Aug 2002
Sat, 31 Aug 2002
Vibraphonist Lionel Hampton Dead at 94
There's a great irony in the fact that my friend Christian wrote yesterday to ask if I knew anybody who was selling a used vibraphone. Little did I know that it was the eve of Lionel Hampton's death. Hampton's records are strewn about the trunk of my car and we will miss him [ny times]. I loved Hampton's gift for melody and I'd like it even more if Christian picked up his vibraphone and came out to play with my fusion band.
Posted at: 09:31 | permalink
Fri, 30 Aug 2002
Oblivio on Suicide
I found this piece by Michael Barrish while reading Mark Pilgrim. Michael says:I've been corresponding with a young woman, a college student, who is both brilliant and suicidal. She plans to go to law school if she doesn't kill herself. She hasn't said this exactly, but that is the gist. I am loathe to lobby for one choice over the other. Suicide makes as much or little sense as anything else (particularly law school!), and besides, it's her call.I think I have a rough idea why bright people choose suicide. It is the only human experience in which the outcome cannot be known. It is curiosity killed the cat and ignorance is bliss united. And sometimes, for a fleeting moment, it seems like a reasonable choice next to a reality that is, in and of itself, very dark.
Posted at: 22:19 | permalink
Dave Winer on Baseball
Dave Winer talks about baseball on Scripting News:I went to exactly one game this year, and was bored out of my mind. Too commercial. Too perfect. Too expensive. Everyone is so quiet and well-behaved at the stadium. The baseball I loved was rowdy and irreverent.Well, that's what I'm hearing from the local baseball fans in my office. And you know what? They say they'd be perfectly happy to go down to PNC park and watch a minor league game. Me too. You know why? Most minor league teams are better than the Pirates. That said, I think that this same line of thinking can be applied to the music biz. Take Dave's commentary and think of concerts and big money bands where he says game and baseball. AFAIC, that part of the business can dry up and blow away. I'd be perfectly happy seeing small local acts at hip local clubs. Yep, major league music can give way to minor league.
Posted at: 12:38 | permalink
John Munsch: New Version of Netbeans Released
John Munsch reports that a new version of Netbeans has been released - version 3.4. I also noticed that there's a new book on Netbeans coming out from O'Reilly and it's available as a free download! Cool.
Posted at: 10:11 | permalink
Thu, 29 Aug 2002
My Presentation at CMU's GSIA
Today, I spoke at GSIA to a group of 40 Japanese people about software architecture. It was an interesting experience. There were two translators who would translate English to Japanese simultaneously as I spoke. That was a little unnerving at first but I got used to it and learned to tune out the translation. Our industry panel consisted of me and Felix Bachmann from SEI. We had different perspectives but a common theme ran through both sets of slides. It was curious and useful for the students to see two different perspectives on the same subject. Felix worked at Bosch in Germany and so the architecture requirements for an anti-lock brake system or an engine control unit were quite different than the web software that I work on.
One thing that I noticed was how everyone in the class had a totally cool shiny metallic slimline laptop and most had high end cell phones. Those technologies appear to be much more prevalent in Japan though I've never been there so this is a remote observation based on this small tech-savvy sample. Most of the technology that I saw did not look like it was available in the US. Another thing that I noticed was that there was only one woman out of 40 people. Judging from that, it seems that women occupy an even smaller portion of the IT business in Japan than in the US. I believe that the experience was mutually beneficial for me and the class. Now I can turn my attention to some other projects that I've had on the backburner while preparing for the speech.
Posted at: 19:00 | permalink
Wed, 28 Aug 2002
Randy Pausch and Alice
Since I was headed up to CMU tomorrow to speak at GSIA, I needed to make a trip over there to figure out where in the hell I was going since I hadn't been over there in ten years. I noticed on the HCII web site that Randy Pausch was giving a talk this afternoon so I emailed Brad Myers and asked if it was open to the public. Brad was kind enough to reply quickly and said that indeed, the seminars are open to the public and asked about HCI at my company. So Bryan and I decided to go over and listen to Randy's talk.
A lot of things have changed at CMU in ten years. Among them, there's been a lot of remodeling indoors. The outdoors didn't look much different to me, but the insides sure looked fancier than I remember them. Also, the pervasive wireless that others have talked about is everywhere. And the kids look younger to me. I think I'm getting old. Sigh. The array of Titanium Powerbooks that the students are using is pretty impressive, but I digress.
Pausch's talk was amazing. He demonstrated a system called Alice which is being purposed to teach introductory programming concepts to non-majors and even junior high school students. The system that we saw was impressive but I don't believe that it's available on the web just yet. It provides an IDE in which the student can build programming language elements by dragging and dropping. When the student plays the program, a small window displays the animation of a character in a 3D virtual world. Pausch emphasized that their intent is to teach the semantics of programming instead of getting bogged down in the syntax. He said that this approach has met some resistance with traditional CS folks but has been very successful when tested on old women and young people.
I found Pausch's talk compelling since he's a rare find in the academic world - a gifted researcher, orator, and humorist. We're intending on attending as many of these seminars as we can this fall as we had a lot of fun and would like to meet more like-minded folks. It's exhilirating.
Posted at: 21:22 | permalink
Tara Sue Grubb for Congress
Tara Sue Grubb, who's a Libertarian running for Congress in NC against Howard Coble, says, "If a store owner loses a few HoHo's due to shoplifting, he doesn't ask Congress to install a security system." Nope, he shoots the poor bastard.
Voting for Tara Sue Grubb may be a lot like voting for Ross Perot, it's a vote against the existing system, more so than the existing candidate. Well, I voted for Ross Perot and I'd vote for Grubb too, if I could. She may be exactly what's needed to shake up the system in DC. Only trouble is, I think she'd have an easier time getting elected on the left coast than she will in NC. Sigh.
Posted at: 07:32 | permalink
Speaking of Carnegie Mellon
I'll be speaking at CMU on the afternoon of Thursday August 29th. I'll be in Posner Hall at GSIA. My talk is titled, "A Software Evolution Case Study". It should be interesting as I'm speaking to a group of Japanese people through an interpreter and I've never done that before. If you're in the neighborhood, stop by and say hello.
