More of me: My Google Reader Shared Item Feed

Google Reader has been my primary feed reader on my iPhone and desktop since I left Bloglines in 2007.

It’s a great reader, but I especially I love the ability to search my read, starred and shared posts, and to incorporate my GR feeds and my blogs and legacy pages into one custom search.

Since May of 2008 I’ve also been sharing my annotations on posts, and using Google Reader as a micro-blogging platform. Unlike Twitter posts, these GR micro-posts work with my memory management strategy [1].

My GR micro-blogging has changed what I right here. Many of the small frequent posts I used to do are now simply shared items in Google Reader.

So if you’re not getting enough here, you might consider subscribing to my Google Reader shared items feed:

feed://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/06457543619879090746/state/com.google/broadcast

This feed currently does not work in IE 8 or Bloglines and probably doesn’t work in Outlook 2007 (does anyone still use Bloglines or IE?). It works in Google Reader (of course), Firefox, Safari and OS X Mail.app.

Be warned that my GR feed includes everything I’m interested in, so it’s high volume and undifferentiated. It mixes geeky stuff with politics, science, etc.

I’m going to be including a link to my “Google Reader Shared Item Feed” at the bottom of most posts from this blog and Gordon’s Notes, so you can pick up or drop the feed at any time. I should be easy to find.

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[1] I’d prefer to be able to reflect these microblog posts back into my blog. For one thing the blogs are exportable (thank you Google Data Liberation Front!)

Related posts:

• About the FLH: DejaNews, FrontPage, Google Reader, feeds, iframes and more
• Loving Google Reader - Shared post feed
• Google doing weird stuff with GR Shared Item feed
• Using Bloggers undocumented label (category) feeds and Yahoo Pipes to create a tech opinion feed out of Gordon's Notes
• How do I share my Google Reader Shared Items Feed and process it via Yahoo Pipes?

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My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Google doing weird stuff with GR Shared Item feed

This morning I was experimenting with adding a link to my Google Reader shared (annotated) item feed (see Google Help) as a footnote to each blogger post.

That's when I discovered the feed URL on our family news page was bringing up someone else's feed. As best I can tell these weren't items shared by people I follow, they were completely odd.

That feed url has been unchanged for over a year. (I've removed it for now.)

I then visited my GR generated page to get a new feed. That seemed to work - once. Then I tried again and got a no-page error.

There's something broken. I'll try posting on the Google help forums -- very, very occasionally someone from Google notices things there.

Annoying.

Update:

First, some basic references ...

Shared page URI

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/jfaughnan

Shared page "Atom Link" URI

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user
%2F06457543619879090746%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast

If I click the above link in Safari I get this feed URI:

feed://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user

%2F06457543619879090746%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast

If I use the "mail feed" feature from Safari I get the same link without the URL encoding:

feed://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/06457543619879090746/state/com.google/broadcast

If I paste the latter (feed) URI into bloglines or IE 8, it doesn't work (I assume Bloglines, deceased as it might be, does support Atom. I'm sure IE 8 is supposed to). It does, however, work in the latest versions of Firefox [1] and Safari and, of course, in Google Reader.

So what's going on here? I'm guessing it's some mixture of a weird Google screw up (getting the wrong person's feed) and Google using some Atom feed that IE 8 can't handle.

Update 10/17/09: I'm beginning to sort this out. There's a bug in the feed Google provides for the shared item page. The Feed includes items that are not shown on the shared item page. They are not items I've every seen, and they aren't items that the people I "Follow" have shared. They're simply foreign. Not necessarily bad, just not mine.

For example, here are screenshots taken from my shared item list in Google Reader and from the corresponding feed as rendered in Safari:

My shared item list:

Shared item feed as rendered in Safari. The first two are not items I've seen, after these I do find items I've shared.

[1] In FF the link has to start with feed://, in Safari either feed:// or http:// work.

Update 10/22/09: I've reported this problem in two places

• GetSatisfaction
• Google Reader Forum

Update 10/23/09

Groan. I got a prompt response from GetSatisfaction, but there I managed to post my personal (not accessible) reading list feed:

feed://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/06457543619879090746/state/com.google/reading-list

So that was waste of Google time, fortunately not too much. I don't know how I ended up with that url in my clipboard.

The misbehaving feed I meant to refer to is:

feed://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/06457543619879090746/state/com.google/broadcast

Tonight though it's behaving properly. So I'll just have to watch and see if it misbehaves again.

Firefox is in the ICU

Startup times for Firefox are insanely long on all my machines. Same story for my colleagues.

Most have switched to Chrome or IE 8 largely because of this problem.

I've been ignoring the problem for a while, expecting it would be fixed. If anything it's getting worse.

Is this related to Google's abandonment of FF development? Is there any way to raise a red alert here?

I don't want FF to the way of Netscape.

The "iTwinge" iPhone keyboard - explained

A few weeks ago a Canadian company claimed to have an iPhone keyboard ready to role ...

A Real Keyboard for the iPhone? - Gadgetwise Blog - NYTimes.com

... The keyboard will sell for $30 with $5 shipping to the United States. There are prototypes in beta test now that have rubber keyboards. The final version will be made of hard plastic, said Mr. Nykoluk.

The keyboard is available for pre-order and should become available around November, said Mr. Nykoluk...

I noted it back then in my Google Reader stream. I though it was at best a trick, at worst a scam. There's no iPhone OS support for an external keyboard.

Now, looking back, I realize what they've done. They've put a mechanical prosthesis atop the virtual keyboard. I presume they're using a small battery so it emulates the electrical properties of a fingertip.

Now the Canadian angle makes more sense; you could operate this thing with gloves on!

It's ingenious in a sick sort of way.

