2006

Business — No Comments
18
Dec 06

Word Count Journal, and other cool stuff going on at MakaluMedia

This past year has been really great at MakaluMedia. The company has grown in its core space business, and has moved into a couple of exciting new partnerships in the areas of web infrastructure and applications.

In addition to some new, and really cool, Drupal-based platform work in Europe that I can’t talk much about (yet), we’ve had the awesomely good fortune to have hooked up with a very successful software entrepreneur in the United States, with whom, over the course of 2007, we’re going to be building and launching a series of consumer applications that we hope will positively impact people’s lives.

The first app will launch on January 1, and is called Word Count Journal:

http://www.wordcountjournal.com

Word Count Journal is a new blog format where you write one word your first day, two words the second, three words the third, etc. By the end of a non-leap year you’ll have written a total of 66,795 words, more words that most novels.

Read more about it on the Summit weblog!

Routes — No Comments
10
Dec 06

Casares: Sendero Cristellina

Today we decided to do a hike a little closer to home. Driving through Casares, we’d often noticed a few signs on the side of the road indicating hiking routes. However, since we’d never seen these routes referenced or discussed by people on the internet, we’d always kind of assumed they weren’t interesting.

Well, we tried one today — Route (Sendero, Ruta) Cristellina (8 km, circular) — and it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable, and most spectacular, routes we’ve done around Andalucia!

From Marbella, we went to Casares via Manilva, and parked the car at the Restaurante Laura, just a few meters down from the start of the hike. We had a quick tea, and started up the path. The route basically traverses a gorgeous valley up from Casares. The first half of the route is on a partially paved road, providing access to the various houses and fincas in the valley. At about the half-way point, we arrive at a mountain pass, where one can see (I suspected) Gaucin off in the distance (maybe it was one of other pueblos in the area.) Anyway, the path then transitions from road to path, and starts its way across the high mountains on the other side of the valley, back towards Casares. The path is wide enough still at this point, to easily ride a bicycle.

At about the 7km point, the path begins the vertical drop back down to the road leading into Casares (a drop of about 300 meters in the span of a kilometer), where one turns left, walks about 700 meters back up the road to the parked car.

This route offers spectacular views from the beginning, to the very end. It’s easy walking, perfect for kids, and one of the most enjoyable hikes we’ve done. All in all, it took us about 4 hours, start to finish, including about an hour of stops.

The next time, though, I’ll probably prefer to do the route in reverse, climbing those steep 300 meters, at the beginning when I’m fresh, and giving a break to my poor old knees. :)

Be sure to check out the following:

Route elevation profile:

Routes — No Comments
9
Dec 06

El Burgo: Fuensanta to El Burgo

I’ve created a new category in the blog here: Routes. In this category, I’ll be recording the details of the hiking routes we do, including a description, links to trip photos on Flickr, and a downloadable archive of two files:

  • A Google Earth .kml file, which you can load into Google Earth for a satellite image-based view of the route.

  • A .gpx file of the “track”, suitable for downloading to a GPS device. I will try to always include a waypoint of the start of each route.

For today, we headed off from Marbella to Monda, then Guaro, then Alozaina, then Yunquera, finally arriving at El Burgo, in the heart of the Sierra de las Nieves. From there, we began the 2.5 km hike to the recreation center known as Fuensanta. (The track I recorded is actually the return trip from Fuensanta to El Burgo.)

The route is very easy, first heading uphill, then flattening out, then finally descending into the Fuensanta recreation area. The recreation area itself has a beautiful area for picnicing and hanging out.

Be sure to check out the following:

Enjoy!

Uncategorized — 1 Comment
6
Dec 06

Entering the world of GPS with the Garmin 60Cx

This past summer, our family has spent numerous weekends exploring the mountainous areas of Andalucia. In particular, we’ve been exploring the areas around Gaucín, the valley behind Ronda containing Benoján, and the next valley up the road containing Villaluenga. For each location, we’ve located tourist maps containing listing of local trails for hiking.

Unfortunately, many of the trails around these areas are not well marked. For some, it’s even difficult to find them at all. And once you find the trail, it is, in many instances, easy to get lost once you start hiking.

The obvious solution to this problem is GPS. There are a couple (here and here of good websites containing descriptions of hiking trails, and downloadable GPS tracks and routes to aid in navigation. (In fact, as I would understanding it, it should make navigation dead easy.)

