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Just getting around to NY Mag's piece on The Warm-Fuzzy Web:
In this new world of nice netiquette, technology is designed to make it easier for everyone to love one another. After all, if you're not your "real self" online, how will Leighton Meester know it's you who loved her dress at the Teen Choice Awards?
Gold stars welcome on this post. After all, how else will I know that you love my oh-so-last-week link blogging?
The most favorited episode of Know Your Meme for 2009 is Keyboard Cat! The Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies presents its findings on Play Him Off Keyboard Cat, PHOKC blog, Lolcats, Lolrus, Furries and their Escalade!, charlie schmidt’s “cool cat”, Brad O’Farrell, Interview with Brad O’Farrell on Rocketboom, Play Haley Off, Keyboard Cat, Treadmill version, nunchuck version, fainting version, barbell + fish tank version, spider-man version, roof jump version, Keyboard Cat on CNN, Keyboard Cat on The Daily Show, Bill O’Reilly Advocates Keyboard Cat, Vaudeville, Historic Footage- Vaudeville Acts 1898 to 1910, keyboard cat personal life slideshow For more on internet memes and phenomena visit The MemeDB at KnowYourMeme.com
Point blank. She didn't deserve it. Photograph: Emily Jacir creating Material for a film (performance). Courtesy The Artist And Alexander And Bonin, New York [link]I offer this list without endorsement. These are simply the most withering remarks of the year. While I'm sure there are even pissier or at least equally scathing ones out there that I haven't included, these stand out. A simple web search of these writers will yield a rich crop of zingers every time, so if you are an art writer and you don't see your name here, maybe you're just not mean enough.
Top Ten Most Scathing Art Review Zingers of 2009
(in chronological order)
10. "THE NEW MET DIRECTOR WON’T LAST A YEAR. What was his name?" Artnet magazine: 2009 CRYSTAL BALL. By Charlie Finch, Jan 3, 2009
9. "There seems to be a mindlessness about his work that makes you wonder if even he knows what he is doing." NYTimes: Art in Review, JOSH SMITH 'Currents' Luhring Augustine. By Ken Johnson, Feb 27, 2009
8. "Jacir appears blind to the possibility that evil can fester in the most erudite and aesthetically inclined of souls, including, apparently, her own." -- Time Out NY: The Hugo Boss Prize 2008: Emily Jacir. By Howard Halle, Mar 5–11, 2009
7. "By contrast, Fairey's claims to questioning authority through guerrilla interventions in the public sphere are jejune. Obey Giant is now an industry, Hello Kitty with pretensions." Los Angeles Times Culture Monster: Review: Shepard Fairey at ICA Boston. By Christopher Knight, March 23, 2009
6. "Scant of surface and image, with glancing, uneasy brushwork, they imply a divided attention and a reliance on pictorial short cuts and ambiguities to disguise limited skills. Although they are some of Bacon’s best-known works, they barely pass muster as paintings." NYTimes: If Paintings Had Voices, Francis Bacon’s Would Shriek. By Roberta Smith, May 21, 2009
5. "For the most part though, the favorite artists in today’s market are dead ones. Mine, too--they are a hell of a lot easier to deal with." Artnet magazine: Dick In Hand. By Kenny Schachter, July 9, 2009
4. "Condemnations of Dash Snow as a hipster fuck-off are bound to fade away, leaving only the picture of the soul of an artist. That's how legends—-and fortunes-—get made in the art world." Gawker: Dash Snow's Basquiat-ization. By Hamilton Nolan, July 15, 2009
3. "If it feels like what 'Younger than Jesus' is really inaugurating is the era of the exhibition as status update, then maybe that alone tells us something about where we are." ARTFORUM: The Generational: Younger than Jesus. By Gene McHugh, Summer 2009
2. "But even Ms. Emin appears to have reached a point of saturation—-and, finally, the capacity to be embarrassed—-with her own oversharing." NYTimes: Quite Big in Britain, Not Quite in the U.S. By ERIC KONIGSBERG, November 13, 2009
1. "If you spend more than twenty minutes with the three-floor extravaganza, you’re loitering. The New Museum could just as well not have done the show while saying it did. The effect would be roughly the same: expressing a practically reptilian institutional craving for a new art star." The New Yorker: Putting on Urs. By Peter Schjeldahl, December 14, 2009
Filed under: Peripherals, Features, Bluetooth, iPhone, iPod touch, Jailbreak/pwnage
A few days ago, the BTStack keyboard package was released to Cydia. This package, which we posted about recently, allows owners of jailbroken iPhones to use a Bluetooth keyboard with their iPhone 3G or 3GS, or 2nd generation or later iPod touch. The package is available for US$5.00 from Cydia.
Since the iPhone was first introduced, there have been efforts to bring support for external accessories. The iPhone 3.0 external accessory framework allowing accessories that connect to the universal dock connector or use Bluetooth has been closed, and only a few companies have developed accessories using the framework. The BTStack project by Matthias Ringwald offers a more complete and open Bluetooth stack for jailbroken iPhones. The stack has even been used with an iPhone and a Wii Remote over Bluetooth. To use a Bluetooth keyboard for quick and easy data entry into your iPhone, you'll need to jailbreak your iPhone, which can be done with an application like blackra1n.
Read on to find how I set up my iPhone to use the Apple Wireless Keyboard, and how it works with the iPhone.A few days ago, the BTStack keyboard package was released to Cydia. This package, which we posted about recently, allows owners of jailbroken iPhones to use a Bluetooth keyboard with their iPhone 3G or 3GS, or 2nd generation or later iPod touch. The package is available for US$5.00 from Cydia.
Since the iPhone was first introduced, there have been efforts to bring support for external accessories. The iPhone 3.0 external accessory framework allowing accessories that connect to the universal dock connector or use Bluetooth has been closed, and only a few companies have developed accessories using the framework. The BTStack project by Matthias Ringwald offers a more complete and open Bluetooth stack for jailbroken iPhones. The stack has even been used with an iPhone and a Wii Remote over Bluetooth. To use a Bluetooth keyboard for quick and easy data entry into your iPhone, you'll need to jailbreak your iPhone, which can be done with an application like blackra1n.
Read on to find how I set up my iPhone to use the Apple Wireless Keyboard, and how it works with the iPhone.TUAWUsing a Wireless Keyboard with an iPhone using BTstack Keyboard originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 26 Dec 2009 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Being an Apple blogger must do something strange to your brain, because instead of having "visions of sugarplums" dancing in my head on Christmas morning, I was thinking about what cool features an Apple tablet could feature.
While we've heard of some of the proposed ideas -- it's supposed to be a good ebook reader, for example -- I thought of a few more things I'd like my first-generation iTablet / iSlate / iPad / iWhateverIt'sCalled to do or have:
Which one of these features would be on your short list for an Apple tablet? Vote in our poll below, and if you have any great ideas that weren't listed here, please leave them in the comments.
- A camera built into the display side of the device for iChat videoconferencing or streaming services
- Allow "multi-multitouch" so you can have several people playing a game on the display surface, all interacting at once
- Something like Autograph built-in to allow digital signing of documents
- A built-in suite of touch apps to allow limited editing and full viewing of Word / Excel / PowerPoint / Keynote / Numbers / Pages documents
- At least one display port for connecting to an HDTV or monitor
- Access to both the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook digital book libraries through iTunes
- Voice control of app launching to avoid skimming through page after page of app icons
- Dock for using the tablet with a keyboard and/or setting it up as media center (replace the Apple TV)
TUAWTUAW Poll: What features would you like to see in the Apple tablet? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 26 Dec 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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When Allan Cole and I released our WordPress theme back in November, we set the price slightly lower than we originally intended, in order to make it as affordable as possible straight out of the gate. But the response was so great that we ended up just leaving it there at US$45 — until now. As a sort of holiday special, Basic Maths is on sale through the last day of the year for 33% off the regular price, bringing it down to just US$30. That’s a terrific deal for a one of the very finest blog themes around on any platform. If you haven’t already got your copy, here’s your chance to get a great deal on it. Click here to buy.
A handful of my friends ask me periodically for fiction recommendations (usually around vacation time and holidays) and a few of the same books keep appearing on my recommendation lists, even though I try to tailor books to the reader.
It’s starting to look like I should have a handy list of them somewhere, so here’s my top 10 with a few ground rules:
Rule no 1: Recent contemporary fiction only. The book must have been published in the last decade. There’s no point in recommending Dubliners to you. I know it’s a good book. You know it’s a good book. Classic canonically respected books don’t need recommendations from anyone.
Rule no 2: Take it for granted that I think all of my friends’ books are fantastic. Because I do. You should buy them all. Those are automatic buys, so I’m purposely including only people I don’t know from Adam. (Or Paula, Sloane, etc.)
Rule no 3: Novels and short stories only. No nonfiction, creative non-fiction, or memoirs.
So here’s my list, though it’s not really in order of preference—except for maybe the St. Aubyn, which is still my favorite:
10. Typical by Padgett Powell. Credit where credit’s due: @boyfriend is responsible for this one. He recommended it to me. Having been overexposed to Southern fiction growing up (drowning in Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner) I tend not to pick up much Southern fiction at all. But Powell is worth it. His stories are tonally gothic in the way you almost expect all Southern fiction to be, but the narration is unique to Powell and the dialog is more recognizable to me as being authentically of the time and place than anything I can think of in the same settings. It’s the sort of thing you’d want to read aloud for the proper effect.
9. Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee. I like Coetzee generally, and Disgrace deserves its accolades. But I’d recommend Elizabeth Costello on a different basis. It’s straightforward critique in the guise of fiction. And it works. The protagonist is a wheelchair-bound novelist and philosopher in the last stages of her life and her story is told through a series of speeches. It’s a thoughtful, heavily layered story and upon re-reading, I always find something new that I missed.
8. Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead—a novel about a “nomenclature consultant” asked to re-brand a small town with a complex history. Colson Whitehead fans maintain that The Intuitionist and John Henry Days are better books, but I’m a sucker for the branding angle. Whitehead’s a beautifully lyrical writer and it seems almost effortless. For that, I enjoy reading his fiction even though he’s a Brooklyn writer and Brooklyn writers are almost always insufferable. Which I can say now that I’ve moved back into Manhattan. (I’m kidding… Sort of.)
7. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore. For people who haven’t had a lot of exposure to short stories (congenital novel-readers, people who “don’t have time for fiction”), I always recommend Lorrie Moore. It’s hard not to get pulled into her best stories, even if you’re otherwise disinclined. Hand any young would-be creative person a copy of “How to Be A Writer” and see if they don’t finish it. Moore is probably best known for her wit and wordplay, but I’ve always liked her for the icepick-in-the-stomach moments where her characters realize that the worst thing they feared is actually happening. The best of example of this, from another collection: “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” in Birds of America.
6. You Are Not A Stranger Here by Adam Haslett. The beginning story in this debut collection, “Notes to My Biographer,” is brilliant and moving and the first time I read it, it absolutely crushed me. Haslett has since been swallowed up by law school and is, I suppose, pursuing a primary career in that field. (A waste, I say!) But he has a novel coming out in February. I’m looking forward to it.
5. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Fair warning: Don’t read this one without a bottle of Prozac handy. It’s brutal and devastating. It’s an epistolary novel written from the viewpoint of a mother whose son kills several of his classmates. She wrestles with her ambivalence as a mother and whether it contributed to her son’s behavior as well as her beliefs about the nature of evil. It’s incredibly well done. Shriver is such a gifted writer. This one gets the award for Worst Book Cover, though. The paperback cover makes it look like some sort of feel-good-y women’s fiction book, and it’s dark (as it in pitch-black), violent and disturbing. But holy crap, is it good.
4.The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq. I have a love/hate relationship with Houellebecq, but he never bores me. I think he categorically overuses unconventional sexuality for provocation in way that seems—to me, at least—easy and cliched, but there’s always a larger idea at work that deserves some exploration. In The Elementary Particles (the alternate title was Atomized) he uses the sex lives of his characters as vehicles for some interesting ideas about the nature of humanity—scientifically, culturally and spiritually. To employ another cliche, it’s a “big idea novel.” And a good one.
3. Vernon God Little by D.B.C. Pierre. This was the surprise winner of the 2003 Booker. It was written an Australian under a pen name, and it’s about a working class public school kid in small town Texas whose best friend, Jesus, goes on a Columbine-style shooting spree. Given that, it seems awkward to suggest that it’s funny, but it is. It’s also heartbreaking. The character has no real family except his self-absorbed mother who uses bribes from national media people for interviews about her son to buy things she can show off to her friends. Michiko Kakutani hated it because she thought it was condescending to working class Southerners (how dare that Australian!) As someone who actually grew up in a working class Southern family and town, I’d say it is hands-down the best satire/indictment of Southern materialism I’ve seen in contemporary literature to date. I feel a bit weird that this is the second book I’m recommending that involves a high school massacre, especially given that it’s not exactly a common plot point, but the two books have nothing in common otherwise. Don’t choose one over the other. Read them both.
2. Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders. Saunders is another writer I’d recommend All Of. He only writes short stories and far fewer of them than I’d like. This collection contains seven stories, all of which are funny, a bit surreal and focus on the essential fucked-up-ness of modern life. A sampling of features from the Amazon page: “a field full of braying mules toppled over from bone marrow disease; a tourist attraction featuring pickled stillborn babies; and cows with Plexiglas windows in their sides.” Saunders has a unique vernacular that is all his own stylistically, and people who don’t like him enjoy referring to it as “gimmicky”. To which I say, gimmicky is fine if the gimmick is original. And it is here. (See also, Joshua Ferris.) The gimmick only begins to seem unoriginal when people copy it—and there are a lot of ersatz George Saunderses out there. I attribute this to the fact that Saunders is one of the most imaginative writers we have right now and some people mistake replicating style and tone for replicating creativity. But you can’t really replicate George Saunders.
1. Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn. If I’ve never given you a book recommendation before and you ask me, I’ll probably start with this. It’s a scathing, acerbic novel about a young family (told from several viewpoints, including that of Robert, the five-year-old son)—plutocrats in decline—visiting the protagonist’s mother, who’s been seduced by a New Age guru. It’s nasty and witty and I wish my writing were even a fraction as sharp. St. Aubyn’s fairly well-known in Europe, but less so here. I think I read somewhere that he hates this comparison, but he reminds me very much of Evelyn Waugh—especially the darker novels, including my favorite, A Handful of Dust. I could in good conscience recommend everything he’s written but most of his books are unavailable here. I should also mention his trilogy Some Hope, which is published by Open City and is available here, is to date the most-frequently-lended-and-least-frequently-returned book in my library. Which means I’ve bought fifty or so copies of it. (You’re welcome, royalty-earning author!) And people who read it tend to like it—so much so that they keep it forever.
When I think of my own writerly models, I think primarily of Kurt Andersen, for various reasons. But St. Aubyn’s writing is a close second.
So that’s my list.
What? No Roth? No Bellow? No Didion? Not even a Mary Gaitskill?
Look, I like their books. But the ones above are more memorable to me, in part because there was something about each one of them that seemed new when I read them. I have eleven or twelve Philip Roth books on my shelf and at some point they become indistinct from each other and the rest of my library. I’d recommend Roth in general but not in the way that makes you grab someone by the arm and say, “you have to take a look at this.”
Also: Four of these are short story collections, which are hard to sell and tend to have less longevity than full-length novels, so I have a bit of bias in promoting them. And their lack of commercial appeal is a shame, because there are so many interesting short story writers out there, and you’d think that in the age of shrinking attention spans, short stories would be more popular. I hope that in the future they will be.
Sometimes kids start to think Santa Claus isn’t real because they wonder how the elves could possibly have the competence to make every toy, all in one workshop. It seems implausible, but that’s how it really happens. Basically, Foxconn (yes, that Foxconn) makes everything: Macbooks, Kindles, PS3s, Xboxes, if it has a plug, and you want it, Foxconn probably builds it.
And yet, when the WSJ et al write those ‘Which company won Christmas’ stories, Foxconn is never mentioned. Search the WSJ or the NYT. Not visible. Maybe the journos have some sort of pact to keep the elves’ workshop secret. Santa Claus lives at the East Pole.
Sometimes kids start to think Santa Claus isn’t real because they wonder how the elves could possibly have the competence to make every toy, all in one workshop. It seems implausible, but that’s how it really happens. Basically, Foxconn (yes, that Foxconn) makes everything: Macbooks, Kindles, PS3s, Xboxes, if it has a plug, and you want it, Foxconn probably builds it.
And yet, when the WSJ et al write those ‘Which company won Christmas’ stories, Foxconn is never mentioned. Search the WSJ or the NYT. Not visible. Maybe the journos have some sort of pact to keep the elves’ workshop secret. Santa Claus lives at the East Pole.
Exercise 4-13. Write a function reverse(s) which reverses the string s by turning the mind inside out, converting madness into reality and opening the door to allow the Old Ones to creep forth once more from their sunken crypt beyond time.
My father's been working on a book for a long time. A fictional novel with large dashes of memoir about a man, his dog, the Vietnam war, and tales of San Francisco while he plays piano at the Top of The Mark.
I'd been reading and listening to parts of the book for the past year. When Dad was finally ready to let us take a peek at the finished work, he gave me a binder-bound copy, and asked me to read it and let him know what suggestions I had. I started making my editor's notes in the margin. Halfway into making notes, an idea: somehow, Dad needed a hardbound copy of his book.
Cajoling him into sending me the electronic copy in Word was the hardest part. When TypePad did a holiday cross-promo with Blurb, who make books out of your blog (and just about anything else) I knew I had the final piece of the puzzle. Then came the next hardest part: editing the damn thing. All 400+ pages.
I have a newfound respect for editors. Knowing when to cut a word, when to rephrase a paragraph: when does the author's work end and the editor's begin? I stuck to the essentials: correcting a sentence structure here, a continuity error there. Added artwork and reformatted and noodled around with the page layout. The first time I loaded the whole thing into BookSmart, the software choked and crashed: too much text. It was pure joy, though, to work with the book. It reminded me of using Pagemaker and blog templates all rolled in one.
It was coming down to the wire for Christmas delivery, and it looked like the book wouldn't get sent on time to SF. Fortunately, Padraic, the Blurb staff person on duty pulled some magic out of his hat and somehow rerouted the book to be delivered to my parents' house on December 24th. As a fellow customer service person, I've got to give Padraic a huge shout-out for being awesome and going out of his way to help. Rock out, dude.
The DC area, of course, was recently walloped with unexpected amounts of snow, and after four or five increasingly frantic calls to FedEx, Dad's book wasn't on the truck. It was sitting in the warehouse only a few miles away. All that work for it to just to sit until after Christmas? If it were any other present, it wouldn't be a big deal, but this was THE GIFT. I couldn't just give Dad some socks after all that.
I drove to the warehouse, put on my sweetest smile, and made it clear I was. not. leaving. Politely and clearly: please help me. I know it's Christmas, you must be going crazy, everyone's got a problem and they're rude and annoying and UGH working on the holiday, there's no reason you should help me, but: please. Please help.
It must be good customer service karma that I've put out into the universe, because two hours later I was tearing into THE box in a frozen parking lot. Hoping and praying that the book turned out as well as I hoped it would.
As the final present under the tree, after a year of ups, downs, and sideways, after changes and sadness and joy and not a lot of money for gifts, the evidence:
My dear darling Daddy: speechless for the first time ever.
The proud author.
He's still out in the living room reading through his lovely, lovely book.
May your days be merry and bright, may you get your own gifts you didn't even know you wanted, and may each of you have the joy of giving someone you love something completely freakin' awesome.
Shake Shack Snowman.
Who wouldn't want Franni Franken's recipe for butternut squash?
Politicians have long sent out holiday cards fraught with meaning or smacking of reelection desires.
But with technology getting better every year, the offerings have improved to be a bit zanier, and a lot more personal.
From the Franken family's list of Thanksgiving favorites to posed photos, TPMDC collected a random sample of the funniest, wackiest and sweetest political holiday greetings we've seen so far and we're sharing them with you below.
If you've seen some we've missed, let us know and we'll post them this week.
• Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was abundant with cheer, if giving somewhat mixed messages.
Her email began with "Happy Holidays" in the subject line.
The header of the card is Season's Greetings, and the body offers, "Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Blessed New Year."
• In a bit of strange holiday sharing, Senate candidate Marco Rubio in Florida tweets a photo of his family's Christmas eve pig."Warning picture not for the faint of heart," he added.
• Rep. Kendrick Meek, attempting to win the Democratic nomination in the Florida governor's race, told his supporters his family "went green this year" with an online holiday card.
There's the pet angle this staffer used to raise money for the DCCC.
• Rep. John Dingell and wife Debbie sent this card with their best Santa Claus pose.
• In Chris Dodd's case, it's a nearly illegible handwritten note and a cute family photo.
• Sen. Kit Bond pushed his political message against the administration's spending plans in a video set to limerick.
• And don't forget Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL), who used the same rhyme to go after Republicans on the Senate floor this week.
• Rep. Keith Ellison was in the spirit, joining health care carolers this week to the tune of "Jingle Bells."
• Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), prominent in the health care debate, opens up about her family Christmas cards, sharing with supporters an album dating back to 2002.
"May you and your family enjoy this holiday season and forever treasure the relationships that you share," she writes, in a card signed "Steve, Blanche, Reece and Bennett."
• In their email to Franken supporters, Franni declares, "Thanksgiving at our house is all about the food."She shares the family's favorite recipes, and hearkens back to the similar and successful 2007 campaign attempt.
"While some of you may have tried these in the past, our list of supporters has grown so much since then, we wanted to send them out again for everyone to enjoy," she said.
Franni said she would change it up, but "Al has already informed me that changing the Thanksgiving menu is NOT change he can believe in."
On the list are AUNT CARLA'S PUMPKIN CORNBREAD, THOMASIN'S ROASTED BUTTERNUT SQUASH, FRANNI'S PUREED BUTTERNUT SQUASH, AL'S WILD RICE STUFFING and a bonus - the FRANKEN FAMILY POST-THANKSGIVING TURKEY SANDWICH.
• The DSCC offers Democrats helpful tips for battling combative relatives "from the farthest right branches of your family tree" around the holiday table.Their political email offers fictional quotes from Aunt Bertha, Uncle Frank and Cousin Larry about death panels, Medicare and global warming, and gives Democrats a "cribsheet" of policy talking points "that's easy to refer to under the tablecloth or during a well-earned bathroom break."
"Your Republican relatives will be rendered speechless," the DSCC writes.
• And in the odd category, Rep. Joe Wilson of "You Lie!" fame used Christmas as an excuse to collect email addresses.His wife Roxanne said she wanted to add supporters to the Wilson family Christmas card list and directed them to a Web site where they could fill in their contact information - including a phone number for text messages, presumably of the more than Happy New Year variety.
• The DNC used the 13 million-strong Organizing for America list to blast out a personalized video greeting starring staffers and supporters from all over the country.The video (mine here) closes with President Obama signing a "personalized" card to the viewer thanks to some new technology.
A source told TPMDC the site with the personalized videos received 5 million visits in its first week. Supporters have sent more than 1 million videos to their friends.
• There also is Senate candidate Sue Lowden (R-NV):
• Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and wife Elizabeth:
Special thanks to TPM intern Amber van Natten for helping gather these images.
Shared by EveCaffe Trieste: The venerable North Beach coffeehouse's fifth Bay Area location opened on Oakland's Piedmont Avenue in the waning days of summer and wasted no time becoming a neighborhood hangout. Open from dawn to nearly midnight, Trieste dishes up a steady...
tim look at the byline. That weasel?
We have a bunch of holiday weekend stories going up later this afternoon. But this is one of my favorites, just because it brings back some fun memories. Here are the ten most popular TPM stories of 2009 -- as judged by page views.
In most cases, that means these are stories that were popular on TPM and then 'went viral', as the phrase goes, off the site. So they tend to be the quick 'gets' that people pass around to each other by email and social networking sites.
The top stories was viewed 362,300 times. And counting.
Take a stroll down TPM Memory Lane.
A week ago I decided to finally get serious about putting gearman to use for search indexing. I had been batting the idea around in my head for a long time (too long, really) but figured I should just write the code and see what happens. It took less than a day to get a prototype working in our development environment, but the end result made me very happy.
Today, in our production deployment, when a sphinx cluster pulls new content to index, the master does all the work. It fetches the new and changed postings, massages them into the XML format that sphinx expects (and makes a lot of small changes along the way), invokes the indexer, and makes the new indexes available for the slaves. The second step is usually the most CPU intensive. Processing the raw data into XML involves a lot of other tweaks and changes that are very specific to Criagslist.
What I did was turn that into a gearman client/worker pair. The client (or master) simply submits processing tasks and then waits for each of them to complete. The workers fetch the data from the master, transform it, and make the transformed data available. When each task completes, the master grabs the transformed data an informs the worker that it can delete the file.
So instead of being stuck at using only the 4 CPU cores on a single box, I can run 4 workers on each of 3 machines and get 12 CPU cores involved. The end result is that I have a solid foundation for a system that can easily scale to many machines. AH-HA! Linear scaling rocks! So does relatively seamless distributed computing.
As time allows I'll have to work on deploying this in production.
(comments)
Isn’t it interesting that Tumblr and FourSquare are NYC’s major contributions to social software in the past couple years? I have a theory! They share this commonality: they’re both semi-closed networks. To wit: Though wildly successful, both platforms still somehow feel clubby and insidery. In the long run, it will be interesting to see if this distinct (dare I say New Yorky?) quality is a feature or a bug. (Before I lived in NYC, I had a name for social software like FourSquare’s predecessor, Dodgeball. I called it “NewYorkWare” because those apps seemed specifically made for the hyper-urban. Similarly, Tumblr seems made for the hyper-mediated.) via www.mediaite.com
Yes it has been quiet here this month. That's because we have been deep in negotiations with the Mets front office about our seats for next year. Apparently, unless you are a backup catcher or a Japanese reliever, the Mets aren't doing deals right now.
At the moment, we have canceled our plan for next year. If the Mets don't improve our location in Shea Field, twelve fans who have held Met tickets for 25 years will not be returning. We hope the Mets are willing to work with us.
Meanwhile, Merry Christmas to all and to all a Ray Knight!
Sometimes mediocre encryption is better than strong encryption, and sometimes no encryption is better still.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Iraqi, and possibly also Afghan, militants are using commercial software to eavesdrop on U.S. Predators, other unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, and even piloted planes. The systems weren't "hacked" -- the insurgents can’t control them -- but because the downlink is unencrypted, they can watch the same video stream as the coalition troops on the ground.
The naive reaction is to ridicule the military. Encryption is so easy that HDTVs do it -- just a software routine and you're done -- and the Pentagon has known about this flaw since Bosnia in the 1990s. But encrypting the data is the easiest part; key management is the hard part. Each UAV needs to share a key with the ground station. These keys have to be produced, guarded, transported, used and then destroyed. And the equipment, both the Predators and the ground terminals, needs to be classified and controlled, and all the users need security clearance.
The command and control channel is, and always has been, encrypted -- because that's both more important and easier to manage. UAVs are flown by airmen sitting at comfortable desks on U.S. military bases, where key management is simpler. But the video feed is different. It needs to be available to all sorts of people, of varying nationalities and security clearances, on a variety of field terminals, in a variety of geographical areas, in all sorts of conditions -- with everything constantly changing. Key management in this environment would be a nightmare.
Additionally, how valuable is this video downlink is to the enemy? The primary fear seems to be that the militants watch the video, notice their compound being surveilled and flee before the missiles hit. Or notice a bunch of Marines walking through a recognizable area and attack them. This might make a great movie scene, but it's not very realistic. Without context, and just by peeking at random video streams, the risk caused by eavesdropping is low.
Contrast this with the additional risks if you encrypt: A soldier in the field doesn't have access to the real-time video because of a key management failure; a UAV can't be quickly deployed to a new area because the keys aren't in place; we can't share the video information with our allies because we can't give them the keys; most soldiers can't use this technology because they don't have the right clearances. Given this risk analysis, not encrypting the video is almost certainly the right decision.
There is another option, though. During the Cold War, the NSA's primary adversary was Soviet intelligence, and it developed its crypto solutions accordingly. Even though that level of security makes no sense in Bosnia, and certainly not in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is what the NSA had to offer. If you encrypt, they said, you have to do it "right."
The problem is, the world has changed. Today's insurgent adversaries don't have KGB-level intelligence gathering or cryptanalytic capabilities. At the same time, computer and network data gathering has become much cheaper and easier, so they have technical capabilities the Soviets could only dream of. Defending against these sorts of adversaries doesn't require military-grade encryption only where it counts; it requires commercial-grade encryption everywhere possible.
This sort of solution would require the NSA to develop a whole new level of lightweight commercial-grade security systems for military applications — not just office-data "Sensitive but Unclassified" or "For Official Use Only" classifications. It would require the NSA to allow keys to be handed to uncleared UAV operators, and perhaps read over insecure phone lines and stored in people's back pockets. It would require the sort of ad hoc key management systems you find in internet protocols, or in DRM systems. It wouldn't be anywhere near perfect, but it would be more commensurate with the actual threats.
And it would help defend against a completely different threat facing the Pentagon: The PR threat. Regardless of whether the people responsible made the right security decision when they rushed the Predator into production, or when they convinced themselves that local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, or when they forgot to update their Bosnia-era threat analysis to account for advances in technology, the story is now being played out in the press. The Pentagon is getting beaten up because it's not protecting against the threat — because it's easy to make a sound bite where the threat sounds really dire. And now it has to defend against the perceived threat to the troops, regardless of whether the defense actually protects the troops or not. Reminds me of the TSA, actually.
So the military is now committed to encrypting the video ... eventually. The next generation Predators, called Reapers -- Who names this stuff? Second-grade boys? -- will have the same weakness. Maybe we’ll have encrypted video by 2010, or 2014, but I don't think that's even remotely possible unless the NSA relaxes its key management and classification requirements and embraces a lightweight, less secure encryption solution for these sorts of situations. The real failure here is the failure of the Cold War security model to deal with today's threats.
This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.
The place to talk about gaming and - pretty much anything else, too. Happy Christmas!
The Christmas edition of Chatterbox. Happy Christmas!
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The Three Laws of iPhone apps:
An app must not allocate memory or, through inaction, allow memory to be allocated.
An app must obey all didReceiveMemoryWarnings given to it by the system, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
An app must continue to run and not crash as long as such running does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Commentary...
#1 is a bit stringent, but it’s always worth keeping in mind as a paradisiacal condition to strive for, however impossible.
With #2 there shouldn’t be such a conflict, obviously. But possibly worth spelling out anyway.
#3 seems to be just right.
But #1 is my favorite, the one I keep replaying in my head.
Are there any non-geeks in the audience? If so, allow me to point to the Three Laws of Robotics.
Update 12:12 am: I’ve had some questions about this. Obviously, you have to allocate memory. To suggest you shouldn’t is pure hyperbole. My point is just that allocating memory is expensive, and sometimes it can be avoided.
When you run into trouble, use Shark and Instruments to find out what’s going on.
Filed under: Software, Freeware, Developer, iPhone, App Store
HBO has released their very own app for the iPhone, and it's surprisingly deep for an app released by a premium cable channel. There's the obvious stuff -- you can view schedules and watch clips and previews of HBO shows as well as behind-the-scenes and other content. But there's even some cool iPhone-specific stuff, like creating SMS reminders when your shows come on, some hidden object games to play, and even the option to buy some shows with hooks straight into iTunes. The app is designed pretty well, too, and for an app that's basically promoware, there's a lot of content and features included.
It's very well done -- if you don't have HBO, you probably won't need the app, but if you are a subscriber with an iPhone or iPod touch, it's well worth the free download.
[via Aaron H.]TUAWHBO releases iPhone app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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There's growing sentiment on the left--most recently evinced by SEIU President Andy Stern and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman--that the Senate's quiet acceptance of the filibuster--and therefore a 60 vote threshold for most legislation--is dangerous to the country's ability to govern itself, no matter who's in power. Well, they may have a powerful new ally.
"[A]s somebody who served in the Senate, who values the traditions of the Senate, who thinks that institution has been the world's greatest deliberative body, to see the filibuster rule, which imposes a 60-vote supermajority on legislation - to see that invoked on every single piece of legislation, during the course of this year, is unheard of," says President Obama in a yet-to-air interview with PBS.
I mean, if you look historically back in the '50s, the '60s, the '70s, the '80s - even when there was sharp political disagreements, when the Democrats were in control for example and Ronald Reagan was president - you didn't see even routine items subject to the 60-vote rule.So I think that if this pattern continues, you're going to see an inability on the part of America to deal with big problems in a very competitive world, and other countries are going to start running circles around us. We're going to have to return to some sense that governance is more important than politics inside the Senate. We're not there right now.
Obama even suggested that the filibuster, as it's currently being employed, harms democracy.
Look, the fact of the matter is, is that if used prudently, then I don't think it's harmful for our democracy," Obama said. "It's not being used prudently right now. And my hope would be that whether a Sen. is in the majority or is in the minority, that they're starting to get a sense, after looking at this year, that this can't be the way that government runs."
Some might like a firmer statement than that. But everything's gotta start somewhere. For instance, that's slightly different from what Obama was saying earlier this month.
These days you need 60 votes for everything because of the filibuster, which it used to be was applied rarely, but now the opposition just evokes it for everything. I mean, you can be -- try to pass a bill to rename a post office, and they'll say, no, we need 60 votes for that and we need two weeks of debate [...] You know, sometimes it gives you a headache just thinking about it, but, look, that's democracy. That's part of what makes our government stable is, is it's not easy to get anything done. But it's also what makes it frustrating when we have emergency situations.Then came the triple health care filibuster. You can read the entire exchange below.
MR. LEHRER: How do you feel about the way the 60-vote filibuster rule has been employed on the health-care debate?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I am very frustrated.
I think that right now that's the way things are operating. And we've had to make sure that we fight through those issues. I think Harry Reid has done a very good job grinding it out.
But as somebody who served in the Senate, who values the traditions of the Senate, who thinks that institution has been the world's greatest deliberative body, to see the filibuster rule, which imposes a 60-vote supermajority on legislation - to see that invoked on every single piece of legislation, during the course of this year, is unheard of.
I mean, if you look historically back in the '50s, the '60s, the '70s, the '80s - even when there was sharp political disagreements, when the Democrats were in control for example and Ronald Reagan was president - you didn't see even routine items subject to the 60-vote rule.
So I think that if this pattern continues, you're going to see an inability on the part of America to deal with big problems in a very competitive world, and other countries are going to start running circles around us. We're going to have to return to some sense that governance is more important than politics inside the Senate. We're not there right now.
MR. LEHRER: Is there anything you can do about this as president of the United States? Isn't it a Senate situation?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: It is a - it is a matter of Senate rules. Look, the fact of the matter is, is that if used prudently, then I don't think it's harmful for our democracy. It's not being used prudently right now. And my hope would be that whether a Sen. is in the majority or is in the minority, that they're starting to get a sense, after looking at this year, that this can't be the way that government runs.
And one of the things that I think Democrats and Republicans have to constantly do is try to put themselves in the other person's shoes. If we had a Republican president right now and a Republican-controlled Senate, and Democrats were doing some of these things, they'd be screaming bloody murder. And at some point, you know, I think the American people want to see government solve problems, not just engage in the gamesmanship that has become so customary in Washington.
Hilton Als
Cate Blancett as Blanche Dubois (Lisa Tomasetti/Brooklyn Academy of Music)At one point during Blanche’s final mad scene in the Sydney Theater Company’s much discussed revival of Tennessee Williams’s modern-day masterwork, which just concluded its sold-out run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a woman sitting across the row from me began to sob uncontrollably. Despite her obvious pain, she could not look away from the stage’s brightly lit scene of daytime disaster. One wondered about the source of that spectator’s tears. Was it the sight of Blanche being led to her dark future, her sister Stella’s flush cheeked confusion, or both?
You might recall the moment: Stella has just had a baby. Returning home from the hospital, she sets about restoring order to her home. First things first. She commits her older sister to a mental institution. Stella, it seems, cannot live with this truth: that Stanley, her husband, has raped Blanche. Stella prefers to treat Blanche’s report as further proof of her madness. The new mother loves her sister, but she loves her life more. If she believed any aspect of what Blanche had to say, she’d have to leave Stanley, and forego those aspects of her existence that Blanche envies — and has contempt for. Without a man, though, who would Stella be? Her marriage defines her. To divorce Stanley would mean she’d probably end up as her sister’s custodian, thereby becoming another member of the pitiful, powerless female world Blanche is a member of.
But as Williams makes clear about half way through his 1947 drama, Stella would never dream of leaving Stanley. His crude, working class demeanor degrades the memory of his wife’s genteel upbringing in Mississippi. (“I pulled you down off those columns.”) As a result, Stanley makes Stella feel alive, turned on, present. And in order not to forfeit that feeling, Stella is complicit in her own brutalization, and, ultimately, her sister’s. In fact, Blanche matters less to Stella than her future as a happily conventional woman, dutifully attending to her home, and honoring her husband.
Relatively few feminists have yet to articulate—sans ideology — the ways in which some women may find stereotypical male behavior necessary, if only to act out its supposed counterpart, “femininity.” Part of Williams’s genius, of course, was to recognize this dynamic, and to not overstate it. Still, the playwright’s sensitivity to character—and to female characters in particular—was little appreciated, if not misconstrued and ultimately dismissed altogether, when Mary McCarthy reviewed the show in 1948. In her piece, the writer more or less characterizes Williams as a mincing faggot, dramaturgically speaking, thus unqualified to write about heterosexual lives except as a kind of pornographer. But McCarthy doesn’t stop there; she goes on to equate Williams with his delusional heroine, saying that, as a writer, he seems “addicted to the embroidery lie.”
In the end, McCarthy’s distaste for Williams’s work is not unlike Stanley’s for Blanche’s dreams. Nevertheless, McCarthy was criticizing the play for what it isn’t, which is to say Ibsen-inspired realism; in fact, Blanche’s famous claim that “I don’t want realism, I want magic!” was a cry against the stodgy, realist, and I might add heterocentric theatrical style of the time. (The men in Arthur Miller’s post-war world, for instance, are never without long-suffering wives who put their husbands first.) But McCarthy doesn’t much like Blanche, either. The critic takes after her with the single-mindedness of a misogynistic homophobe. McCarthy writes: “The thin sleazy stuff,” of Blanche’s character “must be embellished by Mr. Williams with all sorts of arty decorations,” because, in McCarthy’s view, there’s so little to Blanche. She even finds Blanche’s backstory frustratingly contrived, saying: “It is not enough that [Blanche] should be a drunkard (this in itself is plausible); she must also be a notorious libertine who has been run out of a small town like a prostitute, a thing absolutely inconceivable for a woman to whom conventionality is the end of existence.”
But part of Blanche’s tragedy is that even though she tries on conventionality when she takes up with Mitch, it doesn’t fit: her intelligence and status as a defiant outsider keep getting in the way. (Stanley and Mitch’s horror and fascination with Blanche’s sexuality is a kind of trope; what really frightens and excites them is her very individual way of seeing things. Blanche can comment on her femininity even as she tries to exploit it. But she knows when she can’t turn the trick, either. Blanche to Stanley: “I cannot imagine any witch of a woman casting a spell over you.”)
Perhaps McCarthy, like Stanley and Mitch, was ultimately too uncomfortable with Blanche’s queerness. She is unmarried, but she has loved. She has no money, no property, and no social equity, and yet her memories of the boys she took to her breast are a kind of sustenance, too. Williams lets us in on Blanche’s difference by degrees, and by having her speak a recognizably gay language. Queer talk from a queer artist about a queer woman. Blanche to Stella: “I don’t know how much longer I can turn the trick. It isn’t enough to be soft.” Blanche to the Young Man she’d like to trick with: “I’m not a conventional person, and I’m so—restless today….” Blanche to Mitch about her dead gay husband: “There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s, although he wasn’t the least bit effeminate looking—still—that thing was there….He came to me for help. I didn’t know that I didn’t find out anything till after our marriage when we’d run away and come back and all I knew was I’d failed him in some mysterious way and wasn’t able to give the help he needed but couldn’t speak of!” Blanche is the forerunner of certain other Williams characters in his gallery of difference.