SyncWiz for Outlook Review - how not to do trial software

When I was using Outlook 2003, I had a kludgy but reasonable way to get my corporate Outlook contacts to a primarily personal iPhone.

I started out using MobileMe to get PST transported contacts to OS X Address Book.

Once I'd done the bulk of the work I found my workplace Outlook 2003 could export .VCF (vCard) files that OS X address book could import. Contacts don't change too often, so I just sorted by Contacts by date revised and emailed the new ones.

Then I went to Outlook 2007, the poor, broken, abused step-child of the Office 2007 suite. Outlook was ugly but serviceable in 2003, but Microsoft butchered it for the 2007 transition. One of the many broken bits was the semi-documented vCard export. In 2007, the only vCard export option is tied to sending them as email attachments.

I could live with that, but in OS X Address Book these Outlook 2007 vCards have notes full of unreadable XML.

So, in desperation, I closed my eyes, tried to ignore my past experiences with Outlook Add-Ins, and tried this product in trial mode ...

SyncWiz

... With SyncWiz convert selected or all of your items to vCard, iCard, iCalendar (iCal), or vCalendar file format. This file is so portable and compressible, that you can easily send the whole folder to anyone (4000 contacts in a zipped Vcard file is less than 100Kb)...

After installation I tried the VCF export. SyncWiz told me I had more than 5 contacts, so it quit. It didn't export five then stop, it just quit.

I decided that was a strong sign this wasn't a serious product, so I uninstalled it.

I then restarted Outlook 2007 -- and found the Add-In had not been removed and Outlook was revolted by it.

So now Outlook showed the SyncWiz add-in as disabled. Fine, but I'd just as soon delete it forever.

Except, you can't delete an Outlook Plug-In from Outlook 2007. You can only inactivate it, and admire the festering corpse.

I hate Outlook Add-Ins. I ain't well disposed to either Microsoft or Outlook 2007 either ...

MindManager: nasty bug with task roll-up

Mindjet’s MindManager is an exotic organizational/planning mind map app for XP and, to some extent, for OS X. Definitely for corporate use -- it’s expensive, proprietary file format, completely data locked (no data freedom here!) but very pretty.

Pretty matters in the corporate world.

I use it a lot, and today I ran into a nasty bug. I assigned a set of items task/hour info, then used the “roll up” feature to summarize them at a root concept.

The rollup displayed days instead of hours. That’s ok, but MM rounded up the task hours on every item to days – and the act is not reversible.

I lost all my item-specific task data.

I don’t think this always happens – it’s too obvious a bug. I do have a very large and complex map.

Still – be warned. If you’ve found this post because you ran into the bug please leave a comment. If I get a few I’ll rouse myself to file a bug report with MM (though I’m not sure they take bug reports).

Silver Apple of Death: iPhone hangs on startup

My iPhone 3G showed a cheery silver Apple icon this morning.

The same Apple icon it showed last night when I did a routine (hygienic) shutdown and restart. The phone was stuck on startup.

I rebooted and, after rather a long time, it restarted. I then tried running iSystemInfo, which crashed immediately.

A great way to start the day. I didn’t have time to mess around, so I mounted the phone in iTunes. There was 1.85GB free of 16GB, but I deleted a movie anyway to free up even extra space. I then did a shutdown/restart and iSystemInfo ran normally.

I’ve seen similar behavior in the past when OS X desktop runs out of swap file space. I’ve also seen some curious messages lately from Byline, complaining of a lack of memory.

It smells like a software/hardware problem – maybe something wrong with the file system or to the physical storage media.

I didn’t find much searching on “iPhone hangs startup”, but I eventually found the key search phrase “Silver Apple of Death” (SAD) or Apple Logo of Death (ALoDs) or White Apple Logo of Death (WALD) [1]

For example (I’ve rewritten the original post) [3]:

You must restore your iPhone with iTunes ….

Reset it by holding home button until your phone is shut off.

Hold the Home button while you connect your iPhone to a computer running iTunes. Wait until your phone shows the connect USB to computer screen, then release the home button.

Choose restore as a new phone.

Search for restore mode for more details, this is a well know problem and have already been complained thousands times…

I’ve come across several explanations, including problems with “Springboard” on complex iPhones. I suspect there are multiple causes, and the Springboard bug may have been fixed in 3.0. In my case I’m hoping it’s a file system corruption problem or the solid state equivalent of “bad sectors”.

My phone is working for now, but I’ll put some time on my calendar to do a restore [2].

[1] We need some acronym consensus! Note these are of a family: BSOD – Blue Screen of Death (Windows), SPOD – Spinning Pizza of Death (OS X) and SBOD (Spinning Beachball of Death) (OS X – alt). Tradition favors a four letter acronym, all upper case. I’d say WALD or SALD.

[2] If the restore doesn’t work I might try a “wipe” – forcing the OS to write to all sectors and perhaps mark some as unusable.

[3] This is from Apple discussions. There are fewer of these than one would expect. That’s what you see when Apple is deleting posts. Just saying …

Update: If you search on the words in the various names of this syndrome one finds better posts, such as this one and this one. Most do very well with the restore mode, but in some cases the problem recurs and the phone has to be replaced. Looks like a combination of hardware and software. I’ve read recently that RAM and other memory defects are much more common than once thought, I suspect that in older phones this may be due to emerging memory hardware issues. Even then a restore might help, especially if the issue is bad storage that the OS can work around.

Update b: When got home I synced the phone. I ended up doing a wipe first (from iPhone:Settings:Reset). That took about 90 minutes. I then plugged it into iTunes and I was invited to restore from my last backup. After the initial restore you get to restore Applications and Music. With past restores I've had quite a bit of cleanup and credentials re-entry, but this one worked perfectly. Nice improvement, even though a complete restore takes hours.