Scripting News

Odd fact

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 02:35:33 GMT

A one-night stay in a relatively nice hotel in a European capital costs an American about the same as a Mac Mini.

It's left as an exercise for the reader to determine which is a better deal.

Greenspun

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 02:36:33 GMT

I miss Phillip, a real agent provacateur if there ever was one.

As reported by the NY Times, he's offering payments to illustrators to spiff up Wikipedia articles.

"It occurred to me that when the dust settled on the Wikipedia versus Britannica question, the likely conclusion would be 'Wikipedia is more up to date; Britannica has better illustrations.'"

Just $20K (less than 30 nights in a European hotel for an American) and he's given the publishing world something to think about.

That's called leverage!

This is just a test

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:29:01 GMT

Best wishes to Marc

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:30:24 GMT

Best wishes to Marc Orchant and his family.

Marc had a heart attack yesterday, not a small one, and he's in a coma after surgery, and fighting for his life.

This is a test

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 05:26:26 GMT

Jeff and Bill

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 16:25:14 GMT

It's fascinating to watch the back and forth between Bill Keller, a top editorial guy at the NY Times, and Jeff Jarvis, a NY blogger who they look to for an authoritative view of blogging as it relates to journalism.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2007/11/30/updating-bill-keller/

I don't want to presume to speak for Jarvis, but I share his obvious frustration at the way Keller spins the blogger position. God help us if the bloggers replace professional journalists, but also god help us if the professionals don't start taking their jobs seriously. Someone needs to watch the people who run the show, who manage the US budget and military, run the education system, keep the trains and garbage trucks running. If it's not the Times, who would it be? I don't trust any of my fellow bloggers to do it.

Keller's comments are about as irresponsible as our President's insistence that Congress is to blame for his mistakes. It's a joke -- you don't have to look very deeply to see that Congress was Republican for most of Bush's tenure, and the bloggers are, like Congress, looking for some leadership from the professionals. Keller, if you want permission to keep doing the same sloppy business in the future that you've been doing in the past, you won't get that from us bloggers. We want you to do better. And you can start by quoting Jarvis accurately.

Non-competes

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 23:43:09 GMT

Bijan Sabet, a Massachusetts VC, wants to get rid of non-competes.

Bay Bridge

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 23:51:37 GMT

PS: Whenever you see a pic like this on Scripting News, you can click on it to see the full picture and comments.

PPS: Pictures taken recently in San Francisco.

The Hollywood writer's strike

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 03:00:28 GMT

I haven't heard it said in the tech blogosphere that the Hollywood writer's strike cuts right to heart of the philosophy of the entertainment industry and what goes on on the Internet. But it does. It's a classic faceoff, and in this case, the execs, the nemesis of the Internet, seem to be taking the side of the Internet. They can't promise the writers a share of the money they make on the Internet because they don't see how they're going to make money on the Internet. How can you share something that doesn't exist??

When we talk with people from the entertainment industry they explain how they can't just release stuff on the Internet, because they have agreements with the rights holders that assume the realities of the old more restrictive distribution system. Those are the writers.

Now you can see how real the concerns are, when there are real people who express them, and how the execs are in the middle.

I'm a net native (even though I've heard young people question whether anyone my age can be) and while I appreciate the human concerns, there is no meaningful way to be sympathetic. I'm not going on strike, even though I am a writer. I don't ask to be paid for my writing. I haven't been paid for writing software in a very long time, but I keep doing it. Yet I look in my bank account, and somehow the balance keeps going up. In the end, that's all that matters.

I don't hold on to a principle that I must be paid for what I do. I look at money as separate from my living. I live through my work. Some of it pays, and it's unfortunately unpredictable what that is. Welcome to the net, welcome to the 21st century.

I heard a report on Nightline how the writers of The Simpsons are producing YouTube videos, and they're funny. Of course they are -- the people who write that show couldn't possibly write something that wasn't. They should keep doing them, I suspect they will.

Never mind how you get from point A to point B, we're going there. Creative work won't be directly paid for in the future. And we're already in that future. Read my essays from the 90s to see how angry this made me. Now the anger has subsided, as a software writer, and it will subside for the Hollywood writers too. This may be the moment when the system breaks. It looks more and more like that.

Boardwalk at Crescent Beach

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 06:18:22 GMT

Yeah yeah sure sure what ever

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:48:07 GMT

I was sure that when Facebook backed off the privacy invasion of its "Beacon" service, that MoveOn would crow. We're so powerful, they say, we got the giant software company to back down.

