October 2003 Archives

I've long documented the slimy and stupid things that Microsoft does from time to time. Add two more actions to the laundry list: implementing a feature that Apple's already patented and firing someone for taking pictures of a pallet of dual G5s at a Microsoft campus.

The first is Microsoft's innovative new feature that sounds an awful lot like Piles, Apple's patented, innovative UI feature. I mean, Apple Legal isn't exactly a lazy bunch of do-nothings and the patent is pretty old with no prior art. Is Microsoft just begging to be sued? Do they maybe think that this might get them some more publicity? Or will they say that it's yet another feature that a competitor has stolen? The hubris is amazing.

The second occurred when a temporary worker who was also a blogger snapped a picture of a pallet of dual G5s outside of a Microsoft office and then blogged about it. Somehow someone at Microsoft saw the entry and fired him for it. It wouldn't be the first time that a blogger has been fired over entries in his blog, but it would be a very stupid action since Microsoft publicly develops software for the Mac. One would expect that they would need the newest hardware in order to fully test their software out. If they were trying to avoid any negative publicity engendered by using a competitor's products, they certainly botched it in classic Microsoft fashion since there's been a maelstrom of negative publicity already. Slashdot picked up the story right away and Slashdot is often the vanguard of big news items in the computer industry. This'll probably rank up there with the fake endorsements.

Shame on you, Microsoft.

I'm taking a blog vacation day today and possibly tomorrow. I imagine that I'll be pretty consumed with taking care of two little ones. If you want to know all the pertinent details, check out the PregoBlog, which I will be updating.

For future reference: Plone Conference Archives. Plone is built on top of Zope and Zope is a free, open-source content management system.

AppleScript for Absolute Starters, a free e-book, comes highly recommended from several sources. I haven't read it yet so I can't add my accolades, but it looks pretty solid after a quick scan.

Simon Willison has a great list of reasons why pair programming is such a great idea. This is another link I will be passing along to the boss man.

There's a good interview with Evan Williams up over at CNET. Evan is the founder of Blogger—the software used to power this and the other blogs at the Bill Brown Information Center—and is now working for Google, which bought his company.

Evan and his employees have created an internal version of Blogger called BIG that he says has taken off. According to Evan, several hundred Google employees use blogs internally to track projects, share links, and whatnot. That is so cool: I've suggested to my employer numerous times how internal blogs could really work wonders on reporting and project management. I believe I will pass him this link as further data.

Does anyone know if OmniWeb has a feature, preference, or option to prompt before quitting? I've inadvertently pressed CMD-Q a few too many times, thinking I was in a different application than OmniWeb, resulting in the loss of whatever sites I was browsing. No big deal thanks to OmniWeb's excellent history drawer, but it gets really maddening when I'm working on a blog entry.

I just want to know before I shoot off yet another email to OmniGroup suggesting a feature that has already been implemented.

I thought that I had already posted an entry about WhyNot and its accompanying book, but I can't find it after looking through the archives. Damn! It's a really cool site and the book sounds intriguing.

Tom Ehrenfeld, whose book I have mentioned, just reviewed the book in his blog. He recommends the book highly, stating that it stands out in the crowd of books about innovation. Good enough for me; added to my Wish List.

I'm an innovation and creativity junkie, reading just about anything on the subject. I like to think of myself as a creative type, but I know my limitations. I'm always sure that I'm missing something and that that something is out there for me to find and discover. I read IdeaFlow regularly, looked into TRIZ, and contemplated Taguchi.

I might be kidding myself, thinking that I'm worse off creatively than I really am. But I usually garner at least a morsel of useful information from the books I read and the sites I browse, so I guess it's not a complete waste of time.

Sanjay has a great tip to speed up your Acrobat 6 startup for Windows. I don't know if it works for Mac OS X as well—it probably should—because Panther's Preview app is so freakin' fast that I don't care. That and I only have Acrobat Reader 5 installed because I never saw a need to upgrade, which is very unusual for me, the Upgrade King.

I'm trying to decide what language to learn next and I'm really leaning towards Python. I figure that I can master C# at work since the big project relies on it and I'm pretty much done with Java (as much as I like it) because I just can't seem to get any traction on using it. I've heard a lot of good things about Python and the PyObjC seems to have reached stable, mainstream status. Plus, Panther now lets Python into the Quartz graphics libraries, which suggests that Python is poised to break into first-language status in Mac OS X—joining Objective-C, Java, and AppleScript.

This essay about the utility of Python as a first language in computer science swayed me. Perhaps after getting comfortable with Python (and mucking about in Zope), it will open me up to getting comfortable with Cocoa and Objective-C—my inevitable goal. Plus, there's so many great books online about learning it.

[UPDATE (11/4/03): I just found this great series of interviews with Bruce Eckel on the subject of Python. Awesome perspective!]

After seeing Kill Bill Vol. 1, I thought that it would be a good idea to see Quentin Tarantino's other major film, Pulp Fiction, so that I could get a feel for what came before in Tarantino's oeuvre. As mentioned in that previous review, I had avoided Pulp Fiction thus far because of the hype surrounding it. I feared that the movie would not live up to the hyperbole and the movie would turn out just as I had initially suspected: a postmodern movie about nothing, devoid of plot and more concerned with form than anything else.

That's exactly what the movie turned out to be. It is presented as a series of vignettes that seem separate and independent but are loosely tied together in the final scene. Each chapter does not build on the previous one; in other words, there is no plot to speak of and the theme—here I'm being charitable in ascribing one to it—is fairly minimal: bad things happen to bad people. I thought that the movie might be about the redemption of the hit man Jules, but that's neither well-developed or fully explicit.