Posted at: 00:51 | permalink
Amphetadesk On Linux
I got amphetadesk back online tonight after a rather massive effort to get all the libs resolved on my clarkconnect linux box. The ones in the doc were EZ. The most difficult was when it choked on zlib and then I discovered I could just comment out the zlib line in amphetadesk.pl and be done with it. I'm happy to have an aggregator again. I'd like to integrate amphetadesk into Movable Type. I'd also like to have amphetadesk mail me an HTML MIME of the content whenever it updates. If you've done such a thing, please comment.
Posted at: 00:45 | permalink
Tue, 27 Aug 2002
Diabetics Rejoice - GlucoWatch Gets FDA Approval
GlucoWatch is here. I gotta try one of these. Woo Hoo!
Posted at: 23:25 | permalink
Jonathon Delacour: American Porn
Jonathon Delacour lead me to an interesting PBS piece on American Porn. A special thanks to PBS is in order for putting the entire show online in streaming video. The psychology, law, and financial aspects are fascinating. This article ties in nicely with our discussion of investing in the Vice Fund.
Posted at: 09:08 | permalink
Berman-Coble HR 5211
In an article in the News and Record linked from an article on scripting news, I read Howard Coble's remarks on Ed Cone's condemnation of the entertainment industry's beloved HR 5211: "It only allows a copyright owner to look at files that a peer-to-peer user makes publicly available to millions of other network users. Moreover, copyright owners can only disable the distribution of infringing files. A copyright owner is not permitted to alter the original file itself."
Copyright owners can only disable the distribution of infringing files? There's only one problem Howard. How are copyright owner's expected to "only disable the distribution of infringing files" without violating the rights of the device owner? You seem to be such an expert on law and technology. Why don't you tell us? Could it be that perhaps there's no solution that won't infringe on the rights of the device owner? I think so.
Howard goes on, "The bill explicitly provides network users with legal redress against any copyright owner who acts beyond the scope of what is permitted by the legislation."
Beyond the scope of what is permitted by the legislation? What is permitted by the legislation certainly looks like a violation of my rights. I need some help on the legal research side. I'm no attorney, but when I was a card carrying member of the National Motorists Association, I recall seeing a precedent-setting court case in which a judge declared something to the effect of, "Americans have a right to know when they are being surveyed." Further, I recall that having an effect on radar detector cases at the time or perphaps it was detector detector cases. If I'm remembering this correctly and indeed there is some basis for this in law, wouldn't that defense against this bill make sense?
If you walk into my living room unannounced at 2AM, it's likely that a shotgun will leave a gaping hole in your chest. In a similar fashion, if you go digging around my network unannounced, it's likely that I'll take all manner of redress against you at the point of entry, and very little of that redress is likely to be legal. If Hollywood thinks it's got problems now, wait till HR 5211 inspires hardworking tax payers like me to start reading 2600 and listening to Rage Against the Machine. Hollywood should think long and hard before it picks a fight in the schoolyard of the technologists. I, for one, am betting on the technologists.
Posted at: 08:41 | permalink
Mon, 26 Aug 2002
The Parking Malaise
My company leases part of a large building for it's headquarters which houses my company and an engineering firm. There's not enough parking in the main lot (A) so my company leases a lot about a mile down the road and puts some employees in the remote lot (B) based on seniority. The less time you have with the company, the more likely you are to be in the B lot.
Being in the B lot sucks for a variety of reasons. If you park in the B lot you have to ride a shuttle bus. My company's located on the edge of a bad neighborhood and so employees are strictly forbidden from walking. The bus driver varies and the driver's seat has occasionally been occupied by a recent detainee from the local mental institution who thinks he's Dale Earnhardt reincarnated. The bus only runs on a 20 minute schedule, so if you're off by a minute, your commute just grew by 30 minutes. Multiply that by two, once for morning and once for evening, and your 2 hour daily commute just turned into 3 hours. By the way, the shuttle bus only runs till 7PM. Now picture yourself sitting at your desk after you've been driven to work by a psychotic man and then you're at the end of the day glancing at your watch every five minutes as you try to finish your last project for the day. I surely can't be the only software person in the known universe that isn't particularly productive working this way. You get the picture.
Recently, the engineering company that occupies half of the building began laying off people which resulted in a lot of holes in lot A. I, being an opportunist, started parking in one of these holes on a daily basis, even though I didn't have the proper tag for the A lot, I'd just remove my B lot tag, thus avoiding detection by the parking police. Ah, the parking police - I forgot about them. They are people employed by my company to count which cars park where. There's a super secret decoder ring system whereby if you're a good boy and park in the proper lot, not on the street (which is also strictly forbidden), or in a lot for which you don't have proper authority, then you'll get promoted out of the purgatory lot faster.
On friday, everyone in my company save for me got a parking pass in the company's A lot. I think they do this to me just to annoy the hell out of me. What's really amusing to me is that I get paid to wait in the B lot and ride the shuttle bus every day. My company does not have telecommuting arrangements or even a VPN. In the past, I have telecommuted full-time.
And people wonder why I'm looking for another job? Do you think I'm crazy for feeling this way or do you think I should just be happy that I have a job?
Posted at: 08:19 | permalink
Sun, 25 Aug 2002
MSNBC: We can't decide whether it's Hatfill or Hatliff
MSNBC ran an article on Dr. Steven Hatliff... or is it Hatfill? View image One can only hope that the editing at msnbc would improve. Hey MSNBC, I'd be glad to proofread these for you since I seem to be able to find at least one a month that's just plain wrong.
Posted at: 20:18 | permalink
Brad Wilson Continues The Obsessive Discussion
Brad Wilson picked up the discussion of obsessiveness in software developers and has some interesting thoughts on hiring quality people.
This one may seem tangential, but it always seems to hold true: some strong interest in an artistic pursuit, such as music, literature, poetry, etc.
Brad makes some excellent points that I agree with wholeheartedly. I also agree with the poster who noted that most of these traits, save for the artistic one, are true for a broad variety of positions, not just technologists.
I wanted to document further some of the reading that I've done on the subject of gifted coworkers in case others were so inclined. I find that one of the most educational things that a young person working in commercial software can do is to read a couple of books on the gifted mind and it's sometimes bizarre psycho-social implications.
