A few years ago I saw a TED demo video about BumpTop, a prototype 3D desktop designed for pen interaction. Now this prototype has grown into a Mac desktop environment called BumpTop. (There is a Windows version too.) Now it is time to see how much the product can live up to the presentation.

A great thread on the Code4Lib list gives shoutouts to a number of web hosting services. Every few years I take a look at this market, so I wanted to remember to look at these in the future: Heroku (for Ruby), Slicehost (now owned by RackSpace), Linode (founded in 2003), WiredTree (noted for Drupal), DreamHost (which I’ve used too), and Sonic (run by geeks).

I’ve been wondering why nobody has done this. Inklet makes the modern Mac trackpad a pen tablet as well. If I had a newer MacBook or Pro, I’d be checking it out.

Last week I spent an evening training new caucus convenors for our February 2nd DFL precinct caucuses here in Minnesota. In general, precinct caucuses can be great fun, and I’ve found the caucus system here in Minnesota was much more successful at getting me involved in party politics at the local scale than I ever was in Massachusetts or Ohio, which rely on primaries.

One tradition of the caucus is that if there are more people in your caucus who want to be delegates to the next level of party convention than you have delegate slots available, the walking subcaucus process (a kind of proportional representation) will be used to determine who gets elected as delegates. In theory the walking subcaucus is a pretty easy process, each person just walks over to the group that best represents their point of view. If that group ends up big enough to elect one or more delegates, they do so within the group. It is a fun way to get to know your neighbors.

In practice, the simple math involved can be a bear. It is well described on page 4 of the 2010-2011 Official Call put out by the DFL, but even that clear description does not make it easy. I decided to write a web-based calculator to help with the math, and after I dug into the problem I realized that even the training we had been giving convenors was incomplete in some minor, but notable, ways. In fact, I’d never been given a complete picture myself!

This is all a long way of getting around to the point, my Minnesota DFL Subcaucus Calculator is now available. I still consider it beta, because it is only a few days old and I hope some early testers shake out some problems. I have had a couple people from the statewide DFL dig into it and report a raft of problems to me which I’ve fixed, but please don’t blame the DFL if the calculator still makes mistakes. Just let me know.

In particular, I’ve tried to make this a tool that can be used from an iPhone or other mobile device. I was particularly pleased to find ways to make the calculator iPhone aware (though it could be prettier) and even able to use the numeric keypad by default for certain text fields. The small joys of programming!

Anyway, if you are a Minnesota DFLer, take a look!

It looks like Access 2009 was a great conference, and they have many of their presentations online. The shame of this is that until a few hours ago I didn’t even know Access existed. With my US blinders on, I failed to realize that Canada hosted a conference that falls somewhere between DLF Forum and Code4Lib. It’s been going on for a long while, I have no excuse! I’d better start watching some video.

Anyone who does business with Google (and don’t we all?) may want to take a look at their Google Dashboard. Google announced yesterday…

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings.

And if you are a web devloper, you may also be as excited as I am that Google announced yesterday it is opening the JavaScript library and tools behind Google’s own web apps. This is a big deal, making years of Google development available to even the lowliest web developer. As noted at Ars Technica:

The library, called Closure, includes an extraordinarily diverse assortment of capabilities with functionality ranging from JSON serialization to standard user interface widgets. All of the features are cross-browser compatible and can be readily adopted without marginalizing any users. The library consists primarily of helper functions and user interface widgets, many of which are recognizable from popular Google applications.

This is an astute move by Google. The more widespread the adoption of this toolkit, the more likely vendors keep building browsers that run this code well. Everyone wins.

Two bits of book news caught my eye this week, the Barnes and Nobel nook reader came out of the closet and my old friend HP announced that they are presenting University of Michigan books scanned by Google in their BookPrep system.

To my eye the nook is a much more pleasant e-book reader than Amazon’s Kindle. I can’t imagine reading on the Kindle simply because it has all those buttons and keys on it. It feels way too much like a machine. The Nook is all smooth, with what appears to be a calm touch interface. Much more my speed. Not that I can imagine spending $250 on a single-purpose device anyway. I’d sooner read my e-books on an iPod Touch.

As much as I appreciate the Nook’s aesthetics, what really impresses me in the social aspect of Nook. For the first time that I know of, a mainstream e-book provider is planning to differentiate itself by allowing e-books with digital restrictions to be shared:

Lend eBooks to friends, nook lets you loan eBooks to friends, free of charge. Remember, what goes around comes around.

Publishers complain about the first sale doctrine which has given book owners the right to share and resell books. They have seen digital restrictions as a way to prevent the same behavior in the e-book world. I think this is horribly short sighted, since the social behavior of sharing is the best way possible to spread word about titles and authors that you love. It is great to see even a small break in this facade.

Another kind of electronic book is made accessible by HP in the BookPrep system. I didn’t notice BookPrep until the UMich announcement, but it is a great demonstration by HP that even the roughly scanned material from Google and other scanning projects will have a long digital life. They have developed a process to clean up the images of scanning projects so that the pages are legible and even pleasant to read online. I am really glad to see UMich being so proactive about getting the trove of material from the Google project into public view. Thank you John Price Wilkin and everyone else at the UMich Libraries.

Especially charming about BookPrep is the fact that after going to all the trouble to clean images of artifacts like page edges and binding curvature, the presentation software puts artificial versions of these elements back to make the experience of reading these volumes more bookish. Does the experience of reading a book really require the form of the book around it?

I think nook indicates otherwise. I look forward to the day that nook can present all the content from BookPrep, Google Books, the Internet Archive, and all the other scanning projects out there. I think the form of the book will begin to fade, but the content still has a long life ahead.

Today I learned that an app called iSinglePayer has been rejected by Apple. Apple seems to want to avoid approving iPhone apps that take a stand on hot political issues. Or maybe it wants to avoid politics altogether? “Activism, we’ve got an app… oh, wait, no we don’t!”

I am so frustrated with Apple’s App Store insanity I could burst. I’m one of the awful people who likes to push Macs on all my (very patient) friends. I own stock in the company. But their misguided and almost random policing of the App Store has me seriously worried about the cocoon they seem to live in.

Moreover, I think this is going to hurt the iPhone enormously. I spent the summer learning to program the iPhone (even though I don’t own one and won’t any time soon). This Fall I began to talk with some Democratic Party folk here in Minnesota (we call it the DFL here) about building an iPhone app to help us manage our caucuses, or maybe more generally to allow us to complete surveys from our national Vote Builder tool. I find the news about iSinglePayer directly chilling. Do I really want to spend weeks of my time developing an app that Apple may well reject as too political?

How many other potential app authors are letting their ideas cool off on a back burner because they have gotten the impression that the road to the App Store is arbitrary or worse?

The only reason Apple is winning the smartphone wars right now is because all the other companies are even worse and more restrictive. Still, that hardly makes me feel better. I hope the FCC or someone with some leverage takes note and stops this kind of nuttiness. It seems sadly clear that left to its own devices, Apple will only dig a deeper hole.

If I ever get an iPhone, I’d like to drive around with Waze open on it! Maybe I can convince Mary to give it a try.

Google announced today that its Data Liberation Front will work to make sure customers can get the data they put into Google’s cloud back out again. That sounds good, I hope they stick to it!