Full Speed

Obligatory Cat Picture

Hey, everybody’s doing it, right?

There’s a new kitten around. She likes posing for the phonecam and chatting with me on AIM while I’m out of town.

US Nationwide Wi-Fi Providers

• AT&T
• Boingo Wireless
• Clearwire (coming soon)
• iPass
• Sprint
• T-Mobile

Honorable Mentions:

• Panera Bread
• Schlotzsky’s Cool Cloud

If you know of any others that are missing from this list, please feel free to contribute.

Centralized Problems

A few hours after reading Shelley’s recent post on problems with Tecnorati and the scaling of centralized network services in general, I am faced with the following error message when trying to open my email:

While I don’t believe in turning off servers at night, many companies do this. I suppose a scheduled outage or downtime is just something that we have to deal with from time to time, but to my knowledge, this is an unannounced outage. Has Gmail scaled beyond its capacity already? I seriously doubt it.

I realize that Gmail is beta software, but it sure is disappointing that it is completely down right now. And Google’s definition of beta seems to be somewhat different from the definition most software organizations use. How long has Google News been in beta now?

I have always been extremely impressed by all of Google’s products that I have used, including Gmail. But my good old POP3 server is certainly looking more attractive at the moment.

I first began to see this error at around 2:30am here in Texas. At the time of this writing, the service has been down for over half an hour.

Update: Well over an hour has three hours have passed, and I am still unable to log in. I can get a login screen, but I get the above error every time I try to log in. Oddly, though, I can log in to a different account from my PC but not mine. Perhaps Google doesn’t like me tonight. I finally went into my Firefox cookie store and manually deleted all gmail.google.com cookies and was able to log in afterwards. I certainly hope the folks at Google fix this problem soon, as the average webmail user will not tolerate this sort of thing.

Pics of New Treo

Engadget was kind enough to post up pics found on TreoCentral of the next incarnation of the Treo. I’m still happy with the old Treo600, but this new phone looks amazing!

New Specs:

• Bluetooth
• 320x320 16-bit TFT
• 312MHz processor
• 32MB RAM
• better backlit keyboard

Staking a Claim

There is absolutely no reason that you would want to click here. This link is merely a sign of me staking a claim on my feed over at Friendster Feedster.

The site has already had its turn as feed of the day over at Feedster. So now it’s time to take control of how Feedster’s users see the feed. That is, of course, assuming that the flaky Feedster servers will cooperate. The claim process seems to not really work all that well:

We’re sorry but the feed you’re trying to edit is not claimed by you. Please claim this feed before trying to edit it.

That’s the error message that I keep receiving when I try to edit my lovely feed on the Feedster website.

They may have been through a few rounds of enhancements, but Feedster still needs a lot of work. Other than the above error, I first noticed that the help page was full of dead links. But then I found that some (most) of the pages on the site link to what I am guessing is the new help page.

Also, the “Delete Feeds” page gives a bright red warning that shows clearly that the Feedster developers really don’t care about the quality of their app:

Please note that there is no confirmation and no undo so delete with care. Also due to our cache, your delete may not show up immediately i.e. the feeds you delete could still be displayed for 10 or 15 minutes – but they really are deleted.

This post was not intended to turn into an anti-Feedster rant, but I couldn’t help myself. As an “RSS Search Engine”, Feedster seems to do an excellent job. But the newer, expanded toolset that has been released (and even “Improved!”) is not very usable. Bloglines, in its earliest incarnation, was a far better aggregator. And even Friendster seems to work better as a simple web application. And I had previously thought that Friendster was one of the worst web apps out there.