In speaking with people about the movie, the constant refrain was that the movie was great because it jumped around the different vignettes in no particular order and then tied it all together nicely in the end. This is the elevation of form above substance. I question how innovative it really is since it goes against the fundamental characteristic of narrative: chronology. Sure, other films and fiction have gone back and forth between the present and the past through flashbacks. But these interludes are brief and serve to drive the main story line forward. Pulp Fiction presents these chapters willy nilly, without any real reason for their order. Memento used chronology in an interesting way, but it served the story well. Pulp Fiction chops up the story line (whatever it may be), throws it in the air, and where it lands is how it's shot.

If this had been done in a book, would we hear praise for its innovativeness? (Bad analogy, if you're familiar with the current state of literature and literary criticism.) No, we would call the product amateurish, disjointed, and incomprehensible. Why would such a farce become acclaimed and vaunted if transferred to film? No matter how well written the individual chapters (or individual sentences), the sum is less than its parts.

Tarantino is clearly skilled as a director, for the shots and scenes are extremely well crafted. The tension in the overdose scene with Uma Thurman, John Travolta, and Eric Stoltz is palpable and chilling. The actors and actresses are generally well played, though their characters aren't developed beyond the generic range of mobsters.

As a final note, the scenes with the drug use and the anal rape were completely unnecessary. The only reason that they were included was for their shock value, which was considerable. They detracted from the story for no purpose and that is a major strike in my mind. There are a limited number of scenes and minutes in any film and so each scene should advance the drama or story along. To spend so much time on these subjects and events is a travesty. In a perfect film, they would represent a major flaw. In this film, they suggest a relativistic disdain for both the audience and man's cognitive needs. That's the most damning criticism I could level towards a film.

Well, my wife's water broke this morning and FedEx suggests that my Panther package is on the truck. I hope they don't require a signature…

In other words, I'll get two great upgrades in one day!

[UPDATE: Okay, there'll only be one great upgrade today. Turns out that Sandi's water didn't break, but she was having some serious amniotic fluid-wannabe discharge. Even her doctor thought she was ready. Luckily, the hospital visit was fairly minimal.]

Amazon has unveiled a feature that many are heralding as useful: full-text search of 120,000 books (thus far). It allows you to preview the text so that you can get a feel for where the terms are used in context.

Their explanation of how it works indicates that its utility is strictly of the preview before you buy and there are a limited number of pages you can view in each book.

As I said earlier, a lot of people are going to think that this is the cat's meow. I disagree. I think it's a nice enough feature, but I have to wonder about its utility. Searching through titles and other metadata is one thing and I think the fact that it's served Amazon up to now is testament to its power. That Amazon, normally the astute and prescient e-commerce operator, would devote precious resources and effort towards storing the full-text of 120,000 books and then making it available through such a search mechanism suggests that more is at work here than meets the eye.

Suppose that Amazon eventually got through all the books in its catalog. What if it were to offer those books online for purchase or subscription? It is the Wal-Mart of the bookselling industry and there is ample reason to suppose that it could bend publishers to its will. The biggest hurdle to ebooks' success was the limited offering available online. Textbooks are useful to read, but having every Danielle Steel or Tom Clancy novel online would get people hooked. The iTunes Music Store has established that people will pay a premium for convenience, paying 99¢ for a lesser-quality version of a song without any liner notes or lyrics.

We've already seen how O'Reilly's Safari service makes such a venture viable. Imagine if all of the books on Amazon were so easily accessible and available! The publishing industry isn't game for this right now, certainly, and Amazon is making all the right statements about the limitations of this new feature to placate them. But I bet it's quietly amassing just such a gargantuan archive. And I bet that Jeff Bezos isn't devoting so much effort to let you know that the words "human entelechy" are only found in Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.

It's a revolutionary idea that rises from the ashes of the flameout of the ebook. The ebook is the future and the time has come for a solid player to back it wholeheartedly. I'd buy that for a dollar.

Apple's new version of Mac OS X is going to provide a new feature called FileVault, an automatic, configurable system that encrypts and decrypts your entire home directory at login and logout. It uses AES—currently the most advanced encryption available that's not public key—and a 2048-bit key!

My initial thought at hearing this was that no one could possibly ever remember a 2048-bit key (256 characters, in other words, or 128 if using Unicode) and people would end up using "panther" or "edna" as their key, rendering the security easily breachable. A comment over at Slashdot cleared up the matter. It turns out that the 2048-bit key is probably a one-way hash of a much smaller key, thus making the key virtually uncrackable. That's an elegant and awesome solution that makes me feel much more comfortable using it. Thanks, Apple!

[UPDATE: I keep hearing the 150 new features figure being bandied about, but I never knew what those 150 were (aside from the big ones mentioned at every opportunity). Apple has since put up a page listing each and every one of them. And my copy arrives tomorrow! Yeehaw.]

[UPDATE (10/24/03): Oops, FileVault isn't 2048-bit encryption. It's only 128 bit. I think 2048-bit encryption would result in massive disk usage. My mistake.]

A SEARCH FOR GULLIBLE ON GOOGLE YIELDS NO RESULTS. FREAKING INCREDIBLE!

[NOTE: THIS ENTRY IS IN ALL CAPS ON ACCOUNT OF INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY. DID YOU FORGET TO CELEBRATE IT?]

Steve documents some more Winer wackiness. He's so … volatile.

Sweet. Google has added a new feature to its main search interface. Entering define before your search term will conduct your normal search as well as provide a definition of the term or terms. The function appears to be relying heavily on Princeton's WordNet software, which is quite an adequate base from which to work. It would be really neat if Google worked on WordNet and integrated its enhancements back in.

