Calling BS

Two compelling cries of bullshit in the blogosphere this morning. First, Dave Winer pegs the onslaught of advertisements in RSS accurately: it represents lazy thinking by marketers:

Here’s some food for thought for “marketers” who say they need to put ads in RSS feeds to make them pay. By some calculations, in three years, 27 percent of the NY Times hits will originate from their RSS feeds. The BBC is aiming for 10 percent by the end of the year. Neither company puts ads in their feeds because: The feeds themselves are ads for the stories they link to, which are revenue-generators. Anything that keeps people from clicking, that confuses them, takes them off course, is going to drop the click-through rate. And it’s a good deal for the users, because they get the headlines and summaries for articles they only have a superficial interest in, and can easily access the full stories for articles that they want more information on. The rare win-win.

And Doc Searls posts an insightful criticism of the effects of bell-curve thinking on IT, the educational system, and individual achievers, in a post that follows up his equally insightful two-part review of Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat and “It’s a Flat World, After All”:

…all this might also help explain why I chafe at the caste system implied in labels like “Alpha blogger.”

What I love about blogging is that it isn’t school. Instead it’s a great way to discover how the long, flat tail features plenty of original and brilliant individuals. These good folks succeed by earning links, not grades. It’s a much better, and a much flatter, system.

Expansion begins at home, in Redmond

microsoft campus buildings 1 - 6

CNet: After looking around, Microsoft decides to expand at home. That the travel across the 520 bridge to get to hypothetical Seattle offices should be viewed as an insurmountable obstacle to development should surprise no one. Microsoft doesn’t know how to build software (broad generalization) unless all the people are within two minutes’ walk of each other. For all its high-techness, the most surprising thing about the Microsoft culture is how meeting-centric it is.

The thing that caught my eye was this sentence in the third paragraph: “The company also plans to demolish and rebuild 600,000 square feet of older buildings that lack the power and cooling capacity needed for modern computer equipment.” I wonder if that means a final sayonara for buildings 1 through 6? These were the original Microsoft buildings on the Redmond campus, and while they’re earthquake damaged, mold infested, and confusing as hell (check out the satellite photo here and then imagine navigating around the corridors inside those Xs), they’s historic. They also fit sympathetically into the wooded ravine landscape in a way that none of the later buildings manage. Maybe one of my Microsoftie friends can comment on this?

Tiger part II: iChat and Virex

Tonight we tried to talk to Lisa’s parents over iChat, and it didn’t work. I kept throttling the bandwidth of the client down, and it kept reporting “Insufficient bandwidth to maintain the connection.” I thought, huh? Then I checked online.

Thanks to the magic of Google, I found it: Virex 7.5.1, not compatible with Tiger. The good readers of Macintouch had already flagged it as an issue with iChat. I had forgotten about the reported incompatibility until an iChat reader pointed out that processor utilization was pegged by one of the vshield processes. Sure enough: killing the process freed up the CPU.

The Virex issue is troubling: it’s software that was provided by Apple, via the .Mac subscription service. Surely they would have thought to test it? Or for Apple to let Network Associates know that they ought to test it?

Time traveler’s convention, anyone?

Okay, pop quiz: what’s funnier than a bunch of MIT students deciding that this weekend will be the only ever Time Travelers’ Convention (because, technically, you would only need one time traveler convention)? First, the decision that it would be held in East Campus Courtyard, which certainly won’t hold all the necessary time travelers. Second, the story on CNet. And third, the comments on CNet, which as of this writing included:

  • “I went last year. I was a bit disappointed as the only people there were a bunch of geek wanna-bes.”
  • “Which parallel universe? They forgot to mention which parallel universe it was held in. My timeline led to 28,762 instances — of which 32 looked very likely — but I was low on Planck energy… ”

Finally, of course, the CNet story misses one very important thing: the proximity of the Time Travelers’ Convention to the Disco Dance Floor. I submit that this is nothing more than a cheap excuse for a party. Which of course I want to crash.

Tiger notes: install, Spotlight, one-time hits

My copy of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) arrived yesterday, finally. So far? Well, the upgrade went smoothly enough. That’s about all I can report, really; I got home at 9 pm last night and had just enough time to run a backup, verify and repair some minor permissions issues on my hard drive, and kick off the installer before going to bed.

