TechCrunch Pwns VentureBeat

That's some scoopage right there...

Instructables *almost* has it right

Instructables almost has it right. They are so close. The problem is that they are treating instruction as static - that it's like content that you create, post, and walk away from. That's not how it is though. Instruction changes over time, people offer alternatives, and variants, but instructables doesn't capture any of that information!

"A quiet but impressive group of big-gun, for-hire developers."

This just in: RWW reports that Pivotal Labs (which VentureBeat describes as a "quiet but impressive group of big-gun, for-hire developers.") has been hired to "fix twitter". Curious about Pivotal, I went to their site. Turns out they are a Ruby/Rails oriented group with background in Java and Smalltalk. They also have the "Pivotal Social Media Platform" socialicious which is what they are using to power most of their consulting gigs, apparently. Now that's interesting - a consulting firm that apparently retains their IP to resusable code they wrote? Weird.

Two petty injustices.

I believe that the sum total of petty injustice in the world far outwieghs the large ones that get all the attention. For every tragedy that ends lives or oppresses freedom, there are milions of smaller indignities born by millions of people every day. These injustices don't get a lot of attention, although they should. Here are two:

1. Credit Card companies defrauding card holders who traveled overseas by increasing the base exchange rate and tacking on a few points over that as well. I would not have known except for a settlement packet in the mail. There are several points of injustice here:
   
1. I didn't know about it until the case was over.
2. The case settled for $313m. That seems like a very small amount because this case covered 10 years of fraud.
3. THey make it hard to get your money.
1. Most people will get the easy pay option $25
2. However, you only get 30 days to make your claim
3. Where does the excess go?
   
4. The lawyers get 27.5% of the settlement. That's $86m. Oh, and that doesn't include expenses (which tacks on another $5m). Not a bad payout for 2 people for 6 years of work - it works out to $7.2m/year. Who are these hardworking individuals, you ask?
   
1. Bonney Sweeney, 665 West Broadway #1900, San Diego CA 92101
2. Merrill Davidoff, 1622 Locust St., Philidelphia PA 19103
   
5. The injustice here is that this kind of case should strike fear in the hearts of lenders, as in "You know Bob it's a great idea to tack on those fees, but remember the legal firestorm of 2008 when we did it last time?" ; but all that's happened is that the lenders got of very cheaply and the lawyers got a super fat payday.
2. Local law enforcement and their petty abuse of power. I've run into cops (OC Sherriffs) with bad attitudes before, who've told me off and grabbed cameras out of my hands, and generally acted like thugs. But the OC Weekly writes about an outrageous incident that happened 4 years ago. It is truly disgusting. No one got killed or seriously wounded, which is why only the OC Weekly is covering the story, and 4 years later at that. It's no less wrong just because no-one got killed. (There are a variety of letters from readers, that point out how common this kind of misbehavior is). The only remarkable thing about the incident is that the family is seeking legal recourse, and that it's getting any news coverage at all.
1. The injustice here is that police are not held to a higher standard of conduct, but rather to a lower one. Who doesn't have sympathy for police? The work is hard, the pay is crap, and you are constantly dealing with miserable people. The terminus of this trend is the kind of widespread corruption you find in Mexico, which paralyzes the entire country and keeps the people in crushing poverty. (Indeed, the oppressor in Mexico is just these myriad of petty injustices.)
2. What
   Omar Patel (the officer who's angry and confrontational attitude escalated and created the problem) fails to realize is that you don't get respect with anger and posturing. You get respect by helping people to solve their problems. An officer's mission is to serve and protect - and that doesn't mean your own ego, it means the very public you chose to assault.
   

Kung Fu Panda: Great Movie

What a great movie. It's entertaining and offers a wide variety of positive messages. Technically stunning (especially on IMAX) and a good soundtrack to boot.