Examples: define Pakistan, define Google, define Dave, define 42, define RSS, define Radio—more evidence that Google is blacklisting Dave's products: they didn't even mention his software!!!, define apple, and define f*ck

If Microsoft did decide to compete with Apple in the online music arena, this "innovation" would certainly be helpful in driving sales. In Microsoft's world, if you can't beat them, prevent users from knowing they exist or spread FUD.

[UPDATE: Salon has another good article about Microsoft's chicanery.]

[UPDATE 2: The Register's Andrew Orlowski has a column up about Microsoft's reaction to Apple's iTunes Music Store. Orlowski suggests that Apple is looking to create a vertical monopoly on music distribution and playback. This is about the most ludicrous thing I've heard about Apple and iTunes—and I've heard a lot of ridiculous stuff in the last few days.

This is precisely why the Sherman and Clayton Anti-Trust Acts are so insidious. To say that Apple has a monopoly because of iTunes Music Store is to overlook all of the options available, all the substitutes already present. Sure, the iPod is wildly popular and the iTunes Music Store has had gangbuster sales—better than any other legal service out there by most accounts—but a true monopoly requires some forcible barrier to entry. Any company is able to enter the online music business, and many have done exactly that. The barriers to entry are minimal and getting lower because of Apple's pioneering licensing deals.

The iTunes Music Store does use a relatively proprietary format, for now. AAC is really only supported by Apple and its iPod. There's no reason why some other music player couldn't implement AAC because its an open format available to anyone willing to pony up the licensing fees. In fact, there's no reason why any other audio software couldn't use the codec either. Orlowski would have us believe that AAC represents the path to monopoly.

Even Microsoft's proprietary format—Windows Media Audio—isn't really a monopoly because there's so many other formats available to consumers, ranging from the commercial MP3 and AAC to the open-source Ogg Vorbis. Microsoft can't force anyone to use WMA and they can't prevent anyone from not using it. Even if they made sweetheart deals with music player manufacturers, the manufacturers could have chosen otherwise and consumers don't have to buy them.

The substitutes here are prevalent and plentiful. Compact discs are widely entrenched in the marketplace and the majority of consumers buy their audio media in that format. There is also a sizable number of computer users infringing copyright via one of the various online download services. To say that consumers are forced to use AAC or WMA is crazy and perhaps disingenuous.

What iTunes and Windows Media Player represent are brands and brands are almost always linked to a single company. But that interferes with the perfect competition implemented by the anti-trust statutes. They envision the marketplace as one of commodity goods available to everyone—where the laws of supply and demand are perfectly realized and equilibrium is constantly achieved. Brands just don't work in this model since they eliminate the possibility of commoditization. All purses are not alike and a lot of people pay exorbitant amounts to get a Prada, Dooney & Burke, or Coach bag, even though there's no reason why these couldn't be produced for much, much less. The brand here is quite powerful.

And that is why there's no monopoly here—on either side. Monopoly comes when the barriers to entry are enforced by law. Local phone service is largely monopolistic, so is local power distribution. Software defies monopoly. And the Internet makes monopoly virtually impossible. Anyone who cries otherwise has probably been negatively affected by a competitor and has turned to the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission for cover. These "political entrpreneurs," to use Burton Folsom's apt phrase, can't compete in the marketplace so they turn to government to alter the marketplace in their favor. They probably had an excellent marketshare that they crapped away: Netscape pissed away its browser lead and Sun lost its server operating system preeminence.

What Microsoft and Apple are doing is competing. Microsoft's way is to lock people in to their closed format and create hooks that prevent people from accessing competitors easily; Apple's way is to try and create the best service possible with the best music player driving sales. Sure, Apple would like you to be a Mac user with their iPod but their software interfaces with practically any music player, can use MP3 codecs instead of AAC, and allows you to use music from other online stores providing a codec is available for their format. That's not perfect competition, but Apple's trying to establish their brand as the preeminent source for music.]

Thankfully, I haven't had to be outside too much because it's been over 100° F for several days now. It's freakin' October, Phoenix! Something must be done.

Three days till Panther is released and I still haven't preordered. Crud.

[UPDATE: Fixed that. It'll be here in the afternoon on October 24th. Phew, that was close.]

I'm sorry about the lack of updates the last few days. I've got three things I've wanted to reviewPulp Fiction (hated), Getting Things Done (loved), and The Millionaire Mind (mixed)—but with the amount of sleep I've gotten since Kimberly came on the scene, I was afraid of how bad the reviews might turn out. The best I can do is throw out a couple of Found on the Web blog entries—short and sweet links.

Today is the day where I might get enough sleep. If so, then I'll probably have a review come out. Or time to surf around. Thanks for your patience.

Phew, this every three to four hour feeding thing is weird. I think I understand why everyone always jokes about sleep deprivation with new kids. But you know, it's amazing and it's all worth it. Those of you with kids will understand ("Ahh, someone just got initiated into the Parenthood Club."); those of you without just can't.

I always understood it on an intellectual level, but I never grokked it emotionally. People would always blather on about how it's the most wonderful thing ever. It is. It really, really is.

I'm taking a blog vacation day on account of my first baby's birth. Kimberly Rose Brown will be born around 12:30 p.m. today. Updates improbable, though possible.

I went to the Apple Music Event today—well, half of it due to an unfortunate time zone miscalculation—and was impressed by the announcements overall.

What impressed me most about everything is how easy it was. It wasn't an easy feat, by any means. But it was easy for the end user. All of the changes made to the iTunes Music Store are seamless to me; I didn't have to download or upgrade a single thing. Gift certificates? Allowances? Biographical information? No big deal at all.