There is some Blanche in Brinda, the black woman who must endure the crude advances of a white nurse who feels he can treat her badly because she’s black in Williams’s long 1964 story, “Mama’s Old Stucco House.” Blanche’s affectations are less modified in Candy Delaney, from the writer’s 1970 play, “And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens….” She is also part of the spirit Williams expresses through his verse in his 1966 play, “The Mutilated”: I THINK THE STRANGE, THE CRAZED, THE QUEER / WILL HAVE THEIR HOLIDAY THIS YEAR / AND FOR A WHILE, A LITTLE WHILE, THERE WILL BE PITY FOR THE WILD. A MIRACLE, A MIRACLE! A SANCTUARY FOR THE WILD.”
In “Streetcar,” Blanche is partly undone by the gossip Stanley spreads about her. He tells Mitch about all the men and boys his sister-in-law’s slept with in her hometown, and how she was suspended from her job teaching high school English. Mitch, feeling duped, goes over to the Kowalskis’ and confronts Blanche. He then tries to sleep with her. Why not? She’s cheap goods. To get rid of him, Blanche threatens to scream fire. Given that Mitch is her last hope of ever escaping Stanley and Stella’s home and living a “respectable” life, Blanche should be hysterical for the rest of the play. But under Liv Ullman’s direction, Cate Blanchett doesn’t vibrate with the kind of intensity and need for acceptance that one generally associates with an outsider. Instead, Blanchett’s Blanche tries to engage with, or defy, the male members of the Kowalski-centered community. Ullman and Blanchett’s Blanche is entirely too sturdy a woman. She’s an intellectually superior being who doesn’t so much engage with her sister as lecture her. Ullman uses her vulnerability to advance the plot; in the process, she doesn’t add anything especially insightful to our understanding of Blanche, and seems to find humor in her nearly indefatigable need to connect.
The actors traverse the large set with little ease, and certainly no understanding of the thick New Orleans atmosphere that Williams insinuates into the action of the play like a minor but important character. Under Ullman’s direction, the Kowalskis’ suffocating apartment is just one more prop, like one of Blanche’s summer furs; Ullman never infuses the rooms with a sense of foreboding, or dread. This is obvious from the moment Blanche arrives. Stella and Stanley aren’t there; their landlady and neighbor, Eunice, shows Blanche in. As Eunice chatters on, Blanche rudely cuts her off. But instead of exhibiting a mix of emotions—gratitude, her own wretchedness—she merely barks at the proprietress, like a drill sergeant. Left alone, the errant schoolteacher spies a bottle of liquor and takes a big, hearty gulp, again less out of a feeling of desperation than as a way of quenching her thirst.
Enter Joel Edgerton as Stanley Kolwalski. While Edgerton stresses—as he must—Kowalski’s physical appeal he, like the rest of the cast (Robin McLeavy’s Stella Kowalski is especially weak; her Stella sounds and acts like an emotionally underwhelmed schoolgirl) shrinks in relation to Blanchett’s star wattage, her air of unvanquished health. Still, Edgerton doesn’t act with any real sense of urgency; he keeps close to Williams’s text while trying not to mimic Marlon Brando, who still owns the part.
One requires a Brando-like intensity to play Blanche, but Blanchett doesn’t yet seem to possess the kind of imagination that understands degradation; she is too competitive a spirit to grovel where Blanche has groveled in order to stay alive. In fact, the moments leading up to Blanche’s rape—the cutting of the final chord of reality—rang especially false, because Blanchett plays it as though Blanche is drunk, confused, fitful, and not as a willing female victim to Stanley’s male need for control; she is ultimately relegated to the life of tragic mundanity she has tried so valiantly to escape, while Stella runs towards it.
Several weeks ago, I put together a seat-of-my-pants promotion called One Finger Discount. Over the course of a week, I facilitated the listing of software being offered at a 20% discount for a limited time. I did this because I was inspired to leverage the enthusiasm for software generated by MacHeist into something that might also benefit many other developers.
The response was so overwhelming, that a day into the promotion I realized I would not be getting much work done. I spent most of the following week keeping up with new additions to the promotion, and trying to update the web site to be more useful and attractive. I worked my butt off and didn’t take a penny from any of the participating developers. It just felt great to be doing something and getting the word out about smaller software shops.
When the promotion was over, I got a few really heartwarming notes of thanks from various developers who had taken part. I also ended up selling quite a bit more software last month than I do in ordinary months. Word from developers was that they had likewise seen significantly improved sales. We all win!
Today, with memories of One Finger Discount fading, I was busy coding away on MarsEdit, when my wife knocks on the door with an important looking envelope. Air mail from Canada? Hmm, what could it be? I recognized the name on the envelope as Dan Messing of Stunt Software, a friend of mine and fellow indie developer. Inside, I found two cards:
A thank you card? But what had I done for Dan lately? Even the tell-tale white hearts on pink didn’t clue me in that it was One Finger Discount related. It wasn’t until I opened the Thank You card, and noticed that it was in fact a 10 page booklet containing dozens and dozens of personal thank you messages from a large number of One Finger participants:
Holy cow! How touching that Dan (with help from my podcasting cohort Manton Reece, and my wife) managed to collect so many notes of thanks from so many participants. This was truly an accomplishment, and a greatly appreciated one. Thank you Dan, Manton, and Chrissa for your parts in organizing this. This alone is quite a payback for the hours I spent laboring to make One Finger Discount the success it turned out to be.
And the other card in that envelope? Each developer who had graciously agreed to send a personal note of thanks had also chipped in some cash and sent me the largest Amazon gift card I have ever seen! If you ever wondered whether $700 was enough gift to convey your heartfelt thanks, the answer is yes, yes, yes! Thank you so much to each and every developer who took part in this thrilling and inspiring gesture.
It’s great to be reminded that there are so many generous and thoughtful people in the world, and in our community. Sometimes you may feel that your deeds are going unthanked or unnoticed, but the old cliché that “what you give comes back to you” is true on many levels, and it may surprise you the ways it finds of doing so.
Thanks again, everybody!
It's Jenni and I have some more favorites off The Noughtie List. I'm still accepting any "best of the 2000s" lists you happen to find, just email me. If you missed any past highlights, check out part 1 and part 2.
New York Magazine invited a select few to design covers for the 00's issue. In the end, they chose one for the newsstand, one for subscribers and now have all the submissions online to view. The gallery includes photos showing the creative process of Todd St. John, who built a wooden sculpture of 00's for the subscription cover.
Horror movies are generally not that great, but this list reminded me there are some worth having potential nightmares over. (Thanks Jon!) Anyone who hasn't seen the number one movie, should definitely watch it. For those with Netflix, it's available to stream instantly. If you're looking for something more themed for this week's festivities, AMC has a list of the best holiday movies.
Christian Annyas lists movie title stills of the 2000s in his very thorough collection. It made me realize how many movies still opt for the black screen with white type. Which in turn made me more curious about the art of the title sequence.
Tags: The 2000s
Michael Tomasky
Thursday night—Christmas Eve, that is, just after 7 p.m.—the United States Senate will do something it’s never done and pass a bill that aims for broad reforms of America’s private health-insurers (it also delivers them 30 million new customers over the next decade, a bone of contention on the left). Potential snags exist, to be sure, but in all likelihood Barack Obama will become the first president, out of eight who’ve tried, to pass large-scale health reform. His presidency is either one-quarter or one-eighth over. Let us say, for argument’s sake (because the economy is starting to turn around; and because of the advantages of incumbency), that it is the latter. What have we learned in this first year that might tell us something about the next seven?
Three things, I think. The first is that he’s not the liberal tiger some people assumed or hoped he would be. Put aside the contingent of Americans who consider him a Communist. The rest of us should by now, I think, see him as the center-left politician he is, a person whose deepest intellectual conviction is to look skeptically upon conviction. He has, by the way, never said otherwise. If you happened to read The Audacity of Hope, which I reviewed here, this is the person you encountered.
Whether one likes his positions or not, he has been quite consistent from campaign to presidency. The troop surge in Afghanistan is in line with what he always said he’d do, as are his overtures to Iran and other hostile nations. Likewise, he’s agreed to bail out major financial institutions without imposing the kind of regulations that would constrain Wall Street; and he has not used the government to reduce unemployment. But he never was an economic populist and his campaign team was wary of too much government intervention.
The only area in which his presidential actions strikingly don’t match his rhetoric as a candidate is in matters of civil liberties and preventive detention, on which his administration has fallen far short of advocates’ hopes. Otherwise, he has governed more or less as he indicated he would. If liberals had different expectations, they weren’t studying the record. This isn’t to say he won’t do or attempt “liberal things,” but it is to say that he won’t necessarily do them in ways that will make his party’s base ecstatic.
Second, in his concern with not repeating some predecessor’s errors, he seems to have over-learned some lessons of history. He did give Congress too much leeway on health care, and in the future we can probably look for him to try to keep Congress on a shorter leash when dealing with major legislation. It is unclear in practice what that might mean. Congress, as we have seen, dances to its own tune. I would anticipate an institutional turf battle of some sort in the future. Senators, having stuck their necks out (as they see it) on health care, will be reluctant to do so again; but liberals will be pushing Obama to do something aggressive for unions and for gay men and lesbians. An intramural scrimmage is coming.
Third—and this is just guesswork on my part—it’s not always clear that he’s enjoying this. Though the Senate health bill is a very handy Christmas present for the president, he expended much considerable political capital to get it passed—much more, we can be sure, than he’d initially planned or hoped to when, with approval ratings above 65 percent, he began discussing health-care reform back in May. The New Year will bring more tense negotiations between the House and Senate to iron out differences in their versions.
Almost any president would resent history for dumping the financial crisis in his lap. But in Obama’s case, that collapse—combined with the blind rage of Republicans and conservatives, which no one anticipated—seems to have jarred him. At times, announcing this or that small-business program or what have you, he seems preoccupied and distant. He is not a natural empath. Maybe a strengthening economy will improve his outlook. In the meantime, if a rookie season that saw its share of bumps and errors ends up making way for the passage of the most progressive piece of major legislation in probably forty years, a bill whose strengths overwhelm its shortcomings, then that ends up being a pretty good first year.
It’s also worth mentioning that sites often have two ways to provide gestural feedback, which can cause confusion and frustration. If you look at Twitter’s new retweet functionality, the inability to add your own comment essentially turns this into another way to favorite. It may show up in your user stream instead of a separate page, but it’s the same feature. Google Reader has two gestural responses: like and star (in addition to share and share with note). It seems like they’re just throwing the kitchen sink at the problem. via www.capndesign.com
I know I often shouldn't, but I use the Perl 5 installed through Ubuntu packages for most of my local development. I could maintain a parallel installation myself, but I have better things to do. (I do have bleadperl available if I need it.)
Every time I get a new machine, or perform an OS upgrade which changes the major version of Perl 5, I have to reconfigure the CPAN client to install distributions from the CPAN appropriately.
That's ridiculous, for two reasons.
First, the CPAN.pm configuration has traditionally asked too many questions. I understand that it's nice to have configurability and the ability to run on all sorts of platforms with odd behaviors and strange utilities and baffling constraints, but I also think it's plausible to assume that most new installations of Perl 5 on a modern Unix-like system can speak HTTP, for example.
The second problem is that the Perl 5 version has come from a system package — a .deb file, in my case — and the CPAN client prefers to install tarballs from the CPAN itself.
Even though Debian and Ubuntu packagers (especially the admirable Debian Perl Group) have made plenty of CPAN distributions available as .debs, I have to configure my CPAN client myself, and it does not work with the system package manager.
There's no reason it couldn't.
Imagine that the system Perl 5 included in the default package (or included an optional package) which had a CPAN client configured appropriately. It has selected an appropriate mirror (or uses the redirector). It knows about installation paths. It understands how to use LWP or
wgetorcurlto download tarballs. It requires amakeutility and the Perl 5 development headers.Why stop there? There could be an alternate package (or an alternate Perl 5 installation or a program to switch paths) which set up local::lib for each user to install modules without overwriting the global installation.
Go another step further. A system such as Debian or Ubuntu or Fedora or one of the BSDs may include OS packages of CPAN distributions. If you want to install WWW::Mechanize, why can't a custom CPAN subclass translate that into a request to install
libwww-mechanize-perlthrough the packaging system if it's available?I realize that plenty of experienced Perl 5 developers dislike the idea of giving up control over every aspect of their own installations. That's fine. They can keep that control. Improving the defaults of the Perl 5 experience does not have to mean removing customization possibilities for experts.
The Perl 5 community has to produce at least three artifacts before this is possible:
- An agreement that it's okay for distributions to customize their CPAN client configurations at installation time.
- A set of guidelines for how to do so safely—probably backed up by code.
- The will to improve the experience of installing, maintaining, and upgrading modules from CPAN distributions, especially for novices.
Each goal is achievable, though the latter likely requires the active Perl 5 community to refuse to support specific vendor customizations in any official capacity.
The result—a Perl 5 that's easier to develop, easier to begin, and exactly as customizable as it is now—is better for everyone.
New Jersey rap veteran Redman has publicly reached out to Jay-Z and said he should begin paying more homage to the late rapper, Big L.
[Visit SOHH.com for more information]
He listed them during the last broadcast of the The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
And, finally, I am not in the entertainment business.
(via df)
Tags: Jim Lehrer journalism lists
Just in time for TED's holiday break, we're excited to announce a feature we're launching, today, on TED.com. It's called Best of the Web, and just like the rest of TED.com, it involves riveting talks by remarkable people. But unlike TEDTalks, these talks don't come from TED or any of our partner conferences. These talks come from all over the Web. We'll draw from any source -- from lectures at little-known forums to famous speeches that made history -- so long as the video is available for free, and so long as the talk meets our most important benchmark: that it's an Idea Worth Spreading.
Over the next weeks and months, you'll see the Best of the Web collection grow to include a large variety of great talks on technology, entertainment, design and all the other topics you can find on TED.com. We'll actively seek out great talks and performances, but we also want your help! We hope you'll forward us any gem you think we should include in the collection -- no matter how obscure or well-known it is. Simply email contact@ted.com with "Best of the Web suggestion" in the subject line, and a link to where the talk can be seen.
You might be wondering why we're featuring video from outside TED. Here are a few of our reasons:
- To highlight all ideas worth spreading -- whatever their source, wherever they emerge.
- To bring exposure to great talks that might not otherwise have found a wide audience.
- To create a more comprehensive network of ideas, linked and tagged in a way that allows cross-referencing.
- To show how big ideas from the past are still relevant today.
- To give our online TED community the chance to participate together in the conversation about these talks.
Every Best of the Web talk will get its own page on TED.com, complete with all the tools that accompany TEDTalks: recommendations for similar or relevant talks, information about the speakers, and ways to quickly share the talk with your social network. Most importantly, each will have its own commenting section, so you can discuss these talks within the TED community.
Note: The Best of the Web talks will not interrupt or diminish the daily flow of TEDTalks.
We hope you'll explore our (for the moment, tiny) collection of the very Best of the Web. And we hope you'll bookmark the page and check back soon, as we'll be adding more. Enjoy, and Happy Holidays!
The Best of the Web collection (so far):
Steve Jobs: How to live before you die >>Michael Sandel: What's the right thing to do? >>
Cat Laine: Engineering a better life for all >>
This photo is driving me bonkers – what intersection is this?
I’ve lived near madison square park for 4 years and i have never seen this view. Where is this? If this was the intersection of 23rd and b’way where is the plethora of cars?
Well, most people realized pretty quickly that my last post was riddled with lies! If you didn’t recognize the pictures, they’re a combination of Disney World and Universal Studio’s wonderfully wrong New York City streetscapes. If you’re a NYer, the subway entrance should have been the first giveaway…
The W and D trains of course run on completely separate lines, and Jersey travelers would be amazed to find a PATH train at 18th Street. So why WD? Walt Disney, of course! Also note that the steps lead nowhere.
My parents never took me to Disney World as a kid, and my first time visiting was at the ripe age of 25. I was all set to be cynical and unimpressed, only to have my preconceived notions blown out of the water. I’m clearly a huge fan of detail work, and I think a major reason why Disney World is such a singular phenomenon is the overwhelming attention to every single inch of the parks.
I was down in Orlando recently and stopped in for the second time. I was hoping to do a full article on the park’s hidden treasures, but I didn’t have time. Here are a few of my favorite bits…
As you’re walking down Main Street, you might notice the building proportions seem a bit off. The reason is, of course, forced perspective. While the first floors are full-sized, the second (fake) floors are all 3/4 size, and the upper floors even smaller.
This effect is used most notably on Cinderella’s Castle, which, while actually 189 feet tall, appears much larger in person.
Also on Main Street, if you note the windows on the upper floors…
…you’ll see names listed along with the fake businesses. These are all former Disney employees who have made various contributions. Yale Gracey, for example, was a park “Imagineer” who designed many of the special effects in the Haunted Mansion ride (the Mansion’s “owner,” Master Gracey, is named after him). Wathel Rogers was an imagineer who was responsible for many of the Animatronics in the Hall of Presidents.
My favorite part of Tomorrowland are the elements of retro-futurism that have managed to survive various renovations (modern futurism is so boring!). This “future salon” as seen on the People Mover ride is pretty great.
I also dig this view of a futuristic diner along one of the rivers cutting through the park.
Most people run past the entrance for the Muppet 3-D show, but if you stop and take a moment to look at the front desk…
…You’ll see a sign that says “key is under mat”…
…Yes, there is a mat…
And hey, there’s a key! (glued down, unfortunately – Disney! This should be a souvenir for those who find it!).
To me, the rides are great, but I have the most fun taking in all the details…Like looking up and noticing the huge ACME anvils being held up by giant magnets overhead…
And there is no better place for detail than the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse, which, late at night, is exactly where my 8 year old self hoped to live.
Someday, I’d love to do a full behind-the-scenes article on the over-looked details of Disney World. Any favorites?
-SCOUT
There a number of gestural ways for readers to indicate interest in content on the web. They all go by different names and representations, which makes it difficult to determine the right solution for your community. Below is an examination of the available options and, hopefully, answers to all of your burning questions.
Earlier this week, I was reading Gothamist and became engulfed in an article about EMTs letting a pregnant lady die. It’s an insane story and there are a ton of comments. There are also three “likes”. This disparity—one amongst many that exist on the internet—shows that there’s something broken with “liking” content.
When you find a piece of content that excites you, you probably want to do one of these things:
- Respond to the article with a comment of your own
- Bookmark the article for later
- Share the article with someone else
- Let the author know that you enjoyed the content
When a user “likes” a piece of content, they could be doing any of the final three actions, depending on the service. In the case of Gothamist, my instinct is that people “like” content because they want to tell the author and other readers that it was interesting and that they’d like to see more like it. Assuming this, why didn’t more people “like” this entry?
Before I answer that question, it’s worth noting that these gestural responses are very different from other reactions to content. Commenting, replying, sharing and even reblogging all involve content creation, which is a higher level of engagement and worthy of its own discussion. I also won’t really touch on flagging (e.g., spam, offensive content) or ratings.
Language Matters
Gothamist, as well as another small site called Facebook, use the word “like” as a way to note enjoyment, but it’s conflicting for a person to “like” an article that’s about a pregnant lady dying. Am I saying I like the article or that I like killing pregnant women and their fetuses? It’s clearly not the best phrase here, even though it works in most contexts.
There are certainly other options. Here are the ones I’ve seen the most and what they might imply. These are illustrative examples that cover many, but certainly not all, use cases (if a service has a word and a symbol, I just mentioned the word).
