Not sure what's going on, if this is for everyone, or just a few, or just me.

The last update in my timeline is 8 hours old.

But some people are getting updates, because I've gotten replies to some of my messages.

No mention of the problem on status.twitter.com.

Update at noon: They have something about it at the status site.

1:PM: My timeline is back.

Steven Levy (via Jason Kottke):

The data people generate when they search—what results they click on, what words they replace in the query when they’re unsatisfied, how their queries match with their physical locations—turns out to be an invaluable resource in discovering new signals and improving the relevance of results.

Like 23K others, I'm watching a live stream of a Honolulu television station previewing the tsunami that's likely to hit Hawaii in the next couple of hours.

I wondered on Twitter if any of the news orgs are launching helicopters to provide a view of the surge making landfall.

Brian Stelter of the NY Times notes: "we're about to watch a tsunami reach shore live on TV via Hawaii's local stations. Has that ever happened before?"

Tommy Russo is going to stream the tsunami landfall from Paukukalo on Qik.

I started a photo feed that tracks "tsunami" -- there are already 3 pics in the feed.

If you have any info on media coverage of the landfall please post a comment here.

Obviously safety comes first. But it also seems like an opportunity to make some media history.

Brent Simmons:

But, still, in the end, the new version of the system was less code than the Core Data version. That will not be the case for most apps. I took it as further indication that this was the right move for this particular app.

I’ve run into these issues as well. I don’t think they’re that uncommon, unfortunately. One thing that Simmons didn’t mention is that all of these examples could be handled well in a future version of Core Data. That is, they’re not fundamentally incompatible with its design. (In fact, I think his #4 was addressed in Mac OS X 10.5, and 10.6 added some more database-type features.) Of course, this doesn’t help him now, but if you can possibly live with Core Data you probably shouldn’t bet against it. It will get better with time.

Update: Jonathan Rentzsch explains how this worked with Enterprise Objects Framework and how it might work with a future Core Data.

(This is a follow-up to the previous post.)

I like Wolf’s NSManagedObjectOperation idea.

I’m checking out Aaron Hillegass’s BNRPersistence. I ran across Tokyo Cabinet a couple months ago when building mutt, and it sounded pretty cool, though I didn’t try it any projects.

Justin asked me if it was worth doing this optimization for the extreme case — 10,000 unread items on a first-generation iPod Touch. It’s not always worth optimizing for extreme cases, not at the expense of other things. But there are several reasons why it was right this time:

• High unread-items-count isn’t the only cause of performance degradation.

• Lots of people still have original iPhones and iPods Touch.

• The performance difference is significant even in a more typical case, say 1,000 unread on an iPhone 3GS.

• The performance difference allows me to do other things that people are asking for.

Update 5:45 pm: I just looked, and the Tokyo Cabinet license is LGPL. Even with the leading L that means I can’t use it, because I don’t want to be a legal test case. (If it came pre-installed on Macs and iPhones, I would feel okay about using it.)

A lot of the work I’ve been doing the last several months is optimizing performance for NetNewsWire for iPhone. The changes haven’t shipped yet, because I’m not quite finished. But one part of this might be interesting to other developers, so I figured I’d write it up.

I optimized as much as I could, spent tons of time in Shark, went all multi-threaded with Core Data, switched away from my own queuing system to NSOperationQueue, optimized the XML parsing, etc. But performance and memory use on my first-generation iPod Touch (my development test device) was still not nearly good enough with a big unread count (of around 10,000 items).

At that point, having done everything else, the remaining issue was clearly Core Data. So I tried more things, re-read everything I could about Core Data performance (for the nth time), ran experiments, spent tons more time in Shark. Trying to get it good. No go.

Finally I realized I had to switch away from Core Data and use SQLite more directly. Not completely directly — I use FMDB, a lightweight Objective-C interface that works on Macs and iPhones. Gus wrote it. It’s good.

That meant a bunch more work — it’s not like Core Data and FMDB are similar or meant to be similar. So it was no drop-in replacement. Not intended to be.

But why?

I bet Core Data is the right way to go 95% of the time. Or more. It’s easy to work with. It’s fast (in most cases). It has schema upgrade tools.

The important thing to know, though, is that it’s not a database. It’s an object graph and persistence manager. (Check out the post on Cocoa with Love that goes into detail.)

