I wanted to show the Mentos-Diet Coke video on my TV and was happy to discover there is now an XBMC script for browsing and playing Google Video.

As well as the aforementioned Mentos video, my kids and I had a great time watching soccer highlights and nature videos. Vastly more entertaining than anything we would have found on cable.

I’ve been trying Carbonite online backup. [Update: I have stopped using Carbonite. The number of angry comments below were just too many to ignore.]

It’s an appealing value proposition attractively priced– $5/month for “unlimited” backup of all of the documents on your PC, or $50 for a year if you pepay.

So far so good; it’s been very easy to set up and immensely reassuring to have automatic offsite backup.

With a price that low there are naturally a couple caveats to the “unlimited” backup offer.

The terms of use have clauses to prevent “abuse” which could either be very concerning or a non-issue depending on how aggressively they are enforced. “YOU WILL BE IN VIOLATION OF THIS POLICY IF, WITHIN ANY MONTH, YOUR USAGE GREATLY EXCEEDS MORE THAN THE AVERAGE LEVEL OF MONTHLY USAGE OF CARBONITE’S PAID SUBSCRIPTION CUSTOMERS GENERALLY.” The definition of “greatly exceeds” is entirely up to Carbonite. If enforced overly aggressively, someone who simply takes lots of digital photos could easily exceed the average monthly level.

The other caveat is that Carbonite, by design, does not make it easy to restore particular files to a PC other than the original one. You can easily restore particular files to the host PC, but for other PCs you can only easily restore the entire backup. Carbonite wants to be in the backup business, not the file synchronization business, which could lead to much greater ongoing bandwidth usage for a particular user.

If the Carbonite team is listening, I have two suggestions:

* I would happily pay an additonal fee based on bandwidth used to be able to access particular documents remotely on an on-demand basis.

* It would be very useful to be able to see and search the list of folders and filenames that have been backed up through the web site interface. This would provide additional reassurance that the backup has in fact worked.

Update: The comments below from Mike Abrams have some interesting info on how Carbonite handles users with large backup sets. If the size of your backup is more than 50GB, the backup rate is throttled down to 500MB per day. It will complete eventually, but very slowly.

David Brin has a long and through provoking article on the false dichotomy that has been constructed between guided allocation and free markets. Both the left and the right are to blame for this misleading and frequently self-serving dichotomy that shapes so much of our thinking and debate. His article is especially relevant relevant as we consider how to attain global sustainability.

The article sufficiently long (over 18 pages printed) that it seems a service to excerpt the essentials without too much interspersed commentary. Hopefully this summary will encourage you to read the full article.

[T]his damnfool left-right thing has yet another aspect that I haven’t addressed before. Yet another part of a dismal dichotomy that badly needs debunking, at long last.

I am talking about the struggle between those preaching “prudent sustainability” and those who claim that market forces will solve all looming crises of poverty, pollution, energy depletion and so on.

We’ve all grown familiar with these apparently rigid “sides”, and so let me avow something from the start. If I am forced to choose between them, you can bet that I will side with the New Puritans of the sustainability crowd! They, at least, want somemodernist attention paid to assertive problem-solving, instead of preaching an indolent, pollyanna faith that some grand and superior external force will come to our rescue, averting calamity in the nick of time.

But that’s the point. I will not choose sides between the extreme poles of yet another absurd “devil’s dichotomy.” As I say here and here … we don’t have to pick between two perfectly opposite positions! In fact, that kind of inflexibility is the surest way to guarantee our failure as a civilization.

So let’s pull back from our immediate troubles, once again, and ponder how these two viewpoints may reflect assumptions that are far older and more similar than any of the adversaries think, reflecting habits of thought going back thousands of years.

In fact, there are certain ways in which doctrinaire leftists are taking up old-time feudalist positions while today’s neo-feudalists of the right seem, at first, to be standing up for the Enlightenment… only to show their truer, reactionary colors when we dig a little deeper.

Read more excerpts

I recently finished Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How societies choose to fail a succeed.

The book covers a numbers of examples of socieities that have collapsed, or have avoided collapse, because of environmental problems and overpopulation. In today’s globally interconnected world, those lessons could be valuable on a global scale. Diamond describes the world as being in an exponential horse race of uncertain outcome, between exponentially growing population and enviornmental impact on one hand, and increasing environmental concern and activism on the other hand.

In the cases where societies did choose to adapt and survive, the foresight and action of cultural elites was an essential factor, which typically required that the elites experience the effects of their actions directly rather than being insulated, and that they take a long term view.

Today’s announcement that Warren Buffet will donate $37 billion to the Gates foundation, and the announcement that Gates will be spending most of time on the foundation, are encouragings bets in this exponential horse race. Education and health will help improving living conditions, reduce overpopulation, and create sustainable food production.

Even if the Gates Foundation succeeds, we still face difficult choices. Diamond puts the argument starkly but convicingly. The world cannot sustain first world levels of consumption, for most of its population– or even for the first world plus China. This is not an abstract argument– China is clearly on a pace to hit those levels of consumption, and we are already feeling the pain in areas like high oil prices and pollution with global reach.

“There are many ‘optimists’ who argue that the world could support double its human population, and who consider only the increase in human numbers and not the average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not met anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times its current impact, although an increase of that factor would result from all Third World inhabitants adopting First World living standards… Even if the people of China alone achieved a First World lving standard while everyone else’s living standard remained constant, that would double our human impact on the world.”

Can we make a soft transition to a more sustainable form of life, or will we have an unpleasant crash landing?

Because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies.