But as Valleywag points out, the war in Iraq still rages, Bush is still President, and MoveOn is still a creepy organization that sends out prodigious amounts of spam, and when you ask them to stop they respond with more spam.

Facebook wants to change, but like everything in tech there are tradeoffs. Open up more (good spin) and lose some privacy (bad). They figured no matter what they did people would protest, so they did something extremely radical, people freaked, they backed off, and now will do something less radical, which is probably what they were planning all along.

FB is a smart company run by people with IQs higher than typical creeps at political action committees. God knows what they're thinking at MoveOn, but they lost my support with this ridiculous incursion into techland.

Casting in late 2007

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:14:23 GMT

There are two sides to RSS, casting and catching.

On the casting side, obviously there is:

1. MP3 casting (aka podcasting).

2. News item casting (blogging, news organizations, PR).

3. Photos (not much has been done here, but that will change).

4. Video (check out the major networks, they're doing a lot here).

5. The new hard to describe (for me) casting done by users on social networks like Facebook (which I almost called Feedbook).

6. I think Twitter is a form of casting (it's also a catcher).

7. Publishing bits of code in feeds. I use this extensively as the update mechanism for all my software. Others do too.

8. Torrent feeds (slapping forehead). With this innovation it's possible to write a TiVO that runs on a desktop or Mac Mini. Check out EZTV's feed, very sensible, futuristic (one hopes).

9. What else?

Some comments...

For MP3s you're basically on your own. There aren't many tools for creating RSS 2.0 files with MP3 enclosures. This art has been around since 2001, it's been popular since 2004, so it's fair to assume perhaps that there isn't much demand. It's pretty easy to cobble together a podcast feed by hand. I write scripts to do it, myself, I never do them by hand.

Blogging software is probably the most common tool for news item casting.

For photos, you have Flickr, and Apple's iPhoto does something they call "photocasting" but I haven't investigated this yet (I will, for sure). I have some stuff coming here myself not too far down the road.

Question: What photo collecting sites offer RSS feeds of users' photos? Are they compatible with Yahoo's feed format (they use a namespace called Media RSS) or do they use enclosures, or something else?

Answers: Zoomr, ShoZu (but no metadata about the photos, so what's the point).

For video, it's basically like MP3, if there are any tools on the casting side, I'm not aware.

If you'd like to add anything to this list, which is far from complete (I'm sure) please use the comments.

I'll write about the catching side of this later.

Specifically about podcasting

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:46:43 GMT

I've heard that podcasting didn't achieve its promise, and I guess it's time for me to say what I think about that.

First, obviously it depends on what you felt was the promise.

Second, it depends whether you think there's more to do.

I think there is, and when that's done, podcasting will become more than it is.

As much as I love the iPod, it is not a great podcast player. However, unfortunately, it is the best podcast player you can buy, today.

What if the energy that went into Chumby, for example, went into designing a podcast player? The player might actually look more like Chumby than it does an iPod. The interesting thing about the Chumby is that it is connected but not tethered to the network. The ideal podcast player would be even more loosely connected.

1. It would directly read its feeds over wifi, it would not have to synch through a desktop or laptop computer. The iPhone has enough connectivity to do this. The iPod Touch does. A Nokia N800 does as well. Most cell phones do.

2. You could use it to create a podcast. We're basically there with Twittergram and BlogTalkRadio. Just call a number, and we not only shoot your minicast at Twitter but we also maintain an RSS 2.0 with enclosures feed. In other words, in every way, it's a podcast.

3. It must be open, so users can have a range of choices of catcher software. I don't think a one-vendor approach has a chance of working.

When we get this device, podcasting will work better.

In terms of expectations, a lot of people hoped they could make podcasts and quit their day jobs. I wasn't one of those people, and I never encouraged people to believe that. I see podcasting, for bloggers, as just another way to communicate with a few people who are interested in what they know and think. I also see it as a way for professional news organizations, esp non-profits, to flow reports to people in a very convenient and powerful way. As a consumer of podcasts, I am in heaven. I am a regular listener of: Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, Fresh Air, Nightline, NYT Tech Talk, and numerous NPR shows. I have far more content than I have time to listen. Thanks to podcasting I am a much better informed person, and it gives my mind something to do as I get my exercise.

