I have a large collection of Delicious bookmarks, which sits at over 11,000 right now. As my collection grew, I’ve wondered if there was an upper limit to bookmarking in the cloud. Wasn’t having the ability to store and access all those bookmarks the point of cloud computing? Would I eventually bookmark every site on the Internet, then bookmark the Delicious URLs of those URLs, causing the Internet to implode?

Don’t worry. I’ve taken extra precautions to prevent that. If the Internet implodes, it won’t be my fault.

Tonight I discovered something that may change the way I think of bookmarking. Delicious users, consider this a bug report.

After a round of Wikipedia-hopping, I stumbled upon Joshua Schachter’s Delicious bookmark collection. That name should sound familiar; if it doesn’t, he founded Delicious, so I wasn’t surprised to see that his collection was larger than mine. Since he’s the first user I’ve encountered with more Delicious bookmarks than me, I clicked his last page to view his first bookmarks. The date on those bookmarks were 2004. Reasonable, but odd since the site was founded in 2003. I clicked the page before that and saw the same bookmarks. And the page before that. After about five minutes of experimentation and URL tweaking, I discovered that I could view up to ?page=401 (or 401 pages of bookmarks) before seeing the same few bookmarks from 2004 over and over.

My bookmark collection is slowly creeping up on Schachter’s, so it was time to test this hypothesis on my own collection. While logged in, everything was fine and dandy. The bookmarks on the last page were those imported from my browser and dated 2006. When logged out, I encountered the same problem.

I signed up for Delicious in 2007. Don't pull these shenanigans.

I tried exploring the bookmark collections of some users with over 4000 bookmarks. Same problem. After asking Twitter and asking friends off Twitter about this conundrum with my own account, it’s not just me. This has happened in Windows (Firefox and Opera, no reports or IE/Safari/Chrome yet) and Linux (Firefox and Epiphany). No Mac reports yet.

So what does this mean? Overall it’s not that noticeable. Several searches show that it hasn’t been caught yet. I’m always logged into Delicious, so the bug wouldn’t affect me often. Every now and then I want to find something on the go or see what others have bookmarked over time. This bug stands in the way, and as long as it’s still outstanding, I’ll worry about the future of my bookmarks at Delicious.

The keyboard is hard to type on, even when the iPad is oriented horizontally. This may be due to my talons or because I’m not used to typing on a touchscreen. Whatever the case, the keyboard feels unnatural, and I found myself pecking at the keys instead of typing naturally. You can buy a special keyboard to attach to the iPad, but if you’re planning on doing hardcore typing, aren’t you better off using a real keyboard on a real computer?

For a device that has been touted as the gadget to get for the non-techy person in your life, it’s surprisingly nonintuitive to use. I played around with several of the apps that were preloaded on the iPad. Zooming in and out of Google Maps isn’t obvious, as there’s no button to zoom in or out; your fingers do the work. Surfing the Web takes time, as you use your fingers to scroll, and I found myself running my finger up the screen to scroll down, an action that made perfect sense to me. I’m scrolling the stuff at the top away, right? Wrong. You scroll your fingers down the page. This makes sense if you think about it, but at first glance it wasn’t the obvious thing to do.

The iPad doesn’t always orient itself properly when you turn it around. This drove me mad to no end, and I found myself looking at an upside down iPad. In theory you can orient the iPad with any of the four edges at the top; in fact, that happened to me at some point. This just doesn’t always happen when you want it to.

The iPad isn’t completely bad, though. Reading books is pleasant. You can import books in epub format and read them through the books app, and you can even click a word to define it, which is nifty. The neat part for me is the movies. I only tried this with the Youtube app, but this works with other video apps as well from what I’ve read. Turning the iPad horizontally makes the video fullscreen, and turning the iPad vertically gives you other options. This can be handy when traveling, especially given the iPad’s ten-hour battery life.

I don’t see myself owning an iPad. The concept of a tablet computer is a great idea, especially for those who consume media instead of create it. With the arrival of other tablets in the not so far future that are superior to the iPad, there will be plenty of options out there. Choose responsibly. Meanwhile, I’ll stick to my hardy laptop and desktop, though I may seek out some on-the-go gadget one day, preferably one without the restrictions that Apple has chosen to place on the iPad.

That sounds about right. This doesn’t bother a lot of people; in fact, one guy has been sitting in line since yesterday for one. He was also first in line for the iPhone and many other things, but he’s not going to miss anything.

Neither are the hackers. The iPad is a locked device, so you won’t be able to install any outside apps on it.

Until someone figures out a way to jailbreak it. That’s going to happen very quickly, folks. People will want to install outside apps to make their tablet useful for something beside reading newspapers and playing games, and someone with hacking skills will go to such lengths. Remember how quickly the iPhone–a completely new OS–was jailbroken? The iPad runs a similar OS to the iPhone OS, so jailbreaking could happen even more quickly.

Forget the iPad countdown. I’m waiting for the jailbreaking countdown. It’s coming.

The author of http://www.sushimustwrite.com has written an excellent article. You have made your point and there is not much to argue about. It is like the following universal truth that you can not argue with: Donald Duck was always naked but always wore a towel when getting out the shower Thanks for the info.

In case you’re curious, the comment was in response to what my alma mater assumes about technical knowledge. Clearly the point of my entry is like the Donald Duck, but why does he wear a towel when he exits the shower? And in fact, he’s not always naked. He wears a shirt, remember? Was this an insult of some kind, or was the spambot referring to being bottom-half naked? You can certainly argue about Donald Duck being naked.

I’m probably taking a spambot message way too seriously, so let’s take it at face value. My point is in some ways a universal truth. I like this. Clearly I should start a movement.

Enter a certain jwz on LiveJournal. This person explains how to pull RSS feeds of notifications (no thanks, I can get those through email), notes, posted items (no thanks), and status updates (this is what I’m really after). I had figured out the notes RSS feed on my own a long time ago, but the status updates feed is hidden with no good reason. A few more clicks and an import to Google reader, followed by organizing all my feeds into folders labeled Facebook and Not Facebook, and all my friends’ status updates were ready for quick scanning. No real effort needed besides the organizing. I can even ignore the Facebook updates by marking everything as read without opening the folder.

Goodbye, Facebook homepage. Unless I want to comment on a friend’s page or update my own, I no longer have to touch Facebook unless I’m feeling masochistic, and yet I have to announce this on Facebook despite the fact that this site is imported to my Facebook notes. Karma, you are cruel.

I’m also proud to announce that I’ve finally caught up with a month and a half of LiveJournal reading. I took an unintentional vacation from LJ reading starting in mid-November when I returned to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving, mostly because I put off packing to the last minute. After removing enough communities so that the essentials remain, I find myself wondering if anything else can be cut. This is where Google Reader comes in.

If a community is primarily public, I’ll add the feed to Google Reader, taking advantage of the subject line (though most LiveJournal users don’t use descriptive subject lines) and the ability to read just the subject line and the first few words of a post to help me decide whether to expand the post to read it. This will help me scroll past my friends list much more quickly. If after a reasonable period I find that I’m not opening most of the posts in Google Reader, I’ll go ahead and remove the feed altogether.

Maybe this will lead to a more streamlined Internet expreience. One can only hope.

Then Debian came along.

Sure, the installation and the tweakings to get everything just the way I want it took a day, another person, and lots of groaning. Most of that was because Debian wouldn’t recognize my Internet connection. Groan.

A review will come after actually using it properly. I will say this: Debian has Windows beaten in the pre-installed games, and I haven’t even touched those yet.