For all of these reasons, I hope that the Gates Foundation and organizations like it can help to not only address the incredibly difficult problems of third world health, education, and living conditions, but also the even difficult issues of global sustainability.

Clearly, to have any hope of addressing these problems, the Gates Foundation must not only leverage their substaintial financial assets but also create a viral “platform” for attacking the problems. By “platform”, I mean platform in the software sense, allowing third parties to contribute in a way that adds value to the system. By “viral”, I mean that the message and incentive to participate in the program needs to be viral and fan out exponentially, in order to have hope of competing against the inevitably exponential growth of population and enviromental impact. (Windows, the Open Source movement, blogging, and Google are interesting points of comparison in the software world and some or all of these might even play a role in the solution.)

(While I’m on the topic; do check out gapminder.org for an essential set of visually illustrated global statistics.)

Berry411 v3.10 adds an autocompletion dictionary based on the most popular yellow pages searches. Berry411 will automatically suggest completions for popular businesses even without training. In addition, Berry411 learns new completions as you search. In combination, this means that you need to typically only need to type only a couple of letters to find what you’re looking for.

Download Page | OTA install link: http://thebogles.com/berry411.jad

As I mentioned earlier, we’re delighted to welcome Tony Wright (profile, blog) and Brian Fioca (profile, blog) to the Jobster product development team. Tony and Brian have now moved out to Seattle and they’re both making an impact already.

You’ll see their blogs as a part of aggregagation of all Jobster development blogs at labs.jobster.com. Check out Tony’s recent post Jobs space is sexy) and Tony’s recent post on Digg’s PHP scalability and performance in OReilly’s OnLAMP blog.

gotAPI.com is a nice AJAX search frontend for a number of sources of technical documentation, providing a consistent and powerful way to search them all. (Thanks to John for pointing this out.)

Matching search results autocomplete as you type, and the table of contents is organized into a expandable tree view.

The currently available sources of documentation are below:

HTML

HTML at htmlhelp.com
HTML at msdn.microsoft.com
HTML at w3.org

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

CSS at htmlhelp.com
CSS at msdn.microsoft.com

JavaScript / HTML DOM

JavaScript/DOM at www.w3schools.com

Prototype.js at www.sergiopereira.com

XML

XSL at www.w3schools.com
XPath at www.w3schools.com

XML Schema (XSD) at www.w3schools.com

XML DOM

XML DOM at www.w3.org

C / C++ / Standard Template Library

C, C++, STL at cppreference.com

PHP

PHP at php.net

Ruby / Rails

Ruby / Rails at ruby-doc.org & rubyonrails.com
Ruby Standard Packages at ruby-doc.org

Perl

Perl Functions at aspn.activestate.com

MySQL

MySQL at mysql.com

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL at postgresql.org

ActionScript

ActionScript at macromedia.com
ActionScript (frames) at macromedia.com

ColdFusion

ColdFusion Tags & Functions at macromedia.com

Java

J2SE v1.3.0
J2SE v1.4.2

J2SE v1.5.0
J2SE v1.5.0 less UI

J2EE

Struts
Spring Framework
Castor
Log4J
Apache RegExp

Apache Ant

Ant at ant.apache.com

DITA

DITA at oasis-open.org

Congrats to Jobster’s CEO Jason Goldberg, who has been nominated for the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. The awards ceremony for the Pacific Northwest will be this Friday.

Jason has done an incredible job creating and leading Jobster, and all of us here will be cheering him on to advance to the next stage.

As announced in the Yahoo Local blog, Yahoo Local now supports microformats.

Starting today, we’re happy to announce Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews. There are a few reasons behind this change, which for now, will be transparent to almost everyone.

In less-techy terms, “microformats” are an open standard for structuring web page content in a meaningful and reusable way. At Yahoo, we’ve been big microformat fans — Yahoo! Tech uses the hReview microformat for all product reviews, Flickr supports XFN and hCard on all profile pages, and our own Upcoming.org was the first big hCalendar supporter.

We believe in giving you more control over your data and the user experience on Yahoo! Local. With our microformat support, we’ve opened up new data and new possibilities for the developer community to build upon, to make tools that will be genuinely useful to all our users.

This is an exciting development and sign of building momentum behind microformats. Microformats are a way to achieve the vision of a machine readable semantic web without requiring significant changes in end user and authoring behavior. It will be great to see microformats extended to all of the toolsets people use to author content.

The Java servlet containers available today seem to focus on performance and scalability at the expense of speed of development and agility.

There is a significant business opportunity for some company to produce a Java web server optimized for development. The usage patterns and requirements in each environment are different enough that it makes sense to produce different product optimized for each scenario.

To take the example I know best, Tomcat is quite slow to start up with a large application, is painfully slow at JSP compilation, and does not allow changes to models, controllers, and configuration to be reliably applied without restarting the web server. (After a few restarts you typically get a permgen memory error.) And of course I have to manually rebuild my classes after making a change rather than having the server notice automatically.

If Java feels significantly less agile than, say, Ruby on Rails, at least part of the blame must rest on the application servers that we use to run it, and the fact that they penalize every little change with such expensive restart times.

There are of course other factors (between strictly typed languages and dynamic language, and between different frameworks, for example) that play a role in agility, but we ought to be able to at least compare the languages and frameworks on their merits without having the additional albatross of a developer-hostile web server to deal with.

The beauty of a standard like J2EE is that it allows multiple implementations optimized for different purposes– development vs. production, for instance. My dream development server would start up in a second or two, would never need to be restarted when I made changes, and would intelligently rebuild whenever source files change. (Optimizing for developer performance is just one example of where we can much better than the current state of art– ease of debugging is another good example.)