I’ve been waiting to upgrade the memory in my MacBook Pro, but hadn’t–until this week. Other World Computing has this deal going on right now where you can get the 4GB upgrade for $92.50. If you send in your old memory chips after the upgrade, you can take up to an additional $20 off. After it’s all said and done, this will cost me $72.50 for a 4GB upgrade. That’s a pretty good deal.
Month: January 2008
Self Tuning Guitar
So this is pretty cool. My friend Kip says that it would make me look like a dork if I showed up with one of these at an open mike night, however, I don’t think I’ve ever been to an open mike night where *everyone* didn’t look like a dork. It’s a cool piece of gear. And by the way, I’ve never done and don’t plan on doing an open-mike night, no matter what Kip says.
Twitter: The Long Tail of Celebrity?
If you’re not familiar with Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, you should take a look at his book or at least read the about page on his site to understand this post. In a nutshell from Chris’s site:
The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.
In an attempt to explain what Twitter is to those who are not familiar, I’ve said that it is the long tail of celebrity. Ok, so that is probably pretty dumb since now I also have to also explain what the long tail is. I probably need to keep searching for a better definition, but when I say that it’s the long tail of celebrity, I simply mean that everyone who uses Twitter can be a celebrity…
to a certain extent.
Once you have followers on Twitter, you could be considered a celebrity of sorts. You’re not one of the big names, the hits, but you could certainly be considered a niche–especially in the case where your followers are only friends or family.
Thanks to Marcus I have started to follow some independent software developers for the Mac on Twitter and find many of their tweets (Twitter posts/updates) to be interesting. There’s lots of noise too, but you can quickly filter through that. What I’ve learned from following these guys is just the sheer amount of time these guys seem to spend coding. I know that’s what it takes to be successful as an indie, but it’s just fascinating to me to watch these guys update what’s new in their development processes.
To me, guys like Wil Shipley, creator of the award winning Delicious Library and Daniel Jalkut, developer of MarsEdit are celebrities of sorts. I don’t know Wil or Daniel personally and they don’t know me from Adam, but Twitter has enabled me to see what’s going on with the most recent developments in the latest version of each of the applications they develop and maintain. It’s highly interesting to me.
I see them as successful at doing that which I would personally like to do as well. I’m not star struck by these guys as tends to be the case when people are fascinated with Hollywood celebs, however, there is certainly an element of admiration as they are the real deal in independent Mac OS X development. They actually have applications available for purchase and are living the dream.
If my theory is right, then everyone can be a celebrity by using Twitter. Just don’t go taking yourself too seriously, throwing public tantrums, and getting caught driving drunk like the regular celebrities do every time your followers number rises. Remember, you’re still in the long tail–you’re a niche, not a hit.
You can catch me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/perlmunger. It’s not terribly interesting, but if you follow me, I’ll be your celebrity.
Satisfaction Guaranteed
So I’ve been using the NetBeans IDE v6 to do some Java development. I’ve been pretty happy with it so far. It has a nice set of project templates. It allows you to run and test web apps directly and at $0 dollars you can’t beat the price.
I loaded the application today and here is what I was greeted with:
Now, I suppose you could make the case that since it’s a free application, I should be obliged to take their survey, but I don’t recall agreeing to that. Just like most people, I didn’t read the license agreement so maybe I did agree to it, but what’s funny is that they want me to express my satisfaction with an application that has, for the first time since I started using it mind you, done that which is one of the most likely ways to cause dissatisfaction. They gave me two options and neither of them are useful to me.
Netbeans is cross-platform which means you’re going to have some hold-over ideas from other platforms, namely Windows. Since I work on a Mac, this also seemed very unfamiliar. Mac apps don’t bother you with stupid dialog boxes (that often) and when they do, they normally give you a way out. This dialog does not.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think a third option that says “No thanks. I don’t ever want to take a survey”, or even simply “Cancel” would suffice for the moment. That’s basically what “Remind Later” does, but when labeled that way, I realize that I should deal with this in a permanent way in order to be left alone, but the only permanent way is to choose the other option, “Go To Survey”. Now, I realize I don’t have to take the survey once I’m at the site, however, I am now less satisfied with the application because it is bugging me to take a survey and tell the company that I’m not satisfied because they bugged me about taking a survey. (I’m dizzy now) So I’m going to clue them in without taking the survey. Hello, Netbeans people. Yes. Here’s one way to guarantee my satisfaction–leave me alone!!
So this is just a rant and me complaining. It’s not that big a deal, but I would take this opportunity to say that if you are a new Mac developer coming from the Windows world where forcing users into choices they don’t want is the order of the day, just get over that notion now. Don’t start building Mac apps that do this. Please. It doesn’t help anyone. I think Mac users are generally happier people. I think it’s because their apps are unobtrusive. Leave your users alone. They’ll let you know if you need to fix or change something.
Update: Just got contacted by Gregg Sporar who works for Sun (see the comments). He says this has been fixed in Netbeans 6.1. Cool!
I’m Nearly Certain He’s Right
I’ve started reading some economics blogs lately. Marginal Revolution is one of them. It’s not the standard fair I cover here, but keep in mind I’ve left myself the option to talk about anything by saying my blog is about programming “and stuff”. Anyhow, economist, author, and blogger Dr. Tyler Cowen posted this gem called What I Think I’m Nearly Certain About. I didn’t know anything about Dr. Cowen until I read this post, but several of his insights are quite profound to me. I’ll name the ones that stand out.
