Lance Arthur: Life isn't made for 'whys,' it's made for 'why nots.'#

Avi Bryant on Services vs. Applications.#

I think we have to draw a crucial distinction here, between web applications and web content. What Daniel is talking about is effectively content: here's the URL you go to if you want to see so and so's profile. That's great, and very useful, and in fact what the web was designed to do - but it's not an application. At most it's a service: it has a simple, well defined set of inputs and outputs, has minimal user interaction, and can be used from many places.

My argument is that this content or service view of the web doesn't scale up to the application level. It's like unix commands - it's nice that you can string together cat and sort and grep to do useful things, and that these provide services that anyone can take advantage of. But even though the loose coupling is great, you're going to have a real hard time writing emacs as a shell script. Or even pine. At a certain point, you need a richer model of state, of components, and of control flow. Building a complex application by stringing together a series of simple stateless parts, at the level of granularity we're talking about (essentially one user interaction per part), is madness.

Peter Lindberg quotes the article "Velocity of Celebration: Jazz and Semiotics" by Sean Singer,#

The jazz musician is intimately involved in the life of signs. There is never a wrong note in jazz, the photographer Roy DeCarava said, because each note can be redeemed by the next note [my emphasis]. The connection between jazz and semiotics, simplified, is this: the meaning and feeling behind each note, each chord, each chorus, and each improvisation, are not given. They, like the signifier and the signified, are arbitrarily formed. They arrive at their meaning within the context of the notes that surround it.

Reading my blogging homework tonight. Dave Winer's How to Make Money on the Internet is very insightful.#

Dave wrote it while at Davos in 2000. Bill Clinton spoke.

I wasn't sure that Clinton and I were talking about the same thing until Schwab asked him a question after his speech. "Mr. President," Schwab said, "do you have a message for the business leaders here at Davos?"

After a long pause he said "Find a shared vision." He expounded, telling the story of trade negotiations and economic imbalances between developed and developing nations. I felt he was stating the problems of the Internet industry using terms that made sense to him. My interpretation: Without a shared vision, something we agree on, growth can never really happen. As soon as a layer of progress is complete, the wars begin, and years of stagnation follow. This is the cycle of the software-slash-Internet industry, and it looks (thanks to patents, more on that later) as if we might be about to loop around once again.

Not that I only care about political leaders, but this is interesting as well...

When I went to see King Abdullah of Jordan on Sunday, I was prepared to see an immature shadow of his father, the distinguished if short King Hussein, who died last year.

Instead I heard a beautiful speech about peace and friendship. He called the Israelis and Palestinians his brothers. Then he said something that gives me goosebumps to remember. "It's not enough to strive for peace for our children and grandchildren, we must have peace for ourselves." Ahhh the perfect contribution from a young man with most of his life ahead of him. There is nothing wrong with selfishness in the cause of peace. It's beautiful.

Dave asked, "Who loses?" in the Internet?

Again, in my humble opinion, no one has to lose, but no one gets to keep doing the same job they were doing before the transition to the Web. If you define success in terms of continuing to do the same old thing, you will lose. This is the message that causes so much dissonance at Davos and at Seybold. The people who had a good thing going before the Internet are angry. If they draw a line in the sand, as Sumner Redstone of Viacom did so insistently, sorry it's off to glue factory. But if you're willing to risk it all on your intelligence, experience *and* your enthusiasm for the Internet, you will win. But you have to be willing to change.

Joi Ito says that emergent democracy is NOT direct democracy.#

Ross Mayfield rants about the problems of direct democracy and the difference between emergent democracy and direct democracy. This was one of the points that I had difficulty making during the Harvard Law School class. Rojisan and I talked about it last night too. Emergent democracy IS NOT the same as using technology to scale direct democracy. Emergent democracy is about leadership through giving up control, activating the people to engage through deliberation and action, and allowing emergent order to grow from the grass roots. It's the difference between a couch potato clicking the vote button and a group of people starting their own Dean coalition group.

Ross Mayfield writes,

Emergent Democracy should differ from Direct Democracy. Self-organization, deliberation, and citizen driven initiatives -- where the constraint is equal interest of the people -- is in stark contrast to modern direct democracy. Dean's decentralized organization is in contrast to professional pertitioners. Dean's local deliberation and socialization of issues is counter to debate within media and binary referendum decisions. Dean's ability to leverage McCain-Feingold's matching contributions to raise funds at the grassroots level crushes even the specialist interest.

