wikked thoughts by Waqas Ahmed

The best show on TV right now is in danger of being cancelled. If you haven’t seen Arrested Development, then I suggest picking up a season 1 DVD right now. Failing that, find a mega bittorrent file for it.

Interested in speaking out for it? Visit GetArrested.com or SaveOurBluths.com to help out.

April 14th, 2005 | | | Comments Off

I’ve been making my way through the superb Arkady Renko Series by Martin Cruz Smith.

The latest book in the series, Wolves eat dogs (you just gotta lova that name) just got delivered. That should keep me up late at night.

March 27th, 2005 | | | Comments Off

More from Chandu Thota: see blogs near me, in Seattle, on a map.

Scoble wants more, and I agree with him.

March 8th, 2005 | | | Comments Off

Here’s a better example for price comparison – this book is actually in stock right now.

Now I know I could get the book cheaper buying directly from Amazon.com as opposed to third party (compare lines 3 and 2 respectively) because I can get free shipping from Amazon. How? Either by adding other items to my cart and reaching the $25 magic figure or by enrolling in the cool new Amazon Prime program.

So is there a way I can set an “always assume free shipping wherever appropriate” preference in the UI?

February 10th, 2005 | | | Comments Off

As Albert pointed out in repsonse to my original posting, Pricenoia now also shows used prices, in addition to brand new prices, from all the Amazon.com sites.

Other than the fact that the listing above is missing the “.com (new) price” of $7.19 and should assume free shipping for it, this is great progress. Now to make the service even more usable I have more items on my wishlist (don’t I always?):

- Search toolbar plugin / sidebar for Firefox
- Figure out actual prices of electronics products on Amazon.com when the price is “too low to display”. For example this Canon camera on Amazon shows up on Pricenoia as “no stock“

February 9th, 2005 | | | Comments Off

A9 has just launched Company > Yellow Pages on A9.com” xhref=”http://a9.com/-/company/YellowPages.jsp” mce_href=”http://a9.com/-/company/YellowPages.jsp”>yellow pages with a “block view”. You can actually see the shop you’re searching for in the online yellow pages, and then virtually walk up and down the block. It’s utterly cool.

Let’s see… this is what Kabab House and Madame K’s look like in the Amazon Yellow Pages.

Since it’s beta, it needs feedback. Here’s mine:

- Some of the GPS information does not match the street address. Some addresses are only a few steps off, but others are just not there, as if the wrong street has been photographed.
- Pictures were taken from the opposite side of the road. Too many places have been obscured by buses.
- The UI needs to be improved. The “location” box is the most visible, while the “search” box is off to the side. Took a few attempts to figure out why my searches were not working. The html / javascript view of the street and block needs much better coloring to help you understand where the street is, and which side of the road you’re looking at.
- Use yahoo maps instead of mapquest. When you click on “driving directions”, it doesn’t include your saved locations in a drop down. The map for mapquest is so blah anyway.
- I want a way to poke around a large map and see places visually – as in Microsoft Streets and Trips. Give me mouse hover for the pictures and single click to see details.

Update: I have more feedback…

Cool things:

- Users can rate the “best” image for a given location. It’ll be interesting to see what the results are once enough people start using the service.
- The “click to call business” feature.
- The “Other businesses along [street]” gizmo.

Wish list:

- Printable versions of the yellow page. After all I still don’t have an unwired web browser in my car. I’m going to be taking a printout with me.
- Mini video or flip through images or montage for driving directions. Something like turn by turn directions but using actual street images to virtually show you the route you need to take.
- A shortcut button to turn around and look at the opposite side of the street.
- When you virtually walk up and down the street, the main block image changes. It would be nice if a tooltip showed you what business you were now looking at when you hovered over the image with your mouse pointer.
- Some quick way to snap my view back to the business I searched for. I tend to walk too far up or down the road and then spend a lot of time getting my bearings again.
- Widescreen panorama of stitched together block images. Something like this.
- Know when I’m searching for a restaurant and link to its menu page on Amazon.com.
- Show compass direction and cross streets in the “other businesses” area.

