Jason Toy2010-01-05T17:27:27-08:00http://jtoy.net/Jason Toyjtoy@jtoy.netthoughts on ebooks and ebook readers2010-01-05T00:00:00-08:00http://jtoy.net/2010/01/05/thoughts-on-ebooks-and-ebook-readers<h1>thoughts on ebooks and ebook readers</h1>
<p class="meta">05 January 2010</p>
<p>I love to read books, but I travel a lot and I don’t like to carry so many books with me, hence I recently acquired an ebook reader (Sony reader pocket edition) in September 2009. I’ve only used this ebook reader, but I’ve also played around with the kindle a few times ( although I have never read a complete book on one). I’ve collected my thoughts on the current state of ebook readers and how I see them moving forward. Ebooks and dedicated ebook redears have been out for many decades now. You would think that by now they would be wonderful ubiquitous devices, but they still have low adoption, poor usability, slow, just plain unenjoyable. Fortunately, I believe that we are at the turning point where ebook readers will become enjoyable devices to read on. Here are the hurdles I see the industry needs to overcome:</p>
<h2>Page rendering speeds</h2>
<p>I know I don’t have the fastest ebook reader, but its definitely not slowest on the market. Page rendering/turning on ebook readers is horrendously slow. Depending on the book, it takes anywhere from 2-5 seconds to change pages. It makes trying to find specific sections in a book almost impossible. When reading on my ebook reader, I will try to time it so when I am on the last 2 sentences of a page, I hit the turn page button and by the time I finish the page it will turn so I don’t waste any time. This works sometimes, but occasionally I miss the last few words on the page which can be extremely annoying. This is the biggest reason why I hate reading on ebook readers. I just can’t enjoy reading books on an ebook reader until this becomes a problem of the past.</p>
<h2>Fast and Easy navigation</h2>
<p>One of the great things about having a physical book is the speed in which you can read or browse a book, the pace is up to you. I can jump to any page or chapter very fast, but I can’t do that on an ebook. This is a user interface issue. Many ebook devices don’t have a keyboard so you can’t navigate by searching for text leaving devices with only the ability Ebook readers must be easy fast and easy to navigate if they are to become more useful. When I bookmark a page on my reader, it takes several seconds to complete, the same for un-bookmarking. This should happen instantly</p>
<h2>Able to render charts and graphics</h2>
<p>I have tried to read a bunch of technical books on my ebook reader and have found it extremely frustrating when most of the graphics and charts do not appear. Often pages that are supposed to have a graphic will just appear with one sentence and the rest of the page is blank where the graphic was originally supposed to appear. I don’t know how to fix this in a reasonable way, but it needs to be fixed.</p>
<h2>Consolidation of formats</h2>
<p>There are currently too many formats for different ebooks, this confuses the consumer. Why are there so many ebook formats? Which ebook format is fastest to render? I don’t know what the tradeoffs between the different formats are, but I want the format that renders the fastest and that is also able to display graphics. This problem is already partially solved by the big ebook stores only having support for 1 or 2 formats.</p>
<h2>Opening up the platform for other developers</h2>
<p>Currently out of all the ebook readers I have seen, none of them allow developers to develop applications for them. There is so much potential for applications to be developed for ebook readers. Just some wonderful ideas that I would like to try developing:</p>
A social notes application that gets layered over your book as you are reading it. So for example if you are studying for a class, you could see all the notes that other people wrote about particular problems. You could also filter who’s notes you see, maybe you only want to see your classmates’ notes or friends’ notes.
A net enabled foreign language dictionary. So when you are reading a book in a foreign language, you could highlight a word and its meaning and sample sentence usage of the word. You could then also save the word into your vocabulary list where you could review the word at a later time.
An app that when you highlight a word, it allows you to jump to the previous or next occurrence of that word. Not very practical, but could be useful when studying.
Interactive books where you could do madlibs or choose your own adventure. This is the same as a web application, but the different is this is an actual book that can be downloaded and used without a net connection.
