Web 2.0, Linux Kernels, and Building FireFox

How about a system where people collaboratively describe the components of their PC for fun (this would especially nice for the anandtech/extremetech/pcgamer crowd). But then this data could be fed into a service that creates custom kernels for people and/or bootable mini distributions maxed out for your machine without all the driver dross in a typical distro. (Of course, this would also be a nice place, like Visual History, to hang other meta data off of, perhaps even organize Linux driver projects like this one or this.)

(This occurred to me as I was looking testing LXR with Kernel sources, and realizing how much of Linux is actually "just" device drivers - 99% of which you don't need ever, and 99.9% you don't need to bootstrap to a system that can download what it needs. The idea also dovetails with an earlier idea to wrap common unix utilities in an easy-to-call document that can autogenerate UIs. That would possibly compete with Webmin and Cpanel, but I haven't written that idea up yet, at least not publicly :)

BTW if you want to build FireFox 3b2 get the sources here. Wow it's 220M uncompressed! How on earth do they compile it down to like 6M? I don't know what it is about this tarball, but it's taking even a fast archiver like 7-Zip like 30 minutes to expand all the files. Weird.

Idea: Toward Better Browser History (and bookmarks) - Visual History

Consider a UI where, when you navigate, you see a quick, translucent graph of the sites you've visited overlaid over the browser content window. You get the option of clicking one of these ghostly icons. When you hit the back button, take a different path, a new "branch" is added to the tree. Over the course of seconds, the graph fades away. Call it "Visual History".

The data (your navigation tree, or "Visual History") could be stored locally, or shared, perhaps as simple HTML with some JSON meta-data. Sharing would be as simple as posting some HTML/JavaScript somewhere.

This would be the natural place to hang other meta-data, such as date of last visit, how many times you've visited, whether you "dugg" it, tagging (bookmark tagging is a nice feature of FireFox 3.0!) Of course, some this information probably wouldn't be very useful shared, and so would be elided on output.

I see this data structure as being "seeded" passively, and then actively maintained, perhaps by collaborators. It would be a visualization of some of the same things that are being done by human powered directories like Mahalo.com. But instead of lists of things, you get graphs, with lots of juicy meta data, etc.

The thing I really like about this idea is that it scales from something you could personally use all the way up to something everyone could use. It even has both passive and active data accumulation features, which is great.

I've always thought history and bookmarks lost a lot of information - yes, that URL bookmark or history entry is quite useful and wonderful, but how did you find it? That's perhaps even more important, as gateway sites tend to be used more than destination sites, and are somehow easier to forget in light of the 600lb Goorilla (heh, just made that up!). Indeed, if such a system got popular I think people would use specialist gateway sites and search more often than they do today where we all just "Google it". The marginally better results we get elsewhere just isn't worth the inconvenience of remembering another URL. For now. And anyone who knows me knows that I think concentration of power is never a good thing.

In a small related note, you may be noticing these little popups that preview a link. It's a handy, if somewhat superfluous thing which will probably go away in time. But you could present these "super-bookmarks" in a similar way, and that would be useful. I mean, the ideal client would be a browser addon, but you could get a lot of milage out of the data even without the addon.

[Update: one other big reason this needs to be done, memory. Sometimes I can't remember a site, but I might remember how I got there.]

iPower: The worst Registrar ever?

For the love of God, don't do business with iPower (or iPowerWeb as they are also known).

What a horrible registrar. I wanted to transfer a domain away from them, so I got the login information from my client. I login and search around for a while (20 minutes or so) looking for the transfer authorization (EPP) code. It is nowhere to be found. So I check the help documents. There's plenty of info on transferring domains...in. NOTHING on transferring them OUT.

So I call the "24 hour customer service" line. I am on hold for 40 minutes. I get a kid who sounds like he's 12, but happy to help. He gives me an EPP code over the phone - a 5 digit number. "That doesn't sound right" I said to him. "Normally they are much longer, and consist of numbers, letters, mixed case, etc." He assures me it's right. "Oh," he says, "you have to unlock the domain from opensrs. I'll send a DIFFERENT username/password to the account holders contact email." "Fine," I said. Privately I had misgivings.

So I get off the phone and contact my client again - and ask him to forward me the new email. He does, I plug them into OpenSRS. They don't work. Oddly, they are the exact same crednetials as for the ipower.com site. Basically, that kid didn't know what he was talking about, and I resign myself to calling them again.

And I do call them, and this time the wait is 50 minutes. But it seems the person knows what they're talking about (he sounds like he's early twenties which is an improvement, I suppose). The end result is that he sent the OpenSRS credentials to my client's email address. But by now it's too late to call, so I'll have to wait till tomorrow to ask him to forward the email.

Even godaddy's process isn't that messed up, and that's saying something.

(I discovered I'm not the only one who had a bad experience.)

[Update: I had to bother my client to check his email, and it turned out that NO EMAIL EVER ARRIVED from iPower. So now I'm on the phone, and on chat, hoping to get this resolved. This will be my third and final attempt. I'm thinking that I'm not getting paid enough to deal with this bullshit; alternatively, I could/should have told my client to get the EPP code himself, as he's the one who picked this god awful registrar.]

[Update: I finally had an epiphany: I should update the admin email so I don't have to bother my client. I got on chat, and after a 2 hour 40 minute wait (!), I got someone to email me to the new password, and it works! But get this, because the initial clueless person gave me the WRONG EPP code, and I initiated a transfer, I have to figure out how to stop the transfer with the bad EPP code and restart it with the new one. Lovely. But at least I don't have to deal with iPower ever again. And hey, at least now I know.]