I won't be posting any more tech stuff to this website, I've set up a new site, Azedi Tech, which will be my professional/technical site.

kief.com has always been a weird mix, there is a small but loyal audience of friends and family who check it for information about what we're up to, and then there are those people who find one of my sporadic technical posts via search engines or blog aggregators.

The frequency of my posting on any subject is hardly enough to need two blogs, but I feel more comfortable having the separate places to post. I often feel self-conscious about boring people who subscribed to my feed because they saw a technical post if I post things about my family, and most of my family would be equally bored by my ramblings on Java, Unix, and similar gearhead topics.

So if you're interested in techie stuff, you'll probably want to unsubscribe this feed. This site is probably going to become a monument to my obsession with my newborn son, which I would find painfully boring if I were in your shoes. But please consider subscribing to the feed for Azedi Tech. That site probably won't be much heavier in traffic than this one was, but that's probably a blessing.

Thanks for your patience!

We've started using skype to chat with friends and family, mainly ones in Turkey, the US, and Switzerland. I think the coolest thing is not just that it's free, but rather the open nature of the experience.

We put the call on with the PC speakers a desktop microphone, and usually a camera, and we sit around the living room. So the call isn't a person to person call, but group to group. The fact that it's free adds to the relaxed, leisurely experience of the call.

Technically it's a bit fiddly. Setting up Skype is a snap, but the production aspects of the call, especially with video, take a bit of effort to get nice. It's too easy to have echoing, since most people don't know how to position the speakers and microphone to avoid it. Lighting and positioning can be a problem for the video. The quality of the voice and video connections are also an issue, it's quite choppy.

But these don't really slow people down. The thing that strikes me is the non-techie people in my circle love it, and are enthusiastic about taking it up as a regular habit. As open-room audio/video sessions like this become more widespread, people will become more sophisticated about

I think as this type of thing becomes more popular, whether via skype or other services, people will get more sophisticated about production values. If end-to-end network capacity continues to grow, the audio and video quality will improve with it.

I wonder how long it will be before we're routinely plugging these calls into our wide-screen, HD televisions, gathering people together from multiple locations to share family events.

This is already making it's way around the "blog-o-sphere", but I've got plenty of friends who are into web design but don't follow this stuff, so check it out. The Yahoo! UI Library is a collection of JavaScript widgets for things like calendars.

The Yahoo! Design Pattern Library is a collection of design patterns for web interfaces. Design patterns are a concept from "enterprise" programming, where best practice approaches to typical problems are described in a way that can be used by programmers using different languages. These patterns from Yahoo describe typical web UI patterns, such as paging multiple lines of search results.

There's nothing ground-breaking in the patterns, but it's useful to have these spelled out. It serves as a checklist, or a specification, if you find yourself having to implement one of these things. Even better, if you're asking someone else to implement some bit of web UI, giving them one of these patterns - modifying it if necessary -is a good way to make sure you're both clear on what you want it to do.

Something to think about when designing a site or application is how you write your error messages. This grokdotcom article (which I can't find a byline for) encourages you to write messages that don't chastise the user for not understanding how your app works. The one comment I would make on this article is that any application developer (web or otherwise) who needs to think of the best way to phrase an error like "Phone number cannot contain dashes" should be shot.

I don't understand developers who take the time to check that a phone number has dashes (or credit card number has spaces) and chastise the user for it, rather than just stripping them out and getting on with it.

Vodafone, a British mobile operator, has bought Telsim, the second largest Turkish mobile operator. This is interesting to me since I spent some time working for the third largest mobile operator in Turkey, and currently work on the UK mobile industry. Telsim has a rocky past, they've always been a distant second to Turkcell, and has suffered from seriously dodgy owners, the Uzan family. The Uzan brothers founded Telsim, getting a ton of credit from the likes of Nokia to build their network, then refused to pay. For a while it looked like they'd get away with it, since they had more knowledge and connections in the Turkish legal and political systems, but in the end their business empire collapsed and was taken over by the government.

The interesting thing about the Turkish mobile phone market, at least 4 years ago when I was living and working there, was that very few people used monthly contracts. Most customers use "pay as you go", where you have to prepay for the time you will use. This was mostly down to price, the Turkish companies just didn't offer the kinds of deals that UK operators do. Vodafone may change this, they may even introduce contracts whereby people can get good phones at cheap prices when they sign a contract.

Turkey is a great market for mobile phones, it's such a social culture. I remember being impressed when I first visited Istanbul in 2000 at how pervasive they were. Mobiles were already common in the UK at the time, but in the US they still had an embarassing "yuppie" stigma.

I would really like to build or buy a box that lets me easily watch files I download with bittorrent on my TV. There are a lot of interesting new media appliances for the TV these days, including:

• PVRs, which are hard drive-based TV recorders with nifty features for automatically scheduling shows to be recorded,
• XBox and XBox 360, which are game consoles that can buy and update games through an online service
• Windows Media Center, which is basically a PC running a special version of Windows XP designed for PVR and other functions

I don't have any of these things, but I'd quite like something that does at least the PVR stuff, but also lets me run bittorrent.

If you don't know what bittorrent is, it's basically a network protocol for downloading files that is well suited to transferring large, popular files. Without going into the technical details (which, as a geek, I find fascinating), bittorrent turns the usual dynamics of downloading files on their head - the more people that are downloading a file, the faster it will be for you to download.

This makes it an ideal and increasingly popular way to download software, television shows, movies, etc, which tend to be large files. Serving media files on the Internet requires a lot of bandwidth, which gets very expensive for popular files, but with bittorrent it's much more efficient, cheap, and faster, so better for everyone involved. Of course much of the content people download using bittorrent is of dubious legality.

