Coty's Weblog

SoCon07 Microformatted

I tweaked the post below so that it now has some hCalendar microformatting embedded. This is how it looks using the Left Logic Microformats Bookmarklet for Safari.

If you’re using Firefox, you can check it out using Operator.

SoCon07

Responding to Haynie’s recent tag reminded me that I’ve neglected to promote an event that he has been working on and that I’m planning to attend: SoCon07.

SoCon07 is an unconference focused on social media, social networks, Web 2.0, and all that relatively loosely defined but arguably quite interesting stuff. It will be taking place on February 10th starting at 8am and continuing until 3:30pm in the first floor auditorium of the brand new Social Science Building at Kennesaw State University. There are other related events the evening before and the evening of the event. See the official schedule for details.

If you are here or near here and interested, then go sign up. It is free and open.

Hope to see you there.

Five Things

Wow. So this meme has really traveled by the time it reaches this humble blog (arguably an oxymoron, I know.) Apparently it started with Jeff Pulver. I got tagged by Jeff Haynie. Jeff has also tagged me for a more substantive post, but that will have to wait.

A number of people have compared this to a chain letter. I would never pass along a chain letter, but I’ve actually enjoyed watching this make its way around. I’ve learned that Liz Lawley was a Pantherette, that Chad Dickerson and I both had Buick Regals for our first cars, that Haynie’s step-father is a motivational speaker, and much more.

So, here are 5 things about me that you might not know:

1. I played football in high school.

What really surprises people about this is not so much that I played high school football but that I played offensive guard for a AAAA team. I didn’t weigh much more than I do now, but I was much more muscular. I was on the power lifting team, too.

Man, have I ever fallen.

2. I met my wife in high school.

This means she has seen me in much better condition. (See above.) She has stayed with me anyway—though she has been known to comment on my slide into relative softness from time to time.

3. “Coty” is my middle name.

“Henry” is my first. Every year at the beginning of school when roll was called for the first time, my teacher would call “Henry Rosenblath”. Kids would laugh. I’d explain. Every year.

The world is not set up for people who don’t go by their first name. Forms always take middle initial—not middle name.

My sons both go by their first names.

4. I’m not Jewish.

I know my last name makes it sound as if I should be, but I’m not. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)

I did play the Jewish father in the Hanukkah segment of one of my elementary school Christmas plays.

I don’t think there were any Jewish boys in my class.

I suspect my teacher may have thought there was one.

5. I haven’t have a Coke since 1982.

Any cola drink, really, and it may have been a bit longer than that, too.

I don’t recall what exactly made me stop. I think it was just the start of the period when I was obsessed with my health, strength, etc.

It is a bigger deal that you might think given that I live in Atlanta. I was once at a dinner at Emory for a law school scholarship I was in line for (There’s number 6 for free. I almost went to law school—twice, actually.), and little Coke bottles were at every place on every table. There was a toast made later in the evening with the Coke.

I faked it.

I tag Sanjay Parekh, Jeff Schilling, Will Clarke, Dr. Nic Williams, and Reginald Braythwayt . Let’s see who actually reads this and/or ego surfs effectively. Apologies if you’ve already been tagged and I missed it.

Happy New Year!

I’m tempted to make some sort of resolution to start posting actual content with some sort of regularity, but since I’m backdating this post, that would be somewhat laughable. Having my Time’s Decimal Point post make it onto reddit.com recently was cool. (Thanks, Reg.) That and similar experiences may provide the needed incentive. We’ll see.

In the meantime, my best to all who read this.

Delicious stalking and BarCamp Atlanta

Or del.icio.us stalking, more precisely. That is how I knew Haynie had tagged TorCamp and was probably thinking about BarCamp here in the ATL. You can read what happened next in Jeff's BarCamp Atlanta post.

I'm generally interested in revving up the geek/startup culture here in Atlanta, and I think it is a shame we haven't had a BarCamp or something like it here already. (I mean, BarCamp Birmingham has already happened!) Of course, I can't really complain too much, as I haven't made it happen, either. I'm hoping that Jeff's interest will help build a little critical mass.

