Whitney McNamara's Sea Monkey Rodeo.
This blog moved over here in August 2006. Come by if you're interested in newer posts.
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All opinions expressed here are, of course, entirely my own personal views, and do not reflect the views of my employer or its associated companies.
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| k a r a o k e | m i n d | c o n t r o l |
| k a r a o k e | m i n d | c o n t r o l |
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Yes, SeaMonkey 1.0 was released today...
...and no, SeaMonkeyRodeo (or maybe it's "Sea Monkey Rodeo," I've never really gotten around to deciding which I prefer) has nothing to do with the SeaMonkey project -- other than my enthusiastic endorsement of any project that's run by a "SeaMonkey Council."
So please stop sending me email about it, okay?
Friday, January 27, 2006
Comments on Comments
Del.icio.us brought me the Commentator yesterday -- a revolutionary tool that automatically comments your code for you as you write it. Ah, the wonders of technology.
As it happens, just a few days ago I was forwarded a copy of a comment-related document that I myself put together. While maintaining a fairly sizeable Web-based app, I finally camt to understood the degree to which comments give you a window into a developer's soul...though you may or may not want that insight, of course.
All comments below exactly as I found them in the wild, except that names have been changed to protect the guilty.
SomeCompany Comment Highlights Some of the best comments that I've run across in my time at SomeCompany. The style indicates that they probably all came from Elmo, company founder and one of the greats of "Stream of Consciousness" programming. First we have the informative comments. Pithy yet pungent, these casual asides have helped generations of developers navigate the twisted pathways of SomeCompany code: ;;; takes the shit out of textareas and turns them into nice little citizens # gotta do all that bullshit with volume vs brokers discounts, all that crap. Next, the incredulous; when you come across one of these, it's almost like you're sitting beside Elmo as he realizes just what he's gotten himself into: # fuck, we have to figure this out based on total_price sum in lstats vs original price? # add this file to our masterpurge file. unfortunately we have to sort this fucker when we are done too. fuck. ;;; gotta get the fucking list_id in order to load the bitch. makes us do 2 fucking queries? Then we have the ever-popular "oops" comments. These are particularly enjoyable, as they invariably exist independent of any more detailed examination of the issue (or any indication of whether it was resolved): ;;; what the fuck is this crap? looks like I left a sponge in the patient. Then, finally, my all-time favorite. I love the way that it just trails off into nothing... ;;; oh shit, it tries to write oracle too... |
Friday, January 20, 2006
Reply All. Rinse. Repeat.
I've (unfortunately) seen this happen a number of times as a byproduct of dumbasses failing to grasp the fact that desktop email clients aren't great tools for email marketing, but never before seen it attached to out and out spam.
Rick Klau received a spam message yesterday. Not big news in and of itself, but here's the twist: the spammer had compromised a mail server, set up his (or her) spam list as subscribers to a mailing list, and then sent the spam as a message to that list...with the reply-to address being the newsletter address.
See where this is going? Every reply to the original spam message then went out to the entire spam list. And then the replies to that reply went out to the entire spam list. And so on, and so on...
Read Rick's original post for more amusement.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
BellSouth Makes an Offer You Can't Refuse
The Internet Daily reports that BellSouth has confirmed that it is "pursuing discussions with Internet content companies to levy charges to reliably and speedily deliver their content and services."
The article notes that "BellSouth has discussed its idea with MovieLink, a film-download service. [Bill Smith, BellSouth CTO] called MovieLink an example of the kind of company that wants customers to have a good experience and would view costs incurred in the strengthening of BellSouth's Internet capacity as worthwhile."
Am I the only one who gets an incredibly strong visual when reading that paragraph? Here's what I see:
A man wearing a snazzy pin striped suit and snap brim hat walks into MovieLink's offices. The diamond in his pinky ring catches the light as he taps the ash from his cigar onto the carpet of Jim Ramo's office.
"My name is, ah...Smith," he says, "and I represent a certain group of legitimate businessmen."
"You've got a nice little business here, Mr. Ramo, and it would be a shame -- a real shame, I gotta say -- if anything unfortunate were to happen to your business. If, like, it took your customers a week and a day to download your movies, let's say...I'd be real sorry to see something like that happen."
Smith stubs his cigar out on Ramo's desk, and looks off into the disance.
"You're worried about things like that, am I right? Of course you're worried about things like that. Your worries, they keep you up at night, right? Now my colleagues are prepared to help you out here. They can make you an offer that will make all those worries disappear -- poof -- and you'll be able to sleep like a baby again. Like a baby. You'd have to be crazy to not want to sleep like a baby, am I right?"
Or maybe I've just got a very visual mind. Well, whatever...I still fail to see how this is anything other than a protection money shakedown that ends up hurting both online content providers (and pretty much everybody is a content provider online) and BellSouth's broadband subscribers. Please explain...anyone? (And "yeah, but it totally benefits BellSouth so everbody else can go screw" isn't really the explanation that I'm looking for.)
