Archive for 2005

I’m interested in switching away from Cingular wireless, so today I went to verizon.com to look for some info on their wireless plans. Clicking the Wireless link on the home page brought me to this page, which tells me to go to www.verizonwireless.com to learn about Verizon’s wireless offerings. But when I clicked the link to verizonwireless.com, it popped up a new window instead of taking me directly there. They’re using target=”_blank”. Thank you, Verizon, for keeping me from foolishly leaving verizon.com. After all, verizonwireless.com is a different site, and apparently the concept of a link to anywhere outside verizon.com makes Verizon a little uncomfortable. They’re willing to acknowledge that under certain circumstances a person might wish to have a second site up in their browser in addition to verizon.com, but they certainly aren’t going to facilitate anyone’s leaving verizon.com (even when the destination is another Verizon site).

It’s a little thing, but it’s a telling example of the kind of cluelessness and lack of attention to detail that seems to characterize phone companies. Please, is there a phone company out there that actually gets technology and isn’t willing to annoy their customers at every turn for some short-sighted gain? If there is such a company, I’ll give them my business in a second. After being an AT&T/Cingular customer for five years I’m totally fed up with them, but I’m not confident that Verizon, or anyone else, is going to be much better.

I’m on vacation through September 6th.

Yesterday Michael Sippy realized that he’s been writing online for ten years. That prompted me to take a look through my archives, and I noticed that this August represents a milestone for me too: five years of fettig.net.

I don’t remember exactly when I registered fettig.net, but the Internet Archive has a copy of the first blog-ish site I ever put up. The first entry is from July 2000. That site was updated sporadically for a year or so. By September 2001 I was more clued in to weblogs, and I started editing the site using a custom client-server blogging app that used XML-RPC. Reading my archives in 2001 and 2002, you can clearly see me digesting and trying to implement all the cool stuff Dave Winer was writing about on Scripting News. I was also getting interested in messaging protocols; the “Contact Me” box on the late 2001 fettig.net homepage was the beginning of the ideas that led to Hep a year later.

A few more interesting bits dug out of the archives:

• January 2002: I search for my name on Google and find my own website. Sweet!
• September 2002: I start using Twisted in Hep.
• February 2003: Hep gets some press in the Indian newspaper The Hindu. The reporter was nice enough to mail me a paper copy, which I still have. The site at the time was using PyBlosxom, but the look hadn’t changed much.
• March 2003: I try out Chandler 0.1, and wonder why they’re not using Twisted. By June of 2004, they were.
• November 2003: A new look, which might be my favorite ever. At that piont I’d also switched to Moveable Type (which I’d also used breifly in 2002. Hooray for open data formats: I’ve switched blogging software quite a few times now, but I still have my archives intact back to 2001.
• March 2004: I got my first Mac, and started using Emacs. I’m still using Emacs, but after a year on the iBook I missed Linux and switched to a Dell laptop running Ubuntu. I still love Apple hardware, though: if they ever ship a laptop with a Linux-supported wireless card I’ll buy one for sure.
• September 2004: I get ready for the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
• October 2004: In the audience at Web 2.0, I blog about the introduction of JotSpot.
• December 2004: I’m hired to work at JotSpot.

And that brings me up to this year, which has had it’s share of highlights so far: a talk at PyCon, a book announcement, and an exciting new project. It’s interesting to look at how many of these opportunities have come as the result of stuff I’ve written on fettig.net. Starting this site was definitely a good career move, and it’s been fun to keep it going these five years. Thanks for reading!

I’ve been working on a project at JotSpot that is so incredibly cool, I get excited every time I think about it. It’s called JotSpot Live.

JotSpot Live is a real-time wiki interface that allows multiple users to edit the same page at the same time. Calling it “SubEthaEdit for the web” is an oversimplification, but that’s probably the quickest way to wrap your head around the concept. Unlike SubEthaEdit, JotSpot Live doesn’t require any special client software: it’s a web application that runs in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, using nothing but HTML, script, and CSS.