Type Services Definition Like Facebook, Vimeo, Google Reader As discussed, it can either mean I liked reading the content or I agree with the content. Essentially, I feel happy after reading this. It’s more often used as encouragement than as a bookmark. Favorite YouTube, TypePad, Posterous Similarly, this is something I enjoyed reading, but it tends to lean more towards a bookmark. Recommend Movable Type, NYT I enjoyed reading this and I think you should enjoy reading it too. [Up/Down] This is essentially recommend and not recommend. [Star] Twitter, Google Reader This is mostly synonymous with “favorite”, but because there are no words it’s more open to interpretation. This is good Vox I’ve only seen this on Vox, but I love it so I’m including it. This is back to a happy feeling and closest to “like”. [Heart] Tumblr Very similar to “This is Good”. The interpretations may give you some insight into what is appropriate for your context. In the case of the Gothamist article, “recommend” may be the best phrase since they use this data to calculate their popular article rankings. This isn’t everyone’s goal, though.
What To Do
There’s certainly no magic bullet, but how you implement this feature should depend on what you want to get out of the data. In the end, most publishers are looking for increased page views, but the path there relies on added value for the site’s community. If you’re keeping them engaged, they’ll keep coming back, which leads us to our final list. These are the benefits of using favorites:
- A list of popular content: In addition to comments, page views, etc., you can use this to determine what content is most read on your site. This is an example of data that the publisher parses to add extra value (as opposed to the user).
- A measure for the success of your articles: You can use this metric to refine the type of content on your site and gauge the success of your writers. This is another example of publisher-driven data.
- A curation tool for users: People often just want a way to bookmark content, but it’s more often used as a way to represent who you are. There are millions of Facebook users whose identity is based solely on the items they “like” and share. This is an example where the community is making use of the data.
Really, all three use cases are valuable to publishers and users, just in different ways. The first and third are most valuable to sites that rely on user-generated content and the first two are more valuable for editorially-driven content. In the end, you should focus your efforts on what will improve the quality of and access to your content, because that’s why people visit your site.
Some Additional Notes
If your site is very upfront about its purpose, the language becomes less important. For sites where the homepage is a list of most popular content (e.g., Digg, Reddit), most users will click the button with the intention of promoting content to that list.
It’s also worth mentioning that sites often have two ways to provide gestural feedback, which can cause confusion and frustration. If you look at Twitter’s new retweet functionality, the inability to add your own comment essentially turns this into another way to favorite. It may show up in your user stream instead of a separate page, but it’s the same feature. Google Reader has two gestural responses: like and star (in addition to share and share with note). It seems like they’re just throwing the kitchen sink at the problem.
Finally, there’s the issue of site-specific jargon. Digg is the only site I can think of that does this with any success. Creating a new verb is not worth the overhead I would never recommend this unless your name is Kevin Rose.
I encourage you to comment with additional use cases and examples of usage in various services. I’d love to see as many examples as possible.
Filed under: Hardware, Multimedia, Rumors, iPhone
I'm about due for an upgrade to my first generation iPhone, and a sweet camera would help seal the deal. That's the rumor going around (more or less unrelated to the other set of rumors we heard today, though I probably wouldn't turn down a higher-resolution iPhone with better camera included) according to a few places, which seem to stem from a company named Omnivision Technologies. They're expecting to not only see an increase in production of iPhone CMOS image sensor parts from 20 million to over 40 million in 2010, but they also say they've landed a deal to put together 5-megapixel CIS pieces for a new version of the iPhone.
Take this with the requisite grain of salt, of course -- we've expected cameras in some of Apple's devices before, and a few of us were disappointed. But it's not a big stretch to think that if Apple does release a new version of the iPhone as expected this year (be it a normal handheld or a larger tablet product), the camera in there will be able to take nicer video and better pictures than before.
[via MacRumors]TUAWNext-gen iPhone to get a 5 megapixel camera? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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@boyfriend's eggnog instructional:As you might expect, it involves a lot of bourbon.
[…] Also from [Doree Shafrir’s NY mag article on netiquette]:Allison Mooney, vice president of emerging trends at media consulting firm Mobile Behavior, says that there’s also a generational divide at work. “I think Gen X is a very sarcastic generation, and sarcasm doesn’t really translate online,” she says. “Gen Y has grown up interacting with people online. They’ve developed different social skills, a different rapport. Being sort of dry, sarcastic, snarky — that’s not going to get you any friends online.” Making friends — whether that’s counted in the number of followers you have on Twitter or Tumblr, your Facebook friends, or how many people “like” something you write — has become the goal. “Social currency is only built around positive interactions,” says Mooney.
I know and like Alli Mooney, but I think she’s wrong here. Being “sort of dry, sarcastic, snarky”** has gotten me most of my friends online. Some of whom are also dry and snarky and happen to be her friends as well.
**Or dry and snarky, rather. I don’t like sarcasm. It’s a poor substitute for wit.
True, but you and most of that circle are Gen X (in sensibility, if not strictly by the calendar). Choire is Gen X. Gawker is Gen X (maybe not some of the newer ones writing it now, but it’s a Gen X sensibility). Twitter is Gen X. Tumblr (except for those of us in new media who use it) is much more Gen Y.
That said, I agree with Alli, she made similar points about the prosocial aspects of Gen Y’s embrace of Obama in a piece I did for Ad Age last year that quoted her. But David’s idea (in Doree’s article) that Tumblr has removed channels for negativity (or that no one wants negativity) is a laugh if you spend any time at all reading the site. Today I had a victory of sorts when I saw three posts in a row decrying a recent nasty argument on Tumblr and realized that I must not be following anyone involved since I had no idea what the big fight was about.
I agree that I’m Gen X (barely) but I don’t think there’s a generational split. Some of the most distinctive dry, snarky voices to crop up it the last few of years—Alex Pareene, Maggie Shnayerson, Foster, Sheila McClear, Moe Tkacik, Meagan Keane, half the writers at theAwl, etc—are Gen Y. I don’t think either generation has a distinct sensibility, re: dryness or snarkiness. I also don’t think negativity on the web is antisocial unless it’s gratuitous and doesn’t involve engagement. But the nasty arguments you were talking about are not antisocial. Quite the opposite. They’re a form of engagement (and by extension, sociability)—just not a feel-good one.
A Spanish artist has been accused of faking this extremely awesome photo of a wolf, not with any Photoshop phoniness, but with a zoo animal. José Luis Rodríguez won a $16k prize from the Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition for his shot of a supposedly wild wolf jumping a gate, but is said to have broken the rules by using a tame animal, one named Ossian living at the Madrid Zoo, according to The Guardian.
Animal experts say its staged since a wild wolf would more likely squeeze through the gate. However, Rodriguez, who claims he’s the victim of an anonymous internet attack, credits an elaborate set up for the “Storybrook Wolf” shot:
His idea was a picture that would symbolize the ancient conflict between humans and wolves, while showing the beauty and strength of this fabled animal. But it took a long time to find the ideal location, let alone a wolf that would jump a gate. His chance came when he found a landowner who was happy to have both the wolves and José Luis on his property, and also had the ideal setting: a copse and an ancient, disused cattle corral.
José Luis started by placing meat in the corral. Once he knew a male wolf was visiting regularly, jumping the gate, he began to introduce the bits of equipment needed to set up a camera trap. At first, the wolf didn’t like the flash triggered by the trip beam, but after a few weeks he took no notice of the light or the clicks of the hidden digital camera. Now that the wolf was happy and the camera positioning was right, it was time to take the final picture with a medium-format camera. When the first transparencies arrived back from the lab, José Luis was overjoyed to find he finally had the picture he had dreamt of.
“Storybook Wolf” photo by José Luis Rodriguez
Following up on our visit earlier this year to Trek during TrekWorld, Mike Pfaltzgraff will take your questions starting tonight and tomorrow. Mike is the man at Trek, designing all the graphics for the Team Bikes, Lance’s specialty bikes, the Team Shack bike, and more. via bikehugger.com DL Byron from Bike Hugger says: "that's the 'dude' at Trek and he wants to talk"
Hopefully Obama will clean this up, but there really is no reason for saying, "I didn't campaign on the public option" Dude, yes you did:Specifically, the Obama plan will: (1) establish a new public insurance program, available to Americans who neither qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP nor have access to insurance through their employers, as well as to small businesses that want to offer insurance to their employees.I guess this could depend on what the meaning of "campaign" means, but let's no go there. Just say you wanted it and didn't get it. From Ezra:Obama's latest statement on this is hair-splitting at best and misleading at worst. That's even more true given how often he mentioned the public option after he got elected. And it's a good example of why the left is losing its trust in Obama. Obama could have given an interview where he expressed frustration that the math of the Senate forced his administration to give up the public option but nevertheless argued that the rest of the health-care bill was well worth passing. Instead, he's arguing that he never cared about the public option anyway, which is just confirming liberal suspicions that they lost that battle because the president was never really on their side.I can't really remember who made this point, and I would link to it if I could, but someone noted that all of this is about not having a head-line that says, "Obama Suffers Huge Loss In Health Care Fight." It just feels like politics, if you can say you didn't campaign on the public option than you can say you got the reform you wanted.
My Foursqaure Heatmap
Brooklyn? What’s Brooklyn?
[via]
Eric Simon of Amazin Avenue has started his look at the Mets All-Decade Team for the 2000s, beginning with catcher Mike Piazza, who played six seasons, stepped to the plate nearly 3,000 times and hit 157 home runs.
… i like to do these lists without looking at stats, just thinking about who were my favorite players of the decade, i.e., the guys i enjoyed watching most, even if they might not have been the best players… with that, here are my Favorite Players by position of the decade:
C Mike Piazza, who, like the cover said, was, ‘the Man,’ despite the most ridiculous-looking facial hair since the 70s.
1B Doug Mientkiewicz, who was not great – actually he was barely good – but I loved his defense, I worked real hard to memorize how to spell his name, and his post-game interviews were priceless.
2B Edgardo Alfonzo, who was like an old, reliable shoe… in a good way… and then in bad way… and then his back went out… but he’s still one of my favorite players ever
SS Jose Reyes, who makes me jump out of seat and love baseball more than any player since Darryl Strawberry, and I can’t wait for him to be back on the field this season.
3B David Wright, who is a face for the franchise, and, despite 2009, is one of the most consistent hitters the team has ever known, let alone at third base, and, in time, will probably break all of their records as well.
LF Cliff Floyd, or Uncle Cliff, who shouldered the weight of some pretty difficult seasons, and for whom I joined in a standing ovation for at Shea Stadium, when all he did was off the field to go have surgery on his ankle.
CF Carlos Beltran, who, simply put, is one of the best, all-around baseball players I have seen, and someone who is very, very under-appreciated.
RF Derek Bell, who was not very good, and who wore his uniform about 10 sizes too big, but, in having to choose between him, Jeremy Burnitz, Ryan Church, Sean Green, Karim Garcia or Xavier Nady, Lee is as good as any.
SP Johan Santana, who is the best, most-intense pitcher to take the mound for the Mets since Doc.
RP Billy Wagner, who, though he didn’t have the shut-down run I hoped for, I still got goosebumps when he’d charge from the bullpen to Enter Sandman, even up to his last outing in 2009.
Gems of pure beauty, found buried in a government website. and found at the radicalcartography web site
http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/sTaH
As a journalist, one of the things I enjoy most about running TPM is our ability to draw on our readers to help us monitor events with national implications at the local and even hyper-local level. We first did this with the "DeLay Rule" in 2004 and Social Security in 2005 and then again as recently this summer the Tea Party/Townhall crazy of August. Sometimes it's writes up in the local press, or mail from members of Congress or what goes down at a public event. And even though knowing these things is critical for understanding national politics, these are events and happenings that are hard for the conventional national press to follow. Now we want your help keeping us posted on what members of Congress -- particularly Dems -- are saying over the winter recess about how they're going to vote on the Health Care Reform bill. via www.talkingpointsmemo.com The exercise suggested above seems simple, but from a software perspective may actually be very complicated. Think Wikipedia meets Twitter meets Movable Type, in front of an audience of millions, with inputs from every blog post by and newspaper article about every politician (at every level). (This is what Al calls the "news blob.")
In fact, though the public option wasn't a regular part of his stump speech, Obama appointed the public option's intellectual father, Jacob Hacker, to his health care advisory committee, and his campaign's health care white paper prominently featured a government run plan, with no mandate requiring uninsured people to buy insurance. The bill he will likely sign next year will do the opposite. Progressives have taken notice, and responded rapidly. via tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com Poor Obama, who hasn't he disappointed?
I haven’t created any best-of or worst-of lists yet, but I think that the 2000s featured one cultural phenomenon that deserves its own special shoutout for true heinousness: the 2004 best picture winner “Crash.” It’s been called a “feel-good” racism movie – one that leads people to believe they’re on the right side of racism, when in fact they’re just having their buttons pushed and their preconceived notions re-affirmed. via trueslant.com Otherwise, spot on. I call Crash "Thandie's folly."
‘Sold Out’
courtesy of ‘Kevin H.’Last night I got an email from the 9:30 club. Usually, their emails are about the sweet shows they get, and about DC Music, but this one was about something else entirely: the LiveNation/Ticketmaster merger that’s in the works. Specifically, they’re hoping that it won’t go through, because it would be bad for DC:
As a concertgoer you have already felt the pain, and if Ticketmaster and Live Nation get their way, it’ll get worse. In the last 12 years, since Live Nation and its predecessor started its widespread takeover of the concert industry, concert ticket prices have shot up 82% while the consumer price index has gone up just 17%*. We are concerned that if the two concert industry behemoths, Live Nation and Ticketmaster, are permitted to merge, the variety and quality of artists coming to local venues will be affected, and your costs could rise further and faster.
And it’s signed:
The 9:30 Club, I.M.P., Merriweather Post Pavilion, Jam Productions, Metropolitan Talent, Another Planet Entertainment, Frank Productions, Stone City Attractions, Rams Head Live, The Black Cat … and independent concert promoters and venue operators nationwide.
If you want to learn more, you can check out TicketDisaster.org and read up on the merger, and how to object as a concert-goer. Me, I think those bastards at TicketMaster can die in a fire, so I’m all for tanking this. “Convenience” Fees my ass…
Today in Michael Huynh Conquers the World: a tipster sends in photographic evidence that Baoguette in FiDi is now open. Enjoy, all you suckers who are still working. She's at 9 Maiden Lane. [EaterWire]
As a journalist, one of the things I enjoy most about running TPM is our ability to draw on our readers to help us monitor events with national implications at the local and even hyper-local level. We first did this with the "DeLay Rule" in 2004 and Social Security in 2005 and then again as recently this summer the Tea Party/Townhall crazy of August. Sometimes it's writes up in the local press, or mail from members of Congress or what goes down at a public event. And even though knowing these things is critical for understanding national politics, these are events and happenings that are hard for the conventional national press to follow. Now we want your help keeping us posted on what members of Congress -- particularly Dems -- are saying over the winter recess about how they're going to vote on the Health Care Reform bill.
As Brian Beutler explains here, Nancy Pelosi will probably need to notch her House coalition a bit to the right to get what will be essentially the senate bill through the House. So the groups we want to be watching are the staunchest pro-choice members in the House? Will they oppose the bill on the basis of the "Nelson language" which Sen. Nelson (D-NE) says is a condition of his support for the senate bill? And what about the pro-life Dems? The "Nelson language" is a bit weaker from a pro-life perspective than the Stupak amendment. So will they bolt on the other side?
And then there's the big question. How many, if any, progressive votes will Pelosi lose because of the demise of the Public Option? I'd figured that Pelosi would not be able to pick up a lot of Blue Dog and freshman who'd voted against the bill the first time, even though the Senate bill gives these folks pretty much everything they wanted. Why? Because for political reasons I don't think these people want to vote for the Health Care Bill at all. Yet, there are signs that a lot of them are inclined to vote for this revised bill.
The key is that you'll likely know what these folks are saying back in their districts before we will. So keep your eyes out and let us know what you hear and see.
We'll be posting a list shortly of the different reps in these different categories -- Blue Dogs who voted against, Pro-Lifers who voted for, Pro-Choicers who might vote against, etc. -- to help you focus who you're watching.
The comments to our interview with Sean Ellis turned into an awesome Q&A — this post is a roundup.
(Feel free to keep asking questions here or there and I’ll try to get answers from Sean.)
Is my product a nice-to-have or a must-have?
Jae Chung wonders whether his product is a nice-to-have despite the positive press:
“I spent the past 24 hours poring over each of the points [in the interview]. We also formed about 8 months ago and the site is currently undergoing beta testing and has received positive feedback from many of our users and the press. However, my gut tells me we are in the “nice to have” category, and could never quite put our finger on what it was that users found appealing. We’ll definitely be implementing your survey to find out where the “love” is!”
The survey he’s talking about is survey.io.
Should I charge users before fit?
“I think that it is easier to evolve toward product/market fit without a business model in place (users are free to try everything without worrying about price). As soon as you have enough users saying they would be very disappointed without your product, then it is critical to quickly implement a business model. And it will be much easier to map the business model to user perceived value.”
“…freeing yourself (pun intended) of paying customers early on would seem to allow you to make more radical moves (pivots), since you don’t have to worry about angering anyone that has given you money and expects you to deliver on their expectations in return.”
Instead of charging users for a part of the product they don’t even want, first find the part they love, and then figure out how to get users to pay for it. Entrepreneurs who advise you to charge from day one probably had fit early on in their startups.
How do I tell users that I’m going to charge someday?
“Do you communicate to the users that the product will have a price someday?”
“I would communicate that “it is free during Beta” or if “beta” is too techie, then free during the introductory period. If you plan to have a free version, you can also let people know that.”
Should I pay users to send feedback?
“What about offering a gift or paying users to send feedback? Is this a useful technique, why or why not?”
“I haven’t needed to offer a gift for feedback yet. However, on SMB targeted products I tend to create a formal beta program that includes feedback requirements. Those people that participate in the beta program lock in a discount on the product (generally I don’t announce price at this point, just that they will receive a 50% discount). In addition to providing great feedback, these people tend to convert at a very high rate (since they worked for a discount).”
What if my customers aren’t filling in surveys?
“From my experience, many SMB users don’t like to fill in a survey for an unknown startup. Should I take that as a bad sign? In other words, is the survey response rate an equally important metric as the “must-have metric”?”
“Yes, I’ve found survey response rate directly correlated to the percentage of users that consider the product a “must have.” For “must have” SMB products I often see the response rate over 10%.”
How do I find the love in a hardware company?
“Sean, how can this “find the love approach” apply to hardware companies? What needs to be adapted to the method when you sell a product that is worth several $k’s?”
Sean:
“Samuel, I haven’t worked on a hardware product, so I’d just be guessing… Given the cost of getting a hardware product to market, I’d spend a lot more time up front on “where’s the need?” Steve Blank’s book Four Steps to the Epiphany gives great guidance on this.”
If you can build a product in a day, show customers the product. If the product is going to take weeks, show customers a PowerPoint instead.
Play us out
Ryan Nile knows what it means:
“This basically describes what we need to do after the MVP is up.”
This story is just so rich and it may very well be proof that there is a God and he is just. Noted mouth-breather John Lackey is appropriately spending time about town as he starts getting acclimated to his new Boston home. Unfortunately, thegentlefolk from Massachusetts may not be so hospitable to their new pitcher. Case in point:That new Red Sox hurler John Lackey’s bride, Krista, may be rethinking her decision to urge her hubby to move to the Hub. Because when Lackey and his lovely wife - a Maine native and University of New Hampshire grad - were in town last week, they popped into a Kenmore Square boite for a bite. Krista put her fur coat on a chair, where, we’re told, an inebriated patron puked on it!
Awesome, just awesome. Are we sure this was the booze though, or might it have been John Lackey's fugly mug that induced this poor soul to lose a hard-earned meal?
via www.nytimes.com
I think my friend Alice essentially met a kindred spirit in her New York Times profile of Cheryl Lins, who is distilling absinthe in a small town near the Catskills.
Congratulations to Alejandro Cartagena for being selected as a Hot Shot. I've long been been a fan of Cartagena's Lost Rivers project and of his work in and around Monterrey. The image above is actually from a new project titled Between Borders. It's great to see Cartagena on a roll. Hey! Hot Shot is on roll too. Two former Hot Shots were selected for the Whitney Biennial, a very big deal indeed.