Yahoo Acquires SearchFox Assets
Zot! Missed this over the weekend: SearchFox (or some portion thereof) folds into Yahoo.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Patent Troubles for...um, the USPTO?
Ah, the beauty of it all: Peter Zura's excellent Two-Seventy-One Patent blog reports that the USPTO's initiative to grant fewer asspatents, which is to include use of an automated "patent quality index," could be heading for some trouble due to...wait for it, now...a patent covering "a computer-automated methon for rating or ranking patents or other intangible assets [...]". Said patent being the property of a patent holding company, of course.
It is indeed reassuring to see how our current patent system helps to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"...oh, wait...that wouldn't seem to be the case here at all. How odd.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Anonymity and Accountability
Bruce Schneier has an article in Wired News on the important distinction between anonymity and accountability, which meshes well with some issues that I've been mulling over about online communities.
Through my wife, I recently learned about UrbanBaby, a child/family resource site focused on a few US metro areas. One of the features that they offer is discussion boards, or course, but those boards are implemented in a really interesting way: registration/login is required to participate, and the discussions are monitored and moderated, but the the individual posts are anonymous.
The result is a fascinatingly vibrant discussion. Because the site operators can see the identity of all posters, anyone who's abusive may quickly find themselves in a time out -- hours, days, or permanent -- and the operators have behavior histories at their disposal to see whether nastiness is a one-time thing for a poster or part of a pattern; on the user end of things, though, people seem comfortable asking questions and giving answers that they might be reluctant to post if their identity -- even just an online handle -- were tied to every post they made.
This combination of anonymity and accountability has, interestingly, made a community that feels much more friendly and personal than most that I've seen online: people post the way that they might make a comment into a room full of friends, just to see who responds, not worrying about whether they'll be judged, or whether their particular clique is there and paying attention.
Interesting model, and one that seems like it could have a lot to offer to some of the more struggling fixed-identity communities on the Web.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Opinions on FeedLounge (or other Web-based RSS readers)?
So FeedBurner tells me that a number of you feed subscribers out there are using FeedLounge. With the sad demise of SearchFox I'm in the market for a new Web-based RSS reader.
Because I'm still a devotee of FeedDemon (the best RSS reader on the face of the earth), I'm going to take a look at NewsGator Online again for all the exciting synchonization goodness and whatnot, and perhaps see whether Bloglines has made any changes since last I looked; since I'm not at all familiar with FeedLounge, though, I'd be interested in hearing a bit about it from current users.
And as long as we're talking feed consumption, while I don't think that any other Web-based readers (or standalone apps, for that matter) currently facilitate the attention-focused "river of news" consumption style that I've come to love about SearchFox, it would be great to be proved wrong on that. Please let me know if you've got any recommentations.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Presentation Zen: Tip Zero
With the Jobs having done another keynote today, you should expect to see the usual analyses of his presentation style. Credit where due, the man is definitely good.
Have spent the afternoon sitting through a series of non-Macworld Expo presentations, I have my own little recommendation to make to those who hope to improve their presentations:
Shut down your IM client before starting your presentation. Perhaps you should shut it down even before hooking up your laptop to the projector, hmmmmm?
Friday, January 06, 2006
Pushy P2P
Push!Music
"Imagine that you have a mobile device that can store and play back music files, for example a mobile phone with an MP3 player. As you encounter various people, the devices you are carrying connect to each other wirelessly and media agents from the other nearby devices check the status of your media collection. Based on what you have been listening to in the past and which files you already own, new music might spontaneously and autonomously 'jump' from another device to yours (and vice versa). Later, when you listen to your songs, your Push!Music player also plays some newly obtained tunes that you had not heard before."
Huh. I'm old and out of touch with the cool kids of the day, but while this seems like it'd present a bunch of really fun technical problems to solve, the end result is of questionable value.
How do you deal with the issue of transferring a relatively large file (4-6MB for an mp3) over a relatively slow connection (732.2 kbits/sec if we're talking bluetooth), when you don't know how long the sender/receiver will be in range? Cool problems.
How do you make reliable judgements about what songs are likely to interest a user when the target device (an mp3-capable phone) can only store a relatively small number of files at any given time, the ID3 information is not necessarily reliable, and most of the user's listening likely happens on some other device? Cool problems.
I could see solving those problems being a lot of fun, but then in the end I've got (1) random mp3 files pushed onto my phone, eating up storage whether I like them or not, (2) I've got to go through a manual "do you approve this download" process every time some other user walks in range, or (3) I have to set up some sort of "approved uploaders" list in which case I could just ask my friends what they think I should listen to.
But, then, since I don't really get how the design and usability abomination that is MySpace managed to become hot stuff in the younger-than-me music world, maybe I'm just out of it.
