Waxy on "Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's" (playable samples included!)

Andy Baio strikes again:

From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, private emails, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made. For obvious reasons, I can't share the whole Infocom Drive. But I have to share some of the best parts. It's just too good. So let's start with the most notorious — Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time, here's the full story: with never-before-seen design documents, internal emails, and two playable prototypes.

Man. Disclosure: I know and like Andy a lot, and I've already linked to him once this week. But come on. This is awesome.

What I like most about what he's doing with the Waxy.org site is that he's creating an interesting kind of online journalism. In an earlier entry this week he headlined a scoop "Exclusive:" and I told him I liked that -- it signaled that he wasn't just echoing things found on other blogs (what I'm doing now). He continues to find things that are new and interesting to the world in which he's writing, so unlike the echo chamber that so many others do -- which, he says, is just what he is trying to do. That's fantastic, and I'm really happy to see him, and support him, pursuing that goal.

Waxy: "Google App Engine ported to Amazon's EC2"

Andy Baio posts what might be a response to Tim's concerns about Google App Engine. Interesting!

I loved Daring Fireball's one-line description: "So much for the lock-in argument." There's definitely still a concern if/when people find themselves addicted to the services Google provides beyond simple app hosting -- as Andy writes:

The App Engine SDK doesn't use BigTable for its datastore, instead relying on a simple flat file on a single server. This means issues with performance and no scalabity to speak of, but for apps with limited resource needs, something as simple as AppDrop would work fine.

Seems to me that this is where Google should head: getting developers addicted to all the services Google engineers already enjoy. They've started down that road and that seems to be the best approach for making App Engine competitively distinct.

Review Board is good software

After having tried and failed to have useful code reviews at several different companies, and after feeling deep envy for Mondrian, Google's web-based code review tool, I'd been looking for some tool that would help make code reviews more painless. I think I've found what I was looking for in Review Board.

Code reviews usually amount to infrequent lunchtime sessions where some poor engineer's code gets put on a projector and strip-searched by the whole engineering group at once. It's not a fun experience for anyone, and post-traumatic stress or severe empathy often result in the next session mysteriously taking several weeks or months to make it onto the calendar. Public humiliation has its place, perhaps, but as a last resort -- attempts to make it regular, good sport usually fail on the launchpad.

Yet good code reviews -- as hard as they are to find -- can produce great effects. There's no better way to learn how to improve your code than to have someone look over it carefully and make suggestions line by line. I've been impressed by the results that teams using careful code review report: that making changes and fixing bugs in the code is relatively easy, since everything is fairly clean and accessible. Great code review makes bugs more shallow.

There are a few web-based tools for code reviews. Mondrian isn't available outside of Google, but Codestriker (Perl-based) has been around for a while, and Crucible from Atlassian has a nice UI and good features -- but a US$2,400.00 starting price point, including the required FishEye server.

I spent a ton of time getting Crucible set up, but before taking the plunge I decided to take one more look for alternatives, and stumbled on Review Board. It's a Django/Python-based open source project, and it seems to have an active and responsive community. The documentation for getting it set up is a little thin, but it still took far less time than Crucible to get going. The UI isn't quite as nice, but it's serviceable, and the iPhone/JSON API/Git & Mercurial & SVN & Perforce & CVS support all turned my eye. Also, I like that Review Board allows pre-commit reviews, which Crucible as yet does not.

You can immediately see why Review Board is going to be a great open source project when you submit a patch. All patches are, of course, code reviewed using Review Board, and nobody working on the project is going to let a minor glitch go by. My first patch got an immediate "no way"; later patches (such as this one) were up to snuff. I've learned a couple of tricks already from the review comments, and I definitely am spending more time getting things right before submitting.

Take a look through the project launch post and you'll see what the authors are going for. I have Review Board set up at our office, and I'm psyched to give it a try and see how it goes. It's great to see such a healthy project in this area, and I hope it continues to grow and go well.

