Important to me anyway ...

Out With The Old, In With The New

2006-06-29T21:07:00.000-07:00

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Everybody Cheats

2006-05-23T10:34:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite movies of all time is Breaking Away. Dave Stoller, the protagonist in that little tale gets his chance to race against the Team Cinzano, his idols. Unfortunately it doesn't work out the way he thought it would, the pro riders recognize him as a threat and toss a pump into his wheel, sending him in a ditch.

After the race he comes home crying, puts his arms around his mother and says, "everybody cheats, I just didn't know".

I keep thinking of that scene as I read yet another SEC scandal, this time backdating options. It's interesting to read the following two articles one after the other.

Dispatches From The Frozen North

There are two explanations for this. One is that the CEOs of these companies have the incredible ability to pick the exact bottom of their company's stock price every single time without fail. If this is true, then these men (and they are all men) are probably actually underpaid for their remarkable ability to predict the future, since the odds of choosing the right date every time for all the different companies is something like a quadrillion to one against.

Malcolm Gladwell, Game of Shadows:

FloJo had a fantastic year in 1988, which is why she raised so many eyebrows. She wasn’t Beamon. She was Bonds. I think if we’re smart about it, we can learn to distinguish the fluke performances from the phony performances.

Essentially the same argument. It follows that any performance which is so statistically improbable, is very probably the result of cheating. But in the case of CEOs, we tend to not give the benefit of the doubt, but in the case of athletes we do.

Malcolm Gladwell, Forensic Analysis:

I take it, from many of the comments on my last post, that virtually no one bought my idea for loosing the forensic economists on sports records.

Found via rentzsch.com. One of the many differences between Wolf Rentzsch, and myself: I'm an admitted criminal when it comes to public transportation.

Baseball's Squeeze Pay

2006-05-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

With the three kids keeping me hopping, I guess this kind of thing just sort of slipped past me.

Baseball Needs DRM Like It Needs a Steroids Scandal

So to follow a local team you're either listening to the radio, or you're paying $60+/month to cable? When did this happen? I used to be able to watch Red Sox games growing up on WSBK TV 38 for nothing. Ok the reception kind of stunk, and I had to delicately balance the UHF dial in the zone between 38 and 39, and occasionally it would flop over to one side or the other and turn the screen to white fuzz. But it *was* free. My TV will go out on the stoop with the trash before I pay $60/month in cable fees.

iPod Zombies

2006-05-15T17:11:00.000-07:00

I've given up commuting on my local bike path for the rest of the summer. There are just too many people walking and running with ear buds in, iPods blaring. The nicer the weather has become the more I found myself dodging oblivious zombies shuffling along. Never their minds on where they are, what they are doing ... they are reckless (thanks Yoda).

Angels and Devils

2006-05-14T21:30:00.000-07:00

This week's Illustration Friday topic was Angels and Devils. As it turned out, I had done a bunch of sketches of an icon for an open source project called Loocifer. To be honest, I'm not sure what the project is about exactly. But the name certainly lended itself to a certain Devil theme. Here's the progression of images.

The feedback for the first was that it was too "real". From the second, they liked the top left but maybe try it without a nose. The third was the final sketch, and then the icon that jakedahn put together in Illustrator. He did a really stellar job on it I thought.

Caltrain Newbie

2006-05-14T21:23:00.000-07:00

I've been not-so-subtley suggesting to a friend of mine that he should really consider taking Caltrain for his commute. I've been dropping these hints for, oh, a couple years now. I guess the combination of $50 for a tank of gas and one too many bumper-to-bumper commutes home from San Jose finally pitched him over the edge. This was his first week of commuting on the train. Bravo!

I Melt With You

2006-05-13T21:13:00.000-07:00

Modern English is now hocking Ritz Crackers. Animated CG crackers dance to I Melt With You, as they combine with cheese slices ... get it? I didn't either. My wife yelled in pain. I retched.

Frodo Lost?

2006-05-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

Saw a bumpersticker I hadn't seen before on the ride into work today. "Frodo lost. Bush has the ring." I got a good chuckle over that. Bush as Sauron. Snicker. The NSA as the eye? Life as Lord of the Rings?

