Category Archives: Rants and Raves

We offer free next day shipping!

I just completed ordering a product from a website which claimed “free next day delivery!”. “Golly”, I think to myself. “It will be nice to have this gadget sooner rather than later.” I eagerly click, and imagine the box being here on Friday.

Just got the confirmation email. The item (mind you, not built to order or anything) is scheduled to ship on Feb 9, and should be delivered on Feb 10. Next Thursday. Sigh.

I imagine that I could use a similar tactic to write my own operating system in a single day. Expect delivery sometime in 2030.

Addendum: Allright, I’m too grumpy. Checking their status again reveals that they have shipped it today! Woohoo! Tomorrow!

Decoding Why Few Girls Choose Science, Math (washingtonpost.com)

Stories like this one have been making the rounds, probably in response to the unfortunate remarks which Harvard University President Lawrence Summers made last month that suggested that innate differences between men and women might be responsible for the differences that the two sexes demonstrate in math and sciences.

Unfortunately, in all of the these stories that I have read, they neglect one thing which seemed obvious to me:

Teachers and scientists say that there are greater differences in learning styles within each sex than there are between the sexes and that any school or teacher that doesn’t approach students as individuals is missing the mark.

The problem with bad schools (of which there are plenty) and bad educational practices (ditto) is that they try to take the shortcut and stereotype the failures and successes of individual students by some overly simplistic indicator. “Girls aren’t good at math because they are more social.” “Boys are less afraid of being wrong.” “Girls are collaborative.” “Boys are programmed for conflict.”

There are certainly lessons to be learned. Every teacher should examine his actions and try to decide whether his actions are somehow biased towards outcomes for any of his students. Every child should enjoy an atmosphere where they are welcome and encouraged. How much should we do? All that we can, and all that they need, for each individual student.

On Crime Dramas…

I watch a fair number of crime drama shows. Early on, I really liked CSI. It had some fairly interesting characters, and tried to present some interesting bits of forensics in a stylized dramatic way. But now that it has branched off into three different shows, it simply makes me wince.

The problem is a basic one of belivability. Yes, it’s just a TV show, I understand. But it has to be even roughly plausible or the sense of drama is destroyed. It is supposed to tease you with its plausibility, not surprise you with its absurdity.

For instance, in CSI they’ve taken to using various kinds of image manipulation to find out key bits of evidence. The simple fact is that the kind of image manipulation they do is impossible. You can’t pull an image of someone’s face reflecting in someone’s eye from a security camera image from a distance of thirty feet, or even five feet. It simply can’t be done. There is not 45% overscan in video images. And don’t get started with what they pretend to be able to do with encrypted files and the like.

It is with this feeling of trepidation that I watched the first episode of NUMB3RS. The basic idea is kind of interesting: a math prodigy teams with an FBI investigator to use mathematics to help solve crimes. Surprisingly, the pilot episode didn’t make me cringe excessively, but I can’t help but think that sooner or later they will be jumping the shark in every episode. It’s just too difficult to come up with real ideas that are remotely plausible. Soon, I suspect they will be resorting to simple magic to “poof”, solve crimes.

We shall see…

Podcasting Police Fail to Stem Tide of Satire…

With the combination of my iPod suffering a meltdown and the Christmas holiday, I must admit that I am way behind on my podcast listening. While trying to catch up, I ran across yet another bit of “controversy” involving the PodFathers, Dave Winer and Adam Curry.

Apparently in a recent episode, Adam excerpted some bits from Yeast Radio, starring Madge Weinstein. Adam also conducted an interview with Madge.

The only problem is: Madge is just an act.

Actually, that’s not the problem. The real problem is their reaction to this “revelation”. I say “revelation” in quotes because I want to know who can listen to this podcast and be left with anything other than the certainty that this is a satire?

Apparently not content with looking merely foolish, Dave and Adam went off on a full-on rant in their Trade Secrets podcast, claiming that Yeast Radio wasn’t “appropriate podcast material”, and dismissing it with a f*ck you.