Flavors of Entanglement Review

Alanis Morissette
Release: June 10, 2008

Alanis and I go way back, and I was very curious about her latest when I heard that she was going to try more electronic arrangements. She's never been afraid of technology - word was that she recorded "Jagged Little Pill" on home-studio ADAT recorders, state-of-the art for the time. Regardless, it was a revelation to the music world - here was a singer/songwriter who was bold, sexual, and angry. Her second album, "Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie" filled with interesting music and the insightful, if self-absorbed, lyrics of a young woman finding herself through repeated glotteral stops. My respect for her only went up when she released a hilarious Fergie/Humps parody, and when she revealed in an interview a fondness for Triumph motorcycles. Alanis' music is often about herself, or close observations of others, but is a record of her growing up.

"Flavors of Entanglement" is the 3rd album of hers that I own - it's the first album I've ever pre-ordered off of the iTunes store. I got a few bonus track and a special pre-order track (and those tracks are very important, as they eclipse the quality of the rest of the album!). But I also only get 128kb tracks, and no art. Not too sure about this iTunes business yet.

The first two tracks, "Citizen of the Planet" and "Underneath", are forgettable. They simply did not hold my interest. The third tack, Straitjacket, made me raise my eyebrows. A dance track? Dropping the f-bomb? The instrumentation is all saw-lead synthesizer, run through a limiter. The vocal track is heavily harmonized. Very strange. "Versions of Violence" is more of the same, although less dancable.

"Not as we", the 5th track, is more Alanis back in the "Joni Mitchell" confessional mode.

"In Praise of the Vulnerable Man" is Alanis back in "singing a letter" mode, similar to "Unsent" or "Head over Feet". But then a minute into it a saccharin backing synth that puts it more into Donna Lewis territory. I couldn't finish listening to this one.

"Moratorium" has the lyric which contains the albums name, and is a kind of eerie-sounding self-excoriation. Not bad. "I declare a moratorium on things relationship. I declare a respite from the toils of liaison." I know the feeling!

(OK, honestly I'm listening to this album as I write the review, and I'm on "Torch" and growing impatient. "Torch" is a down-tempo melancoly break-up song. I find myself wishing she would stop moaning about "missing his warmth" and start taunting him about whether or not she'd go down on him in a theater.)

"Giggling again for no reason" is a song about getting away from your life, driving down PCH without telling anyone where you're going, or even that you've gone. The content resonates with me deeply, but the music is not engaging. It's a great subject for a song, though.

I quickly skipped to the "Bonus Tracks". I'm glad I did! The 5 tracks here are uniformly better than the rest of the album. I was concerned for a bit that I'd wasted my money, but these tracks save the day! I really like "Orchid", "Madness", and "Limb No More". I could do without "On the Tequila" but it's a fun song!

Because I pre-ordered, I got a "Bonus Bonus Track", called "It's a Bitch to Grow Up". Musically, it's a good track, and the lyrics particularly resonate with me, so I'll wrap up this review with some of those lyrics:

...
It's been 33 years of restraining,
of trying to control this tumult.
...

[chorus]
I feel done.
I feel raked over coals.
All that remains is the case: that it's a bitch to grow up.

I've repeated this dance
There's still something to learn that I've not
I'm told to see that this is divine perfection
But my bones don't feel this perfection

...
I've known through the kicking and screaming
that there was no other direction to go
[chorus]

Bumping into Information

A paper from "The American Society of Information Science" is noteworthy more for the fact that it acknowledges (and indeed legitimizes) the notion that we run into information all fo the time, of the sort that we're not necessarily looking for, but which we find useful in unrelated endeavors.

Good News

http://www.fugue.com/pics/goodnews.html

RifleThru: A good use of GWT

RifleThru - an improved ebay search application, written in GWT over Apache AxKit. It shows good use of GWT for usable design, and a very light-wieght, non-Java backend used to convert eBay's XML API into JSON.

Serious problems with Fiddler

Fiddler is a very handy web developer tool written by Eric Lawrence (probably not the same Eric J Lawrence as the KCRW DJ). Fiddler is Live HTTP Headers on steroids, or Wireshark with lots of HTTP specific goodies, and it's a good reason to do web development on Windows.

However, it just doesn't want to start on my machine, and I don't know why. When I try to start it it just errors out with "Fiddler has encountered a problem and needs to close" followed by some Dr. Watson stuff.

The symptoms point to a corrupt .Net runtime, but reinstalling .Net that didn't seem to help.