Really Daring Fireball

2006-04-23T21:04:00.000-07:00

I am a card carrying, t-shirt wearing member of Daring Fireball this year. But had I known John Gruber had a full time gig at the time, I would not have paid for a subscription. I thought I was helping support a writer. Instead I was, what exactly was I doing? Sending money to a writer with stock options and a finger in the air testing the winds? Seems silly. I've always enjoyed and admired John Gruber's writing, so I don't regret subscribing, but I did resolve that this year, once my membership expired, I would not renew.

Looking through the Daring Fireball archives, it reminded me of how this happened:

Oct 3, 2005: Membership Renewal.
Oct 5, 2005: Introducting Joyent.

I subscribed somewhere between the two. And ok, I admit it, I'm hardly being fair. If I enjoy an essay I should be willing to pay for it in some fashion reguardless of circumstance. Unfortunately, that's not how I choose to spend my money. And I'm not alone, the "Introducing Joyent" article was written apparently in response to a number of people asking if he was writing full time. I can only imagine there are plenty of people, who like myself, do factor in circumstance.

But it ends well, now that he's daringly committed to his writing, I'm once again happy to renew in October. And if Daring Fireball has a substantial increase in articles, even better. I can only imagine that this year's subscriptions will far exceed previous years.

College "Tips"

2006-04-16T12:56:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine was accepted to, and has decided to attend UC Santa Cruz this fall. It's that time of year. I sent him my list of college "tips" just for fun. He didn't ask for them, but I had too much fun writing them up.

Don't let your roommate turn his closet into a hydroponics lab. We all know what that's about. It's an old story and it almost never ends well.
There is no alternative beverage at any party. If you think what you're drinking is non-alcoholic, be afraid, be very very afraid.
Pretty much any college class can be passed by spending an hour as soon as possible after class to go over/write up/clean up your notes, and then some time later on homework. Oh yeah, you have to take notes in college. There are exceptions to this rule. Turbulence class for example almost broke me working on it almost 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
Cereal is the one thing that the food service can't destroy. Cereal is your friend. It's ok to eat cereal for dinner.
You don't have to take any class from a bad professor. Typically the profs rotate through teaching duties so a class taught by a bad prof this semester may be taught by a good one next semester. All a bad class does is ruin your motivation, and your desire. Checking off a required class is not the goal. Load up on more classes than you can possibly take for the first week or two and then drop the crappy ones. I would even sit in on multiple sections of the same class to find the best one, and drop the others. It makes for a painful first week or two, but the payoff is over the whole rest of the semester. By the way, Good and Bad are not defined by when the class is scheduled (an 8am class doesn't make it Bad), or how easy/hard it is to get an X (where X is the grade you're trying to get).
Take everything you can from a good professor, once you find 'em. Good professors can make the study of basketweaving interesting. Take advantage of this.
You do have noise canceling headphones, right?
You will likely never have the luxury of this much time to pursue your passions ever again in your life. So, uh duh, pursue your passions. Sitting around drinking beer and playing video games: need I say how sad that is? Not that you would do this, but there will be a lot of people who will, and it's easy to get sucked in. UC Boulder was filled with students who just didn't want to be there. San Jose State was filled with students who just didn't want to be there. And I'm sure UCSC is filled with students who would rather be doing something else.
Hat and sweatpants. With a hat and sweatpants you can make an 8am class after waking up at 7:55am and still look mostly presentable. Why sweatpants? You can run in sweatpants.

Dental Scheduling Software

2006-03-25T11:16:00.000-08:00

After a cleaning at the dentist office, what do you do? You make the appointment for the next cleaning six months out. But it was different this time. Usually the receptionist would pull out the schedule book, flip it open to a page scan for an opening, offer you a couple choices and write it down in the book. The whole process used to take, about thirty seconds. Not this time. The office had cut over to a computerized appointment system.

