Sethop's Irregular Missives

Steps to achieve this feat: Get your add-on recommended by Mozilla. Then trigger an update for your 100,000+ existing users the night before a major new Firefox version is released...

Hey presto! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4999

We also seem to have climbed over 400,000 on the all time download count (which, like the weekly count, includes updates).

Now if only I had a dollar for every one of those downloads...

It's been quite a day. We actually peaked at somewhere over 1000 new installs per hour, while our updates chugged along in the background. Firefox 3 itself, of course, peaked somewhere north of 17,000 downloads per *minute* on the way to achieving 8.2m downloads in a 24hr period. Not a bad effort.

I stuck a "Get Firefox 3" banner on our onUpdate and onInstall pages, and was surprised when goldboy pointed out my name was on the front page of SpreadFirefox 12hrs later. Better go change that banner image actually, Download Day is over now.

Firefox 3 Release gathering tomorrow night at the Twisted Hop for any locals who're interested.

And of course I recommend updating to Firefox 3 if you haven't already. It's awesome.

Many of you may have noticed that my posting volume has never been terribly high, and especially not in the last year or two. This is partly due to a preference to post things that are at least somewhat meaningful and/or entertaining, combined with a lack of time/ability to formulate posts that meet those criterion, and partly because I'm usually feeling that I should really be working on one of my neverending series of urgent tasks rather than posting stuff.

In any case, I usually at least have time to read what my friends have been up to, but not recently - today is the first time I can remember hitting the "Previous 20" link at the bottom of my friends page so many times that I hit the limit - after 220 posts they stop giving you a "Previous 20" link.

So, apologies if I missed anyone's big bit of news from just before that. Sympathy to vonstrassburg over his Kidney Stones. Respect to everyone for the entertaining links and amusing anecdotes. Now, back to work. I've got a fascinating new set of features in mind for Interclue that I'm dying to get into production, but it's going to take a non-trivial amount of effort.

Via Rod.

I'm still not finding time to make posts but some of you may have noticed I've started making the occasional twitter at http://twitter.com/sethop

New Interclue beta up at http://interclue.com/beta.html - supports firefox 3b5.

I have this crazy plan to make an android app in 5 days with a team of people who've never built one before. Madness but there's potentially some *serious* money to be made in a relatively short amount of time so it's tempting.

Android overview: http://code.google.com/android/what-is-android.html
Challenge FAQ: http://code.google.com/android/adc_faq.html

Only just noticed this challenge 36hrs ago...haven't had very much sleep since then....

Here's what happened the *last* time I was in Kaikoura....



It was only a little fire at this point, down the bottom of the cliff in front of my parents house. I could hear sirens in the distance - no problem, I figured, they'll have it out in no time....

( Read more... )

That was quite an exciting Boxing Day! At least a 4.5 on the Zinn-Segaran scale IMO.

It's nice to be back. My brother and my cousin are also visiting this weekend, and a few of my friends are staying nearby at aigantighe's family batch, so I'll get to catch up with them too. In the morning it'll be interesting to see how things have grown back on the cliff since I've been away, and particularly how the poor singed macrocarpa is doing.

Of course, part of me wants to be at Festival with etfb, sandhi, vonstrassburg, mr_cvb, and many of my other SCA pals, but a trip to Kaikoura takes a heck of a lot less prep-time!!

Everyone who's got some free time, please take a look at the 1.5.3 beta and let me know what you think.

It's finally getting the point where I'm pretty happy with our new mode of interaction - one without any fancy cursor-only modes that take too long to explain. We have a little way to go before we can release a final, but things are coming together.

Oh, and Firefox 3, now on to Beta 4, is looking very good for a whole host of reasons.

I can't believe the new LJ owners threw down the dosh for an unbelievably stellar Advisory Board (I will explain why it's so stellar sometime soon, if I get a free moment) and then completely neglect to ask them, or at least, ask the most important member of their all-star cast, about certain fundamental decisions, before going ahead with them. Duh.

We're in.

I've been waiting for my jaw to get better after a fairly solid sock to it during an altercation[1] on the way to the_legionnaire's most excellent party last weekend, but although the bruise is gone, the joint pain on the opposite side has actually been getting worse. Today I thought "ok, what am I doing wrong here?" and googled "sprained jaw" because I figure that's what it must be.. Found this. Right, so the reason it's not getting better is that I'm actively using it, for chewing, swallowing, talking and stuff like that. Hmmm. This could be tricky.