"Okay, big deal," you're probably thinking. "It's like a Web site. So what? It's nothing big. Quit making a huge deal about it. Get over it, man."

To you I say, "Geez, what a bad attitude!" I don't come on to your blog and rain on your parade, do I? And you're so wrong about it. This is Web Services, baby, and it's a proof of concept like no other. Well, maybe like Amazon except that the API is private. And I don't think Amazon takes it to the level that Apple does because they have a great ol' Web site for the consumer.

Web Services have come a long way since the demos at Xmethods. I hope that Apple is at the forefront (though I must give credit to Microsoft for its embrace of Web Services and standards, mostly).

[UPDATE: Okay, so there was a new version of iTunes required. It's still basically cool. Also, it appears that Apple regards the iTunes Music Store as a means to selling iPods. That's consistent with a lot of the other software they create and release for free in order to sell the hardware.]

*cough* *hack* *puke*. You've got to be kidding me. Wow.

Last night's episode of Joe Schmo was exciting yet unfulfilling. Taking a cue from Fox, the producers ended the show with one vote left and announced that the season finale will air two weeks from yesterday. Ugh. They never indicated that this wasn't the last episode; in fact, the commercials leading up to the show conveyed a distinctly opposite conclusion. So I suppose that the last hour-long show will feature a little bit of announcing and 45 minutes of Matt being shocked and filling in the blanks. That should be good TV, though I wish it had happened yesterday instead of several weeks from now.

If you're not familiar with the show, here are some good summaries.

Microsoft has officially stated that Longhorn, the next version of their consumer operating system, will not be released in 2005 like they had hoped: instead, it will be coming sometime in 2006! That means three years of OS X updates between Panther and Longhorn. I think they're going to be way behind right out of the starting gate.

How could this happen? How could a behemoth like Microsoft go five years between major consumer operating system releases? There's the usual suspect, but that doesn't account for the inherent stupidity of such a long lag. Could it be the complacency engendered by monopoly?

I think that that's exactly what's at work here. Microsoft is the IBM of the naughts. In the 80s, Big Blue was sluggish and rudderless. It was trying to be all things to all people and it lost its way. It took Lou Gerstner—got to remember to pick up his book one of these days—to revitalize the business and he basically did it by transforming the company into a consultancy, though with a lot of hardware and software as well.

But Microsoft doesn't have anyone like Lou Gerstner. Bill Gates is firmly ensconced and Steve Ballmer isn't one to dislodge him. As far as I know or have heard, there's no up-and-comer that's going to change Microsoft's course. And that's spectacular news! We all know what happened when IBM rested on its laurels, even though it seemed indomitable at the time. (I should probably go buy some Apple shares now…)

I forgot to mention that the fight scene in the garden of the House of Blue Leaves tea house was one of the most beautiful scenes I've ever seen in film. It's indescribable. I need to try and find a still of that, either for framing or to make as my desktop on Thor, my PowerBook G4.

Columbus Day: A Time for Celebration. I was going to write up a whole essay about how I think Columbus is not worth the vitriol that has been sent in his direction over the last decade, but I had an otherwise busy day and didn't get around to it. Perhaps next year.

[UPDATE (10/15/03): Looks like AIM is up to their same old antics in Denver.]

I just saw Quentin Tarantino's new film Kill Bill Vol. 1 after having spent years avoiding his films because of the hype surrounding them. I know it's crazy, but I can't stand things that are praised to the high heavens—especially when the plaudits are of a pretentious sort. Tarantino is almost always praised like that and I shrugged off the recommendations I received over the years. When Kill Bill Vol. 1 was announced, I thought that the premise sounded good and so I was willing to give it a shot.

With Columbus Day giving me some free time, I journeyed to the first showing at the Ciné Capri. If you have a chance to see the movie there, I would take it. The screen is phenomenal and I got great seats—right at eye level. As a child, I saw many films at the old Ciné Capri and the recreation is perfect, right down to the enormous curtains closing before the start of the movie. The auditorium is larger-than-life; a good theater really enhances the experience. I was glad that I could go there.

My initial reaction is one of awe and amazement. I say initial only because it was such an overwhelming movie that I am still processing it. This has got to be one of the best movies I've seen in years. In fact, I don't think I've felt the same way about a movie since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Kill Bill Vol. 1 is epic in scope; it's really hard to describe.

The movie is about a character known only as The Bride (Uma Thurman) and her efforts to exact revenge on her former co-workers (is that what you'd call former assassin associates? I guess.). They killed her entire wedding party and left her comatose for four years, terminating her pregnancy as well. She awakens and immediately sets out to kill each one in turn and eventually Bill, the group's leader. In Volume 1, she kills Vernita Green (Vivica Fox) and O-Ren Ishi (Lucy Liu), leaving Elle Driver (Darryl Hannah), Budd (Michael Madsen), and Bill (David Carradine) for the sequel due in February 2004.

The action towards these goals is fast-paced, gory, and visually stunning. I am a big fan of Jackie Chan and a lot of the sequences have the feel of his movies, though much more bloody and sword-wielding. Another pertinent influence in this regard is the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone and the spooky westerns of Clint Eastwood—made explicitly obvious by using some of Ennio Morricone's scores on the soundtrack. All of those movies are violent and bloody—I understand the Tarantino created this movie as an homage to two of his favorite genres, kung fu and spaghetti westerns. It certainly wasn't lost on me.

Reading the other reviews, it seems that there are a number of other directors to whom Tarantino alludes. I don't know about those, not having seen a lot of the foreign films. I definitely think that my experience with the two genres already mentioned heightened my appreciation of the film. When I watch the movie in the future, I'm sure that I'll get successively more of it. If you can swing it, I would recommend watching Sergio Leone's classic westerns Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter.