If I was charitable, I’d say they are just being asses to drive more traffic to their podcasts and more attention to their efforts. It’s dishonest and childish to behave that way, but it is perhaps possible to understand why grown men might react so childishly to the revelation of their own guillibility. But they assure us that that is not the case: that they are instead trying to enforce some kind of podcast ethic involving disclosure.

But if we assume that they are telling the truth as to their motives, they are guilty of a greater bit of stupidity: trying to act as the thought police for the podcasting world.

If we are charitable (and I’m less inclined to be so as time goes on and incidents like this mount), Dave and Adam together invented podcasting. But like all creative endeavors, just because you invented something doesn’t give you any special moral authority over it. You don’t get to be the king makers: listeners will do that. If someone wants to create a satirical radio show, I don’t think they should be forced to include some disclaimer to it to make it obvious to the slow witted that it is satire. If someone wants to create an entirely fictional podcast, describing their entirely fictional life, I don’t think they should have to get special exemptions. If someone later feels betrayed that the individual they thought exists is actually just a character, well, then golly, they can stop listening.

I’d stopped paying any attention to Dave Winer’s Scripting News when he decided to whimper and cry about the injustice of people not kissing his ass on New Years Eve, and Adam is following closely behind. It’s too bad, really. When their podcasts really were about doing something cool instead of providing a promotion machine for two individuals, it was a heck of a lot more interesting. Now we see just how bitter, angry, childish and downright foolish a nominally intelligent person can be.

You guys had a good idea, but it’s grown beyond the limitations of your vision. We don’t need your hardware, software, company, ideas or blessing to take it from here. My own sense of self worth is not tied to how many people download my podcast, or how many people consider me a pioneer, or how many BBC articles get written about me or how many times I appear on the Gillmor Gang. Most importantly, I don’t need your applause or your permission to do whatever the hell I want to.

Grow up. You are making the rest of us podcasters look bad.

Addendum: The Register had a nice article about the incident.

Russell reacts to Referer Spam…

Russell Beattie Notebook – Home

What I really want to do though is to be able to mark a URL as referrer spam, then the next time someone hits my machine with that URL as a referrer, a lethal electric shock is sent back through the internet into their computer, killing them and all of their referrer spamming family. (I’m thinking it’s a genetic trait to be such an asshole, might as well wipe them all off the planet in one shot). What do you think? Too severe? How about just torture instead?

One metachlorian short of a Jedi…

One last, long campout for ‘the Star Wars guy’

Jeff Tweiten lives on a periwinkle blue, fold-out futon on the sidewalk in front of the Cinerama Theatre.

He is not homeless, but camping out for 139 days. Waiting.

For Godot, you wonder? An organ transplant? The end of the world?

Jeff Tweiten is already waiting in line outside the Cinerama in downtown Seattle for the next “Star Wars” film.

Tweiten is waiting for “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith,” which opens May 19.

One correction: if you are camping out for 139 days waiting for the next Star Wars movie, you are unemployed, not a graphic artist.

Just how do you get to become a pundit, anyway?

It’s obviously not by having anything insightful to say.

Robert Scoble has quite possibly the most “I just don’t get it” response to Jobs’ MacWorld keynote so far.

Let’s work this slowly so that even he can understand:

  • The Mac mini is the cheapest Macintosh ever released. It costs about the same as an iPod Photo. Even without keyboard/monitor/mouse, it’s an inexpensive machine.
  • It’s not the cheapest machine you can buy, just like the iPod isn’t the cheapest music player you can buy, or iTunes isn’t the cheapest music store you can use. Still, Apple managed to sell 4.5 million iPods in the last quarter, so perhaps more than just raw price enters into people’s buying decisions.
  • The Mac mini is sexy. Very sexy. It’s tiny. It’s quiet. And it does lots of stuff because it comes with iLife, it does lots of stuff that people would like to do with their computer.
  • Most people really don’t need a Windows PC. They have a Playstation 2/Xbox/Gamecube for games, and the Mac mini can do 95% of everything else. Running Virtual PC? Is there ever any reason to? Presumably if you want to do that, it’s because you already had a PC in the past. Chances are, you still have that PC (unless of course it has been rendered inoperable by the virus du jour).

