about time for the new york times to open up. welcome to the web. now i can go back to reading some of the stuff i cared about before this dumb times select experiment.
Web/Tech
7
Jun 07
3 random, unrelated things
3 random thoughts for the morning:
1) i’ve been cool towards getting a first generation iPhone, not wanting my pants to catch on fire. that’s not fair, of course, as not every Rev A piece of Apple hardware catches on fire — it’s more like a 50% hit rate. but these commercials that i’m seeing every night on whatever it is that i’m watching — ESPN? FX? Comedy Central? I don’t know exactly, but i’m suspecting that maybe i’m precisely their target demographic. anyway, these commercials are fantastic. they show off user experience, they highlight UI innovation, and they really clearly, provocatively, show off the things that this phone can do. they’re amazing. i don’t care at all about the music & movies bit, but it’s still really compelling. anyway, i don’t know. i know i’m not willing to stand in line now, so that means an early one is out of the question, but maybe in the fall. we’ll see.
2) at starbucks this morning, probably half the people there were monkeying around with their blackberries/treos/windows mobile thingys. it felt to me like the weight had started to shift away from everyone bringing their laptops in towards working on mobile. it’s a bad sample set for a couple of reasons (1: it’s practically in the middle of the Googleplex, so nerd-friendly territory, and 2: morning time is “waiting for your meeting to show up by reading mail on your phone” time, at least for me & people like me), but still, feels like something is happening in the US now, in spite of our stupid, closed carrier system.
3) i have noticed that i really, really like it when other people are using wordpress for their blogs, because for every post, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of the comment stream. so if something interesting happens in a post, i can use what’s essentially a time-expiring single use feed to track the (often more interesting) comment threads. that’s a great use for feeds — throwaway sources of time-relevant information. they’re not like the other feeds that i track, but still really useful to throw into newsfire.
12
May 07
Letter Perfect, by David Sacks
I’ve had this book around for 2 or 3 years — I kept reading a chapter or two, then putting it down. I finally got through it the past few weeks — it’s an interesting book. It’s all about our alphabet, and how it came to be the way it is, in terms of which letters are in our alphabet, how they look, and how they sound. After the introduction, there’s a chapter for each letter — some are better than others, for sure. My favorite is on the letter “E” (always the glory hog, at least in English — see, there E goes again, starting that word) — and how it’s derived from a semitic character that is itself derived from an earlier character that was effectively “hey!” — both in meaning & pronunciation — and that the capital E letter shape itself is really from a person with both arms up yelling (rotate it counter-clockwise 90 degrees — teh end bars are the person’s arms, the middle is the head). Funny.
Anyway, fun book for letter & type nerds.
1
May 07
microsoft & silverlight
I’ve been thinking for a while about Silverlight, the new tools+browser plugin+platform stuff from Microsoft. it’s very clearly designed to attack Adobe Flash as the rich media platform on the web (and the desktop). I can’t help but think, though, that they’re fighting the wrong war here.
Flash is very strong; there’s no doubt of that — it’s on something like 95% of the Internet-connected computers in the world — and the success of YouTube & other video sites has really cemented its place on the Web. But it’s not open or standard — it’s owned by one company here on the left coast of the US — not such a different situation than Java was in a decade or so ago. And we all know how how that story played out (when’s the last time you ran a Java applet? Don’t know? Right.)
And so Microsoft looks around at what they’ve got, and their Studio.Net tools are one of their absolute strongest franchises. Combine that with the new religion that they’ve got about services (instead of software), and they start to think they need to build yet another proprietary platform to compete head on with Flash, but leveraging their tool set. They know ubiquity is important, so in their version of “ubiquity” they build for PC & Mac, for IE, Firefox & Safari. Which looks a lot like ubiquitous, but it actually isn’t, and that’s telling.
But here’s the mistake I think they’re making: they’re gunning at Flash alone, with their own proprietary, closed stack — Mix07 hype notwithstanding, they’re not going to get any real help from anyone outside of Redmond.
And so if they really believe that Flash is the #1 threat to them on the web (I mean, aside from those cute & cuddly googlers in Mountain View), and if they really believe that services are the bulk of their future business, then they should line up with the open web. Build tools that emit not some weird stuff for yet another balkanized browser plugin. (Ever tried Windows Media Player on a Mac?) But instead use their huge tools franchise to create apps for the Web, using standards like SVG & Canvas & DHTML & Javascript.
Then, suddenly, they’re on the side of the web, on the side of a billion Internet users, on the side of everybody who’s not Adobe. But I think they can’t see it because of their history, even with a new guy at the helm.
So now it’s Adobe v Microsoft v the Web. I don’t see how they can really win this one.
[As an aside, I think a ton of stuff that Adobe has done lately shows that they're thinking much further down this path than Microsoft is, and my hat's off to them for that.]
30
Apr 07
Letter Perfect, by David Sacks
I’ve had this book around for 2 or 3 years — I kept reading a chapter or two, then putting it down. I finally got through it the past few weeks — it’s an interesting book. It’s all about our alphabet, and how it came to be the way it is, in terms of which letters are in our alphabet, how they look, and how they sound. After the introduction, there’s a chapter for each letter — some are better than others, for sure. My favorite is on the letter “E” (always the glory hog, at least in English — see, there E goes again, starting that word) — and how it’s derived from a semitic character that is itself derived from an earlier character that was effectively “hey!” — both in meaning & pronunciation — and that the capital E letter shape itself is really from a person with both arms up yelling (rotate it counter-clockwise 90 degrees — teh end bars are the person’s arms, the middle is the head). Funny.
Anyway, fun book for letter & type nerds.
The Sword of Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks
Mar 18, 21:56 › av videolari: i m trying this is very nice Mar 12, 12:19 › 淘宝点评网: The Sword of Shannara Trilogy Mar 11, 4:03 › Al Jigen Billings: Ever since Card went off the deep end in regards to Mar 10, 17:04 › Traci: Enders game is required reading now in my kids high