Dancing About Architecture

I don't know if I'd really call this movie "scary" ... it was certainly suspenseful and interesting. In fact, the premise was interesting enough to make me look into the story deeper than one should ... the plot is really holding together by a thread and shouldn't really be examined too closely. You get the feeling that all of the source material is there, but it was maybe chopped up a little too much in the editing room. Nonetheless it was a good Halloween night movie to watch ... better than "The Others", not as good as "The Sixth Sense".

The Ring (***)

Posted by Eric at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nothing earth-shattering here, just a nicely written article on the unintended (or unanticipated) problems that occur when the scarcity of certain resources is reduced.

What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?

They are all problems caused by abundance in a world more attuned to scarcity. By achieving the goal of abundance, technology renders the natural checks and balances of scarcity obsolete.

Globetechnology

Posted by Eric at 08:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This account was taken from a "Birds of a Feather" session on blogging at the Microsoft Professional Developers conference. I think he's talking about the people who care about the infrastructure behind blogging more than "bloggers", but still the sentiment is depressing. There are few things more irritating than socially insecure semi-intelligent grown men (not so much women - it's a testosterone thing) getting in a group and trying to prove how semi-intelligent they are by discussing a contentious topic like children. The staggering lack of effort some people have to put forth to be an asshole is truly breathtaking.

I think there's a lot of good work being done in the content syndication community, provided you can evade the energy-sucking deinzens that float around like Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde. Keep your eye on the prize.

benjaminm's blog - Blogger's BOF

Posted by Eric at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This posting by Sean Neville (Macromedia guy) talks about a lot of the things that I find exciting right now. Atom/RSS! Formalized content model for things you can by with Atom/RSS namespaces! Wireless! Macromedia Central! Mystery! Intrigue!

There's some convergence of a lot of these ideas that's just waiting to emerge ... what it's going to be and who's going to find it is anyone's guess right now. But it's going to be a Big Idea.

Project Atom, Amazon, Mobile Web Services, and Fireflies at REST

Posted by Eric at 08:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's another online community opening today: "There". One interesting thing about this community is the intersection of "Therebucks" (the virtual currency) with "actual bucks" and a published exchange rate (see tbux.com). The emerging economic system in these virtual communities is always intriguing to me (see this earlier entry for another example).

Of course, the community is only as good as its ability to foster real relationships and communication, and the early word from There beta participants has been good. We'll keep an eye on it.

Wired News: Wish You Were Here, See You There

Posted by Eric at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ah, the perfect antidote to Legally Blond 2 (the movie I saw previous to this one). This movie had much more of a sense of humor than I was expecting, and I laughed out loud a number of times. Terrific performance from Maggie Gyllenhaal (last saw her in Donnie Darko with her brother Jake), and better than average performance from James Spader. Spader, never one to turn down a weird role, is definitely in his Crash/sex lines and videotape mode here. I think the best thing about this movie, though, is that underneath it all it's actually kind of a touching, albeit twisted, love story. Recommended.

Secretary (***1/2)

Posted by Eric at 09:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An impressive usage of technology over ar Amazon: they're scanning tons of books and letting you search them. Seems simple enough, but the implications are far-reaching, and how they're dealing with the copyright issue is creative. If it works half as well as Google Catalog Search does, I think they'll end up selling a lot more books because of this.

Wired News: The Great Library of Amazonia

Posted by Eric at 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are few people that have a deeper history with XML than Robin Cover. I remember the first time I heard the acronym "XML" was when I visited the Summer Institues of Linguistics with Marc Rettig back in 1997. We were researching content object models, and I met Robin briefly (not that he'd remember) and came away with the impression that XML was the future. Now that's the kind of guy you want to pay attention to!

Here Robin gives an overview of the content syndication format Atom. Personally, I don't really care if Atom takes off or if RSS 2.0 takes off or even if we have competing standards for a while ... the underlying content model is similar enough that transforming one into another (with sufficient namespace extensions possibly) should be feasible for a while. There's still some innovation to foster, I think, and it's only two schemas (famous last words, right?)

Cover Pages: Atom as the New XML-Based Web Publishing and Syndication Format.

Posted by Eric at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nice interview with Evan Williams of Blogger fame at news.com. I really respect how Evan has always stayed true to the vision of how Blogger should evolve, and I wish nothing but the best for him at Google.

Blog on |CNET.com

Posted by Eric at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An excellent article written by Wharton legal studies professor G. Richard Shell draws a comparison between the current RIAA debacle and a similar tactic that was tried 100 years ago against Henry Ford.