3. Government-dominated health systems, insofar as they work well (a number of them do), succeed simply by lowering costs. Health care has a murky relationship to human health, pharmaceuticals and broken limbs aside. A version of the single-payer system, as might be adopted in the United States, would not lower costs. We would be raising taxes and lowering medical innovation to give poor people a good deal more financial security and a slight bit more health; that is the relevant trade-off.
It seems that often when you get people talking about healthcare, there’s this simple pat answer people give no matter what side they are on (and there seem to be many sides). The pat answers are almost always wrong. Dr. Cowen I think hits the nail on the head. If you have a plan that reduces costs, it doesn’t matter what side you’re on. It just makes sense. If public healthcare could do that, so be it. If it’s privatization, so be it. It gets to the root of the matter–make healthcare cheaper by lowering costs. Who’d a thunk.
5. We are programmed to respond to the “us vs. them” mentality and highly intelligent people are no less captive to this framing. We should try very hard to get away from this framing.
Man, isn’t that the truth. Seems hard to admit sometimes, but it’s so much easier to be all about what we (humans) are against than what we are for. This is no less the case for intelligent people. Look at the presidential candidates. There’s a lot of rhetoric about what’s wrong with our country/the world/etc., but it’s very difficult to get a clear answer as to what direction any of them would go that isn’t neck deep in spin and fancy words. This applies to all candidates.
7. It would be a disaster if American taxation ever reached 55 percent of gdp.
A democratic candidate is a shoe-in for Prez. this year, which, frankly, makes significantly higher taxes likely.
8. Which institutions work well is often country-specific.
Amen! Man, I get tired of people saying, well healthcare, taxes, gun control, {your favorite societal problem here} is so much better in {favorite european country or Australia here}. It’s more complicated than that with *everything*.
12. It is a big mistake — even in rhetoric — to conflate concern for the poor with comparative egalitarian intuitions. The left ought to turn its back on this mistake, although it would mean losing one of their most effective rhetorical tools.
Lip service that shows favor to the poor is pathetic. Anyone who does it should be called out on the mat for it. A true bleeding heart is a good thing–a bleeding heart in name alone is societally detrimental.
Well, that’s all I have to say about that. Read the rest of the post and enjoy Marginal Revolution. You should also start reading Mark J. Perry’s blog called Carpe Diem if you’re even remotely interested in economics. I think I like his blog a little better (though slightly) than Marginal Revolution for some econ insights. Mark cuts through the crap and gets to the point. Short posts with a ton of digestible information.
Nobody Uses JavaServer Faces
So, I’m going to take a quick detour from Cocoa development for a moment as at my day job I am working on a Java project. The application simply displays a list of items on the first page and then provides a link for each item to a details page. It’s pretty simple, however, it’s taken me two weeks to get it to the point where it actually displays the data. Now I’m working on formatting fields so that dates don’t just display as unix time stamps and fields that are labeled “Reachable” display as “Yes” or “No” rather than as “true” or “false”, etc.
I am using JavaServer Faces for the project as the technology to be used was specified in the design. If you’re not familiar with JSF, it’s a bit like Java Struts. It uses tag libraries, but it does a good job of implementing a true MVC (Model View Controller) architecture. My kudos for the technology, however, stop there. I’ve read many articles touting how JSF is going to be the great new web development technology that everyone will be using. It constantly gets compared to ASP .NET and seems to nearly always come out on top in such comparisons. Yet, I have yet to find any redeeming qualities. As much as I despise ASP .NET, it is a dream compared to JSF.
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I can’t debug anything with break points as everything is compiled into a java class at run time and all I ever see are tags, not Java code. It is so far abstracted that I can’t get to the guts of it if I tried. If you recall, I am not terribly fond of black boxes and this has got to be one of the worst ones I’ve seen yet. I will complete the project using JSF, but I am not impressed in the least. If the design didn’t have mandated that I use JSF, I would have had this project done the same day it was assigned as I would have written it in PHP. It’s the right tool for this job, frankly.
And that brings me to the point. JSF is a technology that looks good on paper, but when it comes to actually using it, it stinks. I have come to the conclusion that nobody uses JSF simply because when I do a web search to find the answer to the simplest of questions, I find nothing useful. Sure, there are tutorials out the wazoo, but not a single one of them is shorter than 15 printed pages and most of them show you how to make some retarded calculator application that is in no way any sort of representation of a “real-world” app. Fifteen printed pages to demonstrate a calculator? Wow! JSF is impressive!! Maybe fifteen pages is an exaggeration, but I’ve seen many tutorials that are very long and by the end of them all you’ve done is taken input from the user in a single text field and responded in a new page with “Hello {name}. It is currently {datestamp}”. Not exactly useful or helpful.
Ok, I’m done ranting. If JSF is your favorite technology (though I doubt there is a single soul that cares in the least–time will tell), I’m sorry if I’ve stepped on your toes. You probably will surmise that I just don’t understand it well enough. That may be true, however, there is overwhelming evidence that the people who use it are few and far between and very few people consider it worthy of writing a proper tutorial with reasonable explanations. The bottom line is I’ve done a lot of web applications in my career, and I would *never in a million years* choose JSF to build a web app. It’s nearly unusable. Don’t get me wrong. I am getting the project done, but that’s a testimony to my own development skills, not how great the technology is. JSF stinks. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Feel free to disagree in the comments.
The Death Of High Fidelity
There is a great article on the Rolling Stone website about why modern music is so terrible. I’ve been saying this for a while myself, but music is all about the dynamics. Audio compression makes music that could sound edgy and interesting sound like the candy coated drivel the industry has gotten so good at producing.
Watch the video below to understand what this all means and then read the article from Rolling Stone. Awareness is probably the only way this will get fixed.