Jay by Jay Fresh

I use Parallels a lot, running Windows to check that web pages work in Internet Explorer and play around on my corporate intranet (Mac-supported VPN software? Ha!). Most of the time it’s on my desktop Mac, but today I installed it on my laptop and copied the virtual images across.

I received this error message when trying to run a copied image:

“Unable to get the geometry of the virtual hard disk - perhaps file winxp.hdd is not a valid virtual hard disk image file.”

After calming down and not throwing the laptop through the window, I came across this wonderfully simple blog post that sorted me out.

The problem: FILE PERMISSIONS - make sure the .hdd file is not READ-ONLY.

I was going to say the error message was useless, but it is actively misleading. It has anti-use. Parallels, sort yourselves out!

Thanks Kimbro Staken, you saved me some serious headache.

I have noticed that a lot of people who start following me on Twitter also follow thousands of other people. I have to ask, how does Twitter remain useful if you are following such a high number of people. What’s the limit? Of the people that I see tweeting and frequently interacting with other people, only two of them follow over a thousand others. A good number of others follow around 700. I follow just under a hundred and there’s quite a lot of room for growth.

I’ve also noticed that new followers are tending to fall into two groups:

• Following thousands, followed by dozens
• Following hundreds, followed by hundreds

I wonder whether this first type are trying to use Twitter to market themselves or their service, using the idea that if you follow someone there’s a good chance they’ll follow you back. It feels so dirty - they just want to spam you.

If a large number of people are appearing on Twitter following thousands, that means to me that Twitter is becoming like IM. The ambient broadcasting of Twitter is one of the things that people so loved about it; if the tendency is to grow a huge network, it becomes more like IM as Twitter clients show you DM’s and tweets directed @ you.

I know some people who would hate me saying that (@psd, I’m looking at you). Thing is, I’m not sure that the gradual noise-death of Twitter is such a bad thing. I think this opens up a couple of interesting areas:

Broadcast IM clients

I use Twitterific and it does a nice job of grabbing my attention when someone has reached out to me, and it keeps a hold of those tweets in case I don’t check it for a while. I really like that, and I don’t mind so much if I miss some other golden tweets as I’m sure they’ll come along again when I am paying attention. Tweets are a bit like news really.

There’s a certain synchronicity in the way new styles of tweet will penetrate groups. To take an extreme example, it would be annoying if everyone you followed started creating a lot of noise for you because they were using clients that filtered out tweets that weren’t DM’s or @ them. So you’d start using one too. We’ve seen this happen with the “@” syntax (it’s now built into the web client itself), what’s next? Hashtags? Location? Plusplus-ing?

“Twitter as a Command-Line”

That’s the way Ev Williams put it in his LeWeb3 talk in December ‘07. There are opportunities to create services, such as Foamee, which use the Twitter network as their infrastructure. This is just mind-blowingly interesting to me (here’s a good place to start for more on this). However, if Twitterers follow thousands of people, then you can build services that don’t just depend on the interaction between people and a central bot, but leverage the interactions between people… and then it all starts to look a bit like Facebook.

Tim Ferris, author of “4-Hour Work Week“, rocked up in the Trafalgar Square Pitcher & Piano last night, for 3 hours of meeting the fans and answering questions about his Lifestyle Engineering exploits.

This was in aid of the launch, today, of the UK version of 4-Hour Work Week.

Tim announced that he’ll be giving his 1st and only UK book signing in Blackwells bookshop on Charing Cross Road, today at 6pm BST.

He tweeted about it today as well.

Map: http://tinyurl.com/2rs4er

My friend Kiran managed to get herself on centre-stage…

Update: Nick Webb dug out Tim’s first blog.

Osmosoft’s parent company, BT, runs a really useful conferencing service that is accessible from a local number all over the world. I’ve used this a lot in the past and it’s always been a pain looking up the dial-in numbers for people in different countries. For convenience, I’ve reproduced them here.

dedicated to Simon McManus

I’m a big Twitter fan. So it’s painful to see that Twitter is down so often. This problem with scaling from niche service to Internet starlet has plagued a good number of other young (and not so young) websites. The scaling problem itself (growing without experiencing significant performance issues) goes right back to the earliest Internet startups - if you can’t keep adding servers to meet the demand of the people clamouring to get on your site, you’re screwed.

One of the most effective ways of improving your startups’ ability to scale is to take advantage of the thing web servers do really well - serve static web pages. You gain additional benefit from the effects of local caching, so even less traffic comes through your servers. Blogger used to take advantage of this infrastructure before they integrated with Google.