Filed under: photography
Sponsor:
TWO BLUE CARS: Your kid's favorite shirt.
Wow! Very interesting and newsworthy! Amazon's Kindle DRM cracked @ The Register...An Israeli hacker says he has broken copyright protections built in to Amazon's Kindle for PC, a feat that allows ebooks stored on the application to work with other devices. The hack began as an open challenge in this (translated) forum for participants to come up with a way to make ebooks published in Amazon's proprietary format display on competing readers. Eight days later, a user going by the handle Labba had a working program that did just that. The hack is the latest to show the futility of digital rights management schemes, which more often than not inconvenience paying customers more than they prevent unauthorized copying.Unswindle code is available here if you want to check it out...
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Since Moses brought the tablets down from the mountain, lists have come in tens, not that we couldn't have done with several more commandments. Who says a year has Ten Best Films, anyway? Nobody but readers, editors, and most other movie critics. There was hell to pay last year when I published my list of Twenty Best. You'd have thought I belched at a funeral. So this year I have devoutly limited myself to exactly ten films. via hello.typepad.com Introducing the Roger Ebert movie club. I'd like to watch his top 20+ movies. We saw Avatar today. I'm going to watch Goodbye Solo and Julia next. They're both streaming from Netflix on your Roku/XBox 360.
Instead of going team by team this off season, I will review the divisions as a group. And whereas last year, I used a version of BaseRuns, with some modifications for strength of schedule and the like thrown in, to determine the ranking of teams’ true talent levels, this year I will use WAR as provided here on FanGraphs.
Part Four: The NL East
Last year, eventual World Series champion Philadelphia clocked in as the 8th best regular season team according to BaseRuns, which was tops in the NL East. The Mets were right on the tails though finishing 10th overall. The Marlins put up a good show with their $3.99 payroll with a 16th overall finish. The Braves were just behind them, at 18th. Meanwhile the worst of the worst, the Nationals came in at 30th.
2009’s worst team again hailed from the NL East, but you might be surprised at the name. Obviously the Nationals are the first guess, as they managed to finish with a worse record in 2009 (59-103) than in 2008 (59-102). And that guess would be close, for the Nationals came in 29th in this year’s WAR rankings with 19.7 WAR.
But not to be out done, and surprising given their 70-92 record, the Mets managed just 19.4 total WAR and were dead last in baseball. Johan Santana was the only above average starting pitcher and the bullpen, while better than its’ 2008 counterpart, was by no means re-built with Francisco Rodriguez and J.J. Putz. The hitting and fielding was wracked by injuries and ineffectiveness and in the end the Mets ended up with the fourth worst group of pitchers and fourth worst group of position players.
For the Nationals, the hitting was not the problem, they were actually around average there. And the fielding, while not stellar, was not atrocious either. It was the pitching that crippled this team, second worst in baseball at just 3.7 wins in total. The Nationals registered just four pitchers with at least 20 innings pitched and an above average tRA and the four combined to be a total of 9.2 runs above average. Just an incredibly deep group of suck.
Here’s a summary of the ranks for the NL East teams, with 2008 first.
PHI: 8, 8
NYM: 10, 30
FLO: 16, 17
ATL: 18, 7
WAS: 30, 29
98 of the 100-ish books I’ve read since I started keeping a list in TypePad:
![J. M.(Author) Coetzee: Disgrace [DISGRACE]](http://a7.typepad.com/6a00d8341e62ad53ef012875dcb64f970c-75hi)
I say 100-ish because I know there are a few I’ve missed and there are probably one or two here that I didn’t finish. The two missing thumbnails:
Joshua's post about unbundling the tools for deploying publishing components reminded me of a service I wish someone would make.
I want someone to build a user preferences service that would free up developers from having to re-implement settings and preferences in their applications. Something like Cocoa's NSUserDefaults that provides an interface for retrieving and storing user preferences in a user's local library.
I previously wrote about this idea (five years ago!) and I still want it.
Our best wishes for a peaceful and happy holiday season - and new year - from the team at Six Apart.
"They're busy with their careers, and she in particular has a couple of movies out in 2010, and others in the works for 2011, so it's just tough," a source who knows the couple told PEOPLE. "It's ironic, because in the recent season finale of 'Entourage,' Jamie tells Turtle that she has to go to New Zealand to shoot a movie, and it causes problems, so it's ironic but that's what their lives are like." via www.cnn.com I'm not sure that's the correct use of "ironic."
You know what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words? When it comes to explaining concepts like inflation or describing how the Federal Reserve works, a visualization or infographic can educate while it entertains. From bankers to bailouts to taxes and unemployment, the economic downturn provided plenty of fodder for infographics this year and it quickly became part of our mission to produce ‘em to help make sense of it all.
Our visual guides, Mint maps, and animations have proved popular and we’ll be putting even more emphasis on them in the year ahead. For those that may have missed ‘em, here’s a look back at our best financial infographics of 2009, according to you, our readers.
Charity: Who Cares?
Americans lead the world in charitable contributions, giving $300 billion a year to charities. Sounds like a lot right? But this is just a drop in the bucket compared to the over One Trillion Dollars needed to keep US charities in operation, more than the US government collects in taxes. The rest comes from their own assets, government support, and foreign investment. Our visual guide to giving shows who’s paying and offers some tips on how to pick a charity of your own.
Who is paying taxes?
Recent news articles have brought to light the fact that almost 47% of households in the US currently have zero or negative federal tax liability. We take a closer look at this lack of liability across each income level, highlighting the percentage in each range that will not pay any taxes. Also shown is a full breakdown of who is paying the bulk of all taxes collected by the Federal Government each year.
A visual guide to inflation
Inflation. It’s bad right? When prices rise your money is worth less and nobody wants to see their hard earned cash decline in value. But what is inflation anyway and what are its root causes? Turns out the situation is not as straightforward as it first appears. In this first of a two-part series we take a look at inflation and examine the pros and cons of this important barometer of the health of the US economy. Stay tuned for part two next week where we look at inflation’s alter ego, deflation. We look forward to your feedback and comments below.
The Fall of GM: A Visual Guide
In recent weeks, GM has been making a last-ditch effort to deal with its mounting problems and somehow escape bankruptcy. The final outcome remains to be seen, but any bailout efforts or even the most drastic of moves at this stage seem to be, as visualized below, the equivalent of lifting massive, crushing weights with simple balloons. The announcement of the resignation of GM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner at the behest of the Obama administration was just the latest in a series of moves designed to reassure public confidence in the flailing automotive manufacturer.
Mint Map: America’s Most Frugal Cities
We all know that Americans have cut back on their spending during the recession but where are they cutting back the most? Comparing 20 cities across 25 “discretionary” categories we found that five cities spend less than the national average and cut more of their spending (yr over yr) than the national average. Our latest map is based on the aggregate data from over one million Mint.com users, a representative sampling of US consumers.
Student Loans by the Numbers
While it’s been said you should never underestimate the value of a college education, neither should you underestimate its price. Without proper financial planning, you could be paying off those student loans for the rest of your life. College tuition costs are rising at twice the rate of inflation, in part because colleges are attempting to make up for reduced public funding under the previous administration and passing the costs on to you and your parents. The Obama administration has proposed a massive overhaul of up to $6 billion dollars in federal loans but many fear this will lead to the same kind of death spiral that got us into a financial mess with the housing crisis. The numbers tell the real story.
Mint Map: The World’s Resources by Country
A country’s economic worth can be measured in more ways than just its GDP and national debt. It is also important to consider the economic potential that lies in the harvesting of the natural resources within its borders. This map shows the top producing countries of each resource, or the proved reserves in the case of oil and natural gas. Each circle represents the percentage of the world’s total that the country produced in the last two years. Though some of the resources are renewable and some are not, it is interesting to see which parts of the world are rich in resources that are essential to our way of life, and to consider what this map might look like 10 or 100 years from now.
Golden Parachutes: How the Bankers Went Down
When high-ranking executives are fired from a company, for whatever reason, they don’t go to the back of the unemployment line. Instead, they typically receive compensation in the form of the “golden parachute.” Golden parachutes can include severance pay, cash bonuses, stock options or other benefits. In the case of the financial crisis and the ensuing bank failures, if it seems like these executives are being rewarded for poor performance, you may be right. Here’s a look at what some bankers made on their way down.
The Descent into Credit Card Debt
When used wisely, credit cards can be the cornerstone of a sound financial strategy. A solid credit history makes you a good credit risk and that in turn allows you to purchase the necessities of life. But credit cards can also be a slippery slope. One misstep and you’ll tumble into the abyss of credit card debt hell, a mounting spiral of missed payments, fees, high APRs, and rate increases that will take years to recover from. Only by remaining vigilant can you hope to avoid this fate. Here’s our guide to what you may experience on the way down.
China vs United States: A Visual Comparison
Everyone knows that China’s got more people and that its importance as an economic superpower has escalated in recent years. What you might not understand is how the differences between our countries, in economic philosophy, in population, in geography and in how the military is built and paid for ultimately play into the entire economic relationship.
Criterion Adds Thirty-Five Films to Stream via Netflix:Anyone with a Netflix account can now watch 35 Criterion Collection classics via the web or a set-top box like Roku, XBox, Tivo, or a connected Blu-Ray player. There’s less and less of an excuse for anyone (including me) not to be movie-literate. List includes The Seventh Seal, The Vanishing, Seven Samurai, Jules and Jim, My Life as a Dog, Rashomon, Wild Strawberries, and one of my all-time favorites, Wings of Desire.
Women see celebrities as mirrors of their own lives, so when they're looking at celebrities, in many cases, not all, they are evaluating the situation and relating it to something in their own lives or comparing it. It enhances your life,she concludes brightly. It's helping women. Of course it's healthy. Bonnie Fuller in an article on the globe and mail.via www.alaina.org
Call me a crazy feminist, but I'm going to go out on a limb and argue that celebrity gossip sites *don't* help women.Alaina pulling out a choice quote from an article just full of them. I really just felt sorry for the poor women sitting in their cubicles being yelled at about headlines. Fuller may have moved to digital but it sounds like she is keeping up with her old print ways. Nothing new here.
The Mets extended the deadline for season-ticket renewals from mid-December to December 31.
I keep hearing people tell me the Mets MUST make a big signing in order to get people to re-up.
The thing is, if you are on the fence – or, worse, you already decided not to buy a ticket plan, and instead will just role the dice like the rest of us in hopes of finding a seat on an as-needed basis – is Jason Bay or Bengie Molina, or, for that matter Matt Holliday, enough to motivate you to re-up?
I have lived nearly two hours from Queens my entire life, so I’ve never owned a ticket plan. But, I’ve gone to roughly 20 games every season since the early 90s. So, it’s difficult for me to understand what motivates people to commit so much money up front.
This time around, following last year, knowing what we know of Citi Field, the NL East, etc., what is the driving force in either your decision to re-up or not re-up, and what would have to happen before December 31 to get you to commit this early to 2010? Is it about a commitment from Ownership? Players? Ticket prices? I’m curious, and trying to better understand how this decision is made.
Feel free to use the comment section in this post, or the e-mail form below:
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So a real design challenge for e-books isn’t to design the user experience (which is dependent at the end of the day on the device capabilities anyway, which are pretty much unknown) but rather on designing a system that would allow existing publishers to transition their operations from ramshackle print to All Knowing Digital.
via www.sippey.com
For example:
Haruki Murakami: People who like good music.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: People who can start a fire.
Dave Eggers: Guys who are in the third coolest frat of a private college.The full list is here; it says I'm "confirmed 90's literati". Which is LOL. If I'm an -ati of anything, it is definitely not liter-, 90s or otherwise.
Tags: books
Though it’s quite brief, I have to believe that Jeff Sullivan’s post on the correlation between pitcher contact rates and strikeouts from this past August has got to be one of the most exciting of the year. It makes so much sense — miss bats, get strikeouts — and yet Mr. Sullivan appears to be the only one on the interweb (besides our own Matthew Carruth) asking substantive questions about it*.
*If there are others, please don’t hesitate to mention them below.
You can see the correlation between the two in this image I’ve stolen directly, unforgivably from Lookout Landing:
That’s pretty striking. And it begs a question: If the correlation between Contact% and pitcher strikeouts is so strong, then couldn’t Contact% help us understand which pitchers might be poised to top the strikeout charts next year?
Yes. With some caveats.
In that same post to which I’ve linked above, Sullivan also notes that, beyond Contact% (league average 80.5%), pitchers also control their strikeout rates by other means, such as First-Pitch Strike% (league average 58.2%), Zone% (league average 49.3%), Called Strike%, etc. While none of these factors correlate as strongly as Contact% to pitcher strikeout rates, it does appear as though they’re not entirely negligible, either. To that end, I’ve included the first two of those below for comparison’s sake.
What happens when we run the 2009 numbers for Expected K%s (xK%)? That’s the question I asked myself — and which I answered, I think, by means of the kinda dumpy looking table you see below. Here are the Top 10 starting pitchers (50+ IP) by Contact% with expected and actual strikeout rates, plus K/9:
So, what do we see here? Some likely suspects, for sure: Harden, Lincecum, Vazquez, de la Rosa. But also some surprises: Felipe Paulino (second!), Gio Gonzalez (third!), and Bud Norris. The first two of those guys I wrote about last week as tRA* surprises. Bud Norris I didn’t mention, but he actually finished 66th in tRA* out of the 183 pitchers with 150+ xOuts.
What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, we should probably be careful about that, as more research needs to be done in this area. Still, it’s probably reasonable — given his xK% and overall profile — to expect at least a small improvement in strikeouts from Felipe Paulino. Moreover, there’s reason to think — given his excellent Zone% — to think that Bud Norris will probably turn some of his walks into strikeouts.
How well do you think Norris will perform in 2010? Enter your Fan Projection here.
Everyone who reads what I write on this site probably knows a couple of things about me by now: I used to be a beauty editor and I have a wicked pop culture obsession.
You also know that I am often irked by celebrity fragrances. Now, I realize the big business implications of fragrance and therefore understand why a company would sign someone like Beyoncé to a major deal. While I may not wear the perfume, I do see the market.
Paris Hilton, not so much. Eva Longoria Parker, even less so. Yep, she's the newest actress to "create" a scent for the masses. Eva by Eva Longoria will launch this spring, according to WWD.
Really? Are there that many Desperate Housewives fans still out there? This actually would have more sense like three years ago. The woman's never even been in a hit film. She doesn't seem to have a lifestyle image that is ripe for selling.
Sorry if that sounds like sour grapes, but in an economy like this one, I just don't understand major deals with questionably marketable talent. That is all.
desperatehousewives - Eva Longoria Parker - Paris Hilton - Beauty - Actor
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So many posts written by Muni Diaries staff make me want to do what I hate when other folks do it: tell them to move to the suburbs.
Photo by Telstar LogisticsIt’s hard out there for an urban lady. You get cat-calls on your way to work, then you get yelled at all the way down the block for ignoring them. You turn around and look at everyone walking behind you, conveying to even the innocents that you could identify them in a lineup if you had to. It’s a part of a semi-automatic routine adopted for our various journeys throughout town. So pardon us if we’re a little suspicious of any and all people, particularly males, if we’re waiting for the bus.
So there’s this tall, larger, older-to-middle-age guy standing at the 14-Mission/49-Van Ness/former 26-Valencia stop on Otis Street. He’s got a little bag of presents in a tote bag, a receptacle that, for some reason, was not capable of holding the many items he had dangling around his neck. FastPass. Keys. Other card-type things. He’d probably have a troll on there if he could. His jeans are hiked up beyond his gut, resting comfortably around his chest. His vibe was a little off, right from the get-go. But a lot of people in SF are a little off; the question, as always, remains as to whether he was silly-off or dangerous-off.
He turns and asks me and Jeff, Mr. Muni Diaries, about the 26, after realizing on his own that it wasn’t in service anymore. His conversational rhythm came with lengthy, continued stares once you’ve answered his questions. He didn’t turn and look away at anything while he was talking. He didn’t turn around and see if the bus was down the street. While he stared our faces raw, he explained how he had many VHS tapes he was attempting to convert; had a little machine and everything. We basically ran into Milton from Office Space.
Less than a minute into this conversation, I did what any urban lady (or gentleman) does: suspiciously attempt to figure out whether this stranger is dangerous or just weird. The resulting train of thought, for those of us who weren’t Green Berets, is actually an amazing one, I must say. It can prompt everything from laughter, to embarrassment, to relief, to further suspicion, in the span of a minute, unlike any other learned or innate behavior.
“…what’s he staring at?” > “Hmm, could he be sizing me up for his freezer at home?” > “Does he have anything sharp?” > “What’s his expression like…you can always tell these psycho killers from their eyes, right?” > “Ah. Harmless.” It was a pleasant surprise, one that did make me feel a little silly (Who’s afraid of Milton? Turns out I am.)
But I really wouldn’t have it any other way if I’m going to keep (and I will) calling this wacky place home. Thanks, evolution.
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Call me a crazy feminist, but I'm going to go out on a limb and argue that celebrity gossip sites *don't* help women. via www.alaina.org
TheAwl notes that it’s the 25th anniversary of the Bernie Goetz subway shooting. I sat next to Goetz at a lunch a few years ago, which was as weird as you’d think it would be. From my write-up:
Goetz introduced himself and began explaining to Justin Smith that he thought shaking hands was a “awful custom.” When pressed for more information, he began an oral dissertation on the transmission of germs, supported with anecdotal evidence from “when I was running for office.” He mentioned something about a urinal, whipped out a Kleenex, and began blowing his nose. He then crumpled the Kleenex into a sad little ball and set it next to his plate. “Like this Kleenex,” he said, finishing his discourse on airborne comminicable diseases. “So did you use gloves when you were shaking hands during the campaign?” Smith asked. “No,” Goetz replied, pursing his lips thoughtfully. “But I would have liked to.”
By the end of the lunch there was a whole row of sad little Kleenex balls lined up next to his plate.
Related, from Goetz’s website: “Click here to find out how my opponents feel about squirrels!”
These make me so sad. Every time I'm looking through patterns at the fabric store, I see this and try not to picture the scene at the convalescent home where these are being worn.
Filed under: Software
Whoa.
A judge for theThe U.S. Court of Appeals has just upheld an earlier verdict forbidding Microsoft from selling both Office and Word after January 11th, 2010. This suit, which was filed by i4i, a creator of a XML plugin for Microsoft Office, alleged that Microsoft's Open XML format, which uses the DOCX and XLSX extensions that have been a part of Office on the Mac since Office 2008, violated i4i's patented XML handling algorithms. The court ruled in favor of i4i back in May, and Microsoft today lost their appeal, with the judge telling them that they don't have the right to sell the software as-is.
Microsoft now either has to attempt to appeal the rulingagain, or settle with i4i (read as: "Ballmer has to write a big honking check"), and is currently considering further legal options. The company is also working to remove these features from Microsoft Office (possibly in time to release new versions of the old software on January 11th), and this ruling doesn't affect the upcoming Office 2010 for Windows. We'll keep you posted if anything further develops.TUAWCourt orders Microsoft to stop selling Office by January 11th originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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“Women see celebrities as mirrors of their own lives, so when they're looking at celebrities, in many cases, not all, they are evaluating the situation and relating it to something in their own lives or comparing it. It enhances your life,” she concludes brightly. “It's helping women. Of course it's healthy.”
Bonnie Fuller on her celebrity gossip and fashion "webzine", Hollywoodlife.com.
Call me a crazy feminist, but I'm going to go out on a limb and argue that celebrity gossip sites *don't* help women.
Darth Vader and a number of Storm Troopers from the Star Wars Saga rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.
(via @kngofwrld)
Tags: finance Star Wars this is a metaphor for something video
According to the Associated Press, the Mets are close to signing free-agent RHP R.A Dickey to a minor league deal.
The 35-year-old knuckleballer was 1-1 with a 4.62 ERA in one start and 34 relief appearances for the Mariners last season.
