Jeffrey McManus » Web/Tech

Both California Senators Support SOPA/PIPA

jeffrey — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:53:42 +0000

I was pretty much done with Dianne Feinstein after she sat on the sidelines during the 2010 healthcare debate, but I was pretty alarmed to hear that both she and our other senator, Barbara Boxer, are co-sponsors of PIPA (the senate version of SOPA that would give big businesses the right to shut down web sites if they linked to content they don’t like — which is to say, nearly all web sites, including those of many legislators).

People are planning a big day of action on Wednesday, January 18. Some content sites including Wikipedia will shut down for the day in protest of the proposed legislation.

If you’re a Californian you should call both of your senators to let them know that giving Rupert Murdoch a kill switch for the entire Web is not okay. From the Hackers and Founders Meetup, here are their contact numbers:

Senator Barbara Boxer’s contact information:

DC: 202-224-3553
District: (510) 286-8537

or email her via Contact Congress.

Instructions on what to say to register your opposition.

Senator Diane Feinstein’s contact information:

DC: 202-224-3841
District: 415-393-0707

or email her via Contact Congress.

Instructions on what to say to register your opposition.

Both California Senators Support SOPA/PIPA is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

TV Rebroadcaster ivi.tv Shut Down by Injunction

jeffrey — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 20:23:37 +0000

I didn’t see any tech blogger coverage of this, then I remembered I had a dusty old blog of my own, so I’ll do a quick summary here. ivi.tv is a terrific television rebroadcasting product that enables you to watch local stations from various US markets on your computer using a downloadable client application that works on both Mac and PC. They charge a very reasonable monthly subscription fee (a fraction of what we paid for DirecTV before we got rid of it last year), but it was a bargain for the few times a month we want to watch live TV (basically, baseball playoffs and entertainment awards shows).

As you might guess, whenever big media is perturbed by technological innovation, a lawsuit must necessarily follow, and this time is no exception. This TechCrunch piece from last October, written by a presumably non-insane lawyer, talks about the legal status of ivi.tv. The writer points out that there’s an exemption to copyright law called the “passive carrier exemption” that theoretically enables companies to do what ivi.tv does as long as they don’t alter the programming (there were a few failed attempts at this where companies tried to superimpose their own advertisements, which is obviously evil). But ivi.tv doesn’t do that — they just charge subscribers a monthly fee, like any other cable operator. And importantly, ivi.tv kicks back a portion of subscriber fees to broadcasters, just like cable operators do.

Today the company announced that they were shut down by a court injunction brought by the standard evil media conglomerates (Comcast, Disney, CBS, Fox, Major League Baseball, etc.).

The net effect is that our consumption of live broadcast TV will be going from “very little” to “zero”. Well played, entertainment industry. If the Giants make the playoffs again this year, which they will, I guess I’ll watch every game from a barstool somewhere instead of the comfort of my laptop. Maybe I can teach my daughter to fetch peanuts for me or something. The net result is that the local pub will make more money from me than the TV nets ever will. That can’t possibly have been the intention here. And honestly, it can’t be long now before the black hats (also known as Our Triumphant Liberators of Content) will set up some kind of peer-to-peer rebroadcasting network. Have fun bringing a lawsuit against that, jerks.

Update: Over on GigaOM, Ryan Lawler has excerpts from the injunction, which seems to assert that because they send TV over the internet (instead of wires or via satellite), they can’t be classified as a cable operator. This seems like a pretty dippy interpretation of the law (it’s not ivi.tv is broadcasting content willy-nilly — they’re only sending it to paid users of their custom client app).

TV Rebroadcaster ivi.tv Shut Down by Injunction is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Tokbox: A Platform for Adding Live Video Chat to Your Web Site

jeffrey — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:57:22 +0000

This evening TokBox launched a new platform that enables Web developers to embed live video conferencing into their Web sites. This is an incredibly exciting product and I’m sure it’s something that a lot of sites are going to take advantage of.

TokBox provides all the challenging bits to make this happen; all a web developer has to do is write a little JavaScript and you’ve got live audio/video chat in the browser with up to 20 simultaneous live participants (more people than you’d probably want to be video-chatting with at once, really) and up to thousands of audience members.