One thing that almost bit me in the butt: hard disk space. I have habitually been down to less than 2 GB free disk space for about the past month—blame digital music—and the installer told me it didn’t have enough room to install Tiger. I was able to proceed by deselecting a bunch of printer drivers. I would have deselected some language files instead, but it appears that, at least with Tiger, there is no way to opt not to upgrade a previously installed language pack. (Incidentally, it makes me nervous that by deselecting drivers from eight or so printer manufacturers, I was able to reclaim nearly 800 MB of hard disk from the install. What do they put in those things—encyclopedias?)

At any rate, in the morning I checked the install after walking the dogs and found that it had happily rebooted and was waiting for me to log in. I did so, watched it slowly proceed, decided not to wait for it, and got in the shower. When I got out the login had finished and I could play with Dashboard and Spotlight.

Spotlight is cool: it fished up a bunch of stuff I didn’t know I had, including iChat logs, when I typed in my wife’s name. However, the short results list (which appears in a dropdown menu as you type, along with the option to show all results) is going to suffer from the same search challenges as Internet search engines: given a potential universe of content, how do you decide which content to surface as most relevant?

In this case, the problem was, I think, Spotlight’s result categories. By default, Spotlight returns categorized search results. Amazon and Microsoft.com both used to do this. The problem with categorized search results is that they interfere with the relevance ranking of the actual results list. For instance, if the four most relevant results for the query “doc searls” included a chat log, an Address Book card, a mail message from him, two more chat logs, a bookmark, and another mail message, how should the search results be categorized? If your first category is “Chat,” including the first, fourth, and fifth search hits, the Address Book card and mail message appear lower in the search list than they should, making the search results appear incorrect. In my case, I searched for “lisa” and the system returned a bunch of information, including an address card. But it wasn’t Lisa’s address—it was the address card of one of her friends, on whose card I had entered “Lisa Jarrett” in the Friend field.

I have a suspicion that some of my issues with Spotlight were related to the fact that it was still indexing my hard drive. This also caused Dashboard to be less responsive than it could have been. I can definitely see the joy to come with Dashboard, though; just having one-key access to a good dictionary and to Wikipedia is a killer benefit.

I had to go to work, so I left Mail importing my 44,000+ email messages (Mail in Tiger uses a new file format to store mail messages, so there’s a one-time hit for translation and indexing). More reports tonight.

n years ago today…

On May 2, 2002: “Hating your customers, part n” and “…part (n+1).” Who says nothing stays the same on the Internet?

On May 2, 2003: “Man, I’m boring. How boring? Just put in a composter last night, that’s how boring. But I’ll be a boring guy with the best vegetables on the block.”

On May 2, 2004: the weekend of mulch, or just how much work is entailed with 15 cubic yards of organic product. “I knew we were in trouble when by Friday night at 6 (after two hours of work) I had shifted hardly any of the pile and only succeeded in covering a few beds.”

(And this weekend? Digging up stumps in our front yard and laying down new grass seed. Ah, May.)

Happy birthday, Dave

A big happy 5-0 to Dave Winer, the Blogfather, without whose example (and eventual direct encouragement) I wouldn’t be writing this blog.

Though I have told this story before, it’s worth repeating:

  1. 1994: Dave starts writing Davenet, email punditry about the software industry.
  2. 1995: Dave’s stuff starts getting published in Wired (or HotWired, anyway). I, a junior software developer and an amateur student of the English language, wake up: here’s a software developer I’ve heard of (he scooped Apple by releasing Frontier in its first incarnation as an application automation solution before Apple released AppleScript), who’s writing intelligently and passionately about the Internet, Apple, and a bunch of other things I care about. Coooool, as Dave would have said then.
  3. 1997: I get married and we move into our first apartment in McLean, Virginia. This is our first place together, and we are at the time the furthest-north outpost of the Jarrett family (which is centered in North Carolina), so we start calling the place “Jarrett House North.”
  4. 1997: Dave starts Scripting News.
  5. 1999: Dave releases Frontier for free. I download it and start hacking it to build web pages which I serve from my old Power Mac over our first broadband line (you can see my first attempts on the Internet Archive). The site is called Jarrett House North.
  6. 1999: Dave releases Manila and the EditThisPage service, Frontier based services that take dynamic web content management and put all the tools in the browser.
  7. 2000: I sign up for an EditThisPage site and make my first post. In a moment of insanity, I name the site after my little home grown site, little thinking about the implications for the URL. It turns out that jarretthousenorth.editthispage.com is one of the longest possible URLs imaginable.
  8. 2001: I am interning at Microsoft and find myself turning often to Dave’s site for perspective, since he’s writing about things that my company is doing and I’m doing research on online community. I decide that it’s time to start updating my site more often. Maybe once every three months.
  9. July 19, 2001: I opine on the future of SOAP and XML-RPC on the Mac platform following MacWorld. Several people, including Dave and Macintouch, point to me. “You mean people actually read this stuff? You mean I got more pageviews yesterday than (insert Microsoft product)?” I get hooked on blogging.
  10. 2002: I buy my domain name. Of course, at this point the lengthy URL is so established, I figure that shortening it by twelve letters will be sufficient.
  11. 2005: Here I am, still blogging.