…i realize there is nothing wrong with these moves, especially a guy like this, who can start or pitch in the bullpen, and on short notice, but, man, given how the team has yet to make the bigger moves, these sorts of acquisitions only seem to highlight what isn’t happening…
Here is a photo of a videographer getting taken down by an eagle. This is basically the plot of Avatar completely summed up, made for considerably less than $250 million. [Reddit via The Daily What]
Google senior vice president Jonathan Rosenberg published a long memo “about the meaning of ‘open’ as it relates to the Internet, Google, and [Google’s] users.”
It’s the biggest pile of horseshit I’ve ever seen from Google.
Basically, he’s spewed 4,000 words to say that “open” is always good and always wins, Google is always open, therefore Google is always good and will always win. And please don’t worry your pretty little minds about things like Google’s search or ad algorithms or the specific details of how its data centers work, all of which things Google could not possibly be more secretive about. Because if you think about these things, you’ll see that Google isn’t open at all about certain financially lucrative areas where it has built huge technical advantages over its competitors, and that’s not possible, because Google is always open.
I really hope for Google’s sake that this horseshit artist Rosenberg is not representative of their executive ranks. Also: open is an adjective, the noun form is openness.
The Joker playing card is thought to have first appeared in 1860. For future reference, here is a list of Joker playing card collections on the internet.
It's getting closer and closer to check-writing time for Steve Ballmer, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has just upheld a decision that would see Microsoft Word and Office banned from sale starting January 11. If you'll recall, Microsoft lost a patent infringement suit against XML specialists i4i back in May when it was found that Word's handling of .xml, .docx, and .docm files infringed upon i4i's patented XML handling algorithms, but the injunction against further Word sales was put on hold pending the results of this appeal. Now that Microsoft has lost once again, we'd expect either another appeal and request for the injunction to be stayed, this time to the Supreme Court, or for a settlement between these two that would end this whole mess right now. We'll see what happens -- stay tuned.
P.S.- Just to be clear on this, i4i isn't a patent troll -- it's a a 30 person database design company that shipped one of the first XML plugins for Office and was actually responsible for revamping the entire USPTO database around XML to make it compatible with Word back in 2000. What's more, the patents involved here don't cover XML itself, but rather the specific algorithms used to read and write custom XML -- so OpenOffice users can breathe easy, as i4i has said the suite doesn't infringe. Existing Office users should also be fine, as only future sales of Word are affected by the ruling, not any already-sold products.
Engadget: Helping you flame with accuracy.
Update: Microsoft says it's moving quickly to prepare versions of Office 2007 and Word 2007 that don't have the "little-used" XML features for sale by January 11, and that the Office 2010 beta "does not contain the technology covered by the injunction," which can be read in a number of ways. It's also considering an appeal, so we'll see what happens next.Microsoft loses patent appeal; Word and Office to be barred from sale starting January 11 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Cocoa with Love: “In this post, I present a complete Cocoa Mac application implemented with unit tests for all created code. I’ll create the tests first and then only add the code required to make the tests pass, largely following a test-driven development (TDD) methodology.”
President Obama surprised Virginia Gov. and DNC Chair Tim Kaine with a call into Kaine's radio show this morning, identifying himself as "Barry from D.C."
"I just wanted to say how proud we are of your service as governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia," Obama said.
"We continue to think your wife is probably a little superior to you, as I think people think about the first lady, but you and me have to stick together since we're married to better people," he added.
The call made the radio station, WTOP, late for its hourly weather and traffic reports.
Listen:
The logistics of fighting wars in space is a little different than the movies have lead us to believe.
Tags: physics science space warFor the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we'll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window. At any given point in time, there are only so many routes from here to Mars that will leave our imperialist forces enough fuel and energy to put down the colonists' revolt.
Jonathan Rosenberg, Google:
There are two components to our definition of open: open technology and open information. Open technology includes open source, meaning we release and actively support code that helps grow the Internet, and open standards, meaning we adhere to accepted standards and, if none exist, work to create standards that improve the entire Internet (and not just benefit Google). Open information means that when we have information about users we use it to provide something that is valuable to them, we are transparent about what information we have about them, and we give them ultimate control over their information.
Google talks a lot about openness and their commitment to open source software. What they are really doing is practicing a classic business strategy known as “commoditizing the complement“. Google makes 99% of their revenue by selling text ads for things like plane tickets, dvd players and malpractice lawyers. Many of these ads are syndicated to non-Google properties. But the anchor that gives Google their best “inventory” is the main search engine at Google.com. And the secret sauce behind Google.com is the algorithm for ranking search results. If Google is really committed to openness, it is this algorithm that they need to open source.
When I say the Twitter API may be an open standard, I mean something different than when Jonathan Rosenberg says Google likes open standards. I mean it's open in that anyone can implement it now. A smart developer can implement the Twitter API in a matter of weeks. Rosenberg means that the process of defining the standard is open. He would start a process to define a standard that in two or three years a team of 20 programmers could implement in another two or three years. Those are the kind of results that his version of "open" delivers.
It all sounds great and Google certainly is a champion of open systems with Android and Chrome and countless other projects. Google is making a very public effort to claim the mantle of openness. But the battle for this mantle has been going on for a long time. Two years ago, I wrote a post titled “Who Is The Opennest Of Them All?”. What I noted then bears repeating. (...)
Open intent is great. No person or business should need to or advertise being open. But if you are as big as Tiger Woods, Google, or Goldman Sachs you are best to just leave the subject alone and just be great at what you do. Or buy your damn stock back, and talk about how closed you can be. That would be cool too.
UPDATE: And John Gruber:
It’s the biggest pile of horseshit I’ve ever seen from Google.
Jamie as Obi Wan
How have I not seen this before?
These little gingerbread houses that can perch on the rim of your hot chocolate mug are pretty cool:
Make some! (via matt)
Tags: cooking food
Here is the New York Observer’s link-bait-y list of “insurgents,” 53 young New York people they say are changing the face of mankind. The list is filled with all of the usual suspects and you have to click through 53 web pages in order to see them all (I stopped at 10 out of extreme annoyance).
So what’s an insurgent in the eyes of the Observer?
“Insurgents think of things we didn’t think about or were too lazy to mull over much. They have the spirits of street fighters. But whether you like them personally doesn’t really matter. That economy that flattened dreams all over? It emboldened them.”
Yeah, yeah, blow me. |Observer|
Websites live or die based on how a small group of programmers at Google decide their sites should rank in Google’s main search results. As the “router” of the vast majority of traffic on the internet, Google’s secret ranking algorithm is probably is the most powerful piece of software code on the planet.
Google talks a lot about openness and their commitment to open source software. What they are really doing is practicing a classic business strategy known as “commoditizing the complement“*.
Google makes 99% of their revenue by selling text ads for things like plane tickets, dvd players and malpractice lawyers. Many of these ads are syndicated to non-Google properties. But the anchor that gives Google their best “inventory” is the main search engine at Google.com. And the secret sauce behind Google.com is the algorithm for ranking search results. If Google is really committed to openness, it is this algorithm that they need to open source.
The alleged argument against doing so is that search spammers would be able to learn from the algorithm to improve their spamming methods. This form of argument is an old argument in the security community known as “security through obscurity.” Security through obscurity is a technique generally associated with companies like Microsoft and is generally opposed as ineffective and risky by security experts. When you open source something you give the bad guys more info, but you also enlist an army of good guys to help you fight them.
Until Google open sources what really matters – their search ranking algorithm – you should dismiss all their other open-source talk as empty posturing. And millions of websites will have to continue blindly relying on a small group of anonymous engineers in charge of the secret algorithm that determines their fate.
* You can understand a large portion of technology business strategy by understanding strategies around complements. One major point: companies generally try to reduce the price of their products complements (Joel Spolsky has an excellent discussion of the topic here). If you think of the consumer as having a willingness to pay a fixed N for product A plus complementary product B, then each side is fighting for a bigger piece of the pie. This is why, for example, cable companies and content companies are constantly battling. It is also why Google wants open source operating systems to win, and for broadband to be cheap and ubiquitous. [link to full post]
via voices.washingtonpost.com
Yesterday, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) articulated surprise and disappointment that the White House had not done more to push Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) to support a public option. Moments before a vote this morning, I asked him to elaborate.
"All I'll say, I was surprised to hear this because I had assumed all along that the White House was pushing strongly for the public option," Harkin said. "I just assumed that."
"Regardless of that, I mean it was clear that in the end that we did not have the votes for it," Harkin added. "This bill is too important in its entirety to let it sink on that issue."
"As I said yesterday, the issue of a public option will be revisited," the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee insisted. "I guarantee it."
(On this question, one of the Democratic party's leading public option skeptics, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) said, "That could happen, [but] there'd have to be 60 votes."
I asked Harkin if the outcome might have been different if the White House had ratcheted up the pressure on hold out senators.
"I don't know. It's hard to say. What ifs? If? I don't play that game, what if," Harkin demurred. "But all I know is where we are now and I see how we have to move ahead. We have to get this bill passed, and then we'll come back and revisit the public option at some point...next year, the year after."
It’s still not easy to explain what, exactly, Google Wave does and is, but it sure does make for some cool screencasts. Hit play for a Wave-powered trip through 2009. (If you liked this, see also Good Wave Hunting and Pulp Wave Fiction.)
(Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. This column originally appeared on his blog.)
Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers.
Last week, as a favor to a friend, I sat in on a board meeting of a fairly successful 3.5 year-old startup. Given all that could go wrong in this economy, they were doing well. Their business had just crossed cash flow breakeven, had grown past 50 employees, just raised a substantive follow-on round of financing and had recently hired a Chief Financial Officer. It was an impressive performance.
Then the new CFO got up to give her presentation – all kind of expected; Sarbanes Oxley compliance, a new accounting system, beef up IT and security, Section 409A (valuation) compliance, etc. Then she dropped the other shoe.
“Do you know how much our company is spending on free sodas and snacks?” And to answer her own question she presented the spreadsheet totaling it all up.
There were some experienced VC’s in the room and I was waiting for them to “educate” her about startup culture. But my jaw dropped when the board agreed that the “free stuff” had to go.
“We’re too big for that now” was the shared opinion. But we’ll sell them soda “cheap.”
Uh oh
I had lived through this same conversation four times in my career, and each time it ended as an example of unintended consequences. No one on the board or the executive staff was trying to be stupid. But to save $10,000 or so, they unintentionally launched an exodus of their best engineers.
This company had grown from the founders, who hired an early team of superstars, many now managing their own teams. All these engineers were still heads-down, working their tails off, just as they had been doing since the first few months of the company. Too busy working, most were oblivious to the changes that success and growth had brought to the company.
One day the engineering team was clustered in the snack room looking at the soda machine. The sign said, “Soda now 50 cents.”
The uproar began. Engineers started complaining about the price of the soda. Someone noticed that instead of the informal reimbursement system for dinners when they were working late, there was now a formal expense report system. Some had already been irritated when “professional” managers had been hired over their teams with reportedly more stock than the early engineers had. Lots of email was exchanged about “how things were changing for the worse.” A few engineers went to the see the CEO.
The exodus begins
But the damage had been done. The most talented and senior engineers looked up from their desks and noticed the company was no longer the one they loved. It had changed. And not in a way they were happy with.
The best engineers quietly put the word out that they were available, and in less than month the best and the brightest began to drift away.
Startups go through a metamorphosis as they become larger companies. They go from organizations built to learn, discover and iterate, to predominately one that can execute adroitly having found product/market fit.
Humans seem to be hard-wired for numbers of social relationships. These same numbers also define boundaries in growing an organization – get bigger than a certain size and you need a different management system. The military has recognized this for thousands of years as they built command and control hierarchies that matched these numbers.
The engineers focused on building product never noticed when the company had grown into something different than what they first joined.
The sodas were just the wake-up call.
As startups scale into a company, founders and the board need to realize that the most important transitions are not about systems, buildings or hardware. It’s about the company’s most valuable asset – its employees.
Great companies do this well.
Artist: The Flaming Lips
Album: The Dark Side of the Moon
Year: 2009
Genre: Progressive Rock, Psychedelic, Indie
Link: RS
Buy: iTunesAnd before the page turns on 2009, the Flaming Lips are adding to that list of distinctions with one more bit via Tuesday’s iTunes release of The Flaming Lips And Stardeath And White Dwarfs With Henry Rollins And Peaches Doing The Dark Side Of The Moon. The title sorta says it all. Wayne and the gang performed “Eclipse” on KCRW in October, and they’ll usher in 2010 by expanding on that teaser, performing Dark Side Of The Moon in its entirety along with Stardeath And White Dwarfs just after the ball drop at their New Year’s Eve show in Oklahoma City’s Cox Center.
Track list:
01 Speak to Me / Breathe
02 On the Run
03 Time / Breath (Reprise)
04 The Great Gig in the Sky
05 Money
06 Us and Them
07 Any Colour You Like
08 Brain Damage
09 Eclipse
Rating: 4.4/5 (14 votes cast)
Dav set me up back in 2006 with Movable Type and was my very own IT help. Life gets busy with jobs and a toddler, and I've often felt stuck since I really can't do much with Movable Type other than post. Any changes I wanted, I'd have to force Dav from his zillion other tasks...Finally, he imported all to TypePad. Both are Six Apart products. I'm very excited since this will allow me tons more freedom to tinker with my blog in addition to posting. The ease to do things will be lovely!!
The main reason is our trusty old (as in decade old) IBM server that has been in our kitchen forever, is now making suspicious high tone sounds. Dav knew we had to switch, so this past weekend he worked to create a virtual server so we can finally retire Mr. Old Box. Bless his heart...he supported my quirky blogging since 2006, and brought me into blogging. Well, Dav did, but with Mr. Old Box's help.
The DNS has already been switched over due to urgency. I'm still putzing around with design so bear with me. Anyone wanna help?
I am really excited to have more freedom now, and really delve into TypePad features!
Overt humor isn't usually Ruby Inside's thing, but it's the holiday season, so there's nothing wrong with kicking up your heels and having a little fun. Don't worry - this won't become a habit. Promise! After the fold, check out a chart showing how programming language fanboys (Ruby's included) see each other's respective languages.
There's a higher resolution version available..
Clive Thompson on the story behind the greatest vaporware in video game history:
It’s a dilemma all artists confront, of course. When do you stop creating and send your work out to face the public? Plenty of Hollywood directors have delayed for months, dithering in the editing room. But in videogames, the problem is particularly acute, because the longer you delay, the more genuinely antiquated your product begins to look — and the more likely it is that you’ll need to rip things down and start again. All game designers know this, so they pick a point to stop improving — to “lock the game down” — and then spend a frantic year polishing. But Broussard never seemed willing to do that.
Every year I make a new year's resolution that sound nearly impossible. I enjoy the challenge of putting a goal in front of me that at the beginning of the year seems entirely ridiculous, but at the end of the year seems completely doable.
The best resolutions I've made are rarely about doing something, they're usually the challenge of restricting or cutting out something in my life—usually involving the act of media consumption. Self-portait-a-day projects sound fun, but I am far too forgetful to remember to take a picture of my dumb face. I see it enough already.
A couple of years ago I decided not to buy a book the entire year. When I started it seemed completely insane. I love books. I was commuting 45 minutes both ways by bus or boat at the time, and books were a favorite diversion. I finally broke down and made a rule that let me buy comic books, but it did create this reason for me to dive back into books I'd already read, and finish some I had given up on.
The following year I tried it with video games. I couldn't buy a new video game until I had played through every unfinished game I had sitting on my shelf. I wasn't able to keep that one. Some of those games were really terrible.
Last year I vowed to finish five projects or let the domains I had purchased for them expire, which was heartbreaking because I had some good domain names. I was unsuccessful launching those projects and the domains expired.
While I was walking to work this morning I came up with my next resolution for 2010. I was listening to Le Tigre's self-titled album (now 10 years old), and flipped to Operation Ivy's (now 20 years old). Then on the walk from the Embarcadero I switched to the xx (1 year old) and it struck me how I've probably missed a lot of good music because I was spending it listening to old Modern Lovers records.
So then it hit me: what if I only listened to music released in 2010? Okay. That's just crazy enough.
The rules are:
- This includes re-issues/re-masters.
- For the month of January I am allowed to listen to anything from 2009.
- I will probably come up with more rules as I think of them because not listening to Bad Brains for a year is starting to make me sad.
And you can play along at home if you'd like: here is my last.fm stream. It has over 50,000 songs I've listened to over the past few years. The top 18 has 11 bands that aren't even bands anymore (counting Weezer).
Your new favorite blog for the next seven minutes: That's Not Art, from Garrett Murray.
People post ridiculous "art" to Tumblr. These pieces frequently make it into Popular. I reblog them here and call them out for being stupid.
More like this, please.
In this post, I present a complete Cocoa Mac application implemented with unit tests for all created code. I'll create the tests first and then only add the code required to make the tests pass, largely following a test-driven development (TDD) methodology.
Next week I'll show the configuration and implementation of this project as an iPhone application for the benefit of Cocoa Touch developers.
Introduction
A few days ago, I spent some time searching for a Cocoa application with source code and full unit tests but I was only able to find Apple's trivial iPhoneUnitTests sample project.
With more than four years of official support (Apple added OCUnit to the Developer Tools in 2005) and a large number of articles and blog posts by Mac programmers endorsing unit testing and offering solutions to problems within unit testing, it is surprising to me that there are so few code examples showing Cocoa applications with full unit tests.
So I decided to re-implement one of my own projects (the WhereIsMyMac application from an earlier post) with complete unit tests using a test-first approach — I'll create failing tests and only add code to the project to pass those failing tests.
I'll be cheating a bit relative to proper test-first development (since this is a re-implementation of an existing project, I already know what the final code should be) but I'll keep to the spirit of the process by only adding as much code as I need to make the tests pass.
I know people will want to see how this works on the iPhone but since this post is already large, I've deferred that implementation until next week.
Xcode unit testing targets
There are two different ways of configuring Xcode for unit testing: logic test targets and application test targets.
- Logic tests — these are run in a executable that is separate from your application. The separate build can be easier to manage, faster to build and is easier to run objects in isolation since it avoids the application setup. However, you cannot test components which rely on the application (which is most user interface components). Generally, this type of test target is intended for libraries, frameworks and testing the back-end (model components of model-view-controller) of your application.
- Application tests — these tests let the application load first and are subsequently loaded into the existing application. This means that the full application environment is available to your tests. In many cases, controller tests and view tests need to be run as application tests since they are reliant on the full environment.
I'll focus exclusively on the second type of testing target, since it will allow full testing of the application.
Mac project configuration
One of the best sources of information on configuring Xcode for Unit Tests is Chris Hanson's series on unit testing. I'll follow many of the steps that he describes and further add OCMock integration to the procedure.
After you've created a blank project, use the "Project→New Target..." menu item to add a new "Cocoa→Unit Testing Bundle" Target to the project.
Note: The testing target is a separate target. This means that you need to be careful of target membership. All application source files should be added to the application target only. Test code files should be added to the testing target only.It'd be great if that's all that you needed but there's more.
First, drag your application's target onto the unit testing target to create a dependency (force the application to build before the unit tests).
Then edit the unit testing target's settings (Right click→Get Info) and set the "Build→Linking→Bundle Loader" for all configurations to:
$(CONFIGURATION_BUILD_DIR)/WhereIsMyMac.app/Contents/MacOS/WhereIsMyMacwhere "WhereIsMyMac" is the name of the application you're unit testing. This will let the testing target link against the application (so you don't get linker errors when compiling).
Also set the "Build→Unit Testing→Test Host" to
$(BUNDLE_LOADER)(this will give this property the same value as the above setting). This property lets the automated build-time script know to launch the application and inject the unit testing bundle into it to start the tests.Logic tests note: If you want to do logic tests instead of application tests, leave the Bundle Loader and Test Host fields empty and add all files you want to test to the test target (so the test target becomes a separate, self-contained target instead of linking against the main application).Finally, download a copy of OCMock, place the OCMock.framework in the same directory as your .xcodeproj file and set the "Build→Search Paths→Framework Search Paths" to:
"$(DEVELOPER_LIBRARY_DIR)/Frameworks""$(SRCROOT)"Neither need to be recursive. The quotes are to handle potential spaces in your paths. The first search path will probably already exist in the settings but we add the second search path so that the OCUnit framework will be found in the project's directory.
