Empire Maintenance

I finally got around to refreshing the layouts of my various web properties, namely my web site and this blogger template. Let me tell you, both were in bad shape. The banner now reads "vortices" whereas before it was "Vezquex's Vortices". The branding change doesn't really make sense. The domain is vezquex.com, after all. But it was the best logo I have at the moment. It looks pretty sweet over the fantasy space background; don't you think? I lifted it from a Russian guy, but let's keep that between you and me ;). The menu has some new items and should be easier to navigate.

The image used to make the menu bar is now monochrome and transparent so that it can be an arbitrary color using a background color, plus it looks cool over an image. I took out the Friendfeed widget from my home page and moved to the blog's side bar. I adopted their technique of many favicons linking to profiles. I still want to better integrate this blog into the site, but I haven't decided exactly how to approach that.

I've also been doing a lot over on AppJet. The concept of throway apps is great. I wrote a two libraries, lib-subdomain and lib-style, just for making my other libraries look nicer. I've bundled some pretty useful things into lib-general. But I haven't forgotten about the apps. One I recently made is an anonymous (for now) message board with support for external images and mp3s. I'm actually trying to write a user account library, but there are some bugs in it that I haven't quite solved, so it's not finished. There is of course an existing library that does the same thing, but I don't like its execution. (My main gripe is that it sends you to a separate page to log in.) On the lighter side of things, I have rewritten the PHP Novebruary script in JavaScript on AppJet, with added support for Septogust, so mark your calendars. I'll reimplement the widget too.

Comments weren't working. Turns out they were turned off. But no longer!

I somehow got the idea that to use the Disqus commenting system comments had to be turned off on Blogger. That makes sense, because surely Blogger comments should be disabled so that they are not competing with Disqus. Maybe the way Disqus or Blogger works changed at some point because the commenting feature has been missing for a quite a while. And yet, it was working just fine on my other blog, so I investigated. I went to the comments section of Blogger settings for both blogs and looked for any differences. Oh! Comments were turned off for new posts on the Vezquex Blog. I toggled this setting and then went back through the old posts to make sure each one allowed comments. It would have been easier if Blogger had a toggle box for comments on the Manage Posts page so that you could handle it all at once. But I don't post that much, so it didn't take too long.

U.S. Politics: Will things really be different when the Democrats control Congress and the Presidency?

We've seen how corrupt Republican control can be--spending out of control, perpetual wars, holding prisoners without fair trial and condoning torture. Even life long Republican voters are losing faith in their party. They are tired of war and scared of recession.

The probability of an electoral Republican win is low, and gaining net seats in either house of Congress is also highly improbable. Whatever the reasons, the support just isn't there this year, and it could take over a decade for the Republican Party to rebuild.

So let's assume a triple crown for the Democratic Party in the 2008 election: control of the Presidency, House, and Senate. I wonder how good Democratic control will be. Many of the Democrats in Congress vote for bills unpopular with Democratic voters, such as FISA, including Obama in this case [ www.senate.gov]. One problem is that there is simply too much to do. There is the of fixing and possibly nullifying poor legislation from years past (the Patriot Act comes to mind) and also new projects such as universal health care, which I don't even think they'll get to. Congress trails public opinion, therefore health care will come well after most people are clamoring for it, which they aren't yet.

One thing is certain: stuff will get done. Fast. There will still be enough Republicans around to filibuster, but that's only in the Senate. Now, more legislation typically means more unnecessary spending, but in this case that is not true. It is tempting for Congress to pass bills that sound good but are out of budget, and it is tempting for the President to sign them into law. Hell, the bill may be terrible in principle and cost. It's going to take some impassioned legislators to convince the others that the money simply isn't there, but it is not impossible. This is a tough issue because money seemingly grows on trees, but there is a reasonable limit to debt that the U.S. Treasury has surpassed. You can ignore it, but it's still there, devaluing the currency and siphoning tax dollars to pay interest. The flip side of this problem is that if Congress and the President were to cut spending and raise taxes and just pay off debt for years, they would look like they weren't even trying to do anything.

The prospect of Democratic control this term is quite appealing. America's economy, world image, and constitutional rights will all benefit from it. But the hole has been dug pretty deep, so don't be surprised if you get less change than you hoped for.

Minority Report input on the cheap

Nintendo's Wii controller is pretty swell. You wave it around and the movement is translated into actions for whatever metaphor there is in the current game. Now take the controller away. Replace it with any random object or just a piece of tape on your finger. Take the Wii console away. Replace it with your normal computer and a cheap web cam. Viola. Nintendo is screwed.

And it's all thanks to a tiny startup in Israel. This works on any game. All it takes is someone to invent and bind a control scheme.

Friendfeed Awesomeness

Friendfeed is getting a lot of attention. I find the site quite interesting, but actually using it bores me to tears. Maybe I'm using it wrong, not using the "hide" feature enough or simply having the wrong friends. Although the site is innovative, there is a lot of work to be done to bring parts of it up to par with other sites, namely the commenting system and categorization. It is not too much to ask for threaded discussion that allows line breaks. Grouping the discussions in some way would reduce repetition. But few are too worried about these minor annoyances which will be amended soon enough. Bare bones functionality is fine for now, with fine-tuning on the way.

The Staff
They're freaking ex-Googlers. What could possibly stop these rockstar developers? The designer of Friendfeed was behind Gmail and Google Reader. The simplicity of the interface just puts me at ease. Plus, there's knowledge of scaling and search. Friendfeed is the envy of Google, the social network they pine after with the Friend Connect initiative. I wouldn't be surprised if an acquisition happens. Wouldn't it be strange to get bought buy your former employer?

Competition
Some see it as the Twitter-killer, or at least want it to be. Sure, why not? Twitter was important historically because it opened our eyes to an on-demand worldwide conversation but it did not invent status updates nor could it expect to have a lock on them. Friendfeed is sneaky, because its gaining popularity from indirect posts makes it an increasingly attractive place to post on directly.

Digg-killer?
Digg is one of those silly sites that requires the extra step of submitting a link, completely ignoring the marvel of feeds in a hope to get better quality content. It doesn't work, because people race to manually submit every story from the major sources. Friendfeed is much more passive, even throwing out the CAPTCHA. Minding their own business around the web, Friendfeed users are streaming all of their links and posts effortlessly. Laziness is king.

Clones
With the web turning to soup, clones and parasites are sure to emerge. I don't know if Friendfeed can fend them off long enough to reach a state of dominance. Foreign-language clones are always a stickler. But if Friendfeed is open enough, with their API, feeds and widgets, potential competitors would be more inclined to work with it rather than actually compete.

Summary
Friendfeed is awesome. The development team has done most everything right, yielding a clean, efficient experience. Friendfeed takes up where Twitter left off in aggregating a global conversation. It is looking more and more like the end-all social network, at least for this week.