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According an early Sunday morning message by Dave Burstein on Dave Farber's IP list, Jef Raskin died on Saturday night. That information has now been confirmed in many places by many people.
He's famous for many things, perhaps most notably for fighting tooth and nail to get himself added to the list of notables responsible for the Macintosh. That he played a big part has always been obvious, the precise details have been argued to death.
Despite his reputation for user interface ideas, I still remember him as the guy who tried to do smaller. To me, he's the guy who 'almost' made the dream of a TRS-80 Model 100 form factor for the Apple II come true. The Swyft was what I wanted, but it was eventually stillborn.
Around the time (1984 - 85) the idea started generating buzz, I was shuffling back and forth to work with a Model 100, largely used for notes and ideas, but also used to work on code (I could never put it all on the device). I'd come home and sync via a null model connection to my Apple II. What I really wanted a portable that was compatible with my home world with all the extra bells and whistles. In the end, I would up waiting until the spring of 1992 before I finally got close to what I'd wanted (with the PowerBook 100) and another decade to finally arrive (with the TiBook 667).
I don't even recall how I wound up here, but this is a whole new look at basket, er ball? people? Whatever, it's wild!
I'd love to understand the language so I'd know how these guys convince this young woman to try this stunt. You'll also notice that while the guys are whooping and hollering, she'd standing under the bucket rubbing the back of her head, looking upwards and likely wondering why she's still alive.
Perhaps she bumped it on the floor (the catch was pretty low), but my guess is she whacked it pretty good on the back of the rim.
Since I'm the luddite (or one of them at any rate) being called out by Howard regarding SBC's Lightspeed project (a triple play; voice, data and video all wrapped up in one service) I decided I should at least speak up and defend myself.
Time shifting is a wonderful thing and I'll admit to not knowing it as well as perhaps I should, but I don't see live TV as ever fully going away. A presidential press conference (or maybe just the state of the union address), live sporting events and the really popular programming can set their own time schedules and lot of people will watch them as they happen. When a major event happens, people are going to want to watch live, and record another channel (or maybe more than one... who wouldn't love to have multiple tuners?) and converse with one another online (perhaps even trading spippets of things they saw).
I just can't see how this works out when we're talking about a service which is going to cost $99 per month and deliver one HD channel (or four SD channels) with a 1 Mbps data channel to 5,000 feet. Given that I'm almost 11,000 feet from the CO, I'm even more dubious, but that's my problem.
Today (not two years from now), my relatively crummy cable company will allow me to pull one HD feed while recording another on each of the two boxes in the house while also allowing as many SD live feeds (on the channels not protected by the box) as I might wish to capture or view and a 3 Mbps downstream data connection.
If we use the numbers from the most recent analysis I've seen in DSL Prime that would require 46.5 Mbps [(4 x 9.3 Mbps) + (3 x 2.1Mbps) + 3Mbps]. That's just not happening over DSL and yet somehow SBC thinks they can compete against the cable companies this way.
Verizon's FTTH is at least a better prospect (I don't care if it's to the curb or even the sewer line, I'll pay for the last 50 feet if needed, I've already done it once). As David Isen mentioned (more here), Verizon may be making a mistake (PON versus Gigabit PON), but either way their approach seems a lot more forward thinking that hoping everyone in the US will move closer to the CO's and squeezing every last dime out of the copper already in place.
Is IP video coming? Yes! Is SBC going to be the one who delivers it? I don't think so, at least not in a way that's going to make people a lot of money. As Dave Burstein pointed out back in November the smart money thinks fiber is the way to go. When you've got all the video you can eat along with your voice data and 10 to 50 Mbps of headroom left over, then you'll see the true next generation applications happen. What those will be is anyone's guess but it should be fun if we ever get there.
One of my favorite films is the 1957 version of 12 Angry Men directed by Sidney Lumet. On my most recent trip to Atlanta (two weeks ago), it was the only movie of the four I'd brought that I got around to watching. It's a marvelous movie with an exceptional cast. The premise: an all white male jury in mid 1950's New York City is set to deliberate the fate of young black man tried for murder. A slam dunk three minute verdict becomes a tense discussion to sift truth from the fact and fiction presented at a trial we never see, but learn of only through these back room discussions. 
Why bring it up now?
Well it is a favorite, but the spark was a phone conversation today with my aunt. She was telling me about their recent trip to New York and the ground work they were laying for my trip there this summer (I'm going back to the Jersey Shore, but that usually includes a trip to the city too) when she started gushing about a great show they saw on Broadway, Twelve Angry Men. After learning that she'd never heard of the movie before, we exchanged glowing reviews and then I promised that I would bring the DVD with me this summer (I can't believe that it's only $7.50 at Amazon, it is after all #21 on the IMDb Top 250).
The CurtainUp review answers a question that was bugging me, was it ever on broadway before? The answer? No.
Finally, I also got around to checking out the 1997 television version, which I'd head good things about. The reviews are good so I may need to go rent that at some point to compare and contrast (there is a good user comment near the top which does that and speaks well to the quality of the remake).