I’m sure there are more awesome application ideas that I haven’t though of, but the point is, the platform needs to be opened up to other developers so that we can get these applications because the device makers don’t have the resources to provide them.
<h2>Ability to turn on/off everything else</h2>
<p>It is inevitable with the integration and simplification of all the devices we have that all future generations of ebook readers will have integrated net access, music players, etc. This will be help us reduce the amount of physical items we carry with us, but adding in all these features will clutter the interface and add physical buttons that we rarely use. One of the reasons I love reading physical books is because it allows me to escape from all distractions such as the internet. Sometimes when I am reading online, I end up at very different pages then from where I started because of all the different links I followed. Future ebook readers must be able to hide everything else when in “deep reading” mode. In this way I can be in browse mode when I don’t care where I end up or I can be in reading mode where all I want to do is read. This also means that most ebook readers in the future will have very few physical buttons and instead use virtual buttons ala the iphone. Currently I have about 10 buttons on my ebook reader now and I rarely use any of them. They just take away space while providing little value.</p>
<h2>Tight integration with personal computers</h2>
I only know how sony’s integration is, and let me tell you it is horrible. The software just plain sucks, its made from Sony, need I say more? It would be great if I could be reading from my computer and be able to switch to my ebook reader right from where I left off.
<p>Some other things I’d like to see is to allow an easy way for anyone to publish ebooks and allow them to appear on the stores associated with the ebook readers. This would allow more people to write and make money off of mini books.<br />
In conclusion, realistically the only company that I see this platform existing is through Apple or at least started by them. They know how to design a great product that is intuitive to users, they also know how to integration extremely well. Besides them, its the Kindle, but I haven’t been really impressed with what I have seen so far, they’ve had several years as the market leader to come up with the killer device and its just not quite there yet. I’d love to hear your thoughts.</p>new years resolutions2009-12-31T00:00:00-08:00http://jtoy.net/2009/12/31/new-years-resolutions<h1>new years resolutions</h1>
<p class="meta">31 December 2009</p>
<p>So this is the time that I will be writing a public new years resolution. Writing one will be good for me because it will serve as my external memory and people can hold me to it if I don’t accomplish my goals. When making goals, I think it better to set much larger goals instead of saying something unclear and not concrete like I will lose more weight or I will exercise more. Those goals don’t really mean anything. Running more could mean go out running twice and then never running again. Instead your goals should be something like I will run a marathon or I will obtain a six pack. So anywhere, here is my list of things that I will accomplish for 2010:</p>
<ul>
<li>I will run a marathon</li>
<li>I will write a blog post once a month or at least 12 posts</li>
<li>I will write an ebook and put it up for sale</li>
<li>I will fix my sleeping problems, meaning I will be able to sleep</li>
<li>By the end of 2010, I will be generating at least $2k/month in passive income</li>
<li>I will finish reading the original version of 三國演義 aka Romance of the three kingdoms</li>
<li>master my text editor</li>
<li>learn to cook and cook at home at least 1/2 of my meals<br />
I’ll explain these things in detail</li>
</ul>
<h2>run a marathon</h2>
<p>I’ve always wanted to run a marathon. I have a bunch of friends who have done it and it seems like an awesome way to stay in shape. There are many marathons that happen every year so I will just start training now and run one when I feel ready. Eventually I would like to attempt one of those crazy ultra marathons but that is really far away right now. To accomplish this is pretty simple, just go running 3 times a week and run a little further every 1/3 time. I’ve already ran a bunch of 10k races so I’m partially there.</p>
<h2>write more blog posts</h2>
<p>I’ve always wanted to do more writing, but I thought I was a bad writer. I still think I am a bad writer, but you can only improve your writing by writing more. Hopefully you will all be seeing more useful content around here. I’m hoping this skill will help me later with writing some ebooks and maybe a real book later on.</p>
<h2>write an ebook</h2>