I couldn't see the screen, but for some reason I started counting clicks. There went six clicks in rapid succession, and I thought to myself, she just clicked once for each month to go out six months. Then things slowed down, and it was click, scan, click, scan this went on for a while. I guessed that was day by day scanning for an open slot in the morning (my preference). Finally she offered me a choice, which I declined. Some more click, scan, clicking. Another potential appointment, which I accepted. A bunch of typing followed. Then she wrote down my new appointment on a card and handed it to me. The whole process took x5 longer than pencil and scheduling book. And I'm thinking, who designed this thing? They failed.

The Mobile Stare

2006-03-05T06:02:00.000-08:00

This past week I noticed something new while commuting on the train. Is it me? Or are there suddenly a whole lot of people all looking down, staring at their mobile phones? And I'm not talking about dialing, they're reading.

For the past month or so the weather's been pretty nice so I've been commuting by bike almost exclusively. Then this week we had several days of on again off again showers so I've been doing my Caltrain/VTA lightrail commute. Did everyone buy new, bigger screen mobile phones in the past couple months? It's the strangest thing.

Fourth Place

2006-02-27T10:39:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Crowe created DFL to celebrate the last place finishers at the Olympics. DFL stands for Dead F***ing Last, meaning they finished last. The key word being, "finished". DNF by the way stands for Did Not Finish. I can relate, but I can't help feeling that the real stories are with the fourth place finishers. To be the fourth best in the world is a mighty achievement, but given the amount of attention they receive, you'd never know it.

Snowgaritas

2006-02-26T21:16:00.000-08:00

Fresh powder makes great Margaritas. I discovered this the hard way a long time ago in grad school. We were having a party, and my roommate at the time laughed at me when we ran out of ice and I started to panic. There was something like four feet of fresh snow on our little porch alone, enough to make many hundreds of pitchers of margaritas and for some reason I couldn't look past the empty ice cube tray in the freezer. Mike, Leener you all can stop laughing now.

That memory came back to me this past weekend when we were up in south Lake Tahoe. We like to rent a place every year so the kids could play in the snow and we could do a little cross country skiing. The rental didn't have any ice made, but after the little ones fell asleep we'd pack the pitcher with fresh snow and make Margaritas the way you would normally. No blender required. Perfect.

How to Move Your iPhoto Library To An External Disk

2006-02-12T08:36:00.000-08:00

[Update 2006-12-31] After I wrote the original tutorial using OS X alias to move the library, there are a couple easier ways to do this. First, there are some nice software packages for moving iPhoto libraries, for example, one is iPhotoLibraryManager another, iPhotoBuddy.

Second, as mentioned in the comments of this article, you can switch libraries by holding down the option key on launch of iPhoto (apparently this works in iPhoto 4 as well). So simply follow the instructions in the old tutorial for copying your library off to an external drive, then launch iPhoto holding down the option key, you should see a dialog window which looks like this:

Then select "Find Library" and point it at your new copy on the external drive and you're all set. Or you can use the alias method I outline below in my original method. The aliases should work with any version of iphoto. There's more discussion about moving iPhoto libraries here.

[Original]
At some point we all have to help out the family and play technical support. This one I did for my sister and brother-in-law who have filled their laptop's hard drive with photos of their new baby, but as long as I was doing it, I might as well post it. This tutorial is geared toward the novice non-technical user.

The plan is to move the folder called "iPhoto Library" in the Pictures folder, off to an external drive freeing up precious space on the laptop's internal drive. And just to state the obvious, this setup will cause iPhoto heartaches (read: won't work) when the external drive isn't attached to the computer so please keep this in mind.

Also a quick note about backups. If you've been keeping a backup of your iPhoto library on this same external drive, we've got a problem. The original and the backup should NOT be on the same disk, it defeats the whole point. Drives are designed to last on average 5 years, but realistically they can fail at any time. Now that we're using this external drive for primary use, it's time to go get a second external drive for backups. Do it now. You will cry. I have cried.

Ok, introduction over, onto moving the iPhoto Library. In my setup the external drive is oh-so-creatively called "Disk1", so everywhere you see "Disk1", mentally replace your own external drive's name. Here's my starting setup in the screenshot of my finder below. I've clicked on the Pictures folder, found the "iPhoto Library" folder inside it, and the external drive "Disk1" icon is visible on the left, meaning I've attached it and it is mounted.