Winning business strategy? Not then, not now.

Suing Your Customers: A Winning Business Strategy?

Posted by Eric at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good story told by Diego Doval from Ireland. Nice to see that operators are universally clueless. It's the same thing here: the way the operators treat their existing customers is just horrible.

Really, the only thing keeping people from jumping from carrier to carrier here in the U.S. is the lack of number portability. Gee, you think that's why Alltel, AT&T Wireless, Cingular, Nextel, and Sprint have been fighting the Nov. 24 wireless number portability mandate? And why they want to charge customers $1.10 - $1.55 a month for this "privilege"?

Here's an idea, operators: why don't you put your customers first? Why don't you compete based upon your offerings and service instead of relying on manufactured switiching costs. In the Chicago area, U.S. Cellular has really marketed heavily over the past year or so, and their tagline is "Award-Winning Customer Service". And you know what? It's working. Even though they don't have the coolest phones, the forums are filled with fans.

How about creating some more incentives to stay with my carrier? A points program, maybe, or how about encouraging upgrades for those high-margin customers that pay their bills on time?

Diego is right: when everything goes IP, it's all gonna catch up with them. And it won't be pretty.

d2r: O2's and Vodafone's "idiot upgrade package"

Posted by Eric at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When you work with the same group of people for several years, there get to be defining moments in your communal online experience: the first time you all played Capture the Flag in Quake together, sharing Onion headlines, having your IM client make fart noises, and getting Costolo to not use Outlook and stop spreading email viruses.

One of those defining moments was when Matt found this "blew up my monitor" game review at the end of 2000. I submit it now for your amusement:

Freedom: First Resistance Review

Posted by Eric at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This posting from Davic Galbraith touches on another emerging trend in RSS ... moving beyond publishing just "text items". RSS 2.0 has support for namespaces, and RSS 1.0 has modules, but they're both trying to capture the same thing: the ability to extend RSS to capture data (and meta-data) about disparate types without breaking what's great about RSS to begin with: the standardization of the base syndication format. Yes, that was a sentence with two colons in it. Sorry about that.

Once a community can agree upon the accepted namespace extensions to represent the desired content, all sorts of great things can happen. In this case, the community has to include both the feed publishers and (at this point non-existent) extension-aware client. At this stage, I think the key is to not over-engineer things ... you don't have to have some dublin core-esque schema to realize value in constrained domains. Just be good about versioning your schemas!

David Galbraith

Posted by Eric at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Carl Hiaasen

Whenever I go on a warm weather vacation, I like to read someone like Carl Hiaasen, Jimmy Buffet, or Elmore Leonard. I started this book in Lake Las Vegas this past weekend.

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This was Mr. Hiaasen's first novel, and you can project the trajectory he takes with later books from this debut. Crazy characters with a plot that proceeds at breakneck speed in a uniquely Florida environment. I'll continue to read more Hiassen books in future tropical vacations.

Posted by Eric at 08:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Richard Harrison

I'm more of a Java guy, but I'm reading this to really figure out what the capabilities of the Symbian OS v7 are. C++ isn't all that bad, I just don't like the bookkeeping (Java spoiled me that way).

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This has dropped off the shelf for now. No opinion on the book so far.

Posted by Eric at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The first Legally Blonde movie was actually a pleasant surprise, with the smartness of the lead character being able to bleed through her ditzy exterior in a somewhat believable manner. That doesn't happen here. Reese Witherspoon cannot save this movie, although I imagine with a lesser actor this would have been unwatchable. I think I laughed twice. The only consolation was that I saw it on an airplane and didn't have any other choice.

Legally Blonde 2 (**)

Posted by Eric at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was flying back home today after a nice weekend vacation, staring at the GTE Airfone (or whatever it's called these days) in the seatback in front of me and thought (not for the first time) "what a waste". Talk about your captive audience. They really could use that LCD panel to provide valuable information. I know that some of them give news updates and update stock market information, but even that stuff is on a really tight loop.

Same thing with my wireless phone. I have a Samsung I-500 ... a pretty advanced phone, on the whole, that can poll my email every 10 minutes or so with the pretty speedy Sprint Vision service. So why can I have a cool RSS client or some kind of "Pointcast for the Phone" as my screensaver instead of (or in addition to) a clock? I think all the pieces are there.

This guy's thinking along the same lines I think.