<p>There are always talks on hackernews about how the parrot ebook makes tons of money. I would like to see how profitable writing an ebook can be. That will require me to find a niche idea to write about, write about it, and put it up for sale. This will be an experiment for me in learning to write better and maybe generate some income. If anyone has ideas for topics, please tell me about it.</p>
<h2>fix my sleeping problems</h2>
<p>Out of the whole list, this is the hardest problem for me to solve. Since I was a young boy, I’ve had chronic sleeping problems. Almost everyday I have bad headaches from not getting enough sleep, the black cirles under my eyes are the war scares of having dealt with this for so long. This effects everything I do such as my memory, my work, health, etc. When I go to sleep, I toss and turn for hours, sometimes all night. If I don’t want to deal with staying up all night, then I take sleeping pills (often). When I wake, my mind is literally moving at full speed thinking about work and programming. I don’t know how that is possible. During the daytime I see people take naps sometimes,I have never been able to do that. No matter what time I go to sleep at night, I will wake up at the same time in the morning. So no matter if I go to sleep at 12 am or 4 am, I will be waking up at around 8:30. <br />
So how will I know when I have solved this problem? When I understand my problem and when I feel healthy. As of now, I don’t feel healthy at all. Even though I run sometimes and I bike everyday, I still don’t feel healthy because of little sleep, the sleep deprivation is killing me, literally. I’ve tried many different things, I bought sleeping music, meditating at night, I never drink any coffee or soda, etc. It is time for me to solve this problem and I must do something extreme to fix this. If anyone knows of something I can do, please tell me!<br />
<br />
h2. $2k/month of passive income</p>
<p>After reading the 4 hour work week, my life has been changed forever. I don’t agree with a lot of what the author says, but what I have learned is that I should be retiring <span class="caps">AND</span> working now. We are only on this planet for short period of time and I feel we need to live our lives to our fullest. For me that means seeing the world, learning languages, and building awesome websites that help people. To be able to do that I need to have some kind of passive income though. I have a few projects that generate some passive income, but its not enough for me to be able to live off. The definition of passive for me is not spending more than a couple hours a week on the particular project. Understanding the goal is easy, how to achieve that is the hard part, I’m still not quite sure on how I will achieve this.</p>
<h2>finish romance of the 3 kingdoms</h2>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms">Romance of the 3 kingdoms</a> is 1 of the 4 classics of chinese literature. I’ve wanted to read it since high school. I’ve read different versions of the book including the english version, but the original is a very hard book to read. I have never been able to finish reading it because of time issues, I think it would require a few full months of studying to finish it. I hope to eventually read all 4 of the classic books.</p>
<h2>master my text editor (vim)</h2>
<p>I’ve been using vi for over 10 years and I am very proficient in it, but for the past few years I have been using textmate as my daily editor. I love how textmate integrates very nicely with the mac, but I feel it is stagnant and hasn’t improved. I still use vim everyday because of the command line, but I don’t feel comfortable like all the “wizards” I see using vi/vim. All of my configuration files are just copies of other people’s files and so I don’t really understand how they work or how to customize them. A text editor should be modified so that it fits perfectly with your work flow. I will have achieved this goal when I am using vim for 100% of all my text editing and when I have modified vim to work exactly how I want it. Maybe I can publish a couple of screencasts.</p>
<h2>learn to cook</h2>
<p>The majority of my money waste goes to eating out. I have never really done any cooking so 95% of my meals are ordered. When you are eating out , you can’t control the quality of what you eat ( you didn’t cook it yourself, how do you know how it is was made and with what ingredients?) I want to learn how to cook so that I don’t feel like I am wasting so much money. The problem with cooking is that it uses up a lot of time. I would like to figure out a good method that allows me to save time and money, maybe cooking in bulk? I know I have achieved this goal when it is normal for me to eat at home( at least 1/2 of my meals are homecooked)</p>
<p>Overall I think this is a reasonable list of things for me to accomplish for 2010. I don’t think its too easy or too hard, these are all things I’ve thought about before.</p>facebook like translations for your rails app2009-10-07T00:00:00-07:00http://jtoy.net/2009/10/07/facebook-like-translations-for-your-rails-app<h1>facebook like translations for your rails app</h1>