In the past few months JotSpot Live has gone from “could that possibly work?” idea to hackathon project to working prototype. At Gnomedex two weeks ago we did our first public alpha test, and it went very well. For Adam Curry’s keynote, the last talk of Gnomedex, we had around 15 people (some of whom weren’t physically at the conference) taking notes together on a shared Wiki page. It was a thrill to see the JotSpot Live in action, with people showing up in the user list as they came to the page, and the page contents changing in real time as people made edits.

At this point our focus is moving from the design of the system to the design of the interface. We’ve proved that real-time collaborative web editing is possible. Now we want to deliver a great user experience. I’d like to recruit some more alpha testers to try out our (still rough) interface and provide feedback as we refine our UI and get ready for release. If you’re interested, leave a comment or send me an email, and I’ll set you up.

Regular readers of this blog (is it an oxymoron to refer to regular readers of an irregularly updated blog?) may have observed that since last November the amount of posts has decreased noticeably. Some of you may have surmised that this is due to my new job at JotSpot, another familar case of blogger-gets-hired-and-drops-off-the-radar (see also: “Choate, Brad“). There’s some truth to this: one of the reasons I started blogging is to get my name out there to potential clients and employers, and there’s less of incentive to sell yourself when you have a job that you enjoy and are excited about.

But there’s something else that’s has a far greater impact on my blogging, and it’s this: I’ve been writing a book about Twisted. The working title is Twisted Network Programming Essentials. The publisher is O’Reilly. It should be hitting bookshelves in early October.

Writing this book has been a lot of work, much more than I expected when I began the project (Jason Fried, who’s written a book of his own, tried to tell me this before I started, but I had to experience it for myself). It’s been taking up pretty much every ounce of my free time, and some time that wasn’t really free, for the past six months. That’s the primary reason I haven’t been writing here much (or writing docs for Yarn: sorry craig!). All my writing energy has been going into the book.

Now it’is just about done, which is very satisfying. I almost can’t believe it, actually: I wrote a book! I’m happy with the way it’s come together, and excited to get it into the hands of readers. Twisted has historically had a steep learning curve, and some of the modules have lacked enough documentation to let people discover how incredibly useful they are. I hope this book will open up Twisted development to a new pool of developers, those who want to write cool network applications but haven’t had the time or dedication to read the source, sign up for the mailing list, and ask questions on IRC. The Twisted developer community has been great to me, and I hope this book is an asset to the project.

My book isn’t a complete reference to all of Twisted. It doesn’t cover all the modules, and it doesn’t offer a complete API reference to those modules that it does cover (I look forward to reading the 600-page Programming Twisted when somebody else writes it). What it does is give people working examples of clients and servers using HTTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, NNTP, XML-RPC, SOAP, Perspective Broker, and SSH. It also explains how to use Deferreds, write custom protocols, access databases, use twisted.cred for authentication, manage multiple services, and run apps with twistd. It’s designed to help smart developers get started writing apps with Twisted as quickly as possible. If you’re interested in Twisted, I hope you’ll check it out.

Lots of exciting things to talk about soon (including an explanation of why I’ve had absolutely no time to post here lately). That will have to wait until next week, however. For the moment I’m off to Seattle for Gnomedex, where I’m looking forward to showing off a project I’ve been working on.

I’ve been having some problems with the virtual host running yarnproject.org. Apache seems to be periodically locking up. Sorry if you’ve been unable to download Yarn. The site is back up now, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

The Red Sox game was on in the background tonight when Hannah suddenly said “I like that guy’s name: Wiki.”

“Did you say his name was Wiki?” I said, thinking I hadn’t heard her correctly. But sure enough, there really is a player on the Mariners named Wiki Gonzalez. Maybe we should look into this guy as the new JotSpot celebrity spokesperson!

After PyCon, there was a survey asking people to list their three favorite talks. The results have my talk on Yarn getting the 9th-most votes, out of the 62 talks at PyCon. Thanks, everyone! I’m glad you liked it.

Slides from the talk are now available on the Yarn website. Your choice of openoffice, pdf, or flash.

The slides don’t contain everything I said in my presentation; I’m a believer in the less-is-more theory of PowerPoint slides. Check out Ted Leung’s notes for more details from the talk.