So, I’ve recently purchased a Garmin 60Cx GPS device, and have entered the seemingly mysterious world of Global Positioning System navigation.

Purchase. I decided to purchase my GPS through eBay, namely via a seller in the US. I was able to buy the device for about 60% of what it sells for here in Spain. Natively containing the US base map, the seller included a version of MapSource MetroGuide. Unfortunately, the software is a bit out of date — version 6, when the latest is version 8. Furthermore, MetroGuide is the least favorable mapping software sold by Garmin, and I will likely soon purchase the CityNavigator product.

In addition, as the 60Cx device accepts microSD cards, I upgraded the stock 64MB card to a better 1GB card. My hope is that I can carry around all the maps and routes I’m interested in, at all times.

Setup. For my purposes, a GPS isn’t that useful unless I can have it communicating with my computer. I use an Apple MacBook, and unfortunately Garmin hasn’t gotten around to developing OS X compatible software. Furthermore, many of the tracks/routes, etc. that I’ve found use a format compatible with a Windows shareware product, OziExplorer.

Fortunately, there is a great solution — Virtualization! I have purchased a license for the Parallels virtualization program for OS X; however, I’ve had problems getting it to recognize the Garmin device when connected via USB. A friend then passed me a beta version of the forthcoming VMWare Fusion product, and it works perfectly! (In addition, I find the VMWare product generally superior to Parallels, and will certainly be buying a license when it hits the street.)

So, under Windows XP, running as a guest OS under VMWare, on a MacBook running OS 10.4.8, I am successfully communicating with the Garmin 60Cx. Fantastic!

So far, I’ve installed:

  • MapSource (from Garmin)
  • OziExplorer, a shareware GPS mapping program, which, as far as I can tell, is the main Windows-based shareware utility for managing a GPS.
  • SendMap. A Windows utility for sending maps to the GPS.

Practical Matters. Now that I’ve got my system all setup and (apparently) working, it’s time to figure out how all this GPS stuff works. On that note, I’ve already run into a number of conceptual issues I’m presently trying to figure out.

  • Right now, I’ve used MapSource, and the MetroGuide Europe product, to download (to the Garmin GPS) all the maps necessary to provide full coverage of Spain. This was about 40 MB, and more than 50 small map “chunksâ€?. Question: How can I determine that the device stored all this data on the microSD card, as opposed to some internal memory?

  • Another question: Is this something I even need to worry about– i.e. if the internal memory fills, does the GPS device automatically switch to the card when receiving data?

  • Will software that interacts with the device “seeâ€? both the data on the card and any internal memory the device has?

  • Let’s say I purchase CityNavigator. Should I first delete all the MetroGuide maps before installing the CityNavigator maps? How do I do that? (I didn’t see an option in MapSource for deleting maps.)

  • Let’s say I have full coverage of Spain via CityNavigator maps, and then I decide to send a special topological map of some area I’m going to be visiting during the weekend. How can I tell the GPS that for this particular area, to use the topo map instead of the CN map? I have seen in the “Map Setupâ€? area a hugely long list of maps, and it would seem impractical, if not impossible, to identify which of the maps are the two that overlap, in order to disable one.

  • I’ve seen that MapSource is document based– i.e. you can save and open multiple MapSource documents, each of which can contain any number of active maps, waypoints, tracks, etc. Why would I want multiple documents? Wouldn’t I want one single document that perfectly reflects the data presently on the device? If I open another document, and download all it’s data to the device, will it delete any additional data it finds on the GPS– i.e. is the concept of “downloadingâ€? to the device with MapSource the same as “synchronizingâ€? the active MapSource document to the device?

  • I’m a little confused about the practical roles of tracks and routes, and the association of waypoints to each. Let’s say I want to record a path I’m walking and then publish it on the web– what is the best process for this? Should I simply start the track recording when I begin, and then save it when I’m finished hiking, and simply publish that? Is it necessary/desirable to add “waypointsâ€? to the track? (Is it even possible to add a waypoint to a track? Does it then become a “routeâ€??) Or, should I use the “routeâ€? concept?

  • If a track doesn’t contain a waypoint, how can I tell the GPS to “Go To” the beginning of the track? i.e. how can I use the GPS to help me find the begin point of the track?

As you can see, I’ve still got a ways to go before I have my head fully wrapped around the practical concepts of using a GPS. Any comments would be greatly appreciated — either in the comments here, or via email to matt (at) makalumedia (dot) com.