[1] They wanted my mate's bottle of wine, and then our wallets. We expressed our reluctance. I distracted them while he called the cops. They ran off when he started talking to them. It was pretty weird, I used to feel completely safe even in the dark areas of town, and this was a main road at 9:30 on a friday night. My bud said it was the first time anyone had ever tried to mug him in any city, and he's been in much rougher places. They didn't seem like professional thugs, just a couple of dumb white trash who'll probably find their way into prison soon enough.

I'm in Wellington for BarCampWellington. Tim offered me use of his flat but I ended up staying with Glynn and Jayne because Marek is staying there too and we're all going to Barcamp. Their place is awesome, an old mansion with great views over Oriental Bay - with hot and cold running WiFi. I was a little disappointed to discover the gorgeous flatmate who wandered in was taken, but not surprised. She was off with her boyfriend (Jayne's brother) to scout movie sites this morning - well, I guess this is Wellywood as well as Silicon Welly. I'm sure Tim will be interested in a bit of a debrief on Monday once he's back here for that silly thing they do in the round building most weeks.

I'm in Wellington until Tuesday 9.40pm and haven't had time to make any plans past Saturday, but I figure I know so many people up here I haven't seem for a while I might as well stay a bit. Also hoping to tee up some business meetings for Interclue at the BarCamp. Anyone who wants to meet up with me or knows something I should go to, please get in touch.

I started writing this at the beginning of the week...but it's been a long week!

BarCampChristchurch was very cool. We'll do it again in 6 months, bigger and better, and over a weekend. I ended being MC by default, which is a pretty unfamiliar sort of role for me, but Ben was busy liveblogging and Stephen was running the laptop finding interesting content to go along with the talks, so I ended up being the one doing the talking between talks. The job was to watch the clock and figure out when and how to call time on each speaker, and since we had a lot of interesting people there and lots of good questions being asked, it was tricky. Didn't completely fluff it. Everyone seemed to have a good time anyway.

There is a new version of Interclue up. Here is rather a nice review the got us a few hundred extra downloads from Brazil yesterday.

This might be significant. [update: link fixed]

And since everyone is doing it, according to some anyway:






Meh. Dumb quiz. Very Americanocentric.

"A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."

-- Ronald Reagan, from his recently published diaries.

Hat Tip : Moby

[update: Too good to be true, apparently. Doh!]

In my copious free time, I'm going to help organise a BarCampChristhurch. We have a great venue for it here at the Incubator.

We're not sure whether to do it next friday or the week after. We're also not sure about carrying things over to the Saturday (probably not). Opinions on this are welcome so long as they come quickly!

Anyone who wants to come along and geek out for a bit should sign up at the Wiki.

You can read more about it on my blog.

Didn't make it to Minuit in the end, boo hoo. Was a good night at the Media Club tho.

BTW interclue got a great review over at Linux.com.  Lots of hits off that one :-)

Minuit is playing at the Jetset tomorrow night (Sat 18th). Warmup DJs from 9pm, Minuit from 11:30. I'm keen, anyone else?

Hera is playing in the Arts Center from 12-1pm, tomorrow and on 1st September. I'll be going to one or both depending on weather.

Crosspost of my Pitch Black Gig Report from my myspace blog:

-------------


Pitch Black Gig on Saturday was awesome. Er, make that Sunday...they didn't get started until 1:30am! I find it a bit irritating how the nightclubs in Chch don't get under way till around 11pm. But Nacoa and COSM were good warmups and Pitch Black was definitely worth waiting for.

I had contacted a few folks to let them know about it, in the end only Jason could make it and he was bummed to discover they were starting so late and had to bail around one. So I boogied away on my own but there were some very attractive ladies in the crowd so that was far from a burden. Was thinking about how to get a phone number from one lovely dark haired lass in particular, but she disappeared while I was still finding my bearings after the gig. Oh well.

Chatted with the protagonists a bit before and after. I'd met Mike briefly at Kiwi Foo. Still have to finish writing up a neat multimedia mashup idea I thought of for them (he was asking around at Foocamp for ideas)

I mentioned to Paddy that I'd first seen their act at Kaikoura Roots festival, he said he'd heard a rumour that there might be another Roots, which would be awesome. I'd heard previously from Andrew Pennman (a co-organiser, of Salmonella Dub fame) that 2006 was the last one, but I told Dad he should ask Andrew about it again - who knows!

Couple of other amusing bits:

One of the Pitch Black songs got used on CSI:Miami, for which the royalty was $7k, but by the time everyone in the chain took their cut, the guys got less than $1.5k - sheesh.