<p class="meta">07 October 2009</p>
<p>Last year I wrote a plugin for <a href="http://sanbit.com">Sanbit</a>, the language learning site I was working at the time that allowed you to add a facebook style translation system to your application, I call it <a href="http://github.com/jtoy/sanbit_translations">Sanbit Translations</a>. When a user turns on translation mode, all the translation strings in your application appear with an underline to notify the user that they can translate those strings. The user then right clicks on the strings and a window popups where the user can add their own translation or vote on the other submitted translations. The plugin uses jquery and the jquery right click plugin to work. When Sanbit Translations sees translation mode turned on (just an instance variable), it then adds a translatable class to all elements in the <span class="caps">DOM</span> that are translatable. It is up to you to put in your own styling for how you want the text to look while in translation mode. Using this plugin can help you save time when developing your app because users of the site can help you translate the site into other languages. I didn’t publish the plugin because I wasn’t and am still not satisfied with the design. The plugin has dependencies on specific javascript code, controller code, and views to function properly. I do think the system is really cool though and I’m publishing it now in the hopes of getting feedback and new ideas. The tests are all passing, so please <a href="http://github.com/jtoy/sanbit_translations">fork away</a> and start editing the code.</p>Delicious and Instapaper2009-09-21T00:00:00-07:00http://jtoy.net/2009/09/21/delicious-and-instapaper<h1>Delicious and Instapaper</h1>
<p class="meta">21 September 2009</p>
<p>I’ve been using <a href="http://delicious.com">Delicious</a> for the past few years to bookmark my websites, a lot of people don’t use it anymore, but it gets the job done for me. Just recently I’ve also started to use <a href="http://instapaper.com">Instapaper</a> to read offline articles on my iphone. I didn’t want to have to save a url in both delicious and instapaper so I wrote a sintra application where you put in your delicious and instapaper credentials and it will copy over the bookmarks from one service to another. You can also tell it what tags you want to pull bookmarks over from, if you don’t put any tags in, it will just copy over all your bookmarks. I call it del2ip, you can use it <a href="http://del2ip.jtoy.net">here</a>. The only major thing I don’t like about it is that it requires your delicious password. The bookmarks are public anyway, so I don’t understand why yahoo forces you to authenticate with your password. I might change the code later to just scrape the bookmarks so a password is not required. The source code is also <a href="http://github.com/jtoy/del2ip">available</a> on github. <a href="http://del2ip.jtoy.net">Check it out</a></p>Why do event sites suck?2009-09-11T00:00:00-07:00http://jtoy.net/2009/09/11/events-idea<h1>Why do event sites suck?</h1>
<p class="meta">11 September 2009</p>
<p>It is 2009 and I still really hate all the event finding sites that exist. I have tried very hard to use many of these sites to no avail. I can’t find anything I’m interested in, often I know of an existing event, but it doesn’t show up which makes me think that their databases are extremely inaccurate, and the user interfaces are crowded with too much stuff that I don’t care about. The event sites are explicitly designed around location, meaning I should search for events based solely on what area am I at. This works for most cases, but there are several cases where I don’t really care about the location. For example: rubyconf is a yearly weekend conference that changes its location every time. I don’t care where it is, but I definitely want to go. Another example: a few months ago I started to do a lot more iphone development work, I was living in Boston during the time, I wanted to go to some iphone related conferences. I found out from lots of google searching that there was an iphone development conference coming up in a week at yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA. I decided to go and I had a blast, but I would have had a hard time finding this event if I was using a location based event search, let alone if that event site even had the data pertaining to this event. The biggest event sites seem to be <a href="http://upcoming.org">upcoming.org</a>, <a href="http://zvents.com">zvents.com</a>, <a href="http://eventful.com">eventful.com</a>, <a href="http://craigslist.org">craigslist.org</a>, and <a href="http://meetup.com">meetup.com</a></p>
<p>On each of those sites, I tried searching for the events “startup school”, “rubyconf”, and “Burning Man.” Only Burning Man returned any results at all, and none were related to events, but instead results for people’s profiles.</p>