But surely you’re using objects

The difference between Core Data and a database was never that clear to me — until I found concrete examples.

After all, under the hood, in the code, every news item in a feed is an object. Why wouldn’t I use an object persistence framework for that? They’re objects, and I want to persist them. Duh. Seems like I should use Core Data.

So here are some concrete examples where direct database access made more sense than using Core Data.

1. Marking lots of news items as read or unread

The app gets from the Google Reader API a big list of item IDs that have been marked read or unread.

In Core Data, I had to loop through the list, change the status for each individual item. The list could be up to 10,000 items long. Not a good idea.

This is a very database-y operation. With one query the app can set the status for a whole bunch of items at once, without having to instantiate them as objects: update newsItems set read = 1 where...

2. Deleting lots of items

Similar to #1 above — from time to time the app deletes old, read, non-starred items from storage. We can’t just let storage grow forever, especially not on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

With Core Data, I ran a query to figure out what items to delete. Then ran a loop that deleted them. Expensive.

With SQLite access, I just did a sinqle query: delete from newsItems where...

3. Dealing with unique IDs from outside system

Core Data does uniquing, but that’s not what this is. The news items have an assigned unique ID that comes from another database.

When refreshing feeds, it’s common to see news items that the app has seen before. They might have been downloaded previously or they might have changed. (We try to avoid the former, of course.)

This means that for each item in a feed, before it’s saved, the app first has to get the existing news item. This is slow. (I tried various techniques: pre-fetching, fetching as needed, fetching only IDs of existing items for a feed, storing existing IDs in a set or dictionary, etc. Nothing helped much. Usually the solution was worse than the original problem.)

Because many thousands of items may come in during a refresh session, and every item has to be checked to see if it exists already, this was a huge performance hit. Better not to do the fetch, right?

With more-direct access, I could just do a insert or replace into newsItems... and it would add the item or replace the existing item. Fast.

4. Testing for the existence of an item

Sometimes the app just needs to know if something exists in the database. With Core Data, it’s a fetch.

With SQLite, here’s one of my favorite tricks: select 1 from someTable where uniqueID = whatever.

In theory it should hit the index only, since it doesn’t actually retrieve anything from the table itself. It’s fast, at any rate.

My favorite magic

Once I had the above (and everything else) working, there was still more optimization to do.

I had created a set of indexes that I thought would do the trick — but there’s nothing like actually seeing what will happen when a query runs. With direct access, with control over the indexes, I could test and iterate until I got the right set of indexes.

The magic is SQLite’s explain query plan command. It tells you what indexes will be used.

In the end

I didn’t entirely switch away from Core Data. Feeds and folders are still Core Data objects. Since there was no performance gain to be had by switching those over, I left them as-is.

It’s just news items that got switched — but that’s almost all the data.

Making the switch did mean I had to do some things manually that Core Data would have done for me: keeping any in-memory items synced with the database storage, mostly.

But, still, in the end, the new version of the system was less code than the Core Data version. That will not be the case for most apps. I took it as further indication that this was the right move for this particular app.

Warning

This isn’t about being a hardcore low-level developer or some crap like that. I like Core Data a ton. (I recommend Marcus Zarra’s book, by the way, which I read twice.) If I could have stuck with Core Data for everything, I would have. (Rule: always work at the highest level possible.)

But how do you know when you might be better off with FMDB or other more-direct SQLite access? I think it goes like this, at least based on my experience:

1. Is performance good? Then stick with Core Data. (That should cover 95% or more of data-driven apps right there.)

2. Is Core Data really the cause of your performance problems? Can you optimize other things? Can you optimize your use of Core Data? Will going multi-threaded do the trick? Try. If you can get performance good, then stick with Core Data.

3. Are your remaining performance problems really database-y things? In other words, are you doing things like setting one or a few properties across a big range of items; deleting lots of items based on a condition; or having to handle unique IDs from another database, and so you’re constantly doing fetches? In other words, can you benefit by not treating your data as objects sometimes? If switching to direct database access won’t help, then stick with Core Data.

My warning: you probably don’t need to switch away from Core Data. It’s the right answer almost every time.

(By the way, were this a Mac app only, Core Data would probably have been fine. But it runs on iPhones too, and that’s where performance optimization becomes so much more critical.)