Mac — 2 Comments
17
Oct 06

iTunes Killer Application — Better List Purchasing

I’ve been purchasing music from the Apple iTunes Store since it opened, and am sure that I’m single-handedly keeping them in business. Thinking about it (as a roaming mountain goat tried to climb into my car) this past weekend, it occured to me that the true value, for me, in the iTunes store is the discovery of new music, and the purchasing of blended lists of music (either iTunes Essential My Groove lists), or user-submitted playlists. I’ve discovered that I simply don’t have the time, nor the knowledge of my own music collection, to create interesting playlists. I’d much rather leverage the time and effort of those much better qualified.

But there’s a problem with the iTunes Store, that I believe represents a huge opportunity for Apple. And that is, probably with at least 80% of the playlists that I discover, I already own several of the songs in the collection, and end up not purchasing the list because I (a) don’t want to repurchase something I already own, and (b) don’t have the time to manually add the other songs to my shopping cart, and then later manually build the playlist in iTunes and add back the songs I already own.

Apple could solve this by detecting the songs I already own, and simply exclude those from the purchase (but not the list!) when I buy them from my shopping cart.

I’ve emailed Apple, and didn’t get a reply. The last time I blogged about Apple, I was contacted within days. So, let’s give it another try. :-)

General / Technology — No Comments
4
Sep 06

US Telephone Services

This US is clearly ahead in many fields, but telephone services doesn’t appear to be one of them. I think it’s long been agreed that mobile services in the US are far behind their European and Asian counterparts (and this was in line with my personal experience last time there.) But after witnessing my mother’s recent adventures, I’m starting to think this might apply to fixed-line service as well.

Since I was about knee-high to a grass-hopper (yeah, I’m from the south) our family had the same telephone number, with, I think, AT&T service. Nothing special, it worked.

About half a year ago, my mom succumbed to the lure of internet telephony and VoIP. So, she switched to a VoIP provider in the US, and for about the next six months was practically incommunicated with the rest of the world. (Oh the number “gizmos” that failed and had to be replaced.) So, now, she’s switched back to a traditional phone service, but with a different carrier. After losing our family’s longtime phone number, and then getting it back, I tried to call home today. It went something like this:

  1. Robotic Voice: Hi, the number you are calling doesn’t accept phone calls from just anybody. Please tell me your name.

  2. Me: Matt

  3. Robotic Voice: Thank you, please hold while we check that it’s ok for you to call.

    [Elevator Music]

  4. Robotic Voice: Thank you, please record your message after the beep.

I then called my mom’s cell phone, and she said, “Did you just try to call? Some voice said they were connecting me to you.”

Oh well….

Uncategorized — 1 Comment
31
Aug 06

Henderson & Henderson, building north Georgia lake homes.

Today our company launched a new website for Henderson & Henderson, LLC (which happens to be another company in which I’m involved.) H&H build one- to two custom dream homes per year in north Georgia, typically on Lake Lanier.

Henderson & Henderson, building north Georgia homes on Lake Lanier.

Over a period of a few days, MakaluMedia user experience designer Alex Bendiken (yeah, the Slashdot guy) and I worked together to specify and comp this site, and within just a few more days, Alex had it all up and running.

I couldn’t be more excited about it– I think it’s beautifully designed (very much in the Alex style), is fully built on WordPress, exploiting some its “Page” key-pair features to pull in Flickr images and specify the Google maps coordinates, and even to specify the state of the properties (“sold” or otherwise). And, hopefully, the site will be very “findable”, as its ultimate objective is to help market the properties.

Web application development is so much fun these days. Between Ruby on Rails (for custom applications), Drupal CMS (for complex publication and collaboration applications) and WordPress (for the small/medium complexity applications), just about all the bases are quite well covered.

General / Technology — No Comments
4
Aug 06

Refreshing Reboot

NetNewsWire (690 Unread Articles) -> Mark All as Read -> Aaaaaahh :)

…and just like that, I feel better. (Somebody let me know if I missed anything real important in the past couple weeks.)

General — No Comments
3
Aug 06

Ojen.net — A new information portal on the Spanish Costa del Sol

My good friend Diego just launched an information portal dedicated to information related to the nearby beautiful pueblo of Ojén, just 10 minutes up the road from Marbella, and the famous home of Spanish singer Julio Iglesias.

