Now This

I have a thousand links to link. Here are four, with a theme. (And a theme song: Peter Gabriel, "DIY")

A presentation from Maciej Ceglowski about his Pinboard experience: The Business of Bookmarking (warning: PDF).

The most popular business model has been to offer a free service and then shut down.

(Ha.)

...while the [Pinboard] business is healthy and profitable, no angel investor or venture capitalist would touch it with a long stick, as it sits on the wrong side of the risk/reward curve. The combination of low startup costs and investor aversion means there are all kinds of opportunities lying around for a developer to run a profitable small business, provided he or she remembers to charge money.

...An archive needs to have a credible plan for offering the same basic feature set over a time scale of decades. Any major redesign risks spooking users who will perceive it as a sign of instability. And the last thing people want to hear is that you're swinging for the fences - real archivists bunt.

A good role model here is craigslist, which has endured sustained derision for its 'ancient' UI for years from a succession of more modern websites, nearly all of which are now out of business.

Related: A fellow named Tom Armitage created a workflow which automatically turns his Pinboard stream into books, by year.

• A Year of Links [Infovore]

Comic writer/artist Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant) dispenses a bunch of good advice for aspiring comic writers/artists in: A lil' Q and A, part one [tumblr]

My first comics were awful. Everyone's are. Some people are awful for a long time then stick with it and get good. But you have to know you can.

(You can.)

... The real wonder of the New Yorker is that anyone can submit cartoons, so technically, anyone has a chance of getting in. Can you say that about many other 'prestigious' publications? Not really.

Last Thanksgiving I found this carving video more valuable than all carving instructions and videos before it: Wegmans Turkey Carving Time Savers.

• I was lucky enough to score a front-row-center ticket to The Bobs (@bobsbestofbreed) performing at Wolf Trap this past weekend.

   I didn't do anything special or illegal to get it -- I just checked the website when I was reminded of the concert by the Bobs' email newsletter, and lo and behold the seat I was presented with was the best seat in the house. I can only think someone who had the prime seats had to return them, or something strange like that. Thanks, unintentional anonymous benefactor!

• Having scored an amazing ticket, I of course somehow misplaced it. Luckily the Wolf Trap Box Office person I spoke to on concert day was very helpful and printed a fresh ticket for me to pick up once I provided a blood sample and a confirmation number.

• This was an unusual Bobs concert, in that it was a passing-the-torch moment: Amy Bob Engelhardt's last gig with the group and Angie Bob Doctor's second-ever Bobs concert.

• Angie Bob and Dan Bob Schumacher have a CD of duets out, He Said, She Said which is just the two of them singing fascinating, complex arrangements (by Richard Bob Greene) which fill in just enough notes to feel like a song is 'all there'. This is hard to do in the best of circumstances, and even harder to reproduce reliably in a live setting. But the two of them performed a few of their tracks as the 'opening act' for the Bobs, and it was impressive.

• Amy Bob was as good as ever in her farewell gig (i.e. very good). "Sandwich Man" was probably my favorite Amy song of the night.

• Matthew Bob Stull has been with the group for all of its 30 years. I had the opportunity to find him after the show and tell him what I have always appreciated about his performances, namely his complete, matter-of-fact commitment to whatever profoundly goofy shit is happening on stage. (He laughed.) Having done some goofy shit on stage myself, I know how hard that can be, but he succeeds at it all the time without going over the top. If I have a challenging task to do on a stage, I will actually sometimes consider: How would Matthew Bob do this?

• How was the new member? Angie Bob is clearly a very skilled singer, but in contrast to Matthew Bob's practiced ease with weird material, she seemed a bit tentative a good part of the time. This frankly isn't surprising: some of the material is truly, deeply odd, plus she's having to learn a deep catalog of songs for live performance and it's hard to ramp up quickly.

    In hindsight I'm really glad I saw her duets with Dan Bob first, because she really shone there. That tells me she's not wrong for the job, she probably just needs a bit more time to settle in.

• It's worth mentioning that each lady Bob who has been in the group has had a very different sensibility in terms of exactly what kind of odd songs they seem to enjoy singing, and often it's hard to imagine other lady Bobs really digging each others' stranger material. (Lori Bob Rivera's "Vapor Carioca" leaps to mind, and I'm not sure any other human can ever do justice to "Fluffy's Master Plan for World Domination" besides Amy Bob.)