January 27th, 2005 | | | Comments Off

I’m attending the Amazon web developer conference as I’m writing this. Long list of speakers for today, including Joel Spolsky and James Gosling.

See the details at the Amazon Web Services blog.

January 19th, 2005 | | | Comments Off

Werner Vogels is our new CTO. He even has a cool blog. I hope he keeps up with it

January 13th, 2005 | | | Comments Off

I’ve never lived in a place where it actually snowed before. Visited yes. Lived, no. So excuse me while I go gawk a little.

Good thing it melted away quickly. Not that I have to shovel driveways or anything, but I still don’t wanna be driving around in that stuff. At least not until I get my Hummer.

January 9th, 2005 | | | Comments Off

Continuing my quest to find the perfect pizza, I ran across a delightful little place just minutes from home.

Madam K’s Pizza in Ballard – “Every town has its celebrated Madam, eternal women to be sentimentalized down the years. There is something attractive to man about a Madam. She combines the brains of a businessman, the toughness of a prize fighter, the warmth of a companion, the humor of a tragedian.” – John Steinbeck.

The ambience is cozy, particularly when it’s threatening to snow outside, but who cares about that? The pizza is magnificent. The crust was one of the best I’ve ever had (I tried the deep dish Go-Go Chick Pie) and I really liked the fact that there was no red sauce – it made the pizza a little unique. The cheese was not as gooey as I’m used to, but I was too busy trying out the server’s suggestion of spritzing balsamic vinegar onto each slice.

The food here reminded me of Pappasallis in Islamabad, in their early days, when they still made a mean chicken tikka pizza.

January 8th, 2005 | | | Comments Off

I want Amazon to offer RSS full text feeds for everything imaginable. There should be an RSS feed for each product detail page in multiple flavors so that you can subscribe to price changes, new reviews, availability, used prices etc. There should be an RSS feed for product categories and subcategories with filters supported so that you can get only paperback or wide screen versions if you want. There should be RSS feeds for my product recommendations and new products for me. I want an RSS feed for my artist watch list. If a new book comes out from my favorite authors or artists, I want to know about it first.

There there should be an XML feed for my order updates. If my order ships, I should know about it in my feed too. It would be even cooler to get updates every time my shipment moves forward, so the shipment tracking information should be integrated within this feed. Security will be an issue here. I don’t want Joe Schmoe looking at my order update feed.

Of course there should also be the ability to subscribe to an aggregate feed, personalized just for me. Instead of reading 15 different feeds, I want one feed with exactly the things I want. Of course Amazon should have a nifty config page that would let me set all of this up.

Why do I want XML feeds? What are the alternatives? I can visit the site every once in a while. But that’s so 2002. I’m lazy and I’m a power user. I could get email updates, and yes Amazon does send out nice product recommendations by email based on my purchase history, but I’m limited to a few emails a month, and I can handle a lot more volume in a “pull when I want RSS feed” as opposed to “clutter my inbox with emails, whydoncha”.

It would be nice to have all of these features offered by Amazon rather than depend on a third party to build these using AWS. Why? One click UI widgets on Amazon.com letting me add and remove pages and categories to my aggregate feed on the fly. And the security. Maybe it can be done by a third party anyway, using a Firefox plugin.

There seem to be a more than a few attempts to build RSS feeds for Amazon. I’ve yet to find one that’s close to what I need.

Amazon has a Syndicated Content page that supposedly has RSS feeds for product categories. As far as I’m concerned, it’s broken. It doesn’t update properly with new products, shows the same ones over and over again and the biggest sin: it doesn’t offer a full text feed.

There are other attempts too:

- Lockergnome’s Amazon RSS Feed Generator
- Weblog bookwatch
- Blogtricks
- Simple Syndicated Amazon Price Tracking at Watchcow

… but all of these combined are still not good enough. There should be a easier, more powerful XML feed solution for the geek poweruser.

January 7th, 2005 | | | Comments Off