Anyway: Core Data is the right answer, except when it’s not, and hopefully I’ve made it a little easier to figure out when it’s not the right answer.

Marco Arment:

I learned that I much preferred pagination to scrolling—even tilt scrolling—and that pagination is part of what makes the Kindle reading experience so great. So I spent a long time experimenting with different methods to bring pagination to the iPhone, and I finally found a solution that, while simplistic, allows any mix of pagination and scrolling in the dynamic Web content that Instapaper is ideal for reading. I now prefer pagination to tilt scrolling. You can toggle between them with the Pagination switch in the Settings screen.

Also, an in-app browser replaces the graphical mode.

As you may know I'm a big fan of Battlestar Galactica, as I'm sure many of you are. I was satisfied with the ending of the series, but of course disappointed that I had to give up the habit. There really hasn't been anything to fill the void.

Now I'm starting to watch the spinoff series, Caprica, which is a prequel to BSG. In it, the lead character Bill Adama is a little boy. There are lots of interesting characters, and they show you how Cylons got started, we're even there for the moment when the term was coined. Very nice touch.

But there's something very clever in the series that just hit me, when I was thinking about something we could do with EC2. And it's also like the little podcasting experiment we did in May 2005, with two songs -- Dixie and Green Acres. Let me explain.

It started with a website for kids that has beautiful MIDIs of famous songs for kids to sing along with. I'm kind of a big kid, so I played Dixie during one of my podcasts from the beach in Florida, and sang the words over the melody. Then Rogers Cadenhead had a great idea -- he joined me in a chorus. Then Kosso joined in. Amy Bellinger and on and on. Most of the intermediate versions are gone, but Rex Hammock's survives. It's really something.

Then I found a version of the Green Acres theme song. I played it on my stereo and sang the male part. Then I uploaded it. (I said in the blog post, "don't worry you'll know what to do.") Amy Bellinger played my version, and recorded the female part. It's all very low-tech, but it's kind of wonderful.

Now to Caprica. Like a lot of science fiction serials Caprica has virtual worlds. You put on some fancy glasses and visit an alternate reality where people do things they can't do in the physical world. But there's a twist. One of the characters figures out how to pack up a whole virtual reality and make it a product. Hard to explain, I guess you have to watch the show. (I don't want to explain too much, no spoilers.)

But then I thought about EC2 and the nice things you can do with operating systems.

They give everyone the power to create their own version of Windows and share it with others. Granted, that's not the kind of thing too many non-techies, or even techies, wake up in the morning with an overwhelming desire to do. But why not? I'm still getting used to the idea of creating my own versions of Windows, haven't even released anything yet. But since everything I'm building is open source, there's no reason someone couldn't take my package, make some changes, and then redistribute it with their customizations. Trust obviously becomes a pretty important issue here.

The moral of the story of the Facebook patent and all the recent news from Apple and Google: Tech companies are no better or worse than big companies in other industries.

They are all about keeping the stock price high, growing at the expense of their competitors, and the role of users is the same as customers in other industries, you're a source of revenue.

Something wonderful happened when the Internet broke through a similar logjam in the early 90s. But that's now a distant memory. A new generation has come of age. The students I work with at NYU were small children when the Web grew out of the ruins of the PC business. They don't have any memory of what it was like before.

Further, the tech companies of today are much larger and more influential than the leading tech companies of the early 90s. Today the music industry's content flows through Apple's servers. Apple is poised to play a large role in the distribution of all other forms of media. Google is huge, as is Amazon and Facebook. And the people running these companies are far more experienced and/or competent than those who were running the industry the last time there was a user takeover.

My thinking has changed recently, as Google's moves with Buzz have surfaced, and Apple's moves to control sexual imagery in the the app store, as they embark on an ugly and dishonest campaign against Flash. Patents are nothing new. Last year, Google patented some very basic technology we created in the first wave of RSS apps. Another company was granted a patent on podcasting. It goes on all the time. What is different is that tech companies are taking a more active interest in the content that flows over their networks, and are doing less to protect their users. Sometimes they're the ones attacking users. Just like other industries.

Think about how you're treated by airlines. By insurance companies. If you have to go to a hospital. That's the kind of relationship you have with Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc. Sooner or later there will be a massive oil spill or a massive network-wide security breach. Expect these companies to be every bit as bad as the ones in other industries. Probably worse because they've come so far without much oversight or scrutiny. Recently Google was given permission to trade energy. Who are these companies? We have no idea.