Lance Arthur is learning a lot from therapy.#

His therapist gave him weekly assignments, ways to connect with the world and break down his walls.

I followed her instructions and took my Evening Constitutionals, walking from my apartment up to Alamo Square one night, walking over to Dolores Park another night, riding my bike out to Golden Gate Park on the weekend, each time trying not to have any plans or objectives and just to be. To be outside. To look at trees and listen to the wind and watch the sky melt into night, the fog cloaking the downtown lights and the people conversing and their dogs playing.

I told her I had done what she suggested and, in fact, it was a good week and I felt better. And she said, "So, whom did you speak with?" And I said, "No one." "No one? Not one person at all? All week?" "No." "Why not?" I paused for a long time, thinking about that, and the first thing that popped in my head was, 'Because it wasn't part of your assignment.' But that wasn't really it. What it really was was "It never occurred to me to do it. I don't... talk to people. It's not something I ever do. Ever. Half the time I don't speak to people I know, let alone people I don't." "Was there anyone you wanted to talk to?" "Not really. I never even considered it, so I never..." "You know what your next assignment is, right?"

Lance Arthur mentions that weblogs are not actually popular.#

Who said they were popular? They're only popular with Weblog authors, no one gives a rat's ass about them. They're just prolific. They're like the new Beanie Babies, in two years no one will want one and they'll be abandoned on the side of the road, mark my words.

The upkeep is too time intensive, the payoff is miniscule for the most part, it's still easier just to pick up the damned phone (whether or not the damned thing takes damned pictures you can put on your damned photoblog) and what's the value of having a thousand places all pointing to the same thing? What's the value of Me-Tooism?

It's not all that different from web pages. Remember them? Of course not. They're out of fashion. Oh, sure, there are still diehard web site developers who update their hand-coded beauties every now and again, but those people are relics. They're like Cher, they get all excited when someone notices them but it's just because they got fed up that no one was noticing them so they declared, "that's it! I'm outta here!" and suddenly (for a split second) they get a rush of 'remember when' posts and maybe a little surge of traffic, but it's over. Done. Weblogs, they'll be there in a couple of years.

Adam Curry on the Americanism of Blogs.#

What sticks in my mind most is the brief conversations about weblogs from foreign countries, in my case Europe. I'm jealous of the vigor and dedication that goes into blogging political and social issues in the states. Believe me that there is no country in Europe as adamant about certain inalienable rights, like free speech. When it comes too that Dave is right, blogging truly is an 'american thing'.

It could have everything to do with the fact that the US is only 200+ years old and documents like the constitution are still pretty fresh in everyone's mind. The city of amsterdam alone is over 700 years old, the dutch constitution even older.

We're on the eve of the birth of a constitution for a new union of states (Europe), comprised of 400 million people with a single currency. Surely that is worth blogging about.

Unfortunately the blogosphere in my neck of the woods hasn't quite moved beyond the stage of commenting on traditional media. In turn, Big Media here is still reporting that weblogs are only used by teenage girls who write about their pets. Sound familiar?

Russell Beattie on the Apple product update cycle.#

Apple is going to launch Panther soon and it's going to be another for-pay upgrade to the current OS, even though it's only a "point release". Everyone's grumbling about it (but no one is saying they won't upgrade). What doesn't seem to get mentioned anywhere is that Apple has once again done what no other company has done on such a large scale, make their operating system into a seamless subscription service.

Or actually, maybe there's lots of talk about this on all those Mac boards that I can't stand to read because of seething jealousy, but here's my observation from PC land: Cool. Apple is funding their development of a next generation OS with yearly pay-for updates, and doing a kick-ass job of it. Everyone sorta bitches about the price of the new OS, but then shells out the cash (either now, or when they have a few extra bucks). From what I understand, Apple has made it just a check-box install as well. Pull up a menu in the current OS, enter in your credit card and away your install goes. Poof, new OS.

Can anyone tell me if they have any problems with this system? It's great! Finally we're all getting the idea that software is a process, not a product. It can't just work out of the box perfectly because it's just too damn complex. And it costs real time and cash to do constant development and bug fixing. Obviously there's a minimum level of bug fixing you expect for free (your OS should work at a minimum level) but it's real work getting a lot of other stuff worked out. Lots of man hours, lots of coding, testing, etc. and there's no reason on earth why software companies shouldn't be compensated for this.