Among the books that I've read, Liberating Everyday Genius by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen, is fascinating. Also, see Gifted Grownups by Marylou Kelly Streznewski. Both of these books provide a good perspective that helps to understand the madman in the cubicle next to you. On the other hand, if you're looking for something a little closer to a real software story, Fred Moody's I Sing The Body Electronic, which documents a year in a Microsoft product development cycle, is one of the best books on software culture that I've seen.
Posted at: 00:23 | permalink
Sat, 24 Aug 2002
Carjacking a Judo Team May Be Bad For Your Health
From VOA News: The Florida International University Judo Team gave a carjacker in Los Angeles a lesson in crime and punishment - before the offender even got to court! 23-year-old Cristina Balducci said, "It was a free-for-all, punch, punch, punch, punch, punch. He (Hogan) got pretty jacked (beaten) up. He did not know what hit him". Cool. Let that be a lesson to would-be carjackers. Next time you think you're gonna carjack somebody, you may get jacked yourself.
Posted at: 23:42 | permalink
Fri, 23 Aug 2002
Dave Winer Gets Internet Politics All Wrong
Dave Winer quotes Ed Cone and gets it all wrong:
Ed Cone: "Comebody could end a political career pretty damn fast by letting out some 2 AM brainfart onto the Web." I don't agree with this prediction. My guess is that when politics and governance move to this medium, it will be a lot more resilient than TV. Remember, in this medium, each voter can have his or her own TV station.
No! Each voter can't have his or her own TV station, or weblog, or whatever you're implying because neither the web nor TV have been or will be ubiquitous. Sure, some pretty influential demographic is operating on the web, and you can certainly reach that demographic, but is that enough to put a libertarian in office in a two party country? I can go to the library and get internet access, or I can acquire an internet device and an ISP, but if your campaign depends on that, you may be in serious trouble. The fact is, for the time being your campaign will likely be in better shape if you target your message toward traditional media. Cone is right.
While the typical technologist can probably insult a few people without totally alienating his audience, the typical politician cannot afford to make such mistakes. Taking the rhetoricians out of the equation just makes it more likely that a candidate is going to make that fatal mistake.
Posted at: 17:58 | permalink
Thu, 22 Aug 2002
Trackback Threading
The Movable Type folks have got the trackback threading examples back online. I wrote about this a while ago. There are two trackback threading examples available, the first is here and the second is here. Thanks to Ben and Mena.
Posted at: 17:40 | permalink
Wed, 21 Aug 2002
Browsing Zope documentation better than Robin Williams
I was browsing the zope documentation, when I came across this gem:
It's not necessary to inflationate the documentation with such adjetives.
Then, I came across this:
Anonymous User: quit cutting the hairs people
Anonymous User: The expression is "splitting" hairs.
I'm still laughing. At the risk of overstating the obvious, I think allowing comments inline in the documentation is working against them and I think sleep deprivation is making me giddy. Good night, cheese crank.
Posted at: 23:26 | permalink
Mark Pilgrim: The Persistence of Melody
Mark Pilgrim writes, "I want to buy Busted Stuff, the new CD from Dave Matthews Band, but I find myself hesitating because I don’t know if it’s copy-protected."
While I own all of the old DMB material, I often question why somebody wants to buy the post-Glenn Ballard stuff, when the life got drained from it. Reading the reviews on amazon, it occurs to me that DMB's listener base is now largely stratified into two groups: those of us who were hooked on the funk-fusion inflected grooves of the original band, and those that prefer their DMB after it's been neatly strained by a major league pop producer into a form that does not offend anyone.
That said, I have had some experience with the atrocities committed in the name of copy protection. In the spirit of documenting the atrocities, here goes. Among the myriad music DVDs on my shelf is Kenny Loggins - Outside from the Redwoods. While I highly recommend this as a benchmark live recording in 5.1 audio, there's one problem that the recording presents: it can't be copied direct digital. I know because I tried to make a quick copy of it one day with a digital cable between my Sony DVD player and my Sony MD recorder so that I could listen to it on my tractor. The recorder quickly displayed a message indicating that it couldn't be copied due to copy protection. Sony and Columbia Music Video can go the way of the dinosaur AFAIC. And I thought it was legal to make copies as I described. I guess Sony and CMV would be happier if I strapped a portable DVD player onto the front of my tractor, but then I'd have to explain to my neighbor why his kids were included in this week's mowing.
Posted at: 08:28 | permalink
Tue, 20 Aug 2002
Peter Coffee: Beyond the Buzz
I always enjoyed Peter Coffee's columns in PC Week when I was still reading paper trade rags years ago. I don't see those much anymore, but I managed to catch a column titled Beyond The Buzz: Putting Web Services Theory Into Practice in eWeek. This should be required reading for developers, managers, and executives hoping to capture part of the burgeoning web services market. Thanks Peter!
Posted at: 18:33 | permalink
Geeklog: PHP and MySQL-based blogging system
While poking around sourceforge this afternoon, I found an entry about this weblogging system called geeklog. It looks pretty cool. If you're in the market for a new blog system and you favor PHP and MySQL, check it out. One of the things that I love about sourceforge is that I can go searching for something like "log analysis" and wind up finding something off-topic, but still relevant to me.
Posted at: 16:35 | permalink
Winer Goes on Whining
If this isn't one of the more self-absorbed pieces of work from Dave Winer that I've read in a while:
Check this out. Another political weblog, in Canada. To Lessig, who says we're doing nothing, up yours. We will rock the western political system. In five years every member of the US House will have a weblog and will be communicating directly with the electorate. Two more election cycles. The house will rock as the economy will. Don't worry about JC Watts' story. He's a quitter. So what if the old guys don't listen. Throw em out. You'll see. And we'll throw you out too, Professor Lessig.
Yeah, uh huh, right - when elephants roost in trees.
First, I agree with Lessig. Second, maybe Dave should walk a mile in JC Watts shoes before he condemns him. I think Dave and John Robb are living on the same software-induced fantasy island. That fantasy island has clouded their thinking to the point where they think the entire country is going to be writing a weblog next week. That's bullshit and I've said it before.