The configuration so far will run all tests as a build step (the Cocoa Unit Testing target includes a Run Script build step that runs all the unit tests).
To allow debugging as well as build-time execution, add a new executable to the project ("Project→New Custom Executable...") with a path relative to the Build Product of:
WhereIsMyMac.app/Contents/MacOS/WhereIsMyMacand in the custom application's settings (Right click→Get Info) on the Argument tab, set the arguments and environment variables as follows:
Most of these settings configure the application to load our test bundle into itself when it runs. The
:$(SRCROOT)at the end of fallback framework path is to allow the application to find the OCUnit framework in our project directory at runtime.Separate executable: since this test debugging executable is a separate executable, you will need to switch to the debugging executable for debugging tests and switch back when you want to run the application normally.AppDelegate Tests
Startup integration
The application will start with the
WhereIsMyMacAppDelegateand we'll use the theWhereIsMyMacAppDelegateto load the main window.The first test is therefore to ensure that application's delegate is an instance of
WhereIsMyMacAppDelegateon startup.- (void)testAppDelegate { id appDelegate = [[NSApplication sharedApplication] delegate]; STAssertTrue([appDelegate isKindOfClass:[WhereIsMyMacAppDelegate class]], @"Cannot find the application delegate."); }This is a short and simple test but it isn't a unit test. It's actually an integration test (since it is testing the fully connected
+[NSApplication sharedApplication]in place.An ideal unit test would test the
NSApplicationin isolation and ensure that it creates and sets its delegate property correctly. This is infeasible sinceNSApplicationcan't be isolated so we simply accept the nature of the class and test the instance ofsharedApplicationthat should be created on startup. Of course, unit testingNSApplicationitself shouldn't be necessary but an integration test to ensure that the startup of the program leads correctly to the creation and setting of theWhereIsMyMacAppDelegateis still a good idea.applicationDidFinishLaunching:
The next test is to ensure that
applicationDidFinishLaunching:on the delegate will:
- create the
WhereIsMyMacWindowControllerand set it on the delegate- load the
WhereIsMyMacWindowController's window- make the
WhereIsMyMacWindowController's window the main and key window- (void)testApplicationDidFinishLaunching { WhereIsMyMacAppDelegate *appDelegate = [[[WhereIsMyMacAppDelegate alloc] init] autorelease]; id mockWindow = [OCMockObject mockForClass:[NSWindow class]]; [[mockWindow expect] makeKeyAndOrderFront:appDelegate]; mockWindowController = [OCMockObject mockForClass:[WhereIsMyMacWindowController class]]; [[[mockWindowController expect] andReturn:mockWindow] window]; NSUInteger preRetainCount = [mockWindowController retainCount]; [appDelegate applicationDidFinishLaunching:nil]; [mockWindowController verify]; [mockWindow verify]; NSUInteger postRetainCount = [mockWindowController retainCount]; STAssertEquals(postRetainCount, preRetainCount + 1, @"Window controller not retained"); id windowController; object_getInstanceVariable(appDelegate, "windowController", (void **)&windowController); STAssertEqualObjects(windowController, mockWindowController, @"windowController not set on appDelegate"); object_setInstanceVariable(appDelegate, "windowController", nil); mockWindowController = nil; }This test is a near perfectly decoupled unit test of the
-[WhereIsMyMacAppDelegate applicationDidFinishLaunching:]method. However, the approaches used to decouple it from the rest of the program probably make it tricky to understand.The first two lines create a clean
WhereIsMyMacAppDelegateto test.The second two lines create a mock
NSWindowthat we use to check that the window is brought to the front bymakeKeyAndOrderFront:. In conjunction with the later[mockWindow verify]this will test the 3rd requirement in the list above.The next three lines create a
WhereIsMyMacWindowControllerthat will be swapped in place of anyWhereIsMyMacWindowControllerthat theappDelegatetries to create (more on how this works in the next paragraph). ThemockWindowControlleris told to expectwindowto be invoked and when it does, will return themockWindow. In conjunction with the[mockWindowController verify], the retain count checks and theSTAssertEqualObjectswill verify the first two requirements in the list.I mentioned that
mockWindowControllerwill be substituted in place of a realWhereIsMyMacWindowControllerany time theappDelegatetries to create aWhereIsMyMacWindowController. This works becausemockWindowControlleris a global variable that affects the following category:id mockWindowController = nil; @implementation WhereIsMyMacWindowController (WhereIsMyMacAppDelegateTests) - (id)init { if (mockWindowController) { [self release]; return mockWindowController; } return invokeSupersequent(); } @endThis category overrides the
-[WhereIsMyMacWindowController init]method to return themockWindowControllerif it exists, otherwise the default behavior. TheinvokeSupersequent()comes from my old Supersequent implementation post (it's like invoking thesupermethod but will invoke the current class' base or earlier category implementation, not just a genuinesupermethod and is more flexible — though slower — than method swizzling).Of course, we only want this override to return the mock object at specific times. This is why the
mockWindowControllermust be explicitly set back tonilat the end of the method.Notice that the category overrides init, not alloc: technically, overridingallocwould prevent any method being invoked onWhereIsMyMacWindowController(making the test perfectly decoupled from other classes) however this would mean that we'd need to invokeiniton the mock object andOCClassMockObjectdoes not let you mock any methods that it implements for itself (this includes all of theNSProxymethods plusinitWithClass:andmockedClass). So instead, we overrideinitand make the acceptable tradeoff to allow+[WhereIsMyMacWindowController alloc]to be invoked.
A related point is thatOCClassMockObjectcan't mockretainorrelease. This is why manual checks on theretainCountare used instead of asking the mock object to expect aretain. If you expectautoreleaseto be used instead ofrelease, you'd need to wrap the tested method invocation in anNSAutoreleasePoolto flush theautoreleasebefore testing theretainCount.A final point about this test: it uses
object_getInstanceVariableandobject_setInstanceVariableto get thewindowControllerfrom theappDelegateinstead of the property accessor. The reason for this is thatobject_getInstanceVariabledirectly reads the value from the object without invoking any accessor methods that might have secondary effects. Some code presented elsewhere usesvalueForKey:to achieve the same effect but the problem with this is thatvalueForKey:will use thewindowgetter method if it exists — we want to directly test that the actual instance variable is set on the class without interference.applicationWillTerminate:
The final tests for the
WhereIsMyMacAppDelegateare for theapplicationWillTerminate:method. This method should close window and release it.- (void)testApplicationWillTerminate { WhereIsMyMacAppDelegate *appDelegate = [[[WhereIsMyMacAppDelegate alloc] init] autorelease]; id mockWindowController = [OCMockObject mockForClass:[WhereIsMyMacWindowController class]]; [mockWindowController retain]; object_setInstanceVariable(appDelegate, "windowController", mockWindowController); NSUInteger preRetainCount = [mockWindowController retainCount]; [[mockWindowController expect] close]; [appDelegate applicationWillTerminate:nil]; [mockWindowController verify]; NSUInteger postRetainCount = [mockWindowController retainCount]; STAssertEquals(postRetainCount, preRetainCount, @"Window controller not released"); id windowController; object_getInstanceVariable(appDelegate, "windowController", (void **)&windowController); STAssertNil(windowController, @"Window controller property not set to nil"); }After creating an
appDelegateto test, this method creates a mockWhereIsMyMacWindowController, tells it to expect acloseinvocation, sets it as thewindowControlleron theappDelegateto this new mock object, invokesapplicationWillTerminate:on theappDelegate, verifies that theclosemethod was invoked, ensures that theretainCountis decremented by one and that thewindowControllerinstance variable is set tonil.That's three failing tests. One is more of an integration test than a unit test (since it relies on the
NSApplcationoperating in place) but the others are genuine isolated unit tests on theWhereIsMyMacAppDelegate. The implementation to pass these tests is less interesting but you can have a look at the sample project to see how I added code to pass these tests.Window Controller Tests
loadWindow integration
As with the application delegate, the first test is an integration test. We need to test that the
loadWindowmethod will load the required user interface elements from files in the bundle. This is similar to Chris Hanson's "Trust by verify" approach except that I test the loading of the window separately from thewindowDidLoadandwindowmethods.- (void)testLoadWindow { [windowController loadWindow]; WebView *webView; object_getInstanceVariable(windowController, "webView", (void **)&webView); CLLocationManager *locationManager; object_getInstanceVariable(windowController, "locationManager", (void **)&locationManager); NSTextField *locationLabel; object_getInstanceVariable(windowController, "locationLabel", (void **)&locationLabel); NSTextField *accuracyLabel; object_getInstanceVariable(windowController, "accuracyLabel", (void **)&accuracyLabel); NSButton *openInBrowserButton; object_getInstanceVariable(windowController, "openInBrowserButton", (void **)&openInBrowserButton); STAssertTrue([windowController isWindowLoaded], @"Window failed to load"); STAssertNotNil(webView, @"webView ivar not set on load"); STAssertNotNil(locationLabel, @"locationLabel ivar not set on load"); STAssertNotNil(accuracyLabel, @"accuracyLabel ivar not set on load"); STAssertNotNil(openInBrowserButton, @"openInBrowserButton ivar not set on load"); STAssertEqualObjects(windowController, [openInBrowserButton target], @"openInBrowserButton button doesn't target window controller"); STAssertTrue([openInBrowserButton action] == @selector(openInDefaultBrowser:), @"openInBrowserButton button doesn't invoke openInDefaultBrowser:"); }The
windowControlleris a fixture that's allocated in thesetUpmethod. The majority of this method then gets the instance variables from thewindowControllerafter theloadWindowmethod is invoked and tests that the required properties are all set.We can now test the
windowDidLoadmethod as a separate step to theloadWindow. ThewindowDidLoadshould create aCLLocationManagerobject, set the window controller as thedelegateand start location updates.windowDidLoad
- (void)testWindowDidLoad { mockLocationManager = [OCMockObject mockForClass:[CLLocationManager class]]; [[mockLocationManager expect] setDelegate:windowController]; [[mockLocationManager expect] startUpdatingLocation]; [windowController windowDidLoad]; [mockLocationManager verify]; object_setInstanceVariable(windowController, "locationManager", nil); mockLocationManager = nil; }This uses the same category override approach that was used in the
testApplicationDidFinishLaunchingmethod to swap in a mockCLLocationManagerand ensure that the appropriate methods are invoked.locationManager:didUpdateToLocation:fromLocation:
Next step: verify that the correct Google Maps location is loaded in the
WebView'smainFramewhen a given coordinate is passed to theWhereIsMyMacWindowControllerimplementation of the-[CLLocationManagerDelegate locationManager:didUpdateToLocation:fromLocation:]method.This test method is pretty big but the essence is that:
- The web view and its main frame are mocked.
- The main frame is told to expect specific a specific HTML string that's loaded from a pre-created file.
- The method is then passed the exact location that should trigger that HTML string.
- The mock web frame is then asked to verify that the expected HTML string was loaded.
- The window's labels are also tested to ensure they receive the correct values.
- (void)testUpdateToLocation { NSString *htmlString = [NSString stringWithContentsOfFile: [[NSBundle bundleWithIdentifier:@"com.yourcompany.UnitTests"] pathForResource:@"WebPageTestContent" ofType:@"html"] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:NULL]; id mockWebView = [OCMockObject mockForClass:[WebView class]]; id mockWebFrame = [OCMockObject mockForClass:[WebFrame class]]; [[[mockWebView stub] andReturn:mockWebFrame] mainFrame]; [[mockWebFrame expect] loadHTMLString:htmlString baseURL:nil]; object_setInstanceVariable(windowController, "webView", mockWebView); NSTextField *locationLabel = [[[NSTextField alloc] init] autorelease]; NSTextField *accuracyLabel = [[[NSTextField alloc] init] autorelease]; object_setInstanceVariable(windowController, "locationLabel", locationLabel); object_setInstanceVariable(windowController, "accuracyLabel", accuracyLabel); CLLocationCoordinate2D coord; coord.longitude = 144.96326388; coord.latitude = -37.80996889; CLLocation *location = [[[CLLocation alloc] initWithCoordinate:coord altitude:0 horizontalAccuracy:kCLLocationAccuracyBest verticalAccuracy:kCLLocationAccuracyHundredMeters timestamp:[NSDate date]] autorelease]; [windowController locationManager:nil didUpdateToLocation:location fromLocation:nil]; [windowController locationManager:nil didUpdateToLocation:location fromLocation:location]; [mockWebFrame verify]; STAssertEqualObjects( ([locationLabel stringValue]), ([NSString stringWithFormat:@"%f, %f", coord.latitude, coord.longitude]), @"Location label not set."); STAssertEqualObjects( ([accuracyLabel stringValue]), ([NSString stringWithFormat:@"%f", kCLLocationAccuracyBest]), @"Location label not set."); }An interesting point to notice here is that the
WebPageTestContentfile is loaded from a bundle that isn't themainBundle. This is because the test resides in theUnitTests.octestbundle, not the application's bundle (which is the "main" bundle).locationManager:didFailWithError: and openInDefaultBrowser:
I'll leave out the code for the
locationManager:didFailWithError:test — it's largely the same as the previous test but with a different HTML string to load in the web view's main frame. You can see it in the downloaded project if you wish.Similarly,
openInDefaultBrowser:is just a URL, generated from the current location and sent to the sharedNSWorkspace(which we mock through category overrides) so the test contains largely the same elements — so I'll omit the code for this test too. Again, check the downloaded project if you're interested.dealloc:
All that remains is to create tests for the
deallocmethod to ensure that thelocationManagerreceives astopUpdatingLocationand areleasemessage.- (void)testDealloc { id mockLocationManager = [OCMockObject mockForClass:[CLLocationManager class]]; NSUInteger preRetainCount = [mockLocationManager retainCount]; [mockLocationManager retain]; object_setInstanceVariable(windowController, "locationManager", mockLocationManager); [[mockLocationManager expect] stopUpdatingLocation]; [windowController dealloc]; [mockLocationManager verify]; NSUInteger postRetainCount = [mockLocationManager retainCount]; STAssertEquals(postRetainCount, preRetainCount, @"Location manager not released"); windowController = nil; }Notice that we have to set
windowControllertonilat the end. This is because invokingdeallocon thewindowControllerfixture has deallocated it and we need to ensure that thetearDownmethod doesn't try to invokereleaseon it.Six failing tests for the
WhereIsMyMacWindowController. You can look at the downloadable project to see the code added to pass these tests.Conclusion
Download the complete WhereIsMyMac-WithUnitTests.zip (136kb).
This project includes OCUnit.framework, which is Copyright (c) 2004-2009 by Mulle Kybernetik. OCUnit is covered by its own license (contained in the OCUnit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/License.txt file).In this post, I created a Mac project, created unit tests for all required functionality (plus two integration tests) and ultimately added code to make the project pass those tests. I've shown the configuration required for unit testing targets in Xcode and the implementation of the tests themselves, which show how to isolate units of a program (using mock objects and category overrides) for properly decoupled unit testing.
Unit tests for all created code does not mean that the project is "fully tested". There are lots of aspects associated with integration, runtime and memory behaviors, user events and the behaviors of the Cocoa frameworks that are not covered by these tests. Of course, this is the limit of "unit testing" for classes that operate in an application framework — to test these other aspects requires different kinds of tests.
Next week, I'll be presenting the same post developed for the iPhone. I apologize that this will result in two posts that almost the same but there are enough differences between the two that I couldn't squeeze both into a reasonable sized post. I also hope that by separating the posts, the result will be easier for dedicated Mac or iPhone programmers to follow.
Finally, a disclaimer: please don't consider the existence of this post as a recommendation that you should necessarily write your applications with full unit tests. It is important to look at the work involved and weigh the associated time costs and against your project's need for unit level validation. There are alternative approaches for maintaining code quality that have different associated costs and benefits which I hope to discuss and compare in a later post.
I believe this is the lost final chapter to The Great Gatsby.
, originally uploaded by kldobkin.
Baseball Prospectus is looking for an excellent dba with Oracle, mysql, perl, php, html, apache, and linux system administration experience to maintain and expand our database and statistical operations. This is a work-from-home position with flexible hours on a full-time equivalent contract. That’s right, sit in your boxers while working on cutting-edge baseball research with cool people. Future likely opportunities to advance further into developing content, or into MLB itself–the originator of this position now works for a major league club, and Baseball Prospectus has graduated many people into big league front offices. Please send resume and cover letter attachments in pdf format with email subject “dba application” exactly to jobs@baseballprospectus.com. Applications ignoring these specifications will not be considered.
This post will be updated as events warrant.
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Patrick Newman, and this is my first post here at FanGraphs. Some of you may be familiar with my blog, npbtracker.com. If you haven’t seen it before, I write about Japanese baseball, covering current events and analyzing top players. Starting today, I’ll be doing the same here on a semi-weekly basis.
Every year, players move back and forth between the top leagues in Japan and North America. So let’s kick things off by looking at a few of the guys looking to change leagues this offseason.
Imports
This year’s NPB free agent class is the weakest we’ve seen in quite some time, but there are some interesting arms making the MLB leap this offseason.
The head of the class
- Ryota Igarashi (signed with the Mets)
- Colby Lewis (destination unknown)
Igarashi and Lewis make for an interesting contrast — Igarashi is a power reliever with middling control; Lewis, though no slouch on velocity, is a starter who’s shown pinpoint command in his two NPB seasons. I’ve casually observed that raw velocity usually survives the journey across the Pacific, while control typically suffers.
Will Igarashi’s command degrade at the MLB level, and if so will it hurt his effectiveness? And was Lewis’s dominant K:BB performance a function of pitching in Japan, or an improvement he made?
The other candidate
- Hisanori Takahashi (destination unknown)
Takahashi is the only other MLB-caliber player out of Japan seeking MLB employment at this point (we may see someone posted later in the offseaon). Takahashi is a lefthanded garbage baller with good sinker/screwball, but a sub-par fastball.
Exports
Over the course of a typical season, the 12 NPB teams will employ a cumulative 70-80 “foreign” players. Note that “foreign” is in quotes because it’s NPB’s own definition of the word. Tuffy Rhodes, for example, is no longer considered a foreign player because he’s accumulated enough NPB service time to qualify as Japanese player under NPB’s rules. JapaneseBaseball.com has a rundown of the rules governing foreign NPB players.
Back to the point, most foreign players in Japan only stay for a year or two, so there’s a high degree of roster churn each offseason, opening up opportunities for a new group of players.
In most cases, Japanese teams prefer “hungry” types, guys with years of AAA success who haven’t gotten extended MLB looks and still have something to prove. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but here’s a look at a couple of the more interesting players making that leap this year.
Contact-hitting outfielders
- Matt Murton (bound for Hanshin Tigers)
- Jeff Fiorentino (Hiroshima Carp)
Though Murton has significantly more MLB experience, these two outfielders head to Japan with the same minor league profile: good contact skills, good strikezone judgement, gap power. Their 2009 3A slash lines are virtually identical at .324/.389/.499 (Murton) and .312/.387.510 (Fiorentino).
Despite their similarities, the two are going to very different environments. Murton joins the Hanshin Tigers, a team whose last two American outfielders (Kevin Mench and Lew Ford) were miserable busts, and with a demanding, yet supportive fanbase that expects to win. Fiorentino will find himself in a different situation in Hiroshima, a team with an air of optimism in a beautiful new stadium, but has not been in contention this decade.
Hard-throwing, wild relievers
- Juan Morillo (Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles)
- Chris Bootcheck (Yokohama BayStars)
- Eulogio de la Cruz (Tokyo Yakult Swallows)
Perhaps due to the success of Marc Kroon, pitchers with plus velocity but control issues that have kept them off MLB rosters have become a popular target for NPB teams. All three of the guys listed can run their fastballs into the mid-90’s and Morillo tops out in triple digits. 2010 will tell whether any of these guys becomes another Kroon, or flames out like similar hard-throwers Chris Resop and Scott Dohmann.