I've also borrowed Pulp Fiction from my sister-in-law and will rent some Bruce Lee flicks in the coming weeks so that I can build up some context for the next viewing of this amazing flick.

In case you think that this is a serious Film, don't. I was surprised at how funny it actually was. It's a mostly understated humor since there's little dialogue but it's powerful nonetheless. Much of the violence is so over-the-top that you can't help but laugh at it: The Bride at one point smashes a table leg with two nails protruding into the head of an adversary, causing the girl's eyes to stream blood. While that may not sound hilarious, it really is contextually since the two actions don't really bear any causal relationship. Another funny part is when The Bride is wailing on O-Ren Ishi's Crazy 88 gang in silhouette until only one is left standing. The lights are turned back on and her opponent turns out to be a rather round-faced teenage boy. She hacks away at his brittle sword with her incredible kitana until he's left holding a hilt. She then grabs him, flips him over, and raises her sword to finish him off … except that she repeatedly hits his butt with the flat side of the sword and admonishes him to stop hanging around yakuza!

I am sure that despite my lengthy treatment I have barely done the movie justice. I don't think that I could adequately present it so that you could grasp its entirety. I won't try, but I will encourage you to go see it. If you're not afraid of violence and massive amounts of fake blood—the art director revealed that they used 450 gallons of it in the shooting—then this movie will astound and delight you. Just don't go in expecting something light: this is an epic movie. It is what The Matrix and its sequels aspired to be; the difference is that this movie (and hopefully its second act) touches on a universal emotion—revenge—and mostly makes sense. Revealingly, the trailer for The Matrix Revolutions played right before the movie and I was struck by its inscrutability, even having seen the two previous movies. The Wachowski Brothers could learn something about screenwriting from Tarantino; I think the fight sequences from Kill Bill Vol. 1 have set a new standard that will be emulated for years to come.

Not too long ago, the National Enquirer broke the story of Rush Limbaugh's drug habit. Everyone sort of dismissed it then because it was the Enquirer after all, long the purveyor of the sort of drivel that now resides in the Weekly World News.

Now that he's admitted to everything, I feel like it's time to comment. Part of me remembers that the drug war is folly and that legalization is the right thing to do, letting adults make their own choices and live with the consequences of their actions—arresting them for any legal transgressions that result from drug use. The other part of me sees Limbaugh as a disgusting hypocrite who deserves whatever he gets.

"Do as I say, not as I do." That's the cardinal principle of Rush Limbaugh and his crony William Bennett. They rail against sinners with a vehemence that belies their complicity. What a life it must have been, to get on the radio for three hours every day while knowing in your heart of hearts that you're a filthy liar and that you're in for an inevitable crash as drugs thrash through everything you've built over years. At the level these two operated, they had to be completely aware of their moral failings. It's amazing that they were able to persevere in the brink of such knowledge.

I've had minor moral failures in my life and they ate away at my consciousness until I couldn't take it anymore. I was disgusted by my inability to do the right thing. I launched quickly into a concerted course of self-discipline because I couldn't take it. It would have taken a systematic denial of reality of epic proportions to continue on for three years, though I suppose massive amounts of painkillers probably numbed ol' Rush to the implications.

His confession reminds me of that scene in Quiz Show when Charles Van Doren confesses his duplicity at a Senate committee hearing. He delivers a moving speech about how he's taken for granted the opportunities he's encountered. A number of Senators then applaud him for his erudition until the Senator from New York mentions that he doesn't "think an adult of [his] intelligence should be commended for simply, at long last, telling the truth."

Rush: I know you'll never read this, but I want to remind you what you said about Bill Clinton when he was implicated in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. You said that character matters, that the way someone behaves in private reflects on his performance on the job. You have demonstrated poor character and your credibility by your own standards is shot. You have betrayed your listeners—I'm not one of them, by the way—and you have to figure out you can regain their trust. That's what your statement should have covered.

[UPDATE (10/16/03): Bill Maher comments further—acerbically, I might add.]

[UPDATE (10/20/03): "Virtue is its own drawback": how the stances taken by William Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, and Dr. Laura Schlessinger backfired.]

Looks like the Barenaked Ladies are coming out with a new CD on October 21st. Looks like it'll be available through "digital retailers" on October 14th. How cool is that!

I haven't liked an Adam Sandler movie since Happy Gilmore and Anger Management certainly did not break that streak.

The story, as you no doubt figured out from any trailer or commercial put out about this movie, revolves around the sentence given to Adam Sandler's character after he is arrested for assaulting a stewardess while in flight. The judge makes him attend anger management classes taught by Jack Nicholson's character, a renowned psychologist. After a bar fight, the judge orders Adam Sandler to attend intensive sessions, which turns out to be 30 days of Jack Nicholson shadowing his every move.

If this reminds you of Seinfeld's show within the show, you're not alone. It was stupid then—consciously so in Seinfeld—and it's even stupider here. To think that the American judicial system would assign a highly-paid, prominent psychologist to live with you (even sleeping in the same bed) for thirty days over the matter of a rude comment to a stewardess and the punching of a waiter during a bar fight is stretching credibility.

I'm perfectly fine with suspending disbelief and giving movies the benefit of the doubt—how else would you explain my love of Jackie Chan movies?—but that doesn't give the screenwriter carte blanche to assault my intelligence. There have been plenty of slapstick movies that had me laughing in the aisles over relatively trivial situations, just none with Adam Sandler since Happy Gilmore. In fact, I found his Mr. Deeds to be singular in its disdain for the audience.