The argument that Dave presents seems to be largely constructed from Eric Hoffer's Nature of Mass Movements. Demonize the enemy - Lessig the Great Satan. Sound familiar? Only one issue: Lessig is not the problem. When Lessig makes his comparison between literature and software, Dave immediately jumps up and cries foul saying that the two aren't comparable. He then goes on to explain that he paid to go to college and he has a right to be compensated, dammit.
Compensated? I have a right to be compensated.
Why, you ask? Radio is opaque - a black box. And it breaks. Perhaps Dave should be compensating all of the people who work for free to keep Radio running? They're the ones keeping Userland afloat while Dave argues with Lessig. You know what I think? I think the source inside Radio is a heinous mess and Dave's afraid to expose that to the world. That's the real reason behind Dave's attack on all things open source and Larry Lessig.
Kind of like the time that Userland's servers blew apart at the seams a few months ago and Dave said something to the effect of, "we're not sysadmins". Oh, really? If that's the case, Lessig's defense should be, "I'm not a technologist." But I think Larry knows more about technology than Dave does about systems administration.
A little too much cluetrain even for you Dave? Well, I'm sure we'll be hearing the words push back and have a nice day tomorrow. I surely can't be the only person out here that finds the attacks on Lessig and open source to be inane.
Posted at: 01:33 | permalink
Mon, 19 Aug 2002
NY Times: Students Prefer News On Paper
This article from the NY Times detailing how students prefer to get their campus news from paper rather than the web is particularly interesting considering that publications such as the Hoosier Review are publishing blog-based sites. I looked for other campus news pubs that have gone blog but couldn't find any. If you know of others, post a comment. Thanks!
Posted at: 20:46 | permalink
Jeff Szymona: CSS Rant
Nothing particularly new here, but my friend Jeff Szymona has wound up in the same CSS quagmire that most of us have fallen into at one point or another. In the midst of my own CSS woes, which are ongoing since I find some old forgotten browser that breaks every piece of markup I write, I have found a few things that helped:
Posted at: 18:37 | permalink
Sam Ruby Notes The Obsessive Gene
Sam Ruby says:
We all are unique in how we chose to invest our time. Sometimes this is in ways that others consider frivilous or pointless. Be that as it may, sometimes it is the most frivilous or pointless of activities that produce the greatest surprises. It certainly has for me. I now see Miguel fairly regularly (I'd point to the pictures he took at OSCON, but as near as I can tell he hasn't posted them yet). The conference that Google selected for me? I'm the keynote at the next one. Mark and I not only did meet, but this has blossomed into the RTP Bloggers Club.
I've certainly noticed this in other parts of my life (the speaking engagement at CMU next week comes to mind), and I treasure the conversations that I've had with other bloggers, but the blog hasn't been quite the connective force for me that it has for others - connecting beyond the ether into the real world. This mostly seems to be a manifestation of the blog combined with the conference circuit that so many folks frequent. Geography certainly plays a role as Sam describes. Location, Location, Location. I used to do the conferences a bit in the late 90's but it's been a while since the day gig has permitted me such indulgences. At any rate, I hope to meet some of these interesting people in the future. I can't help but think of this intertwingularity as an example of an acausal connecting principle. Thanks for completing the circle, Sam.
Posted at: 18:24 | permalink
Sun, 18 Aug 2002
The Experience Epiphany
After a couple hours of sitting here drinking coffee and staring into this LCD, I had an epiphany this morning. I've been thinking about changing the tagline on this blog to read, "Experience is everything". Ugo Cei got me started on this after seeing my tagline, "Perspective is everything" on a commercial site somewhere. Of course, virtually no three word sentence is original anymore, let alone one that's not nonsensical. Anyhow, in this epiphany I realized two things.
First, successful blogs generally blog about experience and that experience goes beyond staring into an LCD. Second, I've stared into an LCD way too much this summer and while that's been mildly amusing, it's indicative of larger problems. The beauty of epiphany is how the entire universe makes sense for an instant, however fleeting the instant, kind of like an old friend describing his experiments with drugs in the sixties. While I wish that I had the constitution to put it all down in writing like this person, I don't. Instead, I wind up resembling Ray Ozzie's story. Yes, as my wife would say, "I resemble that remark". Which gives me even more reason to get up and commune with nature right here, right now.
Have you ever known a successful software engineer that wasn't at least mildly obsessive? I find it interesting that pieces like Ray Ozzie's and even Dave Winer's pay homage to this, at least indirectly.
One final observation, I've had a lot of what I would describe as trains-of-thought lately. What I mean is that I'm improvising a conversation in my head on a particular topic, say this experience manifesto, where the thought goes over several days and resembles the thread of a newsgroup in terms of it's undulation from positive to negative and everything in between. If you have a term for this, by all means, please comment. Thanks!
Posted at: 11:37 | permalink
Sat, 17 Aug 2002
Suicide Jumper Tries To Take Pedestrian With Her
From iol:
A woman suicide jumper landed on top of a pedestrian when she threw herself to her death in Hong Kong, police said on Saturday.
Posted at: 11:40 | permalink
NYTimes: Listen4ever to be blocked by US ISPs
In an article from the NY Times:
"Wouldn't it be better to get an injunction from a Chinese court to punish the people behind this?" Mr. Von Lohmann said. "Are we going to have a situation where rather than going after the actual wrongdoers we just go block all these sites?"
Probably. The problem I see here is simple: what if a website has more content than just music? If I open up Dave's Music and Technology Downloads and the RIAA begs the US legal system to block my site, what happens to the legitimate technology portion of my site? Could I then sue for damages to the technology part of my business? Would they try to force ISPs to block access based on a specific URL filter, page, or the like? Wouldn't that raise the costs of administering such a system beyond what the ISPs could sustain?
Posted at: 10:04 | permalink
Fri, 16 Aug 2002
Galen Rowell and His Wife Killed in Plane Crash
I was deeply shocked and saddened to learn that Galen Rowell and his wife Barbara were killed in a plane crash on August 11. Rowell's work hangs on the wall in my living room and several of his books are on my bookshelves. If you've never seen Galen's work, one look here will give you a sense of the magnitude of his gifts. You'll find telling tales of Galen's life here. I dearly enjoyed his images and will miss his writing. Godspeed Galen.