And finally, to those who would argue (I've had this argument before) that To Kill a Mockingbird is a better treatment of the subject, I say the two films are different. I love both the book (I had the pleasure of reading it again a few years ago when Adam brought it home from school) and the movie (I borrowed it from a friend a few years ago and bought it shortly afterward). While there are numerous similarities, they are distinctly different and I watch Twelve Angry Men quite a bit more frequently.
It's been more than a month since I read Blessed Silver Linings, where DB introduced us to a crazy video I saved with a link name of Mya god! (but never published, it was already done). My copy of the link from Jan 21 is here. I found it funny and wonderful, the joy was quite apparent but so was crazed silliness.
It was generally assumed at the time that this was a young man from Romania who had been a tad rambunctious and had shared the video with friends. Over the next few days, I saw references to the video show up in a lot of places and then it died out as do most network borne phenomena. It was entertaining, but that was the end of the road, or so it seemed.
Not so fast...
During the last couple of weeks, the 'Numa Numa Dance' has again taken the net by storm and this time around MSNBC has a name behind the video (I wonder how they tracked him down), one Gary Brolsma (from New Jersey... must everyone from Jersey be unique? I wonder sometimes if that's my problem). Chris Holland found a somewhat different version (after dealing with the MSN Monster) which seems to be considerably more hacked than than the version I've got from Dec 13 and yet also includes the ability to play a completely unmodified version (select the option without subtitles).
Like the 'Your bases are belong to us' meme, this seems like a long lived cultural phenomenon. Our grandchildren are likely to know about Numa Numa at this rate.
As my wife put it this morning when bringing in the water logged LA Times...
Double bagging is good unless you decide to throw it into a river.
The open end of the outer bag wound up pointing uphill in our driveway (once described by a friend as the steepest driveway he'd ever seen, known by my mom as frightening and when Jon was very small, known by me as a giant PITA until I learned that I must park pointed downhill), filled with water and defeated the entire purpose. When it's raining, each side of our driveway becomes an active spillway, with water from the rooftop, hillsides and every other surface trying to find a way down. The steep, smooth concrete is the path of least resistance. In the end, they wasted twice as much plastic while accomplishing nothing.
I am quite tired of paper (and worse, heavy gloss paper, like magazines). It's not only a problem on the disposal end, but a waste of resources on the production side. I don't even need a newspaper for kindling in my fireplace anymore (something we used papers for when I was a youngster). As displays capable of handling extremely high resolution media become more ubiquitous, our need for always printed material should be lessening.
I'm not advocating the paperless office, something I've no hope of seeing in my lifetime, but how about the mostly paperless newspaper? Every newspaper worthy of the name has a web presence of some sort. It's been more than a decade since Adobe introduced PDF (Portable Document Format, a full featured descendant of PostScript) which works on every computer in my house, even the really old and crusty stuff. It seems obvious that we should be moving toward a convergence of some sort.
Would I be willing to pay for some kind of electronic delivery mechanism? You bet. Would others? I can't say. I can think of one advantage outside of the sogginess issue... delivery while away. There would be no need to ever stop delivery. Just let it pile up and read the sections when you want (even better, the idea you can keep up while being thousands of miles away). I'd also be spared my weekly happy hunt to assemble my Sunday paper (A, B, C, D and M; C and M are usually hidden away in all kinds of weird places by the LAT elves).
The hard part of a purely electronic delivery mechanism is limiting distribution rights. IMO, using shame and personal liability suits is more appropriate than waiting for DRM — I'm not interested once we get to a place where I am no longer trusted. I pay for a lot of content today that comes via PDF and understand the trust relationship. It's not really much different from the idea that I'm not going to reprint a any paper (local, or not).
There are some serious implications.
There are quite a number of interesting things happening in the Ventura County media, led primarily by the Ventura County Star. Last week Dan Gillmor mentioned that the Star gets the message in response to the following message at Poynter Online.
Our online editor, Alicia Hoffman, will be adding the role of citizen journalism/user-content specialist to her duties.
We see blogs, forums, photo blogs and other forms of citizen journalism as a significant part of the online news world. Our readers want to be part of the process of sharing the news and shaping the news. Technology is giving them the tools to do it, and as Dan Gillmor has pointed out, our readers often know more than we do. They can also be more places than we can. And, they also know what interests them and what news they want in ways that traditional, top-down journalism might miss. We need to give appropriate attention to this growing facet of our business.
Alicia's primary duties as online editor do not change, but the focus of her job will be different. She will pay close attention to how we're interacting with our readers and the content and business opportunities that emerge, and help to shape our evolving strategy. She will guide us in the world of "journalism as a conversation" as we develop VenturaCountyStar.com as the online community center for Ventura County. Our current plan is to grow organically in this area rather than push any one big initiative. We have blogs, forums and photo blogs now. We will work to grow these and help promote citizen journalism in Ventura County.
HOWARD OWENS
Director of New Media
Ventura County Star / E.W. Scripps Co.
In addition to other changes at the Ventura County Star, they've now added comment and trackback links on selected articles. It was pointed out over the weekend (see the comments) by Owens that adding comments (but probably not trackback) to every bylined story is somewhat experimental for now, and that they intend to roll this out on all articles sometime during the year.