To find out how much space it's taking up on the internal drive we'll use the contextual menu option called "Get Info". To view the contextual menu right-click on the folder if you have a mouse with a right-button, or hold down the control key (it's the key entitled "ctrl" on the lower left part of your keyboard) and click if you don't. I've taken a screenshot of the iPhoto Library with the contextual menu below.

In my case, the iPhoto Library is 1.72 GB in total. It tells you on the top-right as well as next to the 'Size:' heading under the "General" heading. This is how much space we'll free up on the internal drive, and no big surprise, it's how much space we'll need on the external one.

To move the iPhoto Library copy it by dragging and dropping the folder onto our external drive. You can put it anywhere on the external drive if you have some kind of organizational method to your madness. You should see a window pop up giving you progress information about how long the copy will take. In the screenshot below the internal drive's Pictures folder is on the top and the external drive "Disk1" is on the bottom.

When the copy is complete, delete the original "iPhoto Library" folder. Don't get confused by which one! You can delete the original by dragging it to the trash, or by doing the key equivalent: Apple Command-Delete. Apple-Command is the key with the sqiggly "campground" symbol on it. And you do have a backup, right?

Now we want to make what's called an alias on the internal drive of the iPhoto Library folder that's on the external drive. Think of this as a placeholder at the system level, so iPhoto will be none the wiser. We'll use the same contextual menu we used earlier but instead of "Get Info" we'll go down to "Make Alias". Remember, to reveal the contextual menu you'll right-click or ctrl-click on the "iPhoto Library" folder to reveal it. Here's a screenshot when I did it.

A folder called "iPhoto Library alias" will appear on the external drive. You can tell it's an alias because of the little arrow that's been added to the folder icon in the lower left. Copy the new alias folder we just made back to the internal drive in the Pictures folder, the location of the now deleted, original "iPhoto Library".

Here's a screenshot of what your computer should look like after you've copied the alias file over. The top window is the internal drive, and the bottom window is the external drive.

Finishing up, remove the alias from the external drive (command-delete or drag to trash) and rename the alias on the internal drive to be simply "iPhoto Library". Now we should have an alias called "iPhoto Library" on the internal drive pointing to a folder on the external drive called, well, "iPhoto Library". We can check by using the same Get Info command that we've used earlier (right-click or ctrl-click) but on the alias on the internal drive. Only this time it should tell us that the original is located at /Volumes/Disk1/iPhoto Library (or wherever you put yours). See it, down a bit under the "General" heading?) Confused? Hopefully not.

At this point, you should be good-to-go. We've replaced a 1.72GB iPhoto Library folder with a 4KB (tiny) file that references the much larger iPhoto Library folder on the external drive. Fire up iPhoto and you should see all your pictures. To really free up space on the internal drive, empty the trash at this point.

Hope this helps!

Crash

2006-02-02T13:36:00.000-08:00

For Chirstmas my wife bought me/us a DVD player for our bedroom. With three kids in the house our grown-up movie time has been pretty limited. We really haven't seen anything that's come out in the last three or four years. So we signed up for Netflix to try and catch up, and our first movie appeared in the mail: Crash.

Roger Ebert thought it was a movie about racism. My wife thought it was about racism. My impression was somewhat different. Obviously racism played a large part in the movie, but I thought it was really speaking about Buddhism. Crash was showing how love and hate, happiness and sadness intertwine with a series of similarly intertwined vignettes. Such a good movie.

Netflix movie service.
Crash via imdb.
Roger Ebert's review of Crash.

Great Design

2006-01-26T16:53:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed Joel Spolsky's Great Design: What is Design? (First Draft) article, but I think what's missing is the single most common reason products lack great design: time.

Companies will often spend an enormous chunk of a new product's development cycle deliberating over what amounts to market positioning. Meanwhile, the clock's ticking and none of that is about building a well designed product. By the time a decision has been made and a consensus reached very little time is left in the schedule. The engineers actually making the product are rarely left much more than what's needed to design and build a first iteration.

