again, you’re pretty much required to use, since there’s no other way to get at your data. The lack of a published API is slightly annoying. Purchasing a piece of hardware merely to be turned into a captive audience for a service up-sell is extremely annoying.

So, to summarize, at this point in time, based on the recent (apparent) change in business model and the lack of a way to access the data from the device without the advertising for “premium” services (and the future potential of a mandatory subscription for the web site), I’m reluctant to recommend anybody buy one of these at this point in time.

On the one hand, it is a cool little toy and I think it can help make you more aware of your sleep patterns and overall activity levels, particularly if you’re a desk jockey like yours truly. On the other hand, $100 (the current purchase price) is outside, or at least on the upper end of, the “eh, what the hell” purchase range for most people. So, unless $100 falls firmly into “petty cash” territory for you, or you don’t care about raw data access or the possibility of future required subscription changes, hold off on the Fitbit for the moment.

For the moment, I’m throwing shared bookmarks (a la del.icio.us or pinboard or whatever) into Evernote — you can see them at http://www.evernote.com/pub/genehack/shared (and there’s an RSS feed there too…)

$ history | awk {'print $2'} | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1 -rn | head
   1852 git
   1742 cd
   1176 st
    929 ls
    638 mv
    553 d
    348 prove
    323 rm
    308 push
    284 make

‘st’ is an alias for ‘git status’; ‘d’ is an alias for ‘git diff’; ‘push’ is an alias for ‘git push’…

(via)

Achievements for Git!

Set up your own by following the instructions at this repo.

1. StatusNet is looking to capitalize on the Tweetie purchase fallout.

2. Say Tweet Again (via)

3. I hate the hovercard thing. HATE

Jessamyn put Oddbook up on Google Code, and there was a bug filed against my old reading list tracker, which combined to be the kick in the pants necessary to get me to start working on booklist again. Feel free to jump in if you like. Eventually there’s going to be a web layer!

Mark Pligrim on identity in the modern world:

My attempts at compartmentalization have failed. There is only one inbox.

On the down side (that was the up side), there is no “off the clock.” There is no “not on company time.” There is no “not speaking on behalf of…” Disclaimers to the contrary are commonplace, well-rehearsed, and futile. Technologies that “help” us to link our disparate personas will inevitably intertwine them with our impersonas too. There are no “strictly personal venues.” And when nothing can be said without being misconstrued, there is nothing left to be said.

My attempts at compartmentalization have failed. There is only one outbox.

I am big tired.

Read the whole thing; read the comment thread too. Ponder.

(not speaking for my employer.)

Less Talk, More Rock:

Go right from the inspiration — the vision — to actually making it. Don’t think it through. Don’t talk about it. Don’t plan it. Dive in and start making it happen. If you do that — if you can start rocking — you’ll get some momentum, and when you have some momentum then the project has a chance, because now you’re into it. It’s going somewhere, it’s tangible. Sure, you’ll still run up against problems to solve and decisions to make, but you’ll approach these in the moment and solve them in the moment. You’ll solve them so you can keep moving.

(via Paper Bits and yeah i used the exact same pullquote he did but dammit it’s the best ‘graph in the whole thing.)