  All that to say: I'm looking forward to hearing Angie Bob do her own weird tracks on the next album.

• Richard Bob's "Disappointment Pants" is one of my favorite tracks. They sing it noticeably faster live, which I think takes something away. Trivia: Last time I saw them (2008) they dedicated the song to Eliot Spitzer, which was perfect.

• Cream's "White Room" is still a kickass closer, with Dan Bob doing most of the kicking.

• Public service announcement: there are some still-fairly-new cover tunes available on bobs.com including Queen's "Bicycle Race" and "Synchronicity" by the Police. Worth a listen.

Born blog-ranter Steve Yegge, a Googler for the last 6 years, recently laid into his employer in a lengthy, fascinating post which was apparently not intended for public consumption. It's in the wild, though, so everyone can see it now.

• Stevey's Google Platforms Rant (first found via Flutterby)
• metafilter thread

Fascinating reading if you work on software. Quoth Medley after reading it, "Now I need a cigarette..."

Found this linked a few places today, and if you care about interfaces and communicating complexity (like I do), then it's a fascinating read.

• Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction by Bret Victor

The toy example itself isn't important at all, but the approach is.

In sad news, Dennis Ritchie, inventor of C, has died. His death coming close to Steve Jobs' means that some people are already straining to weigh the contributions of the two against each other, as though it is a contest.

Really people, they can both be titans in their own way. It's OK.

The plan to split Netflix into Netflix (streaming) and Qwikster (DVD) never made sense to me. Now Netflix is turning back the clock and keeping them together. The text string 'Qwikster' will be returning to deserved obscurity.

This at least shows that Netflix can understand whacks on the nose.

But what has struck me throughout this odd episode is their misunderstanding of what their own customers like about the service.

Making customers split their queue management into two separate websites which don't integrate with each other was a really really bad plan (with -- notice -- no actual reason given for it), and I can imagine lots of heated arguments in-house from the people who could tell it was a deeply stupid move. Tip for the head office: keep a list of those people and consult them the next time you get a really 'bright' idea.

The most foreboding aspect (for anyone wishing Netflix any success, that is) is the continued dimness and/or pridefulness of the executives. The juicy quotes in the New York Times report on the policy reversal do not inspire confidence:

"We underestimated the appeal of the single Web site and a single service," Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said in an interview, before quickly adding: "We greatly underestimated it."

Ok, so far so good. They have understood their basic error. But wait.. Reed Hastings doesn't agree with his own spokesman:

"there is a difference between moving quickly -- which Netflix has done very well for years -- and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case."

Replace 'moving too fast' with 'moving in the wrong direction' and you've sold me.

'Moving too fast' just tells me you really want to try this again in a year or two. And that means you do not understand your basic error.

We are still customers for now (and switching to streaming-only), but we'll be keeping an eye out for further drug trips and policy freakouts from the Netflix head office.

These are the sort of topics which catch my eye these days, and about which I'd like to learn & say more:

Complexity

• Where it comes from
• Tools to make it both more comprehensible and easier to manage

• How to communicate effectively with outside parties about how complex a thing actually is

  That's a compact way of saying: it really ticks me off when people who clearly understand many nuances and tradeoffs involved in some things (say, their job, or a sport or two) then consider everything they are not that familiar with to be very straightforward and obvious.

  This happens among otherwise-elite, brainy people too; this XKCD is a great example.

Uncertainty

• Humanity is constantly having to make big bets based on limited information.

  (I think this has always been true; while you could argue that people throughout history have been solving much simpler problems than we have today, they also lacked most of the modern tools we have to tell us about the world - accurate maps, for instance. We're always bumping against the limits of our understanding.)

• How we (as a society) handle decision-making under great uncertainty could be improved.
• How we (as a society) view past decisions made under great uncertainty could be improved.

Music - studying, performing, appreciating, describing

Software - design, construction practices

Apple stuff - Mac OS X, iOS devices (yes, still a big Apple fan)

Parenting - I have a 3-year old. 'Nuff said.

Business - Management; "Organizational Behavior"; Emergent properties of systems of people

Checklists (a la Atul Gawande) and any other ways to improve the performance of groups of people doing complex tasks.

Politics & Media - the various intractable problems we face and the channels through which we all learn about them.

There's plenty more, but those are the headline grabbers for me at the moment.