Thanks for the start, Dave. It’s always good to read you and it’s been a privilege to meet you live a few times as well. Many happy returns and here’s to the next 50!

No Tiger no cry

I’m going to have to have a word of prayer with Amazon, or UPS, or both. Despite a status from the package tracking that my Tiger was “out for delivery” on Saturday morning, it never showed up. So much for next day shipping, for which I paid a nice premium.

I guess that gives me more time to get my backup house in order and to get all the application updates, but I’m still angry. I guess I’ll have to see if Amazon will step up and take responsibility and give me a discount on the shipping cost. Somehow I doubt it.

The James Madison Papers

Library of Congress: The James Madison Papers. A welcome addition to the trove of primary documents from our founding fathers that are now available online. Searchable, of course, though since I can’t link directly to a search results page you’ll have to try it out for yourself. (I suggest the searching the keyphrase university of virginia.)

Also of interest: this essay on Madison’s use of code and cipher, which will resonate with readers of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Interestingly, some of his cryptographic correspondents included Edmund Randolph, James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson (this detail is left out of most Jefferson biographies).

Sadly, the images of the papers don’t come with transcriptions. This is a frustrating flaw in an otherwise impressive collection.

One review to rule them all

Ars Technica turns in its usually comprehensive (if not deeply propellerheadish) review on the newest Mac OS X release. Featuring more information than you ever thought you would need on metadata, imaging technologies, kernel extensions, and a little bit about actual user features, it’s by far the most comprehensive review of the OS yet for those who care not just about what their computer does but how it does it—or might be made to.

Mark your calendars: the Boston Symphony y yo

It looks like my debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra will actually be a Pops concert, or concert series to be precise. I’ll be performing in the Pops’s “Red, White and Blue” program for three performances in June. (I’m intrigued by the listing of an oud soloist on the program; haven’t seen the music yet so anything could be happening with that!) Then in July I’ll be at Tanglewood for Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, which it appears is the “opening night” program.

It’s a good thing my SAT classes are almost over. Rehearsals are about to consume a lot of my time.

Review silence lifts on Tiger

In a few days we’ll find out whether Tiger, aka Mac OS X 10.4, is really the greatest thing since sliced bread or not. I’ll probably find out a little later than everyone else, since I ordered my copy from Amazon (so that I could take advantage of the big discounts; $50 off the family pack price is too compelling to refuse). Just looking at the review headlines gives a flavor of some of the anticipation:

Doing the right thing: Rogers Cadenhead

Congrats to Rogers Cadenhead, briefly notorious for his successful domain name speculation exercise resulting in his acquisition of www.benedictxvi.com, for doing the right thing and pointing the domain to ModestNeeds.org, a local charity. He could have made a bunch of profit from the domain, but this is clearly the net positive choice for everybody. I hope the television crews don’t stop calling. I think he should at least get a free trip to Vatican City and an audience, if not one of those hats.

Regarding Dave Winer’s suggestion: I think there will be a healthy amount of blogging about the Pope’s actions and that it should have some central location. But I don’t think anyone going to benedictxvi.com for faith reasons is going to be persuaded by a bunch of critical articles. Setting up popeblog.com or ratzinger.org will accomplish the same thing.

Email productivity tips

Now that I’m back in the real world (that is, not blogging all day long), I am definitely feeling the need to revisit some of the recommendations for time management at 43 Folders. Fortunately Merlin posted a roundup of email and task management recommendations today, including the following (drawn from the three individual posts):

  • Shut off auto-check, or set it to something reasonable like every 20 minutes.
  • Pick off the easy mails—if you can reply to something with a 1-2 line response, do it.
  • Write less.
  • Be honest—delete or archive the mails you’ll never do anything about.
  • Process each piece of incoming email as: delete, archive, defer for later response, generate an action, or respond immediately. Then go back to the response and action items and do them in batches.
  • Outlook and Entourage allow you to categorize task items. Use categories to provide the context around task items. Merlin suggests using functional categories (“chores,” “errand,” “write,” “calls”), computer-related categories, and categories like “agenda” to prevent items from falling off the plate.