If you want to know what you can do, great -- there are things you can do. Buy your own services and put your content in places where you are treated like a customer with rights that are respected. That's still possible. In many industries it's no longer possible, but you can get that kind of service on the Internet now, but you have to pay for it.

If you're in the media industry, stop partnering with the tech industry, and hire away some of their best people and give them power to run your business. This is how your boat will stay afloat. Pretending these companies are your friends is ridiculous. They don't care about you. Look at how well they're doing monetizing your content. This is probably what you need to learn to do, and there's no time to learn. Hire their people away and get ready to compete.

And when you have a choice between using the product of a small company or a large one, give the small one a chance. This helps protect choice and diversity. And if someone creates something new, and they are not working for a big company, celebrate that, make them famous, make sure everyone knows. The myth is that the only new stuff comes from big companies. That's never been true. The only way to change that is to make sure people hear about the new stuff that comes from individuals.

Hg Init, from Joel Spolsky, looks like a nice Mercurial and DVCS tutorial. (I’m still happy with Git, though.)

John Gruber:

So what I see as hypocritical about Apple’s decision here is not about the fact that you can access the same sort of content via MobileSafari, but rather about the exceptions granted to Sports Illustrated, etc. I see why: Sports Illustrated, Victoria’s Secret, and Playboy are not just strong brands but also quality brands. But who’s to say some new brand couldn’t be just as good? The best apps in all sorts of categories across the board in the App Store are frequently from new companies, building new brands. It’s no more fair for the “hot chicks in bikinis” category to be occupied solely by existing major brands like Sports Illustrated/Victoria’s Secret/Playboy than it would be if the, say, photo manipulation category were occupied solely by Adobe and Corel, or if games were only allowed from companies like EA.

António Martins & João Reis (via Jonathan Rentzsch):

We’ve decided, therefore, to write this open letter exposing what we consider a misjudgment and huge discrimination, specially if you compare it with current Apple iTunes Store contents like L World, Californication, Sex and the City, Bikini Blast, Top 100 Models or Good Luck Chuck.

One of my favorite phrases in tech, after "really simple" is "just works." Here's a story of some stuff that took about five minutes to hook together, and of course as you must have guessed, it "just works."

If you recall, we have an experimental feed of photos from Agence France-Presse. They are available through the River2 aggregator, which in addition to being a news reader is also a podcatcher and a photo-catcher. It's all really simple, I just use RSS and enclosures as we do for podcasting, and it all "just works."

Another thing that "just works" is Dropbox. It's such a great product. I keep thinking of new uses for it. I had a thought last night, wondering if there was a way to allow everyone to have access to one of my folders so I could flow pictures from the Olympics, for the next few days, out through the web. I poked around the site and found they planned for this.

So here's a folder that's updated as pictures are available, with photos from the Olympics.

http://r2.ly/z2fk

It's got a long url, so I shortened it (hint to Dropbox, it might be nice if these had shorter URLs).

You may see some pics with question marks, that's because my machine is still synching up with Dropbox. Refresh the page, it should clear.

PS: I really hope Google doesn't buy Dropbox, but I fear they will. :-(

Today's a bit of a "free day" in Scottsdale. We don't have anything to do until tomorrow. Well, nothing terribly serious, anyway.

The four of us wake up and shower at about 6:30. Four being me, Dave, Steve, and Charlie. We head out to a Starbucks where, when I order a bagel, they don't even have a toaster to toast it. Gee, thanks. I drink some sort of protein juice thing that's a bit chalky but quite tasty.

Then we head to "Crackerjacks" - a fun center with a driving range, mini golf, bounce houses, water balloon fighting areas, a small arcade, batting cages, etc. We're there to meet Kirk, who has been teaching himself the Stack and Tilt swing. His swing is impressive and intriguing - he's one of the few people who seem to have gone too far in doing some of the particular moves, and he's over-drawing the golf ball. He's also a lefty, which I'm happy to notice confused Dave and Steve into saying "right" when they meant "left" and vice versa as often as I said it in my mind.

After that, we wandered over to Grayhawk Golf Club to meet the guy responsible for helping to set up the clinic/school tomorrow. We had lunch while Peter Kostis sat at the next table. Steve was tempted to say something, but chose not to. The burger wasn't very good at all.