Everybody gets the iPhone interface

I noticed two new web applications doing something interesting: serving their iPhone interface to everyone. Muxtape uses an iPhone-style interface for its playlists, which works great on an iPhone but for the fact that the MP3s don't play (at least, for me -- doesn't the iPod app load MP3s from MobileSafari? I guess not). Instapaper takes this further, and makes a web interface that you wouldn't know works great on an iPhone unless you happened to try it. (Their FAQ even addresses the question since it's not that obvious.)

The result is that everyone who tries these apps gets a simple, clean UI. Talk about limitations producing great effects.

Multiuser Backpack

Congrats to my friends at 37signals for their launch of multiuser Backpack, a great upgrade to a product I love. Their new features, which let you share calendars, notes, to-do lists, and reminders with other people in a group, look perfect for the "household schedule" I've been wanting.

I continue to be very impressed with how the 37s do product development. They've always advocated for launching with "Less" in the product and leaving out features until the demand for them is overwhelming. It's great to see that they've heard and watched how people use Backpack and have made it a ton more useful -- essentially adding communication to what was a single-user product -- while keeping all the benefits for individual users that they had.

Go ahead and call me a fanboy in the comments. I am.

Fast Forward for December 29th, 2007

• I would buy more music if my iPhone held more music. I wonder how much demand is suppressed only by device capacity.


• I can't believe Leno and company aren't turning to the Internet for jokes. A little Digg-style interface for submitted jokes and an on-air namecheck and away you go. Submit ten jokes that get used on the air and we'll fly you to Hollywood for a job interview. Done.


• Katie Hafner is wrong; it's not personal attention that makes the Apple Stores work. It's making computer users feel smart. There are few enough choices that anyone can reasonably understand them. The people are approachable enough that anyone can talk to them. The aesthetic is open and clean and, above all, simple. None of those words are usually associated with computers. The Apple Stores teach people that even they can use computers, and that expands the market.


• Virgin America is great and all, but there's something downright unpleasant about flying an airline with "Beta" software on it. I mean come on. I got Red to crash -- reboot! -- very reliably by switching rapidly between the maps and the media player. The DirecTV thing said "your receiver has not yet been authorized" and then asked if I wanted "immediate upgrade without a call" for a premium channel (certainly!). One of the games (Rocks 'n' Diamonds) told me that my username was root. Really?


• My wife got all rank with the iTunes Music Store for not letting her move music from one of her computers to another. "Try Amazon," I told her, and that was that, no more iTMS for her. The true idiocy of the RIAA is that they've made DRM simple enough for everybody to understand why they don't want it.


• My friends keep joining GoodReads, but my heart still lies with LibraryThing. Come on, peoples!

Customer Service is the New Marketing

I've written earlier about liking the people and the project at Get Satisfaction, the wisdom-of-the-crowds company for customer service. They do great work and have a fantastic product going. (Note: since my original post, O'Reilly Alphatech Ventures has invested in Satisfaction, and OATV is also an investor in my company, Wesabe. But I'm on the record loving Satisfaction long before that happened!)

Satisfaction is holding a summit in San Francisco this coming February called Customer Service is the New Marketing, bringing together people and companies that share their ideas about interacting with customers. I'm very happy that they've invited me to lead a panel there on the topic of "Scaling Customer Service," with panel members Heather Champ, Community Manager at Flickr, Frederick Mendler, Vice President, Fanatical Support at Rackspace, and Pratap Penumalli, Consumer Operations Manager at Google.

It sounds like it will be a fantastic event all around. If you're interested in coming, you can get a 15% using my referral code, FOMH. Also, their early registration ends December 31st and prices go up $200 after that, so head over soon if you're interested. And if you do go, please come by and introduce yourself.

Recent Posts

• evhead: "Will it Fly?" on December 16, 2007
• Dopplr Launches on December 11, 2007
• Tab bankruptcy on December 8, 2007
• What does Google's Open Handset Alliance announcement tell us about iPhone third-party apps? on November 5, 2007
• Infiltrating the privacy movement on October 30, 2007
• Goodreads on October 15, 2007
• Here's to the Crazy Ones on September 30, 2007