An alternative is the growing market for on-demand computing resources, where you don’t buy up your own servers at all, you just rent cycles from an abstract “cloud”. Amazon made this field famous with their “Elastic Computing Cloud” (or EC2), although there are numerous companies offering similar services, such as MediaTemple, Oracle and IBM (oh, and maybe Sony). Google’s data centres follow the same pattern and are filled with hundreds of thousands of cheap pc’s, networked together into one big machine.

The rise of Software as a Service (SaaS) has meant that providers of web-based services are building their businesses around a guarantee that their service will be up, and will be performant. Whilst wholesale adoption of SaaS in companies is impeded by justifiable concerns about surrendering so much control over your server estate into the hands of a third-party, the analogy goes that you don’t keep your money under your pillow out of fear that the bank will be robbed. The upside of relying for your software services on large, dedicated third-parties, means that the future of mashups is bright: the aggregation point that your customers visit, where data is pushed between services, can be made scalable much more easily than if you had to build the entire, integrated system.

How easy can this become? If you are a company building a new online service, to what extent can you rely entirely on other companies to host your business logic and complexity? To what extent can you reduce the load on the servers you pay for down to the holy grail of completely static hosting?

The problem with trying to host a mashup as static files is that you always need someone to “pump the handle” of the system - check for updates to the data, update records, etc. I’ve written about this before and described the problem as needing a mashup “nervous system“. What happens if you start to use your customers themselves as the nervous system? A visitor’s web browser has everything it needs to make the appropriate calls to the web services your business runs on, and pump whatever data around the web that needs pumping. If you move the tasks traditionally performed by servers into the hands of your customers, suddenly scaling looks like a very different problem, one that is a lot more amenable to tasks that can be performed robustly by commodity infrastructure.

Putting questions of security aside (and reader, that is a very big ask I know), the big objection to this has been that if no-one visits your site, it will never be updated. The truth is: if no-one is visiting your site, you’re going out of business.

Late last Summer, Osmosoft got off the ground as a part of BT. We’ve now been through two roughly identifiable phases of the experiment: the first was characterised by building the team and figuring out our place in the world, and culminated in releasing the first version of RippleRap at LeWeb3 in December; the second phase was a much more technically-focussed exploration, with an openness for the individual to pursue whatever was interesting in any given moment; this phase culminated in the release of the second version of RippleRap at BlogTalk2008 in Cork.

Reflecting on the first two cycles, it’s pretty clear that the next step for Osmosoft is to begin a stage of increasing maturity and increasing productivity. Our development efforts are focussed around TiddlyWiki and we’ve reached the point where the team speaks TiddlyWiki. Now’s the time to build on the investment that’s brought us to this point. We have grown the team from the lonely figure of Jeremy, to a dozen Osmosoftonians and I, for one, am damn happy to be in this group.

For me, the main area we need to nail is how to add momentum to the ideas that the team comes up with, to turn them into real, working software in people’s hands. Right from the word go, we’ve maintained that the only metric we really care about is adoption of what we produce. It’s time to start producing.

Osmosoft is funded by BT and this puts us in a very special position as open source developers. We can become an exemplar of how a big company can add value to an open source project. One exciting project that’s emerging is Phil Whitehouse’s attempts to scale down the expensive User Experience techniques, developed by and for large companies, to a level where they are accessible by members of a project community with little or no funds to expend. Open source projects are often criticised for neglecting the user experience and I think this would an awesome contribution to project communities worldwide. It’s the generous funding by BT that affords us the liberty of investing time and resources into these sorts of projects. A final thought on this is that we benefit from unfettered access to BT’s corporate service infrastructure; by example, supplying free global conference calls for projects we work on is something we can do and should do.

The last area I have in mind right now is involvement in communities outside Osmosoft, whether or not they are part of BT. We are explicitly agnostic about who our customers and colleagues are and all our software is licensed in the least restrictive way possible. Nevertheless, it is still a fact that Osmosoft is a set of professional amateurs - whilst we do what we do for the love of it, we are paid for our contributions. It behoves us to spread the TiddlyWiki love as far and as wide as possible, and lower the barriers for those that want to get involved in the communities we participate in.

I’m looking forward to embracing these challenges over the next phase of Osmosoft’s development. I’m also looking forward to creating some wicked shit. And as ever, our front door is wide open: hello@osmosoft.com

Fire Eagle launched to developers yesterday. I’ve been keeping my fingers crossed that it is going to provide the location deduping I want for the mobile city review service I’ve been building. The idea behind this is to get people reviewing bars or restaurants by sending mini-reviews via text, which include their location. The downside of relying on this manual approach for feeding in location information is that I need to resolve different references to locations into one. When I heard about Fire Eagle, I reckoned on this being a prime candidate to help me out.

Checking out the developer docs, I’m very happy to hear that:

“Fire Eagle provides a few other API methods that developers can use to disambiguate the names of locations”.

Awesomeness. Now to see if it works…