I know how to cure double-digit unemployment! Train everyone to be iPhone developers. Because everyone I know needs them.
From time to time, The Awl offers its space to normal, everyday people with a perspective on national issues. Today, we’re pleased to bring you this report by Maria Bustillos, who went to the movies this weekend.
So: Avatar. Here is a story with an alleged anti-corporatist message, underwritten by a huge corporation to the tune of $250 million plus. It preaches closeness with (outer-space) nature, but must have produced CO2 emissions at the rate of a dozen oil refineries. It alleges respect for women, who are shown to be uniformly, pornographically subservient to the alpha males. Its message is anti-violence, but it’s also stuffed to the gills with the glorious super-lethal war machines from which toys and video games can and will be fashioned.
The whole of the planet Earth cringed when James Cameron shouted, “I’m the king of the world!” at the Oscars that one time. But did we learn our lesson? No, we did not. We gave this clown a quarter of a billion dollars to make an even more terrible movie. I am sorry Mary HK Choi et al, but I feel that you misled me gravely. What James Cameron knows about being a fanboy could be stuffed in a watch and rattled. He is entirely bereft of the crucial ingredient of fanboyness: humility.
I don’t say that Avatar is not beautiful to look at; it is. I saw it at a 3D IMAX theater and found the images dazzling, if Disneyfied. However, there is not enough beauty in the world to wallpaper over this writer-director’s crude outlook. He is bully and a boor, graceless, swaggering, self-congratulatory, puerile. He has got the emotional nuance and literary sensitivity of spackle.
The worst thing about this movie is the pretend-not-glorifying of violence. Its lush, slow pleasures are taken in the final gasping breath of a fantastical beast, in long, loving strokes of the camera over scenes of annihilation, over explosions, and people impaled on poisoned arrows, over blue bodies exploding out of helicopters or off of psychedelic space-pterodactyls. These brutalities are expiated with a line or two of portentous Native Hokum every now and then.
The impression of complete hypocrisy was in no way lessened by the glossy war-porn recruitment commercial for the National Guard, produced in exactly the same style and character, that played before the movie (though with no aliens, I guess, and not, thankfully, in 3D).
But no, the really worst thing is the ham-fistedness of Avatar’s alternate history. Okay, so this time the Native Americans are able to throw off the European oppressor. Note well, however, that l’homme sauvage, for all the purity of his Native Wisdom, is still quite helpless without a white man to show him what the hell to do. So what if this “hero” “goes native,” just like in Dances With Wolves? (Even as he goes about gathering “the horse people of the plains” to assist him.) It still takes a white man to tame the really BIG dragon, and to outfox the enemy.
He will also take the “best” woman, the noblest, the highest born, the smartest, whose token resistance will dwindle its sorry way from faux-contempt to near-drooling adoration in a matter of days. Her former man will die, and her father will, too; her whole civilization will lie in ruins. She will pretty much get down on her knees to thank this white man, anyway (see Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies for a gruesome but believable explanation of the underpinnings of that whole business).
Notice how nobody—not the Marines, not the brilliant scientist, not the wise blue natives—can make a single successful move without this white guy. They are all completely powerless and vulnerable until he comes along with his fake self-deprecation and his blunt, forceful manner and his great big muscles. Pathetic. I can’t believe more people aren’t all grossed out, here.
p.s. How come the lovers don’t mutually plug their ponytailed braid genital things together? They plug ‘em into everything else.
Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.
memory bank: 2009 by Zadi Diaz.
A really beautiful piece from one of the people who first interested me in videoblogging, with videos like this one.
Blackroc feat. Mos Def, Jim Jones and the Black Keys perform “Ain’t Nothing Like You (Hoochi Coo)” on Letterman, 12/10/09.
Love this record.
To track his wandering cat, Mark Spezio rigged up a cat collar with a lightweight GPS logger. Here’s what he discovered about KooKoo’s secret habits
(via J-Walk)
There are a couple of posts written this past weekend about services beginning to expose their services using the Twitter API and how this marks the rise of Twitter as a de facto standard for use in microblogging (or whatever we're calling it these days).
The first post I was on this topic was from Fred Wilson in his post Open APIs and Open Standards where he writes
As Dave Winer has been pointing out in recent weeks, there is something quite interesting happening in the blogging/microblogging world.
First WordPress allowed posting and reading wordpress blogs via the Twitter API.
Then yesterday our portfolio company Tumblr did the same.
John Borthwick has been advising companies for a while now to build APIs that mimic the Twitter API. His reasoning is that if your API look and feels similar to the Twitter API then third party developers will have an easier time adopting it and building to it. Makes sense to me.
But what Wordpress and Tumblr have done is a step farther than mimicing the API. They have effectively usurped it for their own blogging platforms. In the case of Tumblr, they are even replicating key pieces of their functionality in it
Anil Dash quickly followed up by declaring The Twitter API is Finished. Now What? and stating
Twitter's API has spawned over 50,000 applications that connect to it, taking the promise of fertile APIs we first saw with Flickr half a decade ago and bringing it to new heights. Now, the first meaningful efforts to support Twitter's API on other services mark the maturation of the API as a de facto industry standard and herald the end of its period of rapid fundamental iteration.
From here, we're going to see a flourishing of support for the Twitter API across the web, meaning that the Twitter API is finished. Not kaput, complete. If two companies with a significant number of users that share no investors or board members both support a common API, we can say that the API has reached Version 1.0 and is safe to base your work on. So now what?
This is a pattern that repeats itself regularly in the software industry; companies roll their own proprietary APIs or data formats in a burgeoning space until one or two leaders emerge and then the rest of the industry quickly wants to crown a winning data format or API to prevent Betamax vs. VHS style incompatibility woes for customers and developers.
Given that this is a common pattern, what can we expect in this instance? There are typically two expected outcomes when such clamoring for a company's proprietary platform or data format to become the property reaches a fever pitch. The first outcome is similar to what Anil Dash and Fred Wilson have described. Some competitors or related companies adopt the format or API as is to take advantage of the ecosystem that has sprung up around the winning platform. This basically puts the company (Twitter in this case) in a spot where they either have to freeze the API or bear the barbs from the community if they ever try to improve the API in a backwards incompatible way.
The problem with freezing the API is that once it becomes a de facto standard all sorts of folks will show up demanding that it do more than it was originally expected to do since they can't ship their own proprietary solutions now that there is a "standard". This is basically what happened during the RSS vs. Atom days where Dave Winer declared that RSS is Frozen. What ended up happening was that there were a lot of people who felt that RSS and it's sister specifications such as the MetaWeblog API were not the final word in syndicating and managing content on the Web. Dave Winer stuck to his guns and people were left with no choice but to create a conflicting de jure standard to compete with the de facto standard that was RSS. So Atom vs. RSS became the XML syndication world's Betamax vs. VHS or Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. As a simple thought experiment, what happens if Twitter goes along with the idea that their API is some sort of de facto standard API for microcontent delivered in real-time streams. What happens when a company like Facebook decides to adopt this API but needs to API to be expanded because it doesn't support their features? And that they need the API to be constantly updated since they add new features on Facebook at a fairly rapid clip? Amusingly enough there are already people preemptively flaming Facebook for not abandoning their API and adopting Twitter's even though it is quite clear to any observer that Facebook's API predates Twitter's, has more functionality and is supported by more applications & websites.
Things get even more interesting if Facebook actually did decide to create their own fork or "profile" of the Twitter API due to community pressure to support their scenarios. Given how this has gone down in the past such as the conflict between Dave Winer and the RSS Advisory board or more recently Eran Hammer-Lahav's strong negative reaction to the creation of OAuth WRAP which he viewed as a competitor to OAuth, it is quite likely that a world where Facebook or someone else with more features than Twitter decided to adopt Twitter's API wouldn't necessarily lead to everyone singing Kumbaya.
Let's say Twitter decides to take the alternate road and ignores this hubbub since the last thing a fast moving startup needs is to have their hands tied by a bunch of competitors telling them they can't innovate in their API or platform any longer. What happens the first time they decide to break their API or even worse deprecate it because it no longer meets their needs? That isn't far fetched. Google deprecated the Blogger API in favor of GData (based on the Atom Publishing Protocol) even though Dave Winer and a bunch of others had created a de facto standard around a flavor of the API called the MetaWeblog API. About two weeks ago Facebook confirmed that they were deprecating a number of APIs used for interacting with the news feed. What happens to all the applications that considered these APIs to be set in stone? It is a big risk to bet on a company's platform plans even when they plan to support developers let alone doing so as a consequence of a bunch of the company's competitors deciding that they want to tap into its developer ecosystem instead of growing their own.
The bottom line is that it isn't as simple as saying "Twitter is popular and it's API is supported by lots of apps so everyone needs to implement their API on their web site as well". There are lots of ways to create standards. Crowning a company's proprietary platform as king without their participation or discussion in an open forum is probably the worst possible way to do so.
Now Playing: Eminem - Hell Breaks Loose
This painting is "Griselda" by Maxfield Parrish:
And here's a photo of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia for comparison.
Previously seen: R2-D2, AT-AT Walkers, the Death Star, more.
Sometimes you need more than C-Span.
Our Brian Beutler was at the Capitol for the early morning vote, and captured the scene as relieved Democrats stuck together to move health care forward.
Vicki Kennedy was there to embrace her late husband's former colleagues, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius shouted her congratulations to key senators. Read his piece here.
As we've been reporting, the wee hours vote clears a big hurdle meaning they are all-but-certain to pass the bill in a final vote Christmas Eve.
We'll have more reaction and all the day's latest on our health care wire and don't forget to follow us on Twitter.
Filed under: Rumors, WWDC, iPhone
Rumors and speculation are fun. Sometimes 2 + 2 = 4... and sometimes they don't add up to anything. Here's today's equation:
Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference 2010 seems likely to happen at the end of June/beginning of July.
The schedule for the Moscone Center, traditional home of WWDC, shows a "Corporate Event" running June 28 through July 2, 2010. This is around when Apple usually holds WWDC. "Corporate Event" has been the WWDC placeholder-name on the Moscone schedule in the past, at least until Apple was ready to say, "Hey everybody, we're having a party and here's when!" Additionally, Moscone is booked for all of June and most of July by other companies or organizations. Given that, it's likely that WWDC 2010 will be June 28 through July 2.
That space on the calendar may be a big deal.
If WWDC goes the way these things normally do, registration and other pre-conference fun will happen on Monday, June 28. The WWDC keynote will take place on Tuesday, June 29 -- three years to the day after the first iPhone was released.
Maybe Apple had to settle for that week because the International Stem Cell Conference and the NACUBO Annual Meeting beat them to the dates they really wanted. But it's also possible that Apple is waiting until its exclusivity deal with AT&T ends -- the exact day its exclusivity deal ends -- before announcing an iPhone for Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint.
Verizon's CTO made noise last week about his company being prepared for the iPhone in terms of network capacity, though he said nothing about an actual deal.
Do you think 2 + 2 = anything this time?
Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/parislemon/ / CC BY 2.0
[via MacNN]TUAWRumor: Moscone schedule + "corporate event" = Verizon iPhone? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Typefaces: Gotham, Mercury Text, Giant
Manhattan’s urban grid is a vaunted model of simplicity, a rectilinear plan of numbered streets intersecting numbered avenues. Never mind that West 4th Street crosses West 10th, that those walking from Fifth Avenue to Third Avenue will seldom encounter Fourth Avenue, and that “North” in the New York sense differs from conventional "North" to the tune of 29°. It’s this kind of accuracy, transparency and accountability that makes New York the perfect home for Wall Street.
A fixture of the corner of Broadway and Houston, where H&FJ makes its home, is a tourist population forever asking that question of the ages, “which way is uptown?” I can’t entirely blame them: in the math of the NYC grid, Houston is 0th Street, and local signs wickedly conceal the real names of avenues below fake labels that are designed specifically to ensnare tourists. (Watch the meter when you ask a taxi driver to take you anywhere on “Avenue of the Americas.”)
To the rescue comes H&FJ’s own Andy Clymer, whose joint interests in typography, programming, and human decency are combined in Uptown App, his new utility for the iPhone 3GS. Andy’s thoughtfully used some of our fonts on what’s actually a pretty handy app: because it uses the iPhone’s built-in magnetometer, it can give you a quick read on “uptown” in places where GPS signals and cellular networks are unavailable or slow to come online, like when stepping out of freezing cold subway stations. Compared to the inconvenience of frostbite, 99¢ is a genuine bargain. —JH
Uptown App by Andy Clymer, 99¢ from the iPhone App Store.
December 20, 2009 - 11:45 p.m. - Santa Monica, CA
I shipped these cookies to my brother-in-law who's stationed in Afghanistan. Let's hope they make it.
Sen. Webb's office put out a statement this evening declaring his intention (which will already knew) to be one of the 60 votes to move the health care bill on to passage. I reprint it in full below the fold. But in the process of going through his rather pained journey to supporting the bill he says this ...
"Over the past year, the process of debating this issue often overwhelmed the substance of fixing the problem. The Obama Administration declared health care reform to be a major domestic objective, but they did not offer the Congress a bill. Nor did they propose a specific set of objectives from which legislation could be derived. Consequently, legislation was developed independently through five different Congressional committees, three in the House and two in the Senate. This resulted in a large amount of contradictory information and a great deal of confusion among our public."He's far from the only one to make this criticism. But it's a pretty public rebuke in this context.
"I have decided to vote in favor of moving forward on health care reform legislation. I do so despite my disappointment with some sections of the bill, which I will continue to address in the future. But the final package presented by the majority leader reflects many improvements that take into consideration the concerns that I and others brought forward during the debate."Most importantly, the status quo of our present system, which is damaging our national economy at many levels, is unacceptable. The spiraling costs for health care have become economically unsustainable at every level, from corporate America to our small businesses to individual policy holders. In addition, the billions of dollars spent on medical care for the uninsured is a burden borne not only by government at all levels, but also by tens of millions of others through higher taxes and insurance rates.
"Over the past year, the process of debating this issue often overwhelmed the substance of fixing the problem. The Obama Administration declared health care reform to be a major domestic objective, but they did not offer the Congress a bill. Nor did they propose a specific set of objectives from which legislation could be derived. Consequently, legislation was developed independently through five different Congressional committees, three in the House and two in the Senate. This resulted in a large amount of contradictory information and a great deal of confusion among our public.
"As the debate moved forward in the Senate, I and my staff worked through thousands of pages of legislation, and did our best to shape the bill as well as to bring proper focus to key areas. I repeatedly took a number of difficult votes, often breaking with my party, in order to strengthen the bill.
"The managers' package negotiated in the past several days addresses a number of the most troubling concerns. The new language demands greater accountability from health insurers. It reins in excessive overhead costs that go strictly to administration instead of patient care. It immediately makes available a health care tax credit for small businesses. It forces competition through a multi-state, government-administered insurance option. It immediately bans 'pre-existing condition' exclusions for children. It incorporates a measure that I sponsored to reward quality, instead of quantity, of Medicare services offered to patients.
"Significantly, the independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now estimates that the reforms contained in this legislation will lower the federal budget deficit by $133 billion over the next ten years, and by more than $1 trillion over the decade following.
"Assuming the bill is passed by the Senate, I will examine closely the conference report produced at the next stage of the legislative process. Significant deviations from the core principles I insisted on this compromise must remain, or I will withhold my support."
Spicy codfish stew from Kunjip in Manhattan's Koreatown. [Photo: Robyn Lee]
Winter doesn't officially arrive until tomorrow, but on much of the East Coast, we're digging out from the season's first blizzard. After an enormous warming bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, I'm thinking ahead to dinner—maybe a stew, maybe a big pan of roasted winter veggies, maybe just a pot of tomato soup with a crusty grilled cheese.
There's been a great Talk thread about the best blizzard foods, but whether you're actually snowbound or just a little chilly at night, it's time for those favorite winter warmers. What are your favorite cold-weather recipes?
I'm assuming you'd rather have a post than a guilty silence as I fail to deal with present clinic? Right? If not, you may resume your position slumped in a corner of Sunday night and I will skulk away again.I have not blogged for, oooh, days. What, FOUR days? This is most unusual. The OCD pockets of my mind are most displeased and whisper sermons of my inadequacy at me in the small hours. I must absolve myself, however, since it has been utter carnage. I have vague memories of drowning in a sea of unsatisfactory and impossible to complete admin. I remember blagging a hire car without the proper paperwork using the power of sheer embarassment and a light topcoat of cleavage. I distinctly remember being absolutely convinced my credit cards had been used fraudulently, only to discover they were just used - and abused - by me (and being galvanised by this discovery to actually sort out the various money making pieces of paper concealed amidst boxes of household detritus, thus proving that necessity truly is the mother of getting your fucking act together) . And the snow! Having testified to Czech colleague's "impeccable moral standing" on a peculiar Brussels road trip on Thursday, we came out of our fourth embassy of the day - me having sworn for the first time "on", or more accurately "about five feet and behind a perspex window from" the Bible - to whirling, mad snow. So beautiful until you are stuck cursing and weeping, stuck on a steep, icy main road (just conceivably, possibly, because you may have your feet on both the brake and accelerator simultaneously. But probably nothing to do with that at ALL. Nope).And now, after four or five minor miracles, the magical mystery ferry to Hull, and having only got stuck on the ice perhaps eight times, not all of which involved pedal stupidity, we have managed to reach York. Well, I am reliably informed that York is still out there, though apparently Barnitts is moving into the Minster, the only space now big enough to accommodate its collection of stuffed squirrels and mysterious cabling. I have spent the day finishing the pre-Christmas orders. Prog Rock was entirely unphased that I spent the day making arse biscuits, sitting companionably in the kitchen as I cut out row after row of "wank", telling me about 18th century religious movements on the east coast of America. He's learnt to be stoic. The Space Cadette has apparently taken to making her own soap. In a cagoule. And goggles. The combination of my sister and caustic soda is causing me no little anxiety (no to mention the fact I can't stop laughing), but he floats above it all, a zen master with library privileges.Tomorrow, however, I intend to force the spawn out for improving, Viking related pursuits. They could not be less enthusiastic if I had suggested spending the day choosing soft furnishings or going to a porcelain museum. But it's not York if you haven't poked a historical reenacter in the eye with his own broadsword. We will also: walk aimlessly around the town centre eating pastry products, stare in a bovine fashion at the people in Bettys and maybe buy an ornamental screwdriver holder in Barnitts. Because that, since time immemorial, is what we do.I have to stop because Prog Rock has come back from the pub to tell me, entirely unsolicited, about Hans Kung, Gunther Grass and the Pope and whether observance of the seasons can replace the liturgical calendar. It's all go round here.(I have not bought any Christmas presents. That's ok, right? Maybe I'll get my sister to make a batch of soap?)
The league is going to encourage current and former NFL players to agree to donate their brains to the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. via sports.espn.go.com
Since Moses brought the tablets down from the mountain, lists have come in tens, not that we couldn't have done with several more commandments. Who says a year has Ten Best Films, anyway? Nobody but readers, editors, and most other movie critics. There was hell to pay last year when I published my list of Twenty Best. You'd have thought I belched at a funeral. So this year I have devoutly limited myself to exactly ten films. On each of two lists. via blogs.suntimes.com Ebert is finding his way into the greatest blogger's pantheon. I actually wrote out the who's on the list but then I decided to delete it.
My annual buzzwords of the year piece for the New York Times has appeared today, featuring expressions such as aporkalypse, swine flu party, El Stiffo, Octomom, and sexting. Also, there's a discussion going on about them on the New York Times Ideas blog, where you can leave your own comments about my choices, or give your own buzzword of the year.
Lagniappe derives from New World Spanish la ñapa, "the gift,” and ultimately from Quechua yapay, "to give more.” The word came into the rich Creole dialect mixture of New Orleans and there acquired a French spelling. It is still used in the Gulf states, especially southern Louisiana, to denote a little bonus that a friendly shopkeeper might add to a purchase. By extension, it may mean "an extra or unexpected gift or benefit.” via www.wordnik.com My lagniappe to you is the word lagniappe. Thanks, Yahoo Sports.