I’ve had one Mac in my house in the past decade, and it is powered off at the moment, but I think what Apple has done is really amazing. Not perfect. Not without flaws, but amazing. They are making cool products that people want to buy, and I bet they are gonna sell a ton of ’em. To say “it’s not as cheap as it seems” seems like the wimpiest complaint imagineable, especially for a company which still charges $180 for their baseline operating system.

What is your alternative?

Over at evilgeniuschronicles, Dave Slusher has dug out yet another Internet pundit who proclaims that the idea of allowing every individual to have their own radio show is somehow a bad thing. I promised that I wouldn’t rant, and it may seem like I’m piling on, but here’s my take.

  1. If you don’t want to listen, don’t. Podcasting isn’t like billboard advertising, or even television or radio. You have to specifically request any content you are interested in. Any perceived problem with listening is solved quite simply: don’t bother listening.
  2. Is this argument really saying that some people should not be allowed to express their opinions merely because someone finds them banal? Is the argument really that the world is a better place when there is less communication, rather than more?
  3. Podcasting allows audio publishing at very low cost. There are lots of reasons that someone might wish to do that, and many of them are great for society, not to mention the individuals who participate. If you are a musician, or in theater, or a performer, podcasting gives you the same ability to reach individuals with your talent that writers and programmers have had. That’s awesome. Revolutionary even.

I don’t care all that much about the business opportunities that podcasting represents. I’m more interested in the real opportunities that podcasting has to create a whole new class of human interaction. That’s good. That is very good.

Digital Libraries Considered Bad

Sometimes, you just have to shake your head at the stupidity of people. Today’s installment comes from the editorial pages of the New York Times, where we find the following (registration required):

To the Editor:

Re “Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database” (front page, Dec. 14):

While having online access to some great libraries promises to facilitate research in democratizing access to books, it is worth keeping some things in mind.

A digital version of a book – especially a rare one, printed centuries ago – is not a replacement for the hard copy.

Not only has printed paper proved a durable technology, but there is also much to be gained by visiting the libraries, examining the actual books and entering into discussions with librarians and other researchers.

Gaining access to a digital reproduction of an older text makes it easier to take a first step, but little good research will be done simply sitting alone in front of a computer screen.

Lisa Shapiro
Vancouver, British Columbia
Dec. 14, 2004
The writer is an assistant professor of philosophy at Simon Fraser University.

It’s hard to imagine a more stupid response to the news that Google will open up access to potentially millions of books via the Internet. Honestly Professor Shapiro, just what are you thinking?

It is clear (and obvious) that digital copies are not the same as having the real book. But consider this: I have never seen a real Gutenberg Bible. But I know what one looks like. I haven’t seen copies of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelescium, or Galileo’s Siderius Noncius, but I can buy them. Are you saying that my ability to do research is somehow inhibited by the relatively easy ability of inexpensive digital copies of these works?

And for pity sakes, when you say that you are deprived of conversations with librarians and researchers, just what do you think the Internet is for? That screen in front of you? It allows you to communicate with millions and soon to be billions of other people.

And those librarians and researchers? They publish books too. Books that will be made available through digitization efforts like the one Google proposed. I don’t need to be in the same room to them to be influenced by their ideas.

Consider going over to Project Gutenberg’s CD Project website. You can download 600 eBooks onto a CD. You can download 9400 books onto a DVD. If Professor Shapiro thinks that nothing will come of making these works available at literally no cost to anyone within range of the Internet, I can’t help but shake my head at the ivory tower that these academics live in.