We asked to hit balls on the range "for an hour or so" and ended up staying for five. Oh well. My own swing has progressed to where my position at P2 is pretty good and so I started cleaning up some things at the top of my backswing. Elbows closer, push away with the left arm, no cupping. PGA Tour player (and major winner) Rich Beem hit about 30 balls next to us.

We drove back to "The La Hacienda" and chilled out before Dale showed up to take us to dinner. We decided on PF Chang's. I'd never eaten there, but everything was fine - some sort of honey chicken, Mongolian beef, rice, some spicy green beans, and pork rolls. Good stuff.

We returned to The La Hacienda, hung out with Dale for a bit, and discovered that Cheeseburger Doritos are grosser than gross. Yuck. Blech.

Tomorrow, the clinic!

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I'm typing this on a plane 1:30-ish flight out of Erie (it was only about $10 more than a flight out of Buffalo) to Detroit. When I land, I'll have an hour or so to catch a flight to Scottsdale, AZ.

I'm heading to Scottsdale with Dave Wedzik to photograph and observe a Stack and Tilt golf clinic (on Thursday). I've got media passes for the WM Phoenix Open taking place there, but I don't know that I'm going to use them. I'll play that by ear.

$25 per bag to check the luggage, and I've brought the clubs because we'll have time on Wednesday and Friday to play golf. Or practice. Knowing Dave and another guy, Steve, it's gonna be spent hitting balls and not actually playing golf.

Dave and I are going to use the longer leg of the trip to talk about what we're dubbing "G1" publicly - the video analysis software we're planning to build and sell.

Update: We've landed. Rental car taxes are 58% - let me say that again: fifty eight percent - in Arizona. And apparently there are cameras all over the place to catch people who average 11 MPH over the speed limit between intersections.

But, on the bright side, we stopped at a restaurant called "Los Olivos" (the one on second street, not the other "bad" one" - and had some really good Mexican food. Now it's off to the hotel.

Update Numero Dos: They overbooked the hotel. So for $40/night - a rate we got on Priceline - we're now staying at a 1700-square foot house called "the La Hacienda". We have our own pool, three beds (Steve's going to sleep on the couch, apparently), and two teeny showers. We have a kitchen, etc.

But no Internet. Bah. And we won't be using the pool anyway. We're golfers, not party boys.

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So my kid's sick today. Great day for the Xbox 360 to go belly up, eh?

Three red lights. The wife called me (iPhone to iPhone) from downstairs to ask me why the Xbox was blinking with red lights. She wanted to stream some movies from Netflix on the TV.

Pfffft. Hey, it lasted longer than most people's, huh? The thing never moved. It's in great shape. I hope I get a good one back, and that they take care of the license transfers and everything.

As I walked in to the UPS building, the guy said "Xbox?" I said "Yep. Howdja guess?"

His response: "I've shipped probably 10,000 of them back. Ever since they started makin' em. Get a hundred a week."

Yeah. Way to go, Microsoft. Consoles often lose money that companies will make up for with software, but this one must be a real drain.

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When I started at NYU, I said there was a project I was going to help with, but I couldn't talk about it. Now it's been announced. Here's the press release:

NYTimes.com to Collaborate with New York University for 'Local' East Village Community Site.

That's why I started an East Village aggregator, to follow what the local bloggers are writing about. The community site will incorporate work of NYU journalism students and members of the community. Further, there are computer science students from NYU participating in the project.

My role is simply to help the students when I can, and of course to learn from the process myself.

Jim Posner asks the question I would probably ask if I were outside this project -- what about the paywall. I've never asked the question myself. I assume this site is outside any NYT paywall. My own opinion is that the Times will never actually implement the paywall. That's the nice thing about being in academia, I can say what I believe.

When big pieces of our culture flow through one company's servers.

And when suddenly, that company takes an interest in the ideas that are expressed in that culture, shutting off certain ideas, without explanation, without answering questions.

And when that company shuts off alternate channels for that culture to flow, with nonsense like they're being "open..."

That's when it's probably beginning to be too late to be worried.

In April I’ll be going to two iPhone/iPad developers conferences: iDev 360 in San Jose and Voices that Matter in Seattle. (I’ll be speaking at 360 iDev. For the Seattle conference I’ll be playing the part of a local, since, well, I live in Seattle.)