Be sure to check it out: Ojen.net

Mac — 4 Comments
1
Jul 06

Amazon for Quick Backup

These days I’m working exclusively from a laptop computer — an Apple MacBook — which I transport daily between my home and my office. Each night, my MacBook mounts and backs up my home directory to a 500GB drive served from my home server, a Mac mini. The mini later mirrors this 500GB drive to another 500GB drive, and archives any changed or deleted files to a third (120 GB drive). This mirroring/archiving type backup system has served me well for years. (Knock on virtual wood here…)

But what happens if my MacBook gets damaged in the trip from work to home? (I do ride a scooter.) To address this, I’m experimenting with a new workflow:

  1. I have a Finder Smart Folder, “Current Backups”, configured to include all files located in both my Documents folder, and my Desktop folder, and which have been modified “Today”.

  2. Interarchy 8.1 now supports access to Amazon’s incredible new S3 online storage service. So I used Interarchy to create an upload “dropplet” which automatically sends dropped files to a “Current Backups” area I created on Amazon.

  3. At the end of the day, I look at the file list in the “Current Backups” Smart Folder, choose the files I want to backup, drag them to the Interarchy “dropplet” and wait for them to get uploaded. Once done, I close the MacBook and head home.

So far, this seems to work fairly well.

General — 2 Comments
1
Jul 06

Life/Business Lessons

For anyone interested, I just posted some life and business lessons learned over on the Summit weblog.

Mac — No Comments
15
Jun 06

Email Nirvana

For anyone interested, I followed up on my email situation with a post over at the Summit.

Technology — 1 Comment
12
Jun 06

What’s the world coming to?

Global Warming: You know it’s a problem. A big problem. And the kind of problem that just sort of creeps up on you. But how you fix it? Equally big problem. Who knows?

My email is sort of the same thing. I’ve spent the last hour cleaning, and my “Actionable Inbox” is down to 30 mails. My “Holding” box has 60. And my “Waiting for…” box also has 60. My Spam box has 4830 messages, accumulated over the last 30 days. (Spam Sieve report 99.5% accuracy, which means some 24 messages in there are probably good. I’m not going looking for them, though.)

So much of my time is now spent processing email. I’d hate to look at a graph of my email processing time per week, over the past five years, in fear of what that might indicate things will be like in another five years.

Maybe Donald Knuth got it right.

General — No Comments
5
Jun 06

Wonder of Usability

I love Rory Blyth. This post is hilarious, and reminds me of the parking ticket machines at the Málaga airport.

Business / Technology — No Comments
3
Jun 06

The Building of Fincalena

Not too long ago we launched a site — Fincalena.com — representing a milestone in what for me was a really interesting project. For anyone interested, I published an article about it over at Summit, our company weblog.

The Building of Fincalena

General / Technology — 1 Comment
30
May 06

Alex Bendiken Wins Slashdot Redesign Contest

My colleague in MakaluMedia, Alex Bendiken, just won the Slashdot.com redesign contest. His and our servers are now experiencing a “slashdotting”. This should be quite a ride. I’ll write more about his winning design soon.

Mac — 1 Comment
18
May 06

WebnoteHappy

WebnoteHappy. This is the bookmark manager for Mac OS X that I have so been waiting for.

General — 4 Comments
17
May 06

Perspective

A good point was made this morning, that my recent posts have consistently been critical of Spain, and that some perspective would be in order. And that’s true. While this country, or more particularly this area of this country (Andalusia), is probably the most laid-back, non-serious place I’ve ever been in my life (short of Nepal), you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere on this planet offering a higher quality of life. (And perhaps those things go hand in hand.)

General — No Comments
16
May 06

Jazztel: Worse than Telefonica? (And other Spanish building experiences…)

I hope everyone gets the chance, at least once during their life, to experience trying to get something done in Spain.

We’re involved in the eternal build-out of our new office space. During this time:

  • After asking for confirmation three times, we received notification, after two months, that our building permit was denied for “a missing paper”.

  • No less than three of our providers have gone out of business. Somehow, we managed to avoid being financially impacted by any of these, but they did contribute to the nearly one-year delay in getting the whole project finished.

  • We’ve had a new air conditioning system blow over and self-destruct, because the installer didn’t think to secure it to the roof of the building.

  • Our neighbors agreed to let us piggy-back on their wifi internet access, due to something we discovered so unbelievable (yet so believable) that I can’t even write about it here.

About two month’s ago, we signed a contract with Jazztel, a local telecom provider, to install two ISDN lines, and symmetric DSL internet access. Today — again, two months later — a technician from the installation company Jazztel subcontracts to showed up to install and set everything up. It was a short visit, that went like this:

Technician: Howdy! I’m from Conduitomatic, here to install your Jazztel telecom system, which, by the way, I give about 1% chance of actually working.