Anger Management took a horrible turn for the worse at the end. It turns out that the entire story, from the stewardess to the judge to the psychologist, was all a fabrication by Sandler's fiancée to get him to deal with his doormat personality. The deus ex machina style of plot resolution has never sat well with me, but in the hands of an expert storyteller, I suppose it could work out. The screenwriter, as already noted, is anything but expert. It is the cheapest way to end a movie or story. He's said, in effect, "I couldn't come up with a good way to explain or end this situation so I'll write it away in one sentence." It's utterly despicable and just another indication of how dumb he thinks we are.

That the movie did a little better than breaking even is suggestive that he guessed wrong. You can see that the gross went down every weekend after its open, which was buoyed by the fact that there wasn't much else to go see. If my revelation of the ending made you not want to go rent it, then you are welcome for my saving you $3.99 in rental fees.

Doc and Dave linked to O'Reilly's Foo Camp, a meeting of the minds this weekend. The FAQ indicates that campers can sleep either inside the O'Reilly campus or outside on its grounds. The planned events sound amazing as do the invitees.

On that list of invitees is not Dave Winer, a fact that he notes and then mopes about. I just checked those links again and there's nothing there. Classic Dave! Here's the entries that he pulled (links removed because I'm typing this on a different computer than the one where the entries are so no easy copy and paste):

1. Damn. O'Reilly has these great events with all kinds of interesting people. Reading Doc's weblog today was the first I heard of it. How did this happen?
2. Maybe we should start a Wiki of all the people who weren't invited to O'Reilly's party. Maybe that will become a badge of honor. I'm tired of being pissed off about stuff like this. Their loss. I know so much about the stuff they're doing there. They get to make the same mistakes I made. Feh. Losers.

And that is why the Winer Watcher was such a valuable service. NetNewsWire's HTML diffing is great, but it's not archived and you have to keep it running all the time. This is impossible because a laptop such as mine is disconnected from the Internet at least two times a day and spends a lot of time with its lid closed.

I could talk more about Winer's issues, but I think it's more fun to think about O'Reilly's plans. This is just the sort of salon idea that I love so much. Bring a bunch of interesting, intelligent, stable people together and see what they come up with. It's almost always going to be better than what they could come up with themselves because they can riff off of each other's output.

The events seem very diverse and freeform. I too would love to be there, but I couldn't contribute too much of my own right now because, for me, the best is always yet to come. I'm okay with that. Actually, I'm excited because I like having things to look forward to.

[UPDATE (10/13/03): It's funny, but the blogosphere is aghast at the exclusivity of FOO (Friends Of O'reilly) Camp. Dave's even written an essay about it, which includes the gem "So we had a conference where the users did the talking and geeks did the listening. BloggerCon." Always with the separation: we're the geeks, you're the users. Another one: I'm privy to all sorts of stuff that you commoners aren't. Oh, except what was said at FOO. And it's eating him up inside.]

[UPDATE (10/16/03): For someone who "refuse[s] to be mad at O'Reilly" Dave is sure blathering on and on about it. As someone who's been in this same situation before, I can say that Dave's getting more worked up about this than anyone else. Dave probably barely even registers on O'Reilly's radar, while Dave's measure of self-worth seems to be derived from other people. Very unfortunate.]

[UPDATE (10/21/03): More Dave not being mad.]

One of my biggest pet peeves has to be diction-related. Choosing the right words is half the battle in communication—the other half being arranging them into sensible sentences (i.e., grammar)—and people far too often skimp on it. They choose the hackneyed, convenient phrase rather than their own formulation. Or they communicate through cliché, thinking that the familiarity with the phrasings their audience enjoys will translate into their doing most of the cognitive work. Those sorts of things are imprecise and woozy. When I listen to someone, I want to be engaged, to be inspired to ever-greater cognitive heights. Instead, I often trudge through insipid inanities—mired down in verbal sludge of vagueness.

Yet I still enjoy commiserating about this. Jeremy Zawodny related his experiences recently but the best page I've found so far is Banned for Life, a Tom Mangan production (NOTE: he's the guy who did the Seven Questions interviews awhile back). This is a very comprehensive list of things that bother Tom and his readers and I agree with nearly all of them.

One of the readers comments, "Do we ever sound so stupid when we try to sound smart?" Hear, hear!

I just found a tip for Windows that I never knew about. You probably know that pressing the Print Screen button places a screen capture onto the clipboard so you can paste it into Word or anywhere else.

What you may not know is that holding down the ALT button while pressing Print Screen will capture only the frontmost (or current) window and place it onto the clipboard. No more advertising to the world what applications you were running and how much cruft you've got littering your system tray!

Today I was reminded of a feature that I take for granted in OmniWeb that I have never seen in any other browser on any platform. It's Address Bar search and it looks a little something like this:

This feature has been in OmniWeb for as long as I can remember and I've been using it since the March 24, 2001 unveiling of Mac OS X.

For those of you unlucky enough to not be able to download and use OmniWeb, let me describe the sequence of events that led to the screenshot above. I typed "patterns" in the address bar and its default behavior is to wrap "http://www." and ".com/" around the word—it starts matching as you type. The three entries in the listing after the default behavior are recent pages I've visited with the word "patterns" in the title. After that is a bookmarked URL for the Amsterdam pattern archive. Scrolling through the list shows other URLs that I've visited with that term in the title.

After further consideration, it could be that the Microsoft listings are just those with the word "patterns" in the URL and are followed by listings where "patterns" appears in the title of the page. Maybe the final ones are bookmarks. It's rather difficult to tell since I visit so many sites and have told OmniWeb to remember up to 50,000 visited URLs.