The important thing is that this is a platform, not just a canned widget, so web developers have control over how the in-browser video conference looks and behaves. This essentially enables you to integrate video conferencing anywhere Flash works.

For CodeLesson, the benefits to live chat in the browser are obvious — we’ve been working on using the new TokBox platform to embed live video chat into our online courses as an option to enable instructors to have live office hours with students online. Our hope is to have a video office hours incorporated into CodeLesson early in the new year.

To learn more you can check out their main site or their developer blog, or if you’re a coder and you’re ready to play, get started here.

My consultancy, Platform Associates, has been advising Tokbox on their transition from a consumer site to a platform for the past few months.

Tokbox: A Platform for Adding Live Video Chat to Your Web Site is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

CodeLesson ♥ Etsy

jeffrey — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 22:21:46 +0000

Today we announced A Gentle Introduction to the Etsy API. This course is an important milestone for CodeLesson for two reasons:

It’s the first CodeLesson course produced by someone other than us. The curriculum and instructor will be provided by Etsy; we’re handling the details of getting students registered, hosting the learning software, setting up shell accounts for students, and so forth.
It’s our first free course. We’re able to make this course free to students thanks to the generous assistance of Chad, Justin, and the Etsy team. Thanks guys!

Today marks the transformation of CodeLesson from a somewhat functional online learning site into a mighty platform where anyone can learn and teach anything. We hope to announce more courses like this in the near future, so if you’ve got something you want to learn or teach, please let us know.

CodeLesson ♥ Etsy is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

What’s Happening on CodeLesson

jeffrey — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 21:39:30 +0000

Our mighty mighty online learning site, CodeLesson, continues to astound and amaze us as it slowly consumes my entire career forevermore. Here’s what’s going on with the site today:

My PHP course is proceeding apace. We are in week six of the course and no one’s brain has exploded yet. (At the same time I’m also teaching a modified version of the course for our partner, the University of Victoria.)
We started our first session of Introduction to Web Publishing (our WordPress course) this week.
The indefatigable Zed Shaw’s Introduction to Python Programming will start on November 8. There’s still space in this course, but it’s looking like it will fill up — you can sign up for the course here.
We are talking to a few more interesting instructors and hope to have some new course announcements in the next week or two.
We added a few new courses to our catalog to see if there’s interest: Google Chrome Extensions, a PayPal course, and a few more that you can see on our newly-compacted course catalog page. If any of these courses are interest to you, click on the big orange Add Course button to let us know you’re interested. (Some of our courses don’t make it onto our schedule until there’s sufficient student interest.)
We are itchingly close to announcing our first free course which will be sponsored by an awesomely excellent technology company of which we will be able to hopefully disclose more information soon.
We are having some interesting preliminary discussions with prospective investors who are mightily impressed at the fact that we have figured out a way to get people to pay for goods and services on the Web. Yay us!

Overall I can say that I’ve been blown away to the response to what we’ve been doing, and I’ve been particularly heartened by the dozen or so people who have stepped up to teach courses, suggest new topics and otherwise refine our offering. Thanks, all you cool folks.

What’s Happening on CodeLesson is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Upcoming CodeLesson Courses

jeffrey — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 12:45:01 +0000

It’s hard to believe it’s been less than six weeks since we’ve launched CodeLesson. The response to the site has been terrific and we’re having some enlightening conversations with students, instructors and others about what they want to see from the site.

My CodeLesson PHP course is in progress, and it’s going really well. It’s a small, energetic group, more than one of whom are fellow startup CEOs, which was great to hear. We’re all about smashing the divide between the geeks and the suits.

Meanwhile, we’ve brought on a team of instructors to teach some more courses, a few of which are on our course schedule now:

Introduction to Programming in Python will start November 8 and will be taught by the most excellent Zed Shaw.
Introduction to Web Publishing is our introductory WordPress course. If you’ve ever wanted to run your own Web site but weren’t sure where to get started, this course is for you. This course doesn’t involve coding, but it does cover how to set up, configure, and manage WordPress from beginning to end. The course also covers new features of the recently-released WordPress 3.0. I’ll be teaching this course, which will start on October 18.
Developing WordPress Themes was just announced last week; this is a more advanced WordPress course that will show you how to use your HTML and CSS skills to create custom WordPress front-ends. The instructor for this course will be Cheryl Chung.
We hope to run a session on The Ruby Programming Language in November. We should be able to announce the instructor in the next week or so, but the guy we’re talking to has written a few books on Ruby and is basically drenched in awesome sauce.