Me: Good to see you! (To self: It’s about time.) What’s that about not working?

Technician: Well, due to the technology Jazztel use, the DSL line won’t sync up unless you’re within 1.5 km of the nearest phone exchange. You’re about 4 km.

Me: You don’t say.

(Several minutes of tinkering by the technician…)

Technician: Yep, no way, this doesn’t work. You’ll have to find another provider. Maybe Telefonica?

(Several minutes of technician doodling on my whiteboard trying to explain the difference between Jazztel technology and traditional ISDN lines, during which I learned, repeatedly, that VoIP means Voice-over-IP.)

Me: Thank you very much, sir. Would have been nice if the Jazztel salesman could have mentioned the problem two months ago. I’ll get in touch with Telefonica.

I can really only blame myself. What more should I have expected from a technology company whose website comes up empty if you remove the three w’s:

http://jazztel.com

Mac — 1 Comment
1
May 06

Desktop Mailing List Management

I’m interested in maintaining several email address lists, for example:

  • A list of close friends and family.
  • A list of those who have commented on my weblog.
  • A list of those who have commented on our Jiu-Jitsu weblog.
  • A list of MakaluMedia hosting customers.
  • A list of those interested in MakaluMedia job opportunities.
  • etc., etc.

These are my desires for a tool to manage my lists and send emails:

  1. I need easy and flexible mechanisms for getting addresses into and out of the list(s). For example, I’d like to be able to import addresses from a file, and I’d like to be able to quickly add an address from an email I receive in Apple Mail.

  2. I need to be able to create and send customized emails, for example, including a custom link which will unsubscribe the recipient from my list.

There are various options available, each with its own drawbacks:

  • Apple Address Book combined with Apple Mail. I can create “groups” in Address Book, and use them to generate mails in Apple Mail. Management of the lists, however, can become a headache, as too much manual intervention is required.

  • Daylite. We use the (very powerful!) Daylite CRM in our company. Among the million things it does, Daylite allows one to create groups, and generate customized mailings for those groups. It can send the mails using Apple Mail, or the original version of FSS MailDrop. It doesn’t, however, provide any mechanism for the recipient to unsubscribe, and so the whole process of list management becomes a bit burdensome.

  • CommuniGate Pro. We use the (very high end) CommuniGate Pro messaging system on our corporate servers. This software provides powerful mailing list services, but interaction with it primarily takes place through a browser, within a clunky user interface. I’d prefer a desktop application.

The solution I seem to have settled on is the recently launched IntelliMerge 5.0 product, for MacOS X. Here’s why:

  • IntelliMerge is a MacOS X desktop mailing list tool, providing all the features one could want for generating and sending customized emails to multiple recipient lists.

  • Version 5.0 includes a set of PHP scripts that you can install on your server, providing an automated mechanism for your recipients to unsubscribe. The desktop software interacts with this script, to determine which existing addresses should be removed from your list(s) and/or which should be added. (You could easily integrate these scripts into a website, if you wanted.)

  • With a bit of QuickSilver magic, one can quickly add single addresses to one’s lists. How is this done? QuickSilver interprets any Safari bookmark with the characters “***” as a “search URL”. When accessing these URLs from within QuickSilver, the user is prompted to enter a search term. By creating bookmarks to the IntelliMerge PHP scripts, replacing the unsubscribe (or subscribe) email address in the URL with “***”, you can, from within QuickSilver, generate a request to your scripts to subscribe or unsubscribe a particular address.

    My bookmarks are of the form:

    MML - My Weblog Commenters

http://server/intellimerge/weblog_commenters/im.php?a=s&e=***

    So, when I receive a weblog comment in Apple Mail, I control-click the address and select “Copy Address”, then invoke QuickSilver and type “MML”. A list of my address list management URLs appear (one for each list I’m managing). I select the one I’m interested in, hit “tab”, and then paste in the email address, and hit return. This URL is then sent to Safari, resulting in the addition or deletion of the address from my list.

  • Recipients of my emails then find a link at the bottom saying something like this:

    You are receiving this email as a commenter on my weblog. If you wish to receive no more announcements, please access the following link:

    http://server/intellimerge/weblog_commenters/im.php?a=u&e=steve@apple.com

So far, I’m very happy with this solution.

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