Joel writes:

When you're designing, you're satisfying lots of difficult constraints. One false move, and you fall into the abyss. It's frigging hard to get this right. You think I know how to solve the Motorola RAZR phone power-switch button? Heck no! I'm sure that the design team over there spent weeks working on this.

That's possible I suppose, but my guess? The problem with the RAZR phone's on/off button was not caused by falling into that abyss. The one where you agonize over the design and fail to satisfy lots of conflicting constraints perfectly after weeks of work. Instead it was most likely a design flaw either missed or allowed to ship because of schedule demands. They fell into that other abyss, they ran out of time.

Update [3 Feb 2006]: There appears to be another design abyss: putting forth so much effort that you just can't walk away. The good-money-after-bad abyss? Turning Limitations into Innovation, Marrissa Ann Mayer, vice-president for search products and user experience at Google,

... people working on it have spent so much time and are so personally invested that it's too painful to walk away. They often know the project is misguided, yet they see the effort through to the painful, unsuccessful end. That's why it's important to discover failure fast and abandon it quickly. A limited investment makes it easier to walk away and move on to something else that has a better chance of success.

Yahoo! TV

2006-01-23T10:50:00.000-08:00

Oh fer crying out loud Yahoo!, implement an AJAX/Flash version of the TV schedule page. Especially the TV module on my.yahoo.com. I just want to scroll across time easily without reloading the page. I'm beggin' here.

Lightroom, Photoshop and Adobe

2006-01-12T23:05:00.000-08:00

If you haven't read the Shadowland/Lightroom Development Story by Jeff Schewe yet, you should. There are a couple key passages in there I want to highlight. The first one is the opening paragraph:

The development of Adobe Lightroom, code named Shadowland, was not something Adobe started after Apple announced Aperture. The Shadowland project has been going on for years.

The emphasis here reads: Apple didn't think of this first. We both thought of it independently. I'm fine with that, because he's right, applications don't spring into being like Athena, from Zeus' head, fully grown, armed and armored. But what's been troubling me is a different question, that is, if it hadn't been for Apple's Aperture, would anyone have ever seen Lightroom outside of a few pro photographer pre-alpha users?

Jeff hinted at this same question in his article:

However their contention-that an application designed for pros could be a reality-was proven. In many respects, Aperture actually helped save Lightroom. It gave the dev team and all of Adobe a target to shoot at-and the engineers at Adobe are nothing if not competitive (as well as being pretty darn talented).

Lets also tick off some curious list items.

1. Lightroom was written in Cocoa, NeXT turned Mac OS X's development environment. Which is really to say, it's not a Windows application. David Young had to say in his Dissecting Lightroom article.

On the whole I'm very excited to see a big company like Adobe going with Cocoa for the implementation of what surely will be a major product in their portfolio. To me, Lightroom shows the rest of the world (read: not Cocoa programmers) a couple of things, such as that a) big companies can use Cocoa too! It's not just for one-man shops anymore and b) one can use Cocoa to make an interface be whatever you want to be, for better or for worse.

Or read another way, no other major software player outside of Apple ships Cocoa applications. Major software players, with very few exceptions either build for Windows, or they build with an eye for cross-platform Unix development or both. Correct me if I'm wrong here.

2. Then there's the use of the Lua scripting language. Which up until a week or so ago, I'm ashamed to admit, I had never even heard of. Gus Mueller of Flying Meat fame had this to say:

Holy Crap. 40% [Lua scripts]? Wow. That's nuts. I had heard it described as a Cocoa app, so I needed to download it to check it out.

Exactly. Holy Crap. That's nuts!

3. Finally I'm just going to come out and say it: Photoshop. Photoshop is Adobe's golden goose. Their cash cow. Precious few companies have the sheer hutzpah to so much as scratch their cash cow. And frankly Adobe doesn't have the hutzpah. We are talking about a company that still charges an arm and a leg for fonts they've had in their vaults since Adobe became Adobe. I know Guy Kawasaki seems to think all good intrapreneurs should kill their cash cows. But how often does this really happen? It's rare. Rare enough to make you stop and think.

