Have You Heard?!

Wednesday, April 16th 2008

Have you heard about it? The new app? It's fantastic! It does podcasting, podcatching, and feed reading. It uses Atom, microformats, HTML, XML, jQuery, and Prototype... it even uses Ruby on Rails! It's got blogging and wikis built in, it can handle email, and it's SMS compatible. There's a mobile version. Its a social network, unique in that it appeals to just about everybody...

It's called THE WEB, people.

Seriously! I note that with increasing frequency, web developers seem to be desperately including every feature they can conceive of, and some they (apparently) can't. What happened to the *nix philosophy? Do one thing and do it well, right? Connect all the shiny bits with a series of tubes and let amazing things happen?

To most people, your amazing Web 3.0rc2 app isn't an application at all. It's just one tiny component of the amazing desktop app with the blue "e" icon (if you have especially intelligent users, it's a fox + globe icon, but my point holds). You can't fool all the people all the time, and eventually your users will realize that this amazing app includes better versions of your "wall" and "status update" and "message center," just a click away.

I think it's high time that us developers to learn to say no! No, we won't create yet another social network that sends you emails with message notifications instead of messages (argh!). No, we won't build a feedreader into the release notes wiki! No more slickly vidcast development frameworks that build a slower version of anything that's already been done in just 20 minutes (application design and server configuration time omitted for brevity).

Please oh please oh please. Just write an app - a small app - that adds a nice, solid feature to the web, instead of trying to add all the web's features in your app.

Cyclical Reality

Friday, April 11th 2008

In the long, lonely moments since my wife left with the in-laws for Disneyland (curse you, finals week!) I've been musing about the way that my to-do lists seem to wax and wane over time. I never feel like there's nothing I could be doing — of course, I could always go do the dishes, or get ahead on my homework, or do some reading — but I can remember, quite clearly, entire weeks when I felt like nothing was really going on. No big announcements in the blogosphere, nothing urgent for school, no paper or thesis deadlines...

Movie Review: Live Free or Die Hard

Tuesday, February 19th 2008

The wife and I rented Live Free or Die Hard over the weekend. Most. Unintentionally. Funny. Movie. Ever. There were intentionally funny parts, of course, including some good wisecracks from both John McClane and stereotypical hacker dude, but the "serious" scenes were funnier by far. The trailer-spoiled slaying of a helicopter with a catapulted police car was a hoot, as was the supposed-to-be-creepy conversation between the googly-eyed bad guy and McClane's daughter.

Thinking back on the movie, I do have a few little nitpicks:

Apparently the villain got his HR policy out of a Bond movie: sidekicks included a ninja babe, a freerunner, and the always-popular bearded foreign weapons guy. However, he didn't have a deformity (besides the previously mentioned bug eyes). Where's the scar/prosthesis/embedded bullet?
As usual, "hacking" skill consists mostly of typing speed and the ability to explain the movie's plot to laymen, and everyone in the movie uses custom non-Windows, non-Mac, non-KDE, non-GNOME interfaces with integrated video conferencing.
I know road rash isn't really photogenic, but I can't get over McClane diving out of a speeding police cruiser and ending up with a pair of small cuts on his brow. Someday, some costume guy from E.R. or House is going to give us realistic-looking injuries on the big screen, but this was not that day.
An "E-Bomb?" I mean, I understand that flooding the other guy's screen with spam is funny, but surely they had a writer or two on this movie, right?
No helicopters are available to stake out the computer compound, so they send a fully-armed F-35 over instead to... um... blow things up along the way? What?
And the heat-seeking, proximity-fused Sidewinder decides to go for a concrete freeway support pylon rather than the chiller on a mobile server farm? Which then causes miles of freeway to collapse? And the pilot then conveniently flies under the collapsing road, the better to catch some concrete with his lift fan? COME ON!

All-in-all, a whole lot of good, clean, completely brainless fun: should be enough guns and cars and explosions in this movie to keep anybody entertained for the duration.

IIW 2007B Recap

Friday, January 4th 2008

Well, it's been an entire month since IIW 2007B so I guess it's time I finally got around to posting my report. This report certainly won't be as detailed as last time: this conference felt more like a series of announcements than the working session that IIW 2007 was. Here the things significant enough that I still remember them a month later...

Discworld String Theory

Wednesday, December 26th 2007

As a geek (not just a computer programmer) I can't help but be interested in the current state of theoretical physics. In the current effort to create a theory of everything some of the main contenders (at least from a funding/mindshare point of view) are string theory and M theory, its current superset. A fairly vocal part of the physics community believes these theories to be so much hot air, as they require the invention of an additional six or seven invisible "very small" dimensions and are (currently) nonfalsifiable, and thus not really science at all. This weekend, I read what has got to be one of the best commentaries I've seen on the issue, from Making Money by Terry Pratchett. Lipwig is talking to Ponder Stibbons, a sort of quantum wizard, about a multidimensional cabinet:

"In which case, won't that be a bit of a problem? I mean, can it be in the ground and in the cabinet at the same time?"

"That, Mr. Lipwig, is-"

"The wrong type of question?"

"Yes. The box exists in ten or possibly eleven dimensions. Practically anything may be possible."

"Why only eleven dimensions?"

"We don't know," said Ponder. "It might be simply that more would be silly."

Prognostication is a hard problem

Friday, December 14th 2007

Jeff Barr, the famous and clever Amazon Web Services evangelist, visited our campus yesterday evening to see a presentation by the CS 462 class that Sam TA's. As part of the discussion, most of it feedback about EC2 and S3, Jeff was asked whether any more game-changing services were going to be released by Amazon soon. He told us yes, that something would be coming out before year's end, but then didn't give us any details. Sam immediately guessed it'd be a database-in-the-cloud, while I thought it might be a more modest map- or search- related extension of existing APIs.

TextDrive Security Issues

Thursday, November 15th 2007

Apparently, my TextDrive hosts don't want me to post some specific words here. This morning I referred to the machine learning discipline as an "e c h o" chamber (remove the spaces) but the word e-c-h-o is apparently too dangerous to be passed through Apache to my Lighttpd instance. WTH??