Posted at: 08:30 | permalink
WebWord: Curt Cloninger on HTMinimalism
WebWord.com says:
Let's Not Make It Look Like Microsoft.com! (Web Builder Conference) -- "In his upcoming Web Builder 2002 presentation, "Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Putting Eye Candy to Work," Web designer Curt Cloninger will make a strong case for why you shouldn't choose blandness in the name of usability and how you can transcend the choice."
In the interview, Curt Cloninger refers to a style that I advocate as HTMinimalism:
The style I call HTMinimalism, for example, puts more emphasis on CSS-controlled fonts, and not a lot of GIF text but regular HTML text. If you're coding to standards, the theory is that regardless of what device [is on the client side, the page] will degrade gracefully. But it doesn't mean that on your optimum browser it will look the same as on a PDA. You can make it look really good in IE or Netscape 6 but still have it show on your PDA. HTMinimalism is a style you can use for a newspaper site. Most blogs are HTMinimalist. Someone coming in on a handheld device is not an excuse to abandon aesthetics for people that are coming in on a browser, and the good news is that you don't have to. You don't have to dumb it down because the technology allows [the page] to degrade gracefully.
Cool. Now I know what to call it. I only wish I could go to this conference to hear Curt speak.
Posted at: 07:55 | permalink
Thu, 15 Aug 2002
Jon Udell: Blogs and High Tech PR
For my friends in the PR biz, here's an interesting read from Jon Udell on the changing world of high tech PR and the impact of weblogs.
Posted at: 23:30 | permalink
Joe Gregorio Makes A Good Point About GPL Quiz
Joe Gregorio at bitworking says:
I took the GNU GPL and LGPL Licensing Quiz and only got 4 out of 9 correct. I don't know if this quiz is such a great idea, after doing so poorly on the test and reading my mis-interpretations of the licenses I'm pretty leary of using the GPL or LGPL for any project.
This was my point exactly. I didn't even take the quiz though I read the questions. Normal human beings do not want to have suffer through this kind of legalese. We call those people attorneys. I like open source and free software as much as the next guy, but I'll take the simplicity of the MIT license any day.
Posted at: 23:12 | permalink
Mark Pilgrim Blogs More Cool Tools
I was reading Mark Pilgrim's weblog and what I love about it is that I often find stuff that I was looking for by reading articles that have little to do with the target subject - a kind of weblog synchronicity, if you will. Anyhow, Mark pointed me to Brad Choate who's got a cool little Movable Type macro plugin. But what I really dug was this little overlib script that Brad references in his article on the macro plugin. Ultramod javascript tooltip mouse-overs. Try saying that 10 times fast!
Posted at: 09:03 | permalink
PHP and MySQL Go The Distance
My friend Bryan Mills has a demo of a neat little system that he's built for a local insurance company. He implemented this in a weekend using PHP and MySQL running on Linux. That system's running on a little 500MHz P3 with a couple hundred MB of RAM and it's quick!
Bryan and I have been talking about the potential for systems like this to reduce costs for small businesses and provide fast, usable technology that can be a real competitive advantage for these companies. What Bryan's doing is important because companies like this don't want to be BS'ed and I believe that they can appreciate a system that yields big cost savings with little investment. Cool.
Posted at: 08:50 | permalink
Dave Winer Goes Captain Insano on Hillary Rosen
I usually agree with most of what Dave Winer says about things, but this time he's gone totally bobo. Dave says:
Offer the same service that Morpheus and Kazaa operate, with high quality scans, and a $50 monthly fee. Run an ad campaign aimed at parents, saying that this is the responsible and honest thing for their families to do. Give Mom and Dad an easy way to spend a few bucks on the kids' happiness (and find some of their favorite oldies too).
Whoa! No! Yikes! Wait a minute. That's just what we don't need - record companies having the taxation power of the telecom companies. Most people in this country can't afford a cable internet connection, let alone a $50/month tax from the music industry. If parents are dumb enough to sign up for such a plan, I'm getting further into the music business than I am already, and I've been involved in it since I was 7 years old. Do you really think Hillary and the RIAA are going to be satisfied by a miniscule tax on the less than 5% of Americans that would be able to afford, let alone willing to endorse, such a plan? I don't; nor do I think that Americans are that goofy.
Posted at: 08:44 | permalink
Dave Copeland Reports on FBI Wireless Watch
Dave Copeland says:
This might be old, this might be new (it's relatively early in the morning and my memory is still asleep). The FBI released its memo on Warchalking, saying it could be a federal crime and making extra-special reference to Pittsburgh.
What I still don't understand in these cases is the issue of intent. That is, if I've got the laptop in the back of my friend's car and I'm working on my slides for an upcoming talk while he drives us to lunch and my wireless card picks up a signal and connects, am I then considered a felon in the eyes of the FBI? Does the FBI expect me to remove my wireless card whenever I use my laptop and/or disable it's software? Further, is the use of netstumbler considered an important diagnostic criteria for this type of crime? What if I want to try netstumbler as a means of testing or understanding the security of my own wireless network?
Posted at: 08:28 | permalink
Wed, 14 Aug 2002
Jeff Zapotoczny Blogs the Flood in Prague
My friend Jeff Zapotoczny is blogging the flood situation in Prague, which looks grim. Hope everything is OK in Prague. Having blogs like this is really helpful outside the big news stories.
Posted at: 18:14 | permalink
Even Less Reason To Work At Sun
News.com reports on Sun's brilliant money-saving office idea:
McNealy said the company will use Linux desktops in its "iWork" program, under which employees don't get an office of their own but instead sit down in the first available empty cubicle they encounter. Sun hopes to reduce real estate costs with iWork by moving from 0.8 employees per office to 1.8 employees per office, he said.
I guess Sun hasn't heard of telecommuting. Where does that leave Bill Joy?