The Changing Mobile User Experience

Posted by Eric at 08:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I saw this article today (link below) from the father of using Bayesian filters to combat spam, Paul Graham, which states that these filters are holding up really well, despite spammers trying their darndest to get around them with devious and clever tricks. I decided to start using a spam filter earlier this year. Specifically, the Bayesian filter-based SpamBayes that I invoke via procmail. I've been happy with my mostly spam-free lifestyle, so I thought I'd look at the numbers and see how successful my spam filtering has been.

So I looked at the filter log for the last month to see how much spam I'm not seeing. Here are the numbers:

• Number of spam emails that got filtered before I could see them: 2046
• Number of valid emails that made it to my inbox: 548
• Number of emails Spambayes was uncertain of that I had to classify (mostly as spam): 221

So I get roughly 4 spams for every valid email. About 10% of the spams are sneaking through into the "maybe" category, but they're not clogging up my inbox, and I hope that number will decrease over time as I continue to train it. On the whole, I'm extremely happy with the filtering. In the article, Paul even has a few more tricks up his sleeve to improve the results.

So Far, So Good

Posted by Eric at 07:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Interesting move by JBoss ... they're going to "hire" the lead developers from some other popular Java open source projects, including Tomcat, JGroups, and Hibernate.

"The move will allow JBoss to ensure that each open-source product works well with the JBoss software and expand the potential revenue the company generates from services", said Marc Fleury, the company's president and founder.

I think it's great that these developers that have done some much for the Java community will get some monetary recognition, but my spidey sense is tingling just a little bit in terms of the autonomy these projects will enjoy. I hope it works out for everyone!

JBoss expands open-source reach | CNET News.com

Posted by Eric at 06:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This article talks about one person's experience with Google's Adsense textads. Another thing to put on the "List of Things Google Does Right". I also like Matthew's advice for blog writers: keep it focussed and write your ass off.

The other cool thing about this article that now I've got another feed I'm interested that I can start tracking: PVRBlog.

Blogging for Dollars

Posted by Eric at 06:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

By Dave Pelz
Full Title: Dave Pelz's Short Game Bible: Master the Finesse Swing and Lower Your Score (Pelz, Dave. Dave Pelz Scoring Game Series, 1.)

I always try to have one golf book on the nightstand ... this is what's there now.

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Well, this book has got a lot going on. I'm not really going to have time to work on my game any more this year, so this is going on the shelf until Spring. But it seems like a fantastic book.

Posted by Eric at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Jennifer Vesperman

Like a lot of software development companies, we at Burning Door use CVS to handle our source code management. I've been tempted to move over to subversion, which promises to overcome a lot of CVS's annoyances, but I'm too leery of the pre-1.0 status and general tool support.

So, as it is, I'm reading this relatively new book to see if I can pick up any new hints. I like revisiting familiar territory after a while (like reading the manual to your mobile phone after you've used it for a couple of months ... you're guaranteed some surprises).

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Well, I finished reading it. It was okay ... really more of a reference, not much more that you find in the Cederqvist. I was hoping for more on suggested strategies to employ, especially with branching and tagging. I think I found more useful information with the free resource "Open Source Development with CVS". Ah well, at least I can treat this as a printed reference.

Posted by Eric at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jeremy Allaire proposed in his blog today an extension of RSS to accomodate more data-oriented applications that he's calling RSS-Data. It's great to see how thought-leaders like Jeremy and Dave Winer are approaching the evolution of RSS to be the standard "information interchange" vehicle.

My concern with this proposal probably has more to do with me not quite understanding the goal of incorporating the XML-RPC data serialization elements right into the steam. With RSS 2.0, we have the ability to include arbitrary descriptive elements without breaking any kind of compatability with parsers that are not aware of the particular domain. See the RSS 2.0 spec and this nice description by our good friend Morbus for a quick rundown of how RSS 2.0 namespaces work.

With XML-to-Object (de-)serialization libraries so common, it seems that Jeremy's assertion that we'd have to write a new RSS parser for each namespace doesn't seem any more arduous than having to map the data serialization elements to the correct object definitions.

But then again, maybe the whole point here is that there's no way to say that an element contains anything other than a String unless there's additional semantic meaning imposed on the element that is not captured in the document itself (like the date elements having to conform to the Date and Time Specification of RFC 822, or the ttl element having to represent an integer). If that's the case, I'm wondering why we can't associate an XML Schema with a particular namespace. Jeremy mentions XML Schema earlier in his post, so I'm sure he's thought of this! It seems like that would be a more powerful and elegant mechanism to represent these datatypes.

Well, whatever happens here, it can only mean good things for the evolving world of content syndication!

Jeremy Allaire's Radio

Posted by Eric at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)