Tony Pierce says Moxie is so fine. Seconded.#

Tony Pierce is okay with Arnold.#

arnold can be governor if he wants and hes not half as qualified for doing that as i am for what i want and he gets it. why. because hes rich. because his friends are rich. because he says hes a repub. because he made movies about killing and death that made people somehow feel good about themselves about and i and committing violence with grammar right now im sorry but i am so pissed off right now and i dont know what is wrong with me but if you saw me in the halls right now i would have the biggest smile but thats so fake and so not true that i just have to do another day of this its killing me.

Philip Greenspun reports on the preferred vehicle of rapists and lawyers.#

Interconnected links to Creating a Killer Product in Forbes.#

Looking at what people really want, rather than just what they're doing to achieve that: Creating a Killer Product [via Erik Benson]. "Managers need to realize that customers, in effect, 'hire' products to do specific 'jobs.' That's one reason why retail formats like Home Depot and Lowe's have become so successful: Their stores are literally organized around jobs to be done." And specifically, a bunch of people who buy milkshakes not for the milkshake itself but to avoid getting bored during their commute: "The milk shake did the job better than almost any available alternative. It could take as long as 20 minutes to slurp one through the thin straw. That staved off boredom on the commute. It could be consumed cleanly with one hand, with little risk of spillage. The customers felt less hungry after consuming the shake than after using most of the alternatives. And never mind that it wasn't the healthiest thing to consume. Making you healthy wasn't the job the milk shake was hired for." The rest of the article is stuffed full of examples from Blackberry, Sony, Kodak.

James Robertson links to some horrible jobs from Ryan Underwood.#

Popular Science went the extra mile and sniffed out some of the worst jobs in the world. Among the most grotesque on the magazine's list:

[...]

- One hearty malaria researcher offers up his leg as bait twice a week to capture mosquitoes. Never mind that he already contracted a case of malaria that kept him down for two years. Why so much dedication? Because having a guinea pig take the bites is deemed cruel use of a test subject.

- Isolation chamber testers at NASA--essentially scientists testing their own wares in extreme conditions--once had to recycle their own urine into drinking water 13 times during a 91-day experiment.

- Metric system advocates: two full-time evangelists have the daunting task of convincing the United States to go metric. And you thought Sisyphus had a hard job!

John Gruber follows up his last column.#

pple targeted the Macintosh to the people who would use them, but not to the people who would decide whether to buy them. Or, more specifically, the people who would authorize buying them for large corporations. In every other potential market, the Macintosh was a stellar success.

Joel Spolsky writes about Unicode.#

So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. I swear I will.

And one more thing:

IT'S NOT THAT HARD.

In this article I'll fill you in on exactly what every working programmer should know. All that stuff about "plain text = ascii = characters are 8 bits" is not only wrong, it's hopelessly wrong, and if you're still programming that way, you're not much better than a medical doctor who doesn't believe in germs. Please do not write another line of code until you finish reading this article.

In the new LWN Weekly Edition Development Section is the announcement that Axiom has been released as open source.#

Announcement:

Axiom has been released by Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) as open-source software, and distributed under a BSD-style license. The project, now hosted at Savannah, is led by Tim Daly, who worked on all aspects of the system since the beginning.

Axiom is a general purpose computer algebra system written in Common Lisp. The project started in 1971 at IBM as a research system named Scratchpad. Scratchpad was renamed to Axiom in the 1990s and sold to NAG, which distributed it as a commercial product until 2001. Axiom is a powerful system, which in the current state "represents about 30 years and 300 man-years of research work".

Homepage:

Axiom is a general purpose Computer Algebra system. It is useful for research and development of mathematical algorithms. It defines a strongly typed, mathematically correct type hierarchy. It has a programming language and a built-in compiler.

Kaye Trammell wants webcasted Thursday meetings. It would be awesome IMHO.#

I want to go to the Thursday night blog meetings too.

Now, I don't suggest flying out to Cambridge once a week. But there are other ways to attend the meeting. I think it would be great to attend the meetings through a webcast. Whether it is the full-scale production that we had at BloggerCon or someone's "bootleg" iSight-type feed from a webcam -- Dave & Co. should really think about opening the meeting up to bloggers in Gainesville, Fla.

[...]

That is what makes blogging different than a paper journal. These words want to be read. You share it with others knowing that they will end up giving back in someway. The blogger is not some lonely techie locked away in a mountain cabin - he is a jolly, perhaps misunderstood, "people person."