Posted at: 11:04 | permalink
Thinlet.com: Java Swing Amazon Browser
The fine folks at thinlet.com have gone and done an Amazon browser in java using Swing:
If that isn't enough they've got a technology for specifying Swing GUI in XML. Check it out. [russel beattie]
Posted at: 08:04 | permalink
Driving Skills Or Lack Thereof
This piece from coldfury.com about cars, trucks, and driving is one of the funniest things I've ever read. [jim mcgee]
If you're driving an SUV, you're driving the land-based equivalent of a garbage barge. Act accordingly. You wouldn't try to run a motocross race on a full-dress Harley, would you? If your answer is yes, please consider hanging yourself immediately so as not to hurt the sensible among us with the consequences of your lack of cognitive ability. Don't shoot yourself - it gives us gun owners a bad time with the legislature and someone has to come along and clean up your mess.
Yep. If I had a dime for every one of these morons that drove half way up my ass on the way to work every morning... well, you know the adage. It always amuses the hell out of me because they generally do this when I'm running along at 5 MPH over the speed limit on a straight stretch of road. What they don't realize is that I have the cruise set and I don't waiver when approaching the next maniacal hairpin. I'm always overjoyed when I look in the rearview mirror to watch the nimrod careening off into the forest since they couldn't possibly get the land yacht to do ESP miracles like this.
The real morons are the ones who pass me on the straight stretch and then decide to take the remainder of whatever brake lining they have left off at the next corner at which point I've driven half way up their ass since the luxo-barge couldn't possibly handle the curve at any reasonable speed. As Mike Blaszczak's fond of saying, "People drive like idiots no matter what I'm driving." No matter what you're driving, if you're curious about high performance all wheel drive systems, this article from Eliot Lim is an interesting read.
Posted at: 07:49 | permalink
Tue, 13 Aug 2002
The Problem IS the Tools
Dave Winer and I were discussing his article on Trackback this weekend. I had written a piece on Saturday explaining a few of my points. Ray Ozzie wrote a piece yesterday which makes some interesting points. Finally, Bill Kearney makes some curious comments on my piece which sparked a discussion with a friend of mine. Among Bill's comments was the following:
The reality in physical discourse has these issues handled with a variety of gestures, cues and other expressions that help steer things along in a productive fashion. Unfortunately these cues are largely missing in online environments. The end result is often quite messy. The problem isn't with the tools, it's with the participants and not just the folks with opposing views.
My friend Craig Maier, who teaches communication at one of the local universities, had this to say on the subject:
Actually, my argument would be that the problem IS the tools, in a sense. Communication is always mediated (the human body, with its gestures and vocal fluctuations, is a medium like any other), and media always influence what is said. "The medium is the message," as Marshall McLuhan would say, though I am not certain that his radical perspective is correct all the time. Media influence the choice of messages (you wouldn't want to read Charles Dicken on the web, for instance) and they also influence how the message is stated. Media affect communication, and communicators need to understand the limitations of the particular message channel they are using.The Internet has a significant degree of orality to it. The concept comes from Walter Ong. The web is a dynamic, shifting environment like the world of oral speech. Conversations change on a dime. At the same time, though, the web also communicates through written words, and in this sense it is a highly literate medium. The discourse is disembodied, and because there is no one to ask for clarification, interpretation of particular texts may be difficult and even impossible in some cases. This makes it difficult for discussion groups to treat "sacred cows" or "touchy subjects" in a way that respects all the parties concerned.
Another problem is that the standards for quality conversation on-line are often privatized and left unstated, and a free-for-all atmosphere may not be conducive to productive conversation.
Finally, disenchanted weighs in on the debate:
But that compromise has been largely fixed by some inventive minds, and the line between personal site and public debate space will continue to be blurred in the future. First of all, anyone who wants their rebuttal pinned to an objectionable screed can simply point theirs to the other's, and search engines like Blogdex will discover the link and make it possible for a reader to find both sides of an argument, even if one party is being lazy or uncooperative and won't provide a link back to the guy who's contesting their arguments. Some who are more willing to stand up to critique provide a way to attach a response to the same page (our Linkback feature for example, or the improvement on it called “TrackBack”), but partly driven by the need to express, and partly by the thrill of democratizing the Internet, more features for threading and reading arguments and rebuttals will keep coming to web browsers and dedicated search engines.
Who knows where it'll all turn next. Regardless, these are halcyon days.
Posted at: 18:46 | permalink
Jeff Szymona's got a Movable Type Blog
More Movable Type blogs coming online by the day. This time, it's my friend Jeff Szymona.
Posted at: 07:11 | permalink
Mon, 12 Aug 2002
Travel in my future?
Chinese take-out. Fortune cookies. "You will step on the soil of many countries."
Posted at: 22:29 | permalink
Movable Type User? Take the Survey!
If you use Movable Type, help out Ben and Mena with their data gathering efforts by taking the Movable Type survey.
Posted at: 18:41 | permalink
Mark Pilgrim discovers Ian's Favelets
Some really useful stuff for web developers from Mark Pilgrim. Especially handy is the one that lets me run my site without the CSS, simulating what low end browsers see in the process. Cool. Bryan, are you listening?
Posted at: 18:32 | permalink
NY Times on Eva Cassidy and the Rebirth of Black Rock
The NY Times has a wonderful article on Eva Cassidy: 'But Cassidy still did not get much airplay in the United States, then or now, only isolated radar blips. One of the more significant of those occurred during the Winter Olympics in February when Michelle Kwan skated her exhibition routine to Cassidy's version of Sting's "Fields of Gold."'
The fact that Cassidy didn't get much airplay here is a good example of just how sad the US music business is, paricularly FM radio. Cassidy was a throwback in many ways, having soul and emotion oozing out of her, something that's sorely lacking in a lot of the material that gets primetime airplay here.
This is a sentiment that was echoed by another NY Times piece on the rebirth of black rock in the US: '"I could do my thing over a hip-hop beat," Mr. Luther said, seeming to speak for the movement. "But when I do it my way, with these guitars and solos and breakdowns, you actually feel the gospel spirit from which I'm speaking, and the music talks to you in a different place."'
I only wish I was in New York so I could go check these guys out. I'll bet they'll be huge in Europe. Go figure.
Posted at: 18:04 | permalink
Sun, 11 Aug 2002
Pat Metheny: The Pursuit of Melody
An amazing interview with Pat Metheny from Pat Metheny Group Listener Network and the Wall Street Journal.