Scripting News, Trade Secrets and Ego

My rant begins with Dave Winer’s post on Scripting News, from which I quote:

Here’s the Trade Secrets podcast I promised yesterday where we explain where Adam and I see podcasting going. Since it’s a travel day (flying to Boston for the I&S conference) there won’t be much to read here, so I’m asking for forty minutes of your time today to listen to this cast. I don’t think you’ll regret it. We’re at a moment when this new activity is starting to make sense in a broader way, and the next set of problems are evident. The problems are industry-size, that is, it will take an industry to solve them. Hope you enjoy the story!

While I didn’t actually hear alarm bells, I did feel the hair on the back of my neck prick up. I don’t listen to Trade Secrets much anymore, but Dave said it was important, and that I wouldn’t regret listening to it.

Well, I do regret it. I’ll summarize what took Dave and Adam forty minutes to meander around:

  • Dave is still upset that Adam gets credit for inventing podcasting. Not with Adam, but with the world.
  • Dave and Adam are working on a business based upon podcasting. No real details were announced.
  • The people who are working on iPodder scripts? They aren’t listening to Dave and Adam enough, and they should because they are the number one podcast.
  • Dave and Adam need to make money off of podcasting so they can go on and do the next big thing.

I suspect I might be in the vast minority, or perhaps even alone in this, but did anyone find anything of interest in this podcast? I’m sure it is all of intense interest to Dave and to Adam, but why should we care about what they are doing? When Dave says “listen, you won’t regret it”, I feel that you have to deliver some reason for us to care. I don’t think they gave us any reason whatsoever to care about what they are doing.

We know, you invented podcasting, but the cat is out of the bag and kitty doesn’t want to go back in. While you guys might hold the number one slot now, here’s an update: it won’t last. Just as nobody goes back and watches Edison’s early motion pictures (okay, I do, but very few do) being first doesn’t give you any real guarantee of immortality. As a consumer, I’ve moved beyond your podcasts, because you continue to talk as if the medium was important and your role in developing the medium is somehow important. You can go on and get interviewed by the BBC and CNN, you can be approached by radio and television executives, but none of that matters in the slightest to me. That world has nothing to do with what I do, and has nothing to do with what interests me.

I’m just a hobbyist. I do my podcast because it is fun for me to. The topics I choose are designed to appeal to me, and to the extent that my interests are eclectic, my popularity will always be limited. I am not going to hire production staff or run gigabit networking to my house. I’m not going to play RIAA music, or interview movie stars or music celebrities. Why? Because we already have big media to do that. Duplicating existing big media on handheld devices isn’t innovative or interesting, just as having traditional journalists publish blogs isn’t interesting. What is interesting in my mind is the ability of everyone to participate in the exchange of rich media to communicate with each other. And we can do that now.

Podcasting appeals to me because nearly anyone can do it. On any budget. For any reason. To communicate with family. Or their community. Or their church. Or people with similar interests. Or people who don’t know what their interests are. Or people who just need something different to listen to. There aren’t any real obstacles to doing it, at least to anyone who wants to actually do something. We certainly don’t need an industry to make that happen: it’s happening already.

Useless debugger

I was trying to figure out why my Cinnamon Bear Podcast was not showing up on audio.weblogs.com after pinging. I checked it with the feed validator and it came back clean. I remember that Dave Winer had mentioned that he made a Feed Debugger, so I thought I’d give it a try. It returned the following useless message:

# Error: There was an error reading the file at url: https://brainwagon.org/cinnamon/rss.xml

For more information, see this post on the ipodder.org weblog.

I’m not sure what qualifies as a debugger in Dave’s world, but the fact that the feed didn’t show up on audio.weblogs.com was a sign that something wasn’t right, I didn’t need his fancy “debugger” to merely repeat this fact without adding any additional information.

Useless.

Dvorak is not just irrelevent, he’s a jerk…

It could be possible that someone might disagree with what many others view as the promise of podcasting, or might not possess the foresight to see its possibilities. That in itself is no great crime. Honest disagreements occur even between the informed, and far too few people make the work to even be informed.