Whatever the algorithm for display, this is highly unusual and useful behavior. In every other browser the best you'll get is patterns.com and any URLs you've visited underneath that domain. I'm not even sure if bookmarks/favorites/whatever are included in the URL completion. My browser quit today with a window open to a Inc. article I was going to read (it quit because of something I did, it's an otherwise stable app). I had no idea what the URL was and I had had the page open for over a day while I browsed all sorts of other pages—i.e., I didn't think I could find it in my history. I didn't remember too much about it except that "stubborn" was in the title. Bingo, easily found!

There are countless other user interface niceties like this in the browser. If you have Mac OS X, ditch Firebird, Safari, and Internet Explorer. This browser costs $29.95 (unless you're willing to endure the humorous nagging) and is worth every penny. Plus, it uses WebCore and JavascriptCore so its behavior and rendering are practically identical to Safari's. C'mon, it's totally worth it. If you make the switch, let me know and I'll tell you some of the primo things I've got set up that make for rapid information access.

"Mac would have more viruses if it were more popular. The only reason virus writers target Windows is because there's more impact because it's more widespread." Not so fast, Chester.*

* All characters are fictional and any similarities with real or fictional events or characters are purely coincidental.

[UPDATE (10/9/03): Internet Explorer Full of Holes, discussion at Slashdot]

bblog Snoopified and Doggy-d up.

Kill Bill sounds like an interesting movie. I've never seen a Quentin Tarantino film (I avoided Pulp Fiction like the plague) and the hype-o-meter is off the charts on this one, but the premise is bizarre enough that it might be worth seeing. That and Bubba Ho-Tep.

For future reference (when I move from Blogger to my own blog software *ahem* whenever that might be): Help the Googlebot Understand Your Web Site.

[UPDATE: Don't forget Google's own guidelines and GoogleGuy Says too.]

Mr. Bush, fix your RSS feeds. "I wish someone would explain to me why a user like the President of the United States has to have such a jumble of formats." Umm, perhaps your priorities are not his? It's like he doesn't even want to revolutionize politics.

I've recently discovered the StartupGarden.com, a site by Tom Ehrenfeld about starting your own business. I've devoured it, going incrementally through the archives. That's something I rarely do anymore since most sites just aren't worth the time. This one's not like that—I've also checked out the book of the same name. I'll post a review once I'm done with it

Some of the interesting entries I've found: good books on entrepreneurship (and then some more), movies for entrepreneurs, how now is the time for entrepreneurship, and the one-page business proposal. There's also a handy resources for entrepreneuers page and his articles. Finally, he's got an interesting lecture on WGBH's site.

[UPDATE: Here are some reviews of the book: Inc., The Miami Herald, Mark Bernstein]

We're watching a program on Discovery Health about the use of maggots in healing wounds. Apparently, their use is becoming more prevalent in the United Kingdom. I can't really disparage it too much since it's doing the job well, but it's rather disconcerting to see a doctor lift up a bandage on a lady's foot and see maggots crawling all over the wound.

For those of you whose jaws still haven't closed, the maggots are completely sterile and grown in a laboratory. The theory is that their ability to eat infectious bacteria far exceeds our ability to kill them. The lady in question said that she didn't feel a thing and the doctors say that it's miraculous at preventing gangrene.

Jack Black's new movie The School of Rock is as funny as it looks. If you like Black's frenetic comedy, you must go see this movie as soon as possible.

The movie revolves around Dewey Finn (Jack Black) and his unsuccessful rock lifestyle. He shares an apartment with a former rock band buddy, with emphasis on the word sharing. He hasn't paid his share of the rent for months and the roommate—well, the roommate's girlfriend—isn't standing for it any longer.

When a call comes in for his roommate to substitute teach at a tony prep school for $650 a week, Dewey decides that this is how he's going to pay off his debt to his friend. Posing as his roommate, he gets the job, spends the first day of class hung over, and dismisses the children to a half-day long recess. When the second hand indicates that it's three o'clock, he bolts out the door and runs to his decrepit van.

On the second day, he hears the kids in their music class and realizes that they're not half bad. He immediately concocts a ruse to get them to form a rock band so they can participate in the city's Battle of the Bands—and possibly garner him $20,000. The children are assigned to positions in the band and the remaining students become security, lighting, roadies, groupies, and a manager. The pretense is that there's going to be an interscholastic competition in the coming semester and he wants them to get a head start. The kids are skeptical but eventually give in to the unusual nature of the assignment. The movie mostly consists of practicing under the watchful eye of the principal (Joan Cusack) and constructing the elaborate tissue of lies to cover up the "project."

Jack Black is in his element and the part seemed designed especially for him. He is so over-the-top that it seems completely realistic. You can believe that he's a rock-and-roll loser, a substitute teacher, and a caring, sensitive person. Black emotes so well that you can spot the very moment when he realizes that he can turn this substitute teacher gig into a new band. He reminds me a lot of Will Ferrell when he was a SNL cast member (not in his recent movie forays which have been unrepresentative of his talents)—as subtle as he wants to be, in other words.

I won't spoil the ending, but it's utterly typical of this sort of movie. The parents, as you might expect, get wind of the situation. They're outraged in one scene and in awe of their child's talents the next. One dad, who earlier in the movie had chided his son for practicing rock and roll, smiled smugly at his son's performance. I don't buy it for one second, being married to a teacher and aware indirectly of the nature of parents who send their kids to private schools, but it's exactly how I figured the movie would play out.

This is not a movie with a larger message—unless you believe Black when he says that one rock concert can change the world. It's good, rollicking fun. Takeaways might include letting your kids find what interests them and incorporating real-world experiences into education. The credits at both ends were the most innovative I have ever seen—well, after Ferris Bueller's Day Off of course.