And don't tell me Lightroom doesn't compete with Photoshop. Just like Aperture doesn't compete with Photoshop. Right.

Here's my guess at the story behind the story of the development of Lightroom. Originally it was Lightroom the research project. The prototype. And because it was a prototype Adobe management were fine with the OS X only Cocoa code base, the Lua scripting language and the dinner parties and research trips with photographers. These things play well with the cash cow, because nearly everyone at Adobe outside of the small development group probably saw Lightroom as a testbed for a few new features destined for another reason to upgrade to Photoshop XXIX SC.

But then came CoreImage and Aperture. And if I'm reading the tea leaves right, it scared a few people. And a Cocoa based, Lua scripting, cash cow threatening, free beta from Adobe no less was born. Fun, fun times. First Apple builds an Intel box, and now Adobe bends a few rules. Who would have thought?

[Update: 1/24/2007] since1968 has a nice interview with Mark Hamberg that validates a lot of the things I said above. I especially liked this quote,

And so we would go through discussions internally about “Well how many people are there like this? How big is this market? Maybe what we want to do is just add something on to Photoshop.” A variety of things like that.

Bingo. Exactly what I was saying.

Links:

Shadowland/Lightroom Development Story by Jeff Schewe.
Lua scripting language by Gus Mueller.
Dissecting Lightroom by David Young.
The Art of Intrapreneurship, by Guy Kawasaki via RSS.
Lightroom, A First Look and Primer by Michael Reichmann
Lightroom Beta download, Adobe/Macromedia.
Panic On CoreImage.
CoreImage, my original impression.
Mark Hamberg Interview: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, since1968.com

My Blog Is My Web

2006-01-12T06:27:00.000-08:00

Dave Winer writes:

Let me tell you where my weblog is. Then it knows what my interests are. Give me search results relevant to who I am.

Which I think is exactly right. It's almost exactly the feedback I gave during the Q&A portion of an internal talk describing Yahoo!'s MyWeb algorithms. My blog is my web, so why not use that for MyWeb instead of making me save and rank search results? But we shouldn't stop there, we need an additional set of markup so that you can be absolutely clear about what your blog is saying. The obvious example, if I link to something and say, this is terrible, the search engine should know this. If I link to something and say, this is terrific, it should know that too. And if I link to another blog and say, I trust this, then absolutely the search engine should know this. Not so much for ranking results in general, but for ranking results for me.

Disclaimer, I work for Yahoo!

Links:

Dave Winer's search suggestion.
My My Web, article I wrote about MyWeb.
Yahoo!'s MyWeb Beta.

My Life Is Bread

2006-01-10T07:02:00.000-08:00

Lyrics and I just don't go together, I'd be the first to admit it. My latest gaff, and one my wife can't stop making fun of; I thought the opening line to James Blunt's You're Beautiful was, "My life is bread." It's really "My life is brilliant." But damn, "bread" got stuck in my head for some reason. Blunt, you're killing me here man.

Caltrain Fare Hike

2006-01-03T10:11:00.000-08:00

I love this misleading press releases: Caltrain Fares To Change January 1, 2006.

The 5.6% increase they're touting in particular. The reality is that the cost of a one-way ticket rose by $0.25 across the board in this latest increase. For a one-zone trip the price went from $2.00 to $2.25. That's a 12.5% increase. For four-zone trip, which is San Francisco to San Jose the price went from $6.50 to $6.75, a 3.8% change. Go back a little further and compare to 2002 fares the trend gets very clear. In 2002 a one zone ticket cost $1.50, where one zone was slightly smaller than it is today and the San Jose/San Francisco trip cost $6.00. Since 2002, local users have seen a whopping %50 increase, while San Francisco/San Jose commuters have seen a 12.5% increase or roughly $0.75 across the board.

The message they're sending of course is simply, don't use Caltrain for short, local trips. Now that a one zone ticket costs $2.25, more than a ticket on the NYC subway, it's time to introduce a one stop (one stop not one zone) ticket for local use at about $1.