Personally, I like to download TV shows that aren't available in the UK using bittorrent. The two big things I like are that I can watch it when I want, and without commercials. The big thing I don't like is that I mostly have to watch these on my PC instead of my TV. It's possible to hook my TV up to my PC, but not convenient, since they're in different rooms, and the PC doesn't have a remote control.

A PVR like Sky+ would probably give me the two things I like about bittorrent, and solve the thing I don't. But there is another advantage bittorrent has over a PVR, and that's the Internet. A PVR still only lets me watch whatever is made available by my cable company, satellite service, or local broadcasters. A torrent box connected to my broadband Internet connection and my TV would give me access to any content people put on the Net.

This would do for TV what VOIP is doing for phone service, and what IPTV doesn't even try to do) - wipe out geographical limitations. Producers and/or distributors of television content could make their stuff available on the net via bittorrent, either charging a fee or, for promotional or amateur content, for free, and reach viewers everywhere. My wife and I could watch TV shows from Turkey, local stations in the US, and independent producers, no matter where we live. That would rule.

The box is actually trival to make. It's a hardware device that can connect to a TV and a broadband connection (a plain ethernet jack or wifi would work for me), play media files (XviD), and run a bittorrent client (ideally Azureus), and a UI to make it easy to browse and select files to download. Adding 1 or 2 TV tuners would give you a PVR as well, and a DVD drive (preferably a writer) replaces your DVD player.

The quickest way to get a box that does this, and more, would be to get a Windows Media Center device. This is basically a PC shaped and designed like a home entertainment component, running a special version of Microsoft Windows. It would be a simple matter of installing Java and Azureus, and ideally writing a decent UI (or perhaps WMC plugins?) to browse and select torrent files to download. Alternately, the same hardware could run Linux and a free PVR software package like MythTV.

The drawback of this is expense. Most of these boxes seem to cost around £1,000. I'm sure a box could be sold for around £300-400 that could handle this, maybe not quite as full powered and full featured as the media center PC's, but enough for downloading and watching TV. The new XBox 360 games console actually looks to have the right hardware. I think the only thing keeping the 360 from being able to do this easily is that its Internet connection seems to be restricted to connecting to Microsoft's online service. I'm sure there are hacks for this or, at the worst, Linux will inevitably be ported to the 360 the way it has for the original Xbox.

In fact, I could probably get a workaround for what I want by installing Windows Media Center on my normal desktop PC, and buying the XBox 360 and connecting it to my TV. The 360 apparently works with Media Center as a "Media Extender", so it can play music and video on the Media Center PC's hard drive. I'm not sure how easy it would be to install a program on the XBox that let me browse and choose bittorrent files from the X-Box though, and it is overall an awkward solution.

In any case, the hardest part of all of this is the content. Most of the content out there right now is illegal, so nobody other than a hobbyist like me is going to make a bittorrent box. The key to making it popular will be on the content side, which is an interesting business challenge. I've got more on that subject for a later post.

If anyone knows of a box that costs around £300 and can run Linux (or Windows Media Center), has a hard drive, TV connectors, and ethernet or wifi, let me know. The closest I've found in price is the Topfield (also see the UK forum), which is a sweet-sounding PVR but has no network interface. Shuttle makes many different small form-factor PC's, but these are pretty powerful and more expensive than I'm looking for.

Adam Bosworth of Google has taken a look at how data is being used across the web, that is, how applications have evolved through popular usage patterns, rather than from a Computer Science view of how things ought to work, to draw lessons for application architecture. His article in ACM Queue called "Lessons from the Web" is oriented towards lessons for database design, but it's interesting that it ties in with many of the so-called Web 2.0 concepts, and I think is worth looking at and thinking about for anybody designing online applications and services.

If you're a Java programmer and interested in adding sexy Ajax goodness to your apps, a good starting point is Matt Raible's presentations, which he has made available for download for those of us who can't actually go see him talk.

update: The pdf presentation I downloaded actually doesn't seem that useful on its own, it doesn't contain as much information as I'd hoped. Most of the slides are just Matt's photos, that I assume illustrate personal ancecdotes that he uses to make points about the topic, but are kind of baffling on their own. I think the equinox-ajax.zip file probably contains code examples, but in the past when I've downloaded Matt's appfuse framework starter kit I couldn't really get into it, and I believe equinox is a version of that. Bram Smeets intro to using DWR may be a better start.

While I'm on the subject of former Syzygians, it seems that Irakli West is starting up a new venture, TRND, The Real Network Dialog (all in Deutsch, unfortunately for us non-German speakers). He describes it as a Web 2.0 based word of mouth marketing system, similar to bzzagent. He's also got one of Germany's top blogs, about Firefighting. Cool stuff, or at least I assume it is.

Fellow ex-Syzygian Iain Tait has been blogging for a month now. Iain's a smart guy who's a Creative Director at Poke, and it's fun for me to read what an old friend thinks about things going on today. He's mainly posting on technical/business trends, things like Web 2.0, and he's got a keen eye for quirky new gadgets and toys. So far Iain has been keeping up a good blogging pace, with frequent posts that are tight and to the point.

Brief posts are really the classic weblog style, and obviously makes it easier to keep the posts flowing. Personally I have a very difficult time writing short posts. Even when I start with a small, simple concept I want to post about, I tend to ramble on. Like starting a post about a friend's new blog, and carrying it on into a discussion of weblog posting styles. The result is I post a long, incoherent screed or two every few months.

Gotta work on that.

Update: Iain protests that he's not a Design Director, pointing to his blog's design as evidence.