Tragedy

So, the reason that I use Saft is that I am wont to keep lots of browser windows open. Consequently, it kills me when Safari crashes and I lose all my windows. Saft's crash protection helps with that. (Of course, I get screwed every time there is a Safari update and Saft quits working for me. Hence the pior post.)

Better and more reliable than Saft is NetNewsWire. NNW can keep tons of tabs open for me. It hardly ever crashes, and even when it does, it comes right back up with all my tabs.

At least until this morning.

I don't know how it happened. NNW didn't crash. I did close it yesterday to free up some memory, but it seemed to shutdown cleanly. However, when I fired it up this morning, it opened with the default feed list and some old set of saved tabs. It was horrifying.

Fortunately, NNW does periodically save your subscription list (in ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Backups), and I was able to recover a pretty recent copy of that. My tabs seem to be history, though. I know I would have never gone back to read many of them, but it still sucks.

Potash?

Rui Carmo is not dead. He doesn't want any e-mail or even comments, though, so this is my way of saying, "Hope you're better soon."

Not sure I get the potash title. Does it have to do with the fact that "people who work in potash mines have a 25% lower incidence of heart disease"?

NetNewsWire 2.1 Public Beta!

Woo hoo! After a long dry spell, Brent has released a public beta of NetNewsWire 2.1—and it rocks!

Most importantly for me, 2.1 gets rid of any discernible performance overhead for keeping lots of tabs open. I've currently got 448 open, and I'm sure I'd have more if I haven't been forced to prune periodically due to the delays having too many tabs open could introduce in 2.0. I'm sure I should get a grip and let go of tabs opened ages ago that I'll probably never get to, but I thank Brent for letting me work naturally—even if he is probably enabling.

A great new feature in 2.1 is support for NewsGator synching. I'd been getting along with the pseudo-synching available via Bloglines subscriptions in 2.0, but this NewGator stuff is much better. For one thing, you can just set it to happen for all your subscriptions (I've got 541 of those.), rather than just one at a time. I think the .Mac/FTP stuff in 2.0 probably did the same, but I haven't needed to synch. with another NetNewsWire installation. Rather, I've wanted to synch with a web/mobile phone accessible system. I'm still getting used to NewsGator vs. Bloglines both on the web and my phone, but I'm quite pleased with the synching process. I have seen some duplicates get loaded, but I'm betting those will turn out to be feeds without GUIDs.

Another new feature that I've been looking forward to is attention tracking and sorting feeds by attention. Now, it does sound a bit silly to ask an application to let you know what you're interested in, but I think it is going to be handy. I know my tastes change over time, but I don't have the time or the inclination to reorder my feeds based on that. I've flipped sorting by attention on briefly, but I want to let NNW collect a little unbiased information before I start using it in earnest.

Upgrading was a piece of cake. I did backup, but everything moved over without a problem. That has really been my experience with all my NNW upgrades—so much so that it is sometimes hard to convince myself to backup, but Brent always warns so I always do.

New gig

This has never been much of a work blog, but I thought I'd mention that last month I joined Vocalocity as VP of Engineering. It has only been a few weeks, but I'm having a really good time. I've got a lot to learn, but I've got great people all around me to learn from.

Certainly not the least of those is our CTO, Jeff Haynie, who got his blog going again late last year. His latest post addresses the role of of VoiceXML and CCXML in an IMS architecture and includes a link to his recent presentation on the topic at SpeechTek West.

I don't know how much the new gig will influence my blogging. I'll certainly leave the deep voice tech. to Haynie, but you may notice more posting on Java, software development, etc. here than there has been recently.

It was going to be a really cool post, too

I was just about done with a relatively long post. I was using Performancing's Firefox blog posting extension and switched from the editing view to the markup view to see whether an HTML entity I'd typed in would carry over. It didn't. Nothing did. Crap.

Oh, well. It was a post about Mark Liberman's Old School post on Language Log commenting on Joel Spolsky's The Peril of Java Schools post and how it was cool for two otherwise unrelated blogs to come together like that. Maybe I'll try to resurrect my thoughts, but it probably isn't worth it.