Posted at: 11:38 | permalink
Sat, 10 Aug 2002
Moderated Trackback
On Scripting News Dave Winer questions the efficacy of Movable Type's Trackback system, " Here's the problem. By design it seems to assume that everyone plays fair. But eventually we all attract a relatively small number of people who would mark up every post with trash talk, if given the chance to. It's a predictable process. That's why I don't have a discussion group here (I used to), or a comments feature. It's why MSNBC is moving to weblogs over discussion software. It's basically why weblogs have a future for thoughtful discourse where mail-list-like collaboration tools are dead-ends. When I think about evolving weblogs, I try to avoid features that turn them into discussion groups."
I have two points on this subject:
- Trackback threading has the potential to take this to the next level, perhaps Dave sees that as making weblogs too much like newsgroups, but to me when that trackback thread runs across multiple sites, you've got tremendous power working for you from a knowledge management standpoint. It's unfortunate, but the link to the threading example at that site is broken right now. I'll have to send mail to Mena and Ben later.
- The trackback system is a first attempt. I can envision a system, let's call it moderated trackback, in which a trackback ping is sent, the server registers it, and the server's blog owner receives an email with a simple form which permits the owner to accept or reject the post. If accepted, the ping is published to the owner's site, as in the existing system. If not, it's removed.
Dave then goes on to question Evan Williams assertion that automatic linking is useful, "What's so great about automatic?"
What's so great about automatic? It's simple. If author A writes an article and author B writes a response to that article, the only way that readers are going to know about author B's response, is if author A notices the article (via surfing, friend, email forward, etc.) and links to it (which I'll follow up on later), or author B emails author A and mentions it (assuming author A's email can be discovered and that author A doesn't take it as spam) or you have a system like trackback in which author B can ping author A's article, thus automating the link. Automating the link reduces the cost of administration for Author A and enables ideas to evolve at a more rapid rate than they could otherwise. Case in point? I've written articles that sat for a month on my server before somebody like Dave noticed them, bubbling the discussion to the forefront.
The weblog world works for authors who bubble to the top of the food chain because of syndication systems like RSS. But blogging can be as intimidating a world to outsiders as open source is to would-be hackers. If I don't have the authority of a Dave Winer, will anyone ever see my posts? Perhaps, but the chances are very small and getting smaller by the day as more great thinkers get involved. That's competition, but that competition can work against the growth of the activity. A system like trackback reduces the barrier to entry for novice weblog authors.
Some of the most interesting trackback pings I've seen were ones in which I was being corrected where my facts or opinions were wrong. I like the fact that I have an automated system whereby the small universe of people reading this page keep me honest and humble. That's a good thing.
The problem that I see with Dave's question is this: what's missing is the notion of a semantic link. In the future, I could imagine that a system like trackback would evolve to the point where you could moderate the trackback automatically based on the semantic of the incoming link. In this way, Dave could ensure that the noisemakers were not given a platform for publishing on his site. Of course, that's a long way off and a robust semantic linking system would be quite difficult if not impossible, leaving holes for the noisemakers.
Posted at: 11:45 | permalink
Boston Doctor Leaves Hospital During Surgery
The Boston Globe has a story about David Arndt, an orhopedic surgeon in Boston who apparently left the surgery he was performing to make a trip to the bank then returned to finish the surgery. Barry Lang, an orthopedic surgeon who's also a medical malpractice lawyer, said, ''If I were defending him I'd say bite the bullet, mea culpa, I'm going to get help,'' Lang said, questioning how Arndt could think leaving the operating room did not deserve a suspension: ''If he honestly believes that, I would take his license away forever.'' Ouch.
Posted at: 10:12 | permalink
Fri, 09 Aug 2002
JPG Virus - Oh My!
The Mercury News has an AP story about the arrival of virus-laden JPGs. Ronin Software group has a funny story on the problem. Thanks to Charles Eicher for the heads up. I must have been asleep at the wheel. Sigh.
Posted at: 08:45 | permalink
Kenneth Potashner ousted from SonicBlue
The Mercury News reports on Kenneth Potashner's removal from Sonic Blue in what may be the first case of it's kind - a CEO ousted for questioning the ill-advised loan deals of the company's board members: 'With increased investor scrutiny of boardroom ethics, Potashner said, the loans are in "very poor taste,'' although they appear to be legal. "Firing me may not be legal,'' he said. "That has yet to be determined.'''
Posted at: 08:34 | permalink
Thu, 08 Aug 2002
Disenchanted: Software Ecology
I think Chris Wenham and Joel Spolsky are idolizing the same economist. Who that economist is, I'm not quite sure, but what I am sure of is that when Wenham describes his software ecology, what you're seeing is the commoditization of the compliments. The problem I'm discovering is that while it's easy to generalize this discussion in abstract terms, it's quite difficult to apply in specific scenarios because 1) discovering compliments is elusive in some cases and 2) even if you can discover the compliments, you often don't have enough control to catalyze the commoditization.
Posted at: 08:09 | permalink
Real Networks Lays Off Ten Percent
Real Networks announced today that it will lay off ten percent of it's staff and take a restructuring charge. It also seems to think it is losing ground in the player war. Message to Real Networks: I've said it before but you're still not listening. Grease the path to the Free Real One Download. Make it one click from the home page. No download managers. No advertising. No user registration. Then watch the player flourish.
Unfortunately, given the elaborate download barbed wire that Real puts in front of the free player, the existing users of the free Real One player can only be described by Wenham's First Law Of Demand:
"No matter how dumb your product's concept is, or how badly it's been implemented, there will always be someone who's lifestyle is so perverse and twisted that your service will become indispensable to them."
Posted at: 07:51 | permalink
Wed, 07 Aug 2002
Jeff's Got Pics Of The Flat In Prague
My friend Jeff has put up some pics of his new flat in Prague. Nice.
Posted at: 23:11 | permalink
Encompass Insurance Sells Identity Fraud Insurance
Not sure how widely publicized this is, but I heard a commercial on the rather sad FM radio in the car advertising the fact that Encompass Insurance is selling identity fraud insurance. What next?
Posted at: 22:04 | permalink
Mark Pilgrim: Full Screen Calendars In Movable Type
Also from Mark Pilgrim, see this really cool Movable Type implementation of full screen calendars. I especially like the way that each day includes the titled blog posts. Note to self: implement this on my site soon!