We have a few more courses lined up (JavaScript and jQuery are biggies with me), and we’re also taking suggestions for new courses. Which courses would you like to see taught on CodeLesson? Let us know.

Also, we’re starting to get requests from businesses who want use CodeLesson to teach courses on their technology products. We’re calling this “CodeLesson for Your Business”; we should have some announcements with specifics about how this will work around the holidays. For now, if you have a technology product that you want to provide training for, let me know in the comments and let’s talk.

Upcoming CodeLesson Courses is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

The Great Yahoo! Developer Experiment is Over

jeffrey — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:31:11 +0000

From Yahoo! comes word that a number of popular developer products, including the MyBlogLog APIs as well as Maps and Local APIs, are soon to be shut down.

The announcement is as tone-deaf as it is disingenuous; it starts by saying that Yahoo’s “commitment is unwavering” and then goes on to vaguely enumerate the number of products they’re eliminating. (Which begs the question: What does “unwavering” actually mean to Yahoo? If your surgeon has an “unwavering” commitment to your health, is it OK for her to occasionally perform surgery without anesthesia? How much am I permitted to waver and still be able to say that I’m unwavering? Could it be possible that to Yahoo, “unwavering” actually means the opposite of what everyone else in the world thinks it means?)

This is a big problem because for every API that is taken away, applications will break. It’s a bigger problem for Yahoo because the more thoughtlessly they manage their platform, the more difficult it will be for anyone to trust them in the future.

When I went to work for Yahoo in 2005 I was given the mission of opening the company to third-party innovation through Web services and other developer products, to create a platform that would endure for the ages, enabling developers to create amazing new applications (and, hopefully, accelerate Yahoo’s business). It’s become clear to me now that this was really just a poorly-conceived experiment, not a serious attempt at creating a platform, and I say this not as an ex-Yahoo employee, but as someone who advises businesses on platform integration today. In other words, my reaction to this is professional, not personal.

So my professional advice for prospective platform providers is to do whatever you can to avoid emulating Yahoo. For developers and companies who are thinking about doing any kind of integration with Yahoo, do whatever you can avoid them until the company’s commitment to providing an open platform is more clear. From a developer and platform perspective, Yahoo is unsafe at any speed.

The Great Yahoo! Developer Experiment is Over is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

My Contact Info

jeffrey — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:14:56 +0000

How cool is this, I just discovered the coolness that is qrcodes and stuck my contact info in one:

If you have a mobile phone with a barcode scanning app you can use it to read this right off the screen and it’ll plop all my contact info into your contacts. Super cool! I just tested this with ShopSavvy for Android but I’m sure it’ll work with other barcode scanning apps as well.

My Contact Info is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Updated VPS Hosting Price Comparison (June 2010)

jeffrey — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:31:03 +0000

Update: There’s a more recent version of the data below at http://blog.jeffreymcmanus.com/projects/hosting.

Linode announced that they’re increasing the amount of RAM by a lot (like 40%) on all of their virtual server products today. I’ve been watching pricing for a few of these services for about a year now and I’ve made a few posts comparing pricing. Today, for most servers under 8GB of RAM, Linode is a better value among the services we’re tracking. Here are the details:

	RAM (MB)	HD (GB)	Bandwidth (GB)	Price/Month	Cost/RAM	Notes
Amazon EC2 Large	7680	850	1024	248.88	0.0324
Amazon EC2 Extra Large	15360	1690	1024	497.76	0.0324
Amazon EC2 Small	1740.8	160	1024	62.22	0.0357	Maybe buy Linode 1536 instead
Linode 512	512	16	200	19.95	0.0390	Best value for this size
Linode 768	768	24	300	29.95	0.0390	Best value for this size
Linode 1024	1024	32	400	39.95	0.0390	Best value for this size
Linode 1536	1536	48	600	59.95	0.0390	Best value for this size
Linode 2048	2048	64	800	79.95	0.0390	Best value for this size
Linode 4096	4096	128	1600	159.95	0.0391	Best value for this size
Slicehost 15.5GB	15872	620	2500	800.00	0.0504	Buy Amazon EC2 Extra Large instead
Slicehost 8GB	8192	320	2500	450.00	0.0549	Buy Amazon EC2 Large instead
Slicehost 4GB	4096	160	2500	250.00	0.0610	Buy Linode 4096 instead
Slicehost 3GB	3072	120	1800	190.00	0.0618	Buy Linode 4096 instead
Slicehost 2GB	2048	80	1200	130.00	0.0635	Buy Linode 2048 instead
Slicehost 768	768	30	450	49.00	0.0638	Buy Linode 768 instead
Slicehost 384	384	15	225	25.00	0.0651	Buy Linode 512 instead
Slicehost 1.5GB	1536	60	900	100.00	0.0651	Buy Amazon EC2 Small instead
Slicehost 1GB	1024	40	600	70.00	0.0684	Buy Linode 1024 instead
Slicehost 512	512	20	300	38.00	0.0742	Buy Linode 512 instead
Slicehost 256	256	10	150	20.00	0.0781	Buy Linode 512 instead

The chart is sorted according to best value, defined in terms of cost per megabyte of RAM per month.

This time rather than placing the data in a chart like I did last time, I calculated it in a spreadsheet so I could come up with a total cost per megabyte of RAM per month. I also included pointers to which product is the better value choice at each price point, so, for example, if you’re thinking about getting the smallest Slicehost machine, you’d actually be better off with a Linode 512, which provides twice the RAM for $0.05 less per month.

As in the past, I’ve stacked up two VPS hosting providers (Linode and Slicehost) against Amazon EC2. (I didn’t do Rackspace Cloud this time because I have yet to hear much about the reputation of that service, and they charge for bandwidth and storage separately so it’s more difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison. Amazon EC2 charges for bandwidth/storage separately, too, but they provide a handy calculator for that and I couldn’t find anything comparable for Rackspace. Also, Slicehost is owned by Rackspace now.)

As in the past, everyone’s battling for supremacy at the low end but Amazon is still a better choice if you a) need a larger machine, b) need a guaranteed level of CPU, or c) need some of Amazon’s programmability features such as the ability to spin up new virtual machines automatically or if you’re going to use their automatic load balancing feature.

I’d been thinking about using Linode for a while and today’s pricing changes compelled me to sign up for an account for a few upcoming projects we’re working on. So far, so good — I like that Linode’s control panel is a little more granular than Slicehost’s, although I was initially tripped up by the fact that they don’t automatically boot a new instance for your when you provision it.

It’ll be interesting to see what Slicehost does in terms of pricing now, since they haven’t done anything significant there in the year since I’ve been paying close attention to these products.

Updated VPS Hosting Price Comparison (June 2010) is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Soon You People Will Be Calling Me Master

jeffrey — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:30:35 +0000

Today I got word that I’ve been formally admitted to the Master’s program in Computer Science at Colorado State University.

This program leads to the Master of Computer Science degree, which is a terminal, professional degree (as opposed to a research-oriented degree). Think of what I’m doing as the geek analog to an MBA.

I’ve actually been taking courses in the program since last year (which they helpfully allow students to do before they’ve been formally admitted to the program). Being able to take courses on a trial basis was vital for me since it helped verify that the material is at a level I can handle, although I’m carefully strategizing to avoid a few courses in the curriculum that involve a lot of crazy higher math. I’m a somewhat competent algebraist, but my last formal math course was in tenth grade.

The most common reaction I’ve gotten to this was “Why do you need to take more computer courses? You teach computer courses. You’re like mister software.” The truth of it is that there’s always more to learn no matter how much of a ninja you are (which is one reason why I love the field), but there’s a lot of academic CS I didn’t get in my undergrad years since I only took a few CS courses as electives (my undergraduate degree is in English). And although I’ve been doing technology teaching in various corporate settings since I was in my 20s, I want to open the door to potentially do more kinds of teaching later in my career, and having a Master’s would be a prerequisite for some of that.

A note to panicked clients and co-workers: None of this will change my work status or my city of residence; the Colorado State MCS program is all done online and I will be doing all of my coursework in my off-hours, mostly in my underpants. My plan is to progress through the program as slowly as humanly possible, taking a single course per semester until my planned completion in May 2013.

Soon You People Will Be Calling Me Master is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.