[Update: 7-Jan-2006] After I posted the original note, I also sent a copy via the Caltrain feedback form. They sent me a response pointing out that the Gilroy to San Francisco fare has only increased 2.7% and that senior fares remain the same. They also pointed out that most of their riders travel relatively long distances.

Which is pretty much exactly my point. Of course most of Caltrain's customers travel relatively long distances, their fare pricing policies have made sure of that.

What's Hard About Software

2006-01-02T08:30:00.000-08:00

Lets drag out pointers one more time. Here's a fun blog mashup, read these articles together.

Can Apple do Better than Objective-C?, by Nitesh Dhanjani

As far as the development world is concerned, it is my opinion that Microsoft has done wonderful things with .NET, while Apple hasn't churned out much innovation (not recently at least.) I'd like to see Apple developers gain more choice. With every iteration of OSX, there seems to be so much effort put into innovation of desktop components, but the development environment is age old. I use Objective C because I have to, while I use recent languages such as C# and ruby because I want to.

What's interesting about Nitesh Dhanjani's article is what he's not saying here. The original version of the article, the one he took down, was an email conversation with Steve Jobs with references to pointers. Specifically complaining about having to deal with them. From the new content, innovation then, in the author's mind, is in large part about removing pointers. Could he be the product of a JavaSchool?

The Perils of JavaSchools, by Joel Spolsky

If I may be so brash, it has been my humble experience that there are two things traditionally taught in universities as a part of a computer science curriculum which many people just never really fully comprehend: pointers and recursion.

Spolsky-Recursion by Tim Bray, is largely in defense of Java (he works for Sun after all), but he adds concurrency to the list:

My experience differs from Joel’s in another respect: Recursion is mildly hard. Closures and continuations are hard. Concurrency is very hard. I never found pointers hard at all.

My addition would be, getting ten or twelve coders to work together on the same project: really really hard.

The Road To Paris

2005-12-30T14:34:00.000-08:00

The Road To Paris is a one hour documentary on Lance Armstrong's preparation for the 2001 tour. It came free with the subscription to Cycle Sport I gave my wife for Christmas. She, like me, is a huge cycling fan.

A couple really telling scenes jumped out at me. The first scene highlighted just how damn dedicated Lance Armstrong really was. Johan Bruneel, directeur sportif for what was US Postal at the time, now Discovery Channel and another man were trying to get Lance to stop because the road was flooded. It was raining, and water, a river really, was rushing across the mountain road they were on. Lance ignored them, yelling, "I'm fine, I'm fine", he hadn't yet seen what was blocking the road. He went around the corner and had to stop at the water's edge, head down in frustration.

The second was a quick scene of David Zabriskie. Again, this was 2001 when he was a domestique on the US Postal squad. There's a shot of him in some hotel room doing a "weight" workout with surgical tubing. Another teammate is relaxing nearby looking at him like he's nuts. Dave says, somewhat sheepishly, "I do this workout three days a week." I was thinking, and that right there is why Dave had a fabulous tour several years later, last year. He was one of the very few riders to match Lance in the time trial stages. Not the workout per-say, but that he was obviously willing to do that something extra. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to just lie down on the bed like everyone else after a full day of training. Instead he's pulling on surgical tubing.

Links

The Road To Paris at World Cycling Productions.
DZ, Dave Zabriskie's website.

Who Travels?

2005-12-26T20:45:00.000-08:00

What my wife said. Who would have guessed we would hit stop and go traffic at noon on Christmas day. I could almost hear thousands of Bay Area Moms saying all at once, "we'll have a nice family Christmas morning and then head up to the mountains ...", creating a Borg like many-is-one voice.

I should add, when we returned home and my wife checked the traffic online, out of morbid curiosity. She checked Yahoo! first (I work for Yahoo!, so she's biased). Unfortunately "Traffic" is not listed as a "feature" on the top of the front page. Those listing refer mostly to Yahoo! properties. But of course, no user cares how Yahoo! business properties are organized, they just want to find out about traffic. So she searched and went off to traffic.com, and linked to them in her article. After hearing about this, I showed her the traffic link on the front page on the right, under the weather. Her comment was, "what's it doing down there?". Good point, what is it doing down there. Doh!