I don't do my own podcast very often these days, but then I don't do much public speaking or go to many parties or do press interviews either. I'm in a quiet period. I don't know how long it will last, or if it will ever end, I'm just going with the flow. I like to write, and hang out with friends in small groups, and I do a lot of reading and listening, and I also am working on software projects. If I were driving coast to coast or going to political conventions or teaching at a university, I imagine I would also be doing more podcasts.

The Times finally gets the Leopard story

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 01:17:20 GMT

When Leopard came out Pogue gushed that it had so many features he couldn't hope to write about them all. The real news -- not approved by Apple of course -- to get Leopard to run, many users would have to do things that would make a Windows system administrator blush. This, from the computer that "works the way you do," according to their ads.

On the NY Times blog, today, Saul Hansell finally has the story.

Subscribe to comments

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:40:11 GMT

A reminder that you can subscribe to all the comments here on Scripting News with this feed.

http://scripting.com/commentsRss.xml

The HD is woking!

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 01:06:38 GMT

The receiver is working with the cheap antenna that it ships with.

Here's a screen shot from a PBS program about Mexico. Look at how sharp it is.

Now I have to figure out how to get the EyeTV software to record shows in the future.

Very exciting!!

PS: I figured out how to get it to record. But playback seems to be only through their UI. How do I get an AVI file so I can watch it in the den or bedroom? Are they trying to say I have to watch it at my computer? There must be some way to get it to export, or do I have to buy the $39 add-on for that?

Enough to make me (almost) love Mitt Romney

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 07:07:17 GMT

"Like all Americans we love our sports teams and hate the Yankees."

Last line in tonight's Republican debate, delivered by Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts.

joel.reddit.com

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:30:49 GMT

Joel Spolsky has the Digg-clone I envisioned for Scripting News.

Programming less

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:59:27 GMT

A programming lesson I keep relearning.

The design of the central data structure of an app determines the quality of the app, in every way.

Any extra thought that goes into this, will pay off in:

1. Maintainability of the code.

2. Size of the code (you'll write less code with a well thought-out central data structure).

3. Simplicity of the user interface (the structure inevitably shows through in the UI).

4. Ability to respond to feature requests.

5. Adapt to new hardware, OS changes, other apps.

6. More "it just works" experiences.

This is why it's sometimes the right thing to start over from scratch. Programmers often want to start over because they look at the code and it looks complicated, and they think they can make it simpler if they start over. They're right, of course, it will be simpler when they start over, because it won't do nearly as much as the mature product does. Once they finish building out the feature set, it may well be just as complicated.

It's a judgement call. I remember looking at the source of Unix kernel for the first time as a grad student in Wisconsin, and being amazed at the simplicity and obviousness of the code. I couldn't believe something so simple actually worked. Your code at its kernel level must have this simplicity. But at the edges, where you're accomdating the minds of users, inevitably it gets a little messy. The key thing to look for is how hard is it to add a completely new feature. It should be easy to do that. If it's not, it's likely because of a poorly organized (and therefore not well-understood) central data structure.

I've rewritten apps many times, over many years, because when I wrote the first or second versions, I didn't understand the problem well enough, and the code had turned into a morass of patches and workarounds.

Right now I'm recoding the internals of a special-purpose aggregator. I've written many of these, over the years, always quickly, trying to get something running fast, and then lived with data structures that resulted. This time I'm going slowly and carefully, with an installed base of one (me) and ripping up the pavement whenever I find even a slightly better way of doing something. I have other users who are waiting, but that's life.

5/7/97: "When a programmer catches fire it's because he or she groks the system, its underlying truth has been revealed."

Morning miscellanea

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:52:31 GMT

From the What a Great Idea Dept, this guy has made the Wii remote work with Macs. Thanks to JY for the link.

I got the Hauppauge 1145 working with the EyeTV software, connected to my Comcast cable line, but I'm disappointed with the quality of the image, lack of HD support (I thought that's why I was buying it) and the software is too limited. It was able to get the listings from TitanTV when I hooked up to the antenna they provide, but it doesn't get the listings when I use the cable hookup. There is a way to manually record, but I couldn't find the automatic way. And the software is "lite" -- it costs another $39 to get the full thing. I want to make beatiful recordings of PBS shows like Frontline and Nova (I get the HD versions via Comcast), still not there. But I am determined!

I'm working with people in Italy to organize a conference in February to create a connection betw American and Italian bloggers. Of course the food will be excellent, as will the wine. The Italians will tell us how poorly their country runs, and we will tell them we wish we had it so bad.