More small world stuff - Mike was chatting to a couple of his friends about a flat they were in ages ago on Avonside drive and I said "hey, not the flat Andrew Pennman lived in?" but no, but it was within the same 2 block stretch - same stretch I was living on at the time, but I was just a kid back then. We didn't know Andrew at the time and only recently discovered my parents had been their near neighbours in Christchurch as well as in Kaikoura.

Would have liked to have hung out a bit more after the gig, but it was 4am and I'm trying to get my sleep patterns in line at the moment...so I bailed.

Actually, we were *in* stuff, briefly. The article had one or two flaws. I sure *wish* we had 150k at the beginning. That was just the figure I gave her when she asked how much money had gone into the business so far. It seems like a lot at one level, but compared to the amounts being raised for some, er, less interesting Web 2.0 startups overseas, it's chickenfeed.

The article in computerworld was much better.

I'm pretty chuffed about the state of the Interclue buzz page in general.

It seems likely that I'll be speaking at the Canterbury Software Cluster gathering on the 28th, about, er, Web 2.0 apparently.

New Interclue version has been submitted up to the addons.mozilla.org site and is awaiting approval. Getting better all the time. We still haven't got IE up to snuff. It's hard.

Some radical thoughts about the future of email have been rattling around in my brain and keeping me up at night. Email is broken. There has to be a better way. But, realistically speaking, I'm busy and should forget about it for the moment.

I upgraded my myspace page. This is because there are a whole bunch of bands there that I like, so, what the hey, I might talk about music and gigs and stuff from time to time over there, and cross ref from here. Maybe. We'll see. Still undecided about how much I want to spread my net presense around. I've joined up at facebook as well, and have been expanding my LinkedIn contacts. I guess it's about putting it out there now that we have a product to promote.

At the moment I'm thinking I really must go buy a ticket to the Pitch Black Gig tomorrow night. Is anyone else keen? Get in touch if so.

I really must post more often rather than in bursts like this!

Woot! They put us on the Front page of Scoop SciTech!

http://www.scoop.co.nz/sections/bizscitech.html

Won't be there for long, we were at the top of the page last I looked now we're not, so the deep link is

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0707/S00053.htm

And we're linked off the front page as an editor's pick / most popular article as well.

Lots of links in that story to other articles about Interclue too. Mainly tech blogs, including the tech blog in *Le Monde* however..

I think we're going into Computerworld's Monday edition, which may or may not be the first time someone writes about Interclue on Paper, depending on whether anyone else gets there first.

So yes, we're finally ramping up the publicity machine a bit...lets see where it leads us. Haven't hit the wire services yet, got to figure out what we can actually afford to do here...

Well, we shipped it. Please add interclue as a friend if you want to follow our progress. Sure feels good to be getting it out there. Thanks to everyone who's supported me during the rather overlong stealth phase of our startup. If you've got firefox, give it a try, let us know what you think. If you've got another browser, you can sign up at the site to be notified when we ship your version. We think it's pretty wizzo. If you're not blown away, we held back a few features that weren't quite there yet, so stay tuned for more updates.

Hugs to all,

Seth.

 

A few people have thought my Treo 650 was fairly wizzo. I noticed a couple secondhand on trademe for $400 and $410 buynow today, so they're pretty affordable now. Just thought I'd mention it.

It's pretty good for an older model smartphone. Was all the rage a when it came out. Excellent build quality. Great screen, *vastly* better than all the earlier Treos. No 3G. No WiFi. Costs an extra $15/mth for a data plan on vodafone to make it affordable to run. Qwerty keyboard is great for email, txting, etc (not so good if you have big hands, tho). Gmail and google reader work really well on it, google maps is a bit slow. Camera not good, no flash, only 640x480, but sufficient in some cases. Also does video (see the one I posted at sethop.com, that was taken with it) . Heavyish. But otherwise a great smartphone.

I strongly recommend the Palmary clock application if you want a decent alarm clock/timer/stopwatch.

I should have mentioned this earlier! A friend of mine, Roger Bays, is running an online participatory artwork, starting soon at 6pm NZ Time. So check in at his blog and take part if you've got some free time. It'll run for 6 hours, be interesting to see what happens.

I'm going insane, but what else is new. Way too much to do, not enough time nor money.

Anyone hoping to see me at Canterbury Faire will have to wait till monday because I'm going to Baacamp on the weekend. Damn shame they decided to run that on this weekend, but there may not be another O'Reilly "unconference"  happening in NZ for some time, and I really want to meet some of the people going there for the sake of Interclue.

I have this shiny new helmet that I haven't had time to pad out or drill holes in. I should really build a new shield, too. And get a new belt since I seem to have lost my old one. Hmmm, anyone selling belts at Canterbury Faire? Ping me, I may want a word with you....