Posted at: 00:17 | permalink
Mark Pilgrim: MT-Search 1.31b is out
Mark Pilgrim reports that version 1.31b of MT-Search is out. I've implemented it in the navbar on the right. Try it.
Posted at: 00:13 | permalink
Tue, 06 Aug 2002
Joe Gregorio: .net Desktop Blogging Tool
Joe Gregorio's working on a .net desktop blogging tool. Cool. Those blog software reviews just became more difficult.
Posted at: 08:18 | permalink
New Style - Phew!
I was getting a little uneasy with my own sense of individuality at seeing the same Movable Type Rusty style turning up all over the place. So armed with a 3 column MT stylesheet and index template from the handy folks at blogstyles, I sat down and started hacking. I made significant changes to the 3 column CSS style and worked through the major bugs that I noticed. I'm sure there are other, less obvious bugs that I'll have to work through over the next several days. If you have trouble with the site please note your browser version and let me know. Thanks!
Posted at: 01:07 | permalink
Mon, 05 Aug 2002
Roland Tanglao Finds Some Useful CSS
Roland Tanglao has discovered some useful CSS tricks. Follow the links for even more interesting CSS design examples.
Posted at: 21:21 | permalink
Sun, 04 Aug 2002
Neil Peart's Travels On The Healing Road
I have been a huge fan of Rush drummer Neil Peart since I was a small child struggling to play paradiddles on my lonesome rubber pad. That Peart is a god amongst men in the drum world is a surpise to no one. What is not as well known is that Peart is a gifted writer and lyricist. I had picked up the latest Modern Drummer issue at Border's last night and read with great interest how Peart had returned to the kit after a dark period in which his daughter and wife were killed. My niece returned from a recent trip to Toronto with a copy of the Toronto Star which just happened to have a nice article containing a few excerpts from Peart's book, Ghost Rider: Travels On The Healing Road, also the title of one of the better tracks on Rush's recent album - Vapor Trails. The Star article reveals Peart's difficulties and his eloquence in relating them in such a deeply human way. I'll be headed out to buy the book shortly.
Posted at: 22:42 | permalink
Janis Ian on Internet and the Music Industry
In an article that I found via Sam Ruby, Janis Ian says, "Do I still believe downloading is not harming the music industry? Yes, absolutely. Do I think consumers, once the industry starts making product they want to buy, will still buy even though they can download? Yes. Water is free, but a lot of us drink bottled water because it tastes better. You can get coffee at the office, but you're likely to go to Starbucks or the local espresso place, because it tastes better. When record companies start making CD's that offer consumers a reason to buy them, as illustrated by Kevin's email at the end of this article, we will buy them. The songs may be free on line, but the CD's will taste better."
Janis nails it. I buy aquafina because that's the way god intended water to taste, I buy coffee at the local shop because office coffee is horrendous, and I bought Rush Vapor Trails at a record store because Rush is one of the few bands on the planet that honestly deserve the spoils. Why the music industry can't figure this out is beyond me.
Posted at: 20:40 | permalink
Sat, 03 Aug 2002
Alligator Caught In PA River
Somehow I doubt that this alligator is indigenous to western Pennsylvania.
Posted at: 14:57 | permalink
Fri, 02 Aug 2002
Ugo Cei Notices A Strange Coincidence
Ugo Cei has found that there's a commercial site using the same tagline as me. I haven't received any cease and desist letters so I'm assuming I'm OK. BTW, I had never seen this site before today. Really.
Posted at: 15:20 | permalink
Thu, 01 Aug 2002
Keith Ballinger responds to the Usability Debate
Keith Ballinger says, "The amount of money a programmer is paid has nothing to do with the usability or quality of the software. Winer's point (at least, the point I think he is making that if so I agree with) is that programmers need to be rewarded. They also need to survive: a house, food, and a little something to go to the movies. Money is a typical reward system and way to help people purchase those items that allow to keep from starving or freezing to death. Personally, I believe in charging for the software I create, as this creates a system of rewards that feeds back into even better software from me."
Assuming that you are motivated by money, this final statement is probably true. It's at least true to the extent that if your product is rewarded with paying customers, you can then afford to go out and hire a usability team, assuming that such a team cannot be acquired for $0. It's more true to the extent that somebody like me calls up and says, "Hey Microsoft, my company pays large sums of money for Microsoft Office, why do I have to stare at this goddamn paper clip every time I want to create a document?"
Microsoft then responds by turning a failed social interface experiment into a feigned PR opportunity. And this is why people question the ROI on Microsoft Research. Indeed, Gates credits Microsoft Research with removing Clippy: "One of the most exciting things we did was turn [Clippy] off by default," Yikes. If I was paying a sizable research team costing me billions of dollars to produce innovations like that, I think I'd be looking elsewhere for innovation. If this is what Gates refers to as innovation, I don't think free software teams with a shortage of usability people have anything to worry about. They may even have a competitive advantage because while Microsoft is off arguing about how to amuse people with paper clips, they can focus on building useful and usable software.
At the end of the piece, Keith says, "Great software produced for 0K programmers:".
Why does Keith use the phrase "great software" at the end of the piece? I know Bill has a huge influence on the folks in Redmond - I lived there - but this is ridiculous. Would the same statement be true if we substituted the phrase, "usable software"?
Keith continues, "No one expects a farmer to give away his crops. No one expects a miner to give away his ore. A software developer mines his imagination, invests his time, and produces software for the world. He should be rewarded. This can be money (my preference), but it can be many other things, including recognition and self-esteem."
Malcom Knowles said, "While adults are responsive to some extrinsic motivators (better jobs, promotions, salary increase, and the like) the more potent motivators are intrinsic motivators (the desire for increased self-esteem, quality of life, responsibility, job satisfaction, and the like)."
Increased self-esteem. It's the same thing that John Nash got from winning the Nobel Prize. I believe one of his colleagues said, "Recognition cures all ills." In the fame and fortune equation, if you remove the fortune, what you have left is fame - a huge motivator in and of itself. Why are so many people typing all these blog entries? Surely it's not because of the massive financial remuneration?
Posted at: 23:56 | permalink
