Not wanting to be the last of my friends to cancel their myspace accounts, I pulled the plug today. (Preston did it the day before, but hasn’t written about it yet). I realized that I rarely logged in, most of the messages I got were spam and not very many of my friends were on myspace. Most of the people who were my friends on myspace were also on facebook and were much more active.

Myspace is difficult to navigate, full of irrelevant ads and lacks most of the features of facebook. It won’t be something I miss.

After a non-catastrophic hard drive failure on my laptop, I got to do a clean install of Windows XP. This made me realize how many programs I now use that are open source or freeware. Not too many years ago, a reformat for me meant countless crackz & updating software meant using kazaa to find the latest warez. Now nearly all software I use is open source or free and generally superior to its commercial counterpart.

• 7-zip - This program will handle nearly any type of compressed file (with the notable exception of .ace). Its pretty solid and supports drag and drop. - Replaces WinZip & WinRar
• Daemon Tools - Daemon tools is a CD emulator, needed if you want to mount CD or DVD images. This download is freeware, but it comes bundled with a spywareish toolbar which can be deselected from the install. - Replaces Alcohol 120%
• Filezilla - This is a great FTP program. It keeps getting better with every new release. - Replaces lots of less fun FTP applications
• WinSCP - I also use this for file transfers, mainly because it can untar/gz a file. I know thats lame.
• PuTTY - a telnet/ssh client

Continue Reading…

Preston and I had the opportunity to have dinner with two members of the freshbooks team. We both use freshbooks.com for tracking our work and billing our clients, and it happens to be one of my very favorite web applications.

Now we’re both pictured on the freshbooks blog. Preston and I ended up taking Mike & Sunir out to Zeitgeist, one of my favorite San Francisco bars, which is just down the street from Espetus, my new favorite San Francisco Brazilian steakhouse.

Firefox is fantastic, but you can make it better. Add some of these extensions by visiting the site & clicking the install link. If you are using firefox, the extension will automatically install and be ready to use after you restart your browser.

1. Tab Mix Plus: Allows you to control how you browse by opening tabs for events you specify. This gives you full control over what happens when you browse, and when new windows get opened, recycled, or new tabs get opened.
2. IE View: This adds an item to your right click menu that opens the current page in Internet Explorer. Some poorly designed pages require the use of internet explorer, and as a web developer I am constantly checking my pages in both browsers.

Continue Reading…

Hour 51: Just hit Omaha, NB, 5.5 hours behind schedule. Lots of people got on in Denver so the train was full, now a lot of people are leaving.

Having the iPhone has made this trip much more tolerable. During the trip, both facebook and netvibes launched iPhone versions of their sites, both of which are great. Hopefully yelp and others do this soon.

I’m en route to Chicago from San Francisco (well, really Emeryville) to visit my brother. I’ve got my iphone which I hacked last night to allow my laptop to use the Internet via ad hoc wireless. I’ve got 3 full batteries, so we’ll see how long I can keep the trainblog going.

Hour 1: Left Emeryville. I could see the skyline, Berkeley marina, Carquinez straight and San Pablo bay. The ATM at the station qas broken so I had to rush out and find a gas station so I could eat for the next 55 hrs. We’ll see how on time this train thing is.

Less than three weeks ago I read about geni.com on techcrunch. It sounded interesting so I added my parents and a few relatives to geni.com, typed in 3 or 4 email addresses and now I have 339 relatives connected to me going back 6 generations to 1762. Some of my relatives have scanned and uploaded pictures of my ancestors.

I always knew that someone in my family had records going back pretty far, but geni provides a number of advantages:

Its efficient
Everyone who is invited (requires them to be alive and have the internet) can view the same tree. This means that when I make a change or upload a picture, everyone in my family (339 people) can now see and use that picture. Thats a lot more efficient than doing this on paper or even using a standalone genealogy application on my computer. At one point, I was adding people and families to a more distant branch and someone else logged in and corrected some of the tree which I had made mistakes on (sometimes divorces get confusing, especially if you have never met anyone involved).

Its easy to use
Because the people who know the most about family history tend to be the oldest, its key that any type of application like this be ridiculously easy to use. Geni is very easy to use and moreover its pretty obvious what to do within a few seconds of logging in. Its flash interface quickly allows users to add members to the tree using fairly obvious arrows.

Its viral (sort of)
Not only will you find out more about your direct ancestors, your tree spreads out laterally as distant family members log in and add their family and inlaws. In my case, the tree can only go so far back (there are no records beyond a certain point, and everyone is dead). But there is not really a limit to how broad the tree can get as my second cousins add their spouses family or my great aunt adds her branch of the tree. Already I’ve found relatives on both my mom and dads side who live in the bay area.

You don’t have to do that much work.
All in all, I spent less than a few hours on the site and I have a huge family tree including pictures and facts which would have taken me weeks of research to add myself if I was doing it in a non-social networking way.

Social networking
A relative of mine I’ve never met messaged me and called geni “facebook gone legit”. Its certainly not a facebook competitor but I am now connected to lots of people I’d never find on facebook. Geni has features that allow you to view a map of living (or dead) family members & inlaws to visualize your family geographically and it also makes a list of birthdays and anniversaries. Also, I was able to look up names of distant relatives who are on my generation of the tree and I found four people on facebook. Maybe at some point I will meet them. Geni would be a great tool to plan family reunions.

Learn what a second cousin twice removed is
Even with some relatives I’ve met I had no idea how they were related to me. Geni provides a very visual way to figure this out and when you view someone profile it tells you exactly how you are related.

I look forward to seeing what other features geni adds and hopefully watching my family tree grow.