<p>Meetup.com has lots events that I’m interested in, but they only store their own meetups and not all events. The part that is really frustrating to me about their site though is that they force me to receive emails for each group I join, so if I am want to follow a few different groups, then I receive lots of <span class="caps">SPAM</span> mail everyday.</p>
<p>In regards to craigslist, when I view the events listings, a large portion of the listings are not even events, therefore it wastes my time.<br />
Eventful and zvents just have so much other non event related stuff that I am not interested in.</p>
<p>Here is what I propose:</p>
<ul>
<li>To solve the problem of inaccurate data, I think a spider should be employed that searches the web for events and adds them into the database. This along with allowing users to add and update data on the site will result in a more accurate picture of what events are going on.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>A user should be able to choose categories that they are interested in, then when they come back to the site, they will see upcoming evens for those categories.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Events should have some kind of reputation/score system that is calculated per user. So for example, if I am interested in ruby, then I would see all the upcoming ruby events in my area, but if there was an upcoming huge ruby event (like rubyconf) coming up that was way out of my area, then I would still be presented information about this event.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>There should be some kind of lightweight way to notify users of upcoming events so if there is an event that the user is likely interested in, then the site will email that user, but if the user has visited the site and already knows of these events, then they won’t be notified via email.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>There should be other ways to notify a user of upcoming events. Email is great as lowest common denominator, but personally I don’t like receiving so many notifications via email because I have to manually delete each email. Other notification systems like twitter or facebook should be an option.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The user interface should be as simple as possible, I have no need to to see a list of restaurants nearby the event or movies playing nearby, I can use a dedicated site for those things that will do a much better job.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Tight integration with calendering software so that I can easily keep a record of attending this event. For example I keep my personal schedule in ical, but any software could be used.</li>
</ul>
<p>My tastes might be a little bit different from mainstream audiences, but really all I want to do is follow all the upcoming programming and entrepreneur events and conferences around me. I don’t think my requirements for an events site are that high, but why does such a site not currently exist?</p>
<p>I think that building a new piece of software around these concepts will make a good events site that will create value and save more time for people.</p>Rails plugins and routes2009-08-19T00:00:00-07:00http://jtoy.net/2009/08/19/rails-plugins-and-routes<h1>Rails plugins and routes</h1>
<p class="meta">19 August 2009</p>
<p>While extracting some code I wrote for <a href="http://sanbit.com">sanbit</a> to put into a rails plugin, I ran into a few problems getting the routes to work. I finally figured it out after wasting a couple of hours debugging. The rails docs say that if you have a plugin with a routes.rb in “vendor/plugins/yourplugin/config/”, then it will automatically load up your routes file. That is partially true. For that to work you must also have an apps directory inside of your plugin root. It doesn’t matter if the directory is empty, it just needs to be there. This seems to me like a case of too much magic in rails and not enough documentation. Well, hope this can save other people some time.</p>iPhone Dev Camp 32009-08-02T00:00:00-07:00http://jtoy.net/2009/08/02/iphone-dev-camp<h1>iPhone Dev Camp 3</h1>
<p class="meta">02 August 2009</p>
<p>A few days ago I decided to attend <a href="http://www.iphonedevcamp.org/">iPhone Dev Camp 3</a> at Yahoo’s Head Quarters in Sunnyvale, CA. It was a 3 day event starting Friday evening. Most of the event consisted of a hackfest where teams built a project of their choice and present it towards the end of the conference.</p>
<p>My team choose to build an iphone app that uploads your photos based on your gps location to a public “event” where everyone can share their pictures. Its a cool app because it creates a shared photo album online. The vibe of the event was awesome because everyone was working really hard on their projects. My team was the last team to leave the yahoo campus becuase we were working hard to get the project done. Another cool thing about my team was that we all met eachother on the first day of the conference.</p>
