Jeff Luszcz’s Web Log

I am responsible for posting events to various event calendars around the web, as well as watch the same calendars for interesting events to go to around the bay area. This is a space I expect to see a good deal of consolidation as some good centralized services and APIs become available. For the longest time I was happy with Craigslist’s event calendar but they are losing the battle against spam, ticket requests and mis-categorized so-called events. They also got rid of some categories such as “Tech events” and now everything is either an Event or a Class.

A newcomer on the block is http://upcoming.org which I have high hopes for. You can sign up for different metro areas, there’s iCal support, alarms and more.

One thing I would love to see them, and others as well, add is some sort of event GUID (global unique ID) which could them be used for finding out further information about the event. The thing that brought this to mind was the question of how could I find photos of an event on Flickr? I see that Upcoming seems to already have a ID for an event (though I don’t know if or when those IDs would be recycled).

For example, JavaOne 2005 has the following URL:

http://upcoming.org/event/14842/

I imagine they could add an easily accessible or clickable link or ID in the main page.

UPCOMING14842

You could then add that as your Flickr tag for your photos of the event.

I’m going to do this with photos I took of the Walk San Francisco’s “Green Streets of the Mission” walking tour we did today.

WalkSF’s Green Streets of the Mission
http://upcoming.org/event/15201/

You should be able to click on the following URL and get everyone’s photos of that event (currently only mine)

Flickr photos
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/upcoming15201/

The other night I was iChat AVing with my father and I showed him the new google maps satellite view. We then spend the rest of the hour showing off landmarks and interesting bits from the places we live. He showed me around Staten Island (where he grew up) and what has changed and what has remained the same. Some of the most impressive things was the swamp behind his old house that is now a protected park.

It’s interesting how the ease of use really made this application take off. It’s the little things like cursor keys for panning the map, the “click here to get a link to this map” features that make it possible to spend time site seeing.

http://maps.google.com

Didn’t get much sleep last night. There is a tropical bird, or maybe a series of tropical birds, that show up in the neighborhood from time to time, maybe 3 or 4 times a year. Last night was the first I heard it this year. Starting around 1am there was a crazy catterwalling coming from a tree across the street. I tried to record it using my iBooks’s microphone, but it was drowned out by the hard drive noise. I was hoping to capture the noises and find someone to figure out what type of bird it was. I could hear people in the neighborhood opening their windows and making shooing noises to no avail. I read until after an hour or two it finally flew off someplace. Thankfully.

I’m a big fan of the Java language. It does have some well known quirks, some of which are serious enough that it makes people hate it, but for me, the benefits outweigh its problems. One of Java’s promises has been “write once, run everywhere”, which also is known to not quite be true _everywhere_, but close enough. I’ve been watching Java on small devices for a while. I have written some software for the Apple Newton which was fun, but since that platform has died and I have moved to the Palm I just haven’t written anything for the PDA form-factor. Most of it is the annoyances of C/C++ programming, memory management and weird file systems. J2ME and the JSRs for PDA style system services have the promise to over come all of that. I’ve looked at Java on the Palm since the JavaOne that they were handing out Java runtimes for the Palm and selling Palms all ready with Java installed. Unfortunately that seems to have died on the vine.
Last night I got the Java on the PDA bug again and went to see what the available landscape looked like. Palm is distributing a free runtime for recently purchased machines (Tungsten and Treos) and will some detective work I was able to find the runtime for my palm, the Tungsten T5. Palm’s website has broken links but if you click around enough you can find it.

http://www.palmone.com/us/support/jvm/

It comes with a minimal demo app which is a Golf scorecard. I loaded everything up and managed to get the system installed and run the demo app. Apparently I clicked to quickly on the “next” button in the demo app because the JRE crashed and required a reset using the reset button on the back of the palm. this is the first time I’ve had to reset my palm since getting it. It was nice to get Java running on my machine though and I am sure I will write some prototypes and myself-only apps using it.

I look forward to it being a built in system-level services with apis available for filesystem storage, syncing, network access, among others.

My step-grandmother died this past week in Florida where she had recently gone to live. This photo shows Anna sitting in her favorite chair while she lived with us. She would love to do her puzzles and pet my mom’s cat for hours at a time. Anna always loved getting souvenirs from San Francisco (esp. mugs for her tea) She was buried in Sag Harbor this past Wednesday.

Even though most days I bike to work, a couple times a month I take BART from my house to downtown. For the most part it works really well, though it takes more time than my bike trip. There’s a couple things they could do to make the system work better, IMHO. First thing, have large clocks facing the fare-gates. They already have those clocks inside the attendents booths, but facing inward. The second would to continiously scroll the next-train arrival information instead of doling it out in measured amounts every 4 minutes. Third-ly BART’s station signs a too tiny and in the older San Francisco stations not much to distingish one station versus another. You have to twist your neck to find the small blue sign. Powell Vs Montgomery, they all look the same after a long day.

Today, being day after time change, is one of the days I hear there are the most accidents on the road since people are tired and the subtle cues people use have changed due to the change in daylight.