It was with this basic philosophy in mind that I first read Dvorak’s claim that podcasting was not really ready for prime time. It was sloppy and uninformed, and propagated several myths which are obviously untrue, and even much of what it did tell you was irrelevent. I began doing podcasts in early September, and I was an early adopter. It’s now the end of October. What does this mean? That the entire buzz around podcasting is only eight weeks old. Dvorak’s criticism seems to me like standing on the keel of a cruise liner as it is being contructed and then complaining that they don’t serve very good Mai Tais.

But I’m able to brush off criticisms from the ill-informed quite easily, although others got a bit hot under the collar about it.

But in his own personal blog, Dvorak continued his offensive:

I wrote a column questioning the overall concept of podcasting for PCMagazine and more than a few bloggers blasted me for not being an immediate booster. So troublemaker Chris Coulter sent me this link to a classic and typical podcast that I have trouble believing is serious. It mostly resembles a guy talking to his dog for hours on end. I still think it’s a put-on. Although there are plenty of techies out there who ramble like this. I always imagine these guys on dates going on and on with their date and and eventually out-talking her. There is some justice in that.

At least, unlike other podcasters, he’s not over-modulated and is very understandable although very adenoidal.

Not content with merely slamming the entire concept of podcasting, he is now taken to actual personal insults of an individual who takes time and energy to develop a podcast solely for the benefit of his listeners. John, here you stray over the line of being merely ignorant and lacking in any kind of vision to actually just being a jerk.

I listen to Geek News Central all the time. Combined with The Linux Link Tech Show, these stand as two examples of programs for geeks and as such they are incredibly successful. If you compare the listening experience I have in listening to an hour of this programming combined to traditional radio programming there is simply no contest: I’d much rather be listening to the podcasts.

Todd, if you read this, take heart. Your listeners can see through the transparent idiocy of Dvorak and his mean-spirited barbs and see them for what they are: the increasingly irrelevent ramblings of someone who has lost any vision. Keep up the good work Todd.

Addendum: According to pubsub.com, Dvorak’s website is ranked 6,054, while Todd’s is ranked 4,616. Obviously he is just trying to ride your coat tails to popularity. 🙂

The first rule of podcasting…

I just finished listening to the latest of Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles (love the show Dave!) and thought I’d merely give my comments about a topic that he brought up: the common criticism that the only thing podcasting is talking about is podcasting itself, existing only for the self-gratification and aggrandization of people who make podcasts.

To anyone who would like to lodge this particular criticism, I would merely respond with two questions:

  1. If you are upset with the content of someone’s podcast, why are you bothering to listen to them?
  2. If you think that you know better about what the format and content of a podcast, why aren’t you bothering to create one for the enjoyment of those who are forced to listen to the rest of us?

Podcasting, as exciting as it is to some of us, is essentially still an experiment. There are lots of things that need to be done to streamline the creation, distribution and consumption of podcast feeds. People have good ideas, and are using the bootstrapped version of this medium to distribute these ideas so that the evolution of this idea can proceed rapidly. If you’d like to criticize, perhaps you should do so by example: by writing the software and creating the podcasts that shame the rest of us into doing better, or shine light on areas of darkness that we have not yet explored.

Dave seemed to be a bit angry, I’m just amused. People sometimes ask me why I build telescopes when I could just go buy one. If someone asks you that question, there is likely to be no answer that you can give them. Similarly, if someone thinks that podcasting sucks, well, then tell them to feel free to ignore it. Time will unfold and show us one of two outcomes:

  1. Podcasting emerges as an innovative, important new style of media, and they finally catch the trailing edge of its importance, or
  2. We are all deluded, and it’s just a flash in the pan phenomenon of no significance.

I can take being wrong a whole lot easier than I can take the knowledge that I had the opportunity to participate in some small way to the propagation of a cool new idea and I let it slip by because some people thought it was dumb.