<p><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2671/3785654340_e49190bed1_d.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<h2>I took this picture while we were on stage demoing our app</h2>
<p>The team that one “coolest app award” wrote an app that showed a wall of twitter users, everytime they sent a tweet, their avatar would bounce a send a wave to the surrounding avatars, pretty much they copied the idea from <span class="caps">WWDC</span> that showed what apps where being purchased. it was a pretty cool looking application, but not of real practical use.</p>
<p>One app presentation was pretty lame, they “wrote” an app that allowed you to rent out your car to other people, turn on the car you are renting, and beep the horn of the rented car. During the presentations though, they just explained their idea and showed a video of what their app was supposed to do, they didn’t have the code completed, but they won an award for “most potential to make money” :(</p>
<p><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3287/3779708084_1585b618d8.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<h2>I’m somewhere in that picture, can you find me!</h2>
<p>Besides the hackfest, there were also various talks given, although I didn’t attend any of them as I was busy hacking away. One thing I noticed about the event was that there were lots of people who were novice iphone developers and even a bunhc of poeple who had never programmed for the iphone. I wish there was a more even distribution of developer levels, I wanted to meet more of the advanced developers so I could learn more tips from them.</p>
<p>I really think that these kinds of confereces are really awesome to meet other cool developers and get a chance to work on some cool projects. This dev camp had over 500 people attend!! All in all it was an awesome event.</p>Railscamp2009-07-22T00:00:00-07:00http://jtoy.net/2009/07/22/railscamp<h1>Railscamp</h1>
<p class="meta">22 July 2009</p>
<p>I just came back from <a href="http://railscamps.com">railscamp</a> New England edition. It was one of the best programming events I have been to. It was a mix of a hackfest, tech talks, binge drinking, and <span class="caps">LAN</span> parties. One of the things that made it great was that there was no internet. It was in the middle of the woods up in Maine, fortunately <a href="http://twitter.com/qrush">qrush</a> brought a copy of all the rubyforge gems so we were able to continue hacking away on our projects.</p>
<p><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2469/3747477610_bd8e85418a_d.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p>I’m sure there have been other events like this, but this is the first time I experienced it, I definitely think there should be more events like this. It allowed everyone to get to know eachother very well in a short period of time. The event was for a weekend, not too long or too short. The only thing I would have changed is to make it a little bigger, maybe 50 people, there were about 30 people there. Any bigger and you would have lost the intimacy.</p>
<p><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3523/3746684349_da63183b55_d.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p>The event was purposely loosely organized, which made it awesome, we spent most of the day hacking away at code sprinkled in with a few talks about various projects. Then at night we drank, had a <span class="caps">LAN</span> party, and played some werewolf. Railscamp was held at Maine MountainView House in Bryant Pond, Maine. <a href="http://twitter.com/Pat">Pat Allan</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/bcardarella">Brian Cardarella</a> put up the event, but it could not have been so much fun without everyone there, thanks guys! I highly recommend that other ruby groups put up theses events, I would definetly go!</p>
<p>I also uploaded a bunch of <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/22036754@N03/sets/72157621657322715/">pictures.</a></p>Introduction2009-07-02T00:00:00-07:00http://jtoy.net/2009/07/02/intro<h1>Introduction</h1>
<p class="meta">02 July 2009</p>
<p>This is my first time writing my own blog. I don’t believe I have anything interesting to say, but I will post random thoughts about coding, traveling, and life. The source code for this blog is also available at <a href="github">http://github.com/jtoy/blog</a>. So currently in my life I am spending a lot of my time programming in ruby, jquery/javascript and Objective-C. I have also been playing a bit with clojure, but have not had a chance to use it in a real project. I just recently got my scuba diving license and plan to scua dive as often as I can. I have also been learning how to sail, that is pretty fun, I think it would be a good idea to one day try sailing around the world, anyone interested in going with me :) ?</p>