Declaration: I intend to get back to this (blogging, writing in public, producing visible output, etc.) in a fairly serious way, starting now.

Rationales:

• What good is it to learn a whole lot of things if you never share what you've learned with anyone? I haven't been idle for the last several years; I know about many more things now than I ever used to before. I've just been quieter.
• I'll never be 'ready' to come back in full force if I keep waiting for it. The only way to do it is to practice it and get better at it again. The only way to practice it is to get started even when I'm rusty. So, here I am.
• I've learned (from a lot of observation) that you shouldn't expect to think-think-think in isolation and then produce a finished perfect thing. The people I most enjoy reading are willing to think out loud and share unpolished ideas in order to gain the benefit of getting good input from other smart people about the same topics; it's a better outcome all around.
• "Real Artists Ship" - Steve Jobs

Proximate cause/kick in the pants which led to actually posting something:

• There have been lots of things which should have triggered posts. But yesterday's boot to the behind was the news that Steve Jobs died. If that won't get your ass in some kind of gear to try and make a bigger dent of your own in the universe, then not much will.

P.S. In case there is anyone reading this who doesn't know, I have at least been active on Twitter for the last few years.

Just making sure this still works. Blogging may ensue in the near future.

• Open source Chameleon project aims to ease porting iOS apps to Mac [Ars Technica]

  ...Iconfactory faced only being able to use 25 percent of its code from the iOS version on the Mac, but was able to turn that into 90 percent after porting the iOS UIKit into a new framework on the Mac. That new framework is Chameleon.

  Shew.

• D3.js

  D3.js is a small, free JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data.

  Nice example images.

A reminder, anyone who wants to is welcome to use one of these voting button images. It's easy, all you have to do is use one of these image tags in a post:

	Small: <img src="http://nowthis.com/misc/ivoted-stars72.gif" width="72" height="72" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" />
	Medium: <img src="http://nowthis.com/misc/ivoted-stars96.gif" width="96" height="96" hspace="4" vspace="4" border="0" />
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(Follow the link for more versions, including higher-resolution printable versions.)

I'm OK with other people loading the image directly from nowthis.com. I'm not a heavy-bandwidth user normally, so I don't expect it'll cause me any bandwidth charges.

I've been not-terribly-happy with the Movable Type experience for a long time now. On the other hand, here I am still using it after something like 9 years. Inertia overcomes ambivalence, up to a point.

Recently Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, announced that they're going to shift focus to become a 'modern media company', SAY Media. The Movable Type software itself is not going to be quite as important a focus for them as before. Ambivalence.. rising.

Dave Cross, Perl hacker, has since switched his blog from MT to WordPress. In his post discussing it, he put into words several points I've also been pondering:

WordPress [Perl Hacks]

[In 2002] Movable Type was the only real choice in this area and it had the bonus that it was written in Perl so I could hack on it if I wanted to. Of course I never got round to doing that.

... There just isn't the community of people producing themes and plugins for MT that is for, say, WordPress.

... Oh, and just to head off some obvious comments - yes, I'm using a blog engine that is built in PHP, not Perl. My operating system isn't written in Perl, nor is my web browser or, indeed, most of the software I use from day to day. It would be great if there was a powerful and popular blogging engine written in Perl. But there isn't, so I'm using this instead.

A commenter asks the next obvious question, "What about Melody, a community fork of Movable Type?"

Oh, I know all about Melody. I'm watching with interest and I'll try out their first release when it appears in the next month or so. But it's going to be some time until they have a community to rival WordPress's.

Related: The Future of Movable Type is Melody [OpenMelody.org]

...we are pleased to announce that we are in the final stages of our first official beta release of Melody 1.0, due out this November. Not only is this release one that fixes a multitude of bugs affecting Movable Type customers today, and not only is it a release that adds plenty of new features people will enjoy using, but it is also a release that looks to the future by folding into the core platform essential infrastructure to support the next generation of designers, developers and users of the platform. It is a release that signals a new era for the platform.

So, I haven't switched to WordPress yet, but I'm strongly considering it. Lyn has had some issues with installing WP upgrades from time to time, but we always get through it somehow.

At the same time, OpenMelody is intriguing and still in Perl.

On the third hand, there's Cross' "Of course I never got round to doing that." Is 'hacking on the blog engine' really ever going to make it onto my todo list? And even if so, I could just as well be hacking on WordPress.

Continuing to ponder.