I don't normally link to blog entries, but this one about different iTunes usage styles is incredible. I had no idea about all of the interesting ways in which iTunes could be used and configured. The one that I really liked was setting up keywords in the comments tag so that you can create smart playlists off of that keyword. Actually, the suggestion was to use your ratings to indicate that but I use my ratings to indicate my opinion of the music and I don't want to screw that up.

Reviewing some of the other posts on the site leads me to add this site to my RSS aggregator of choice. [via kottke]

I've used a lot of software in my computing life. I've used a lot of "enterprise" software as well since my employer is quite willing to purchase software to solve problems. Therefore, I think I have the ability to make the following statement:

Magic Help Desk from Network Associates is the worst piece of software I have ever seen. It is worse than I could conceive software to be. It is as if it were designed by people who hate people. It's not just counterintuitive, it's anti-intuitive. It assaults every user interface idiom in conventional applications as well as every one in web applications. It requires memorization of complex, arcane procedures to do even its most basic operations.

The previous version we had was wrong but basically usable. This "upgrade" we went through a year ago or so removed some basic and critical functionality or buried it under a series of obscure clicks. It almost makes me think that Network Associates charges for upgrades and downgrades since they're obviously trying to get it both ways.

One day, I'll try to document the process necessary to get open tickets assigned to you with screenshots. I'd do it now but I'm not at work and I can't access the app remotely. Oh yeah, and I don't want to ruin my weekend.

I had my review of The Map of Innovation published on Slashdot yesterday. If you're here because of that, welcome and thanks for visiting!

The ensuing discussion is not at all what I had hoped. I was disappointed at the level of discourse and its focus. Most of the messages were about the dot-com foolishness, a few were about Kevin O'Connor, and the rest were about how "technology is important" was a prosaic message for a book.

I was not expecting that. I reviewed the book because I thought Slashdotters would be interested in starting up their own ventures. I figured that we could have a productive discussion about practical issues of entrepreneurship, ideas for new businesses, and thoughts about innovation. I guess I was expecting too much. Those are the sorts of things that get my juices flowing.

Only one commenter shared my sentiments. It's a lonely place, that Slashdot.

Dave's been on a vigorous pace lately, wound up with talk about BloggerCon and presidential candidate blogs. His puffery reminds me of an earlier entry of mine about the nature of blogging.

Remember, blogging is simply reverse-chronological ordering of HTML with optional commenting and syndication. It's not some mystical endeavor that elevates your writing. It's not some huge revolution that will give the masses a voice. It's not the future of political campaigns. For all the hype that Blogger, Movable Type, and Radio Userland get, their reach is far, far exceeded by LiveJournal. Do you ever hear any of the hypesters talk up LiveJournal? Curious, that. Could it be that LiveJournal doesn't fit the hyperbolic mold?

And that, fellow bloggers, is today's dose of perspective.

[NOTE: I like blogging tools. It's much easier to open a URL than to load up jEdit, make an entry, and FTP it to my server. I just don't operate under the delusion that blogging is any greater than the sum of those parts.]

[UPDATE (10/13/03): Clemens Vasters has some additional thoughts on why BloggerCon was a failure.]

This article comports with my experience opening Apple packaging. For those unfortunate enough to have never opened a package from Apple and who won't therefore understand what I'm talking about, a lot of people have documented the process in loving detail: 15GB iPod, TiPB, original iBook, newer iBook, 10GB iPod, another iPod, original iMac, the new iMac, Xserve, 17" PowerBook, 12" PowerBook, and more iPod.

I kept Thor's box for a very long time until I realized that it was kind of silly.

[UPDATE: Found four more: wireless keyboard, dual G5, iSight, and G5.]

I would never do this, but it amuses me greatly. If layoffs are imminent (i.e., management starts asking for thorough documentation of everything after a bad earnings report or two weeks before such a report is due), this article at kuro5hin describes how to create documentation that looks good but is completely useless. The very idea just cracks me up.

I hate writing documentation. I love writing code. That's why I strive to write self-documenting code. It's not all about comments—though I use them extensively—it's about writing descriptive method names, filenames, and variable names. If you saw a file named "act_PutStudentOnWaitList.cfm," you would immediately have an idea of what that file does before you ever opened it. If you saw a variable called "Session.Student.Stud_Num," you could easily discern both its purpose and its context. Sure it results in a little more typing, but the clarity in your code makes it so much easier to revisit.

And that's why I do it. The app I maintain (an online training self-management system, or corporate university for the buzzword-loving) was developed and is maintained solely by me. There are parts of it that I haven't touched since the day I deployed the app three years ago. If I had to dive into those parts for some reason, I know that I could read the code and figure out what they do, how they do it, and why they do it the way they do it. I suspect that no one else will ever have to do that since I've been here for nine years and my self-employment is not imminent. I feel good that someone could, though.

I once tried documenting the app in conventional fashion. I got up to 10 pages of complete documentation before I was totally burned out. Unfortunately, what I produced is now stale and obsolete since I've added a considerable amount of features and refactored some areas to work better. And that right there is the problem with documentation that's not in the code: it's outdated as soon as the code changes unless you make it so general that it would apply for a long time—and then you've got useless documentation because it's unspecific.

I think the reason in-code documentation is so unpopular with managers (I don't know my boss's position on the matter, only previous managers) is because they can't get at it. They don't understand how code can contain all the documentation a programmer will need because they've heard programmers comment on spaghetti code. Lacking any basis to understand the difference, most managers (I suspect) think the self-documenting code advocate is being lazy or trying to shirk his documenting duty. Far from it, but it's naturally very difficult to explain to an interested non-programmer.