Maybe if I was Mark Russinovich, the McGyver of Windows troubleshooting, I could figure it out. But I'm not.

There is no reason for anyone to use Internet Explorer

IE is a very bad browser to develop for. There are whole sites devoted to enumerating it's CSS bugs, and more sites dedicated to IE's JavaScript memory leak bugs. And there are at least 3 major browsers that anyone can use, for free, on Windows instead of IE:

• Firefox. My favorite, your favorite.
• Safari. A very nice browser, quite fast, pretty, and secure (carpet-bombing bugs notwithstanding)
  
• Opera. The little browser that could.

There are little niche browsers out there, like Flock (there are certainly other niche browsers, but I don't know about them).

And if you're gonna use IE, then at least upgrade to 7. IE 5, 5.5, and 6 are just awful.

Why don't designers and programmers just tell visitors: "look buddy, if you want to see this site, you're gonna need to ditch IE. That's life."

Because it takes balls to say something like that, and most companies don't have any. It's cheaper and easier to pay some poor schmuck big bucks to fix browser incompatibilities than it is to tell your customer that they have to take 10 minutes to install a better browser.

People like to think themselves compassionate and kind. Well, realize that by continuing to use old buggy browsers you are causing real pain and suffering for web developers. I don't see why some people would never wear fur but would continue to use IE 6.

[Update: Alex commented that changing browsers is scary. She's right. So to make it less scary I suggest that people make Firefox look like IE 6, as described here. Indeed, it would be in all web developers self-interest to make a neatly installable package that includes these changes.]

Microsoft Yahoo Google in Pictures

Yes, yes indeed.

The Google Command-Line: Goosh

This little web2.0 application "Goosh" is a command line for Google. I'm not sure if it will make it's way into my day-to-day toolset, but it does make keyboard-only navigation of google and it's search results quite painless, especially combined with tabbed browsing and the CTRL+W shortcut.

I like the CLI UI, but goosh is lacking some important features of ordinary CLIs, first and foremost piping. One important feature that would make goosh more useful would be to introduce the notion of context - in it's simplest form, to build up a search one term at a time. "Command history" would also make a lot of sense.

I'm glad to see that people are thinking outside the box, and look forward to seeing how goosh, and the inevitable copy-cats, turn out.

Some nice tips on writing sexy CSS

Jina Bolton, who's somewhat of a CSS guru it seems, writes about "sexy CSS". I liked her tips on "comment flagging" (basically making it easy to find headings within the css file), keeping author & timestamp information in the file, and some good ideas on how to organize your selectors. Interestingly, I differ with her on how she organizes her declarations: I like to keep mine ordered "naturally" - that is, as I add declarations for needed effects, they get appended to the end of the list. I like this method because it saves information about the important declarations.

She talks a little bit about css frameworks like YUI and Blueprint, but doesn't say much about them save that they are a "bit bloated" and often make the mistake of using non-semantic class names.

She also makes mention of a code convention that advocates one selector per line - a convention that I'm really fond of, and use, myself.

I am also reminded of the really great tools, like Textmate and CSSEdit that Mac users get but Windows users don't. :(

[Update: actually, it was pointed out to me that the E Text Editor is a clone of Textmate for Windows - it's even compatible with Textmate's bundles.]

Notes about the "Millennials"

Sound bites from this article about "millennials":

1. Narcissistic praise hounds.
2. Parents will phone HR departments on behalf of their kids.
   
3. Blind careerism is begining to fade.
   
4. Friends and family above work.
   
5. There's no such thing as a dream job.
   
6. Looming demographic crisis: there's a lack of people.
   
7. Boss abuse works.

Places to avoid: uBid.com

This place is really bad. I placed an order for a computer, titled "Gateway E4610 Intel Duo Core Computer DVD CDRW XP Professional"

About 30 minutes later, I read some fine print saying that this was an Pentium D CPU, not a Core Duo. I immediately canceled my order. The next business day they charged my card and shipped anyway. I contacted them twice via their support form, and never got a response.

For a variety of reasons I did not pursue this - primarily because I needed the PC fast and didn't want to fuss with all the rigmarole of a return, and it was only $278 shipped. However, I will never shop at uBid again.