It's interesting to see Howard Owens wandering the net, picking up on every mention of Ventura County Star and following up on it. That's not quite his job, but he's doing a pretty good job of being a sort of online ombudsman. And he's finally added a feed (not quite RSS, but it works) to his site. In the process he wonders why he's being asked for a feed more often now that he's returned from a hiatus, even though his traffic numbers are lower. Having also recently begun diving into RSS feeds himself using FeedDemon, I think the reason people want feeds for sites will become quite a bit more clear over the coming days and weeks. Once you get used to it, the desire to have other data from non static sources arrive in a similar way is quite powerful.
Cheers and best wishes to Howard and the Ventura County Star for pushing forward. It'll be very interesting to see how the whole citizen journalism initiative works out.
The OOP (object oriented programming) debate seems to be back in full swing lately. Without even trying (who has the time?) I've stumbled onto more than a handful of articles pro and con on the use of OOP/D during the last month.
Today I found a post by Bruce Eckel where he answered a reader question about the usefulness of OOP and also points to the rant by Richard Mansfield (OOP Is Much Better in Theory Than in Practice) from a couple weeks earlier (referring to him as the machine-code guy which seems quite appropriate under the circumstances). For a different treatment on OO is bad the B. Jacobs site (referenced by Richard Mansfield) is an interesting read. No wildly crazy ideas like using copy and paste for code reuse there, but he does see everything as being easily modeled in a relational database (see the entry on table oriented programming).
What I found interesting about the response was the way that he'd evolved from assembly to higher level languages and patterns (I think of OO design and programming as an über pattern since the concept of patterns was introduced to me with the GoF book) in part because it so closely tracks with my own growth and experience.
It's been far too long since I made the transition from a purely procedural development methodology (a metamorphosis that occurred in fits and starts between 1988 and 1994) to gauge the arguments regarding lost productivity during the transition. Still, I'd have to acknowledge that there is a cost, as there is in learning any new tool. The only argument I'd consider to be valid for OOD/P having a negative impact on productivity is that once accustomed to object based designs, a desire to get the object hierarchy right the first time does set in; paralysis by analysis isn't entirely uncommon. I wound up using an XP'ish approach, putting the code that didn't fit into the object view elsewhere until enough of it accumulated to make a sweep and clean up in a sane manner.
One thing I haven't seen yet from the OO luddites is an attack on object oriented design concepts (perhaps best illustrated by UML system and state diagrams). Having wondered why, I have a couple ideas. Perhaps they don't really know enough about visual modeling to attack it. More likely, they like modeling but don't like the languages available to them for implementation. Assuming the later case, their models would likely have data, manipulators and flow modules; they just wouldn't appear to be so without the convenient naming schemes some of us are so familiar with. One nice result of OO is discoverability.
OO is neither a panacea nor a design disaster (in the general sense). It's another tool in a fairly crowded toolbox.
Bruce seems to feel that OO fails (or at least falls short) for concurrency which is true to a degree. Large mutexed methods in any language are a major problem. Doesn't that mean we should continue to strive toward smaller objects and methods (finer grain) where ever possible? That works until we're stuck creating (and eventually destroying) twenty objects for a simple operation. Stack objects in C++ make this a heck of a lot better from a performance viewpoint, and led to flyweight utility functions. But that's the only place it works that way. So perhaps the argument is that OO isn't agnostic across languages? Possible, but I'm going to ignore that for now.
The failing I see today in the static OO languages are generics. Although I haven't used JDK 5.0 yet, I've been reading about it quite a bit. As a long time abuser of C++ templates, I was dismayed because it's the same crummy syntax. Unlike the scripting languages, which allow for useful (if often simple) generic functions, the proper tuning and completely unreadable nature of generic functions (long term) in static languages OO sucks wind. Our custom algorithms are the parts of our applications most in need concurrency help (not the messaging semantics).
I'm not about to abandon OO, even if I envy those who can fall back to using a DB for everything but it's an interesting perspective.
I've run into this wonderful list of MySQL gotchas before (or something like it), but I didn't do anything to make sure I'd be able to find it again. The list has documented many interesting problem areas (I just ran into the comment without a space issue a couple weeks ago).
Thanks to Kris Wehner's The Recalcitrant Engineer, I've got it where I need it now.
Yes, it's been a while since I've posted anything. I've been not feeling very well and extremely busy with work related topic. As a result, I have a very large backlog of things to deal with. Oh well.
Of course, today is SuperBowl XXXIX, an event which has become every bit as important in American society as many of our official holidays. Face it, even people who hate football (or just sports in general) go to SuperBowl parties and I'd venture to say that party attendance is higher than for Halloween. It's certain that more people here pay attention to the SuperBowl than do something useful (even if it's just hanging a flag) on Veterans Day.
Although I'm an admitted NFL addict, my original plan was to blow off todays game while hoping the Iggles can pull off the upset. And then for some reason even he can't explain, Jon decided that he'd like to watch the game. Sarah's plan to take the boys to Magic Mountain was derailed and now we're going to have a little family party and partake in the great american couch potato experience.
Regardless of your plans, enjoy yourself and drive safe.