I missed the Voices that Matter iPhone developers conference last year in Boston — but I heard great things about it, and I ended up being sad I missed it.

Then just recently I heard the next one is in Seattle, which is where I live. Not going to miss it this time, no way. :)

Let me get the money thing out of the way: use the discount code PHBLOGS when registering to save $100. Register before March 12 for early-bird pricing to save another $200. That’s $300 total, ’kay?

About the conference

It’s put on by our friends at Addison-Wesley — the idea is that the speakers are the folks who literally wrote the books on iPhone development. Folks like Aaron Hillegass, Jonathan Wolf Rentzsch, Kevin Avila, and more.

Aaron Hillegass, by the way, taught a ton of people Cocoa programming in person — and the ones he didn’t teach in person he taught by way of his Cocoa book. Me included. Aaron is responsible for just about everything and everybody.

I’ve seen him talk — and he’s so damn good.

About Seattle

Have you been to Seattle? It’s beautiful. Green. Lush. Alive. Waters fresh and salty plus two nearby mountain ranges plus a view of the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states.

The conference is on the waterfront at the Bell Harbor conference center. I’ve been to two Gnomedex conferences twice at that same location — it’s very nice, with a view of downtown, the waterfront, Elliot Bay, and the Olympic mountains.

The conference hotel is the Edgewater. The Beatles stayed there in like 1964 or something. In those days they used to give you fishing poles so you could fish from your hotel room.

About the Seattle Cocoa community

I don’t know who all of the locals are going. (I hope they all are.)

You might even wonder if there are any locals. Seattle’s gotta be a Microsoft town, right?

But here in the shadow of Mordor we’ve got a pretty hot bunch of developers. By way of proof I could just mention the magic kingdom of Omni and be done.

But there’s also the cool cats at Rogue Sheep, the amazing Flying Meat (Gus Mueller), Joe Heck (ringleader), some Cocoa-y Google folks, the madmen at Black Pixel Luminance, the unclassifiably hip Corporation Unknown, Professor Hal Mueller, the artisans at Zumobi, and plenty more.

After hours

I’m thinking pinball at Shorty’s. (Not like it’s the only place in town. But don’t us geeks love pinball? And it’s walking distance — just up the hill from the Edgewater.)

Anyway, that’s the scoop. Come to my neck of the woods for a change, wouldja?

Going to the 360 iDev iPhone conference?

I am. I’m speaking, even, on the topic of content-based apps. (On feeds, XML parsing, performance, networking, the beauty of NSOperationQueue, image caching and scaling, SQLite and Core Data, etc.)

I went last year to the San Jose conference and then to 360 iDev in Denver. Had a great time both times and totally look forward to this conference.

The iPad should actually be out by then, which is cool — I don’t know exactly what iPad content is lined up, but I have to figure lots of speakers will incorporate iPad into their presentations. And I bet lots of folks will bring iPads with them. I want to go just to see a whole bunch of people’s iPad apps and ideas.

I think it’s the first iPad conference with actual iPads. That’s kind of like Woodstock, right? I don’t want you to say you were there when you weren’t really there — you should actually be there.

Not enough? Here are some other randomly-jotted notes, then...

• It’s near Cupertino. One night we all go over to Steve Jobs’s house for barbeque and Cuban cigars. It’s totally chill. (Wait. Okay. Maybe not. But it is near Cupertino, though.)

• Last year I almost got in a fight at Linda’s Light Rail Lounge. Lesson learned: don’t ever joke about NASCAR with somebody who cares. He said he liked so-and-so as a great driver, I said something about Jeff Gordon (the only driver’s name I know) — and apparently the guy thought Jeff Gordon was a sissy or something. I had to talk fast. It’s possible that I bought him a drink, or maybe Joe or Dan handled it and saved me.

  What I mean is this: you and me, we should hang out.

• My friends Brad Ellis and Dave Wiskus — great designers — are doing a co-presentation on something designer-y-ish.

  Don’t know who they are?

  Check out some apps Brad’s worked on: Apple Design Award winner Postage, Word Spin, and SnoGlobe.

  And check out apps Dave’s worked on: Coathangr and the wickedly addicting Typewar.

• Oh, whatever, shut up, at least it’s always open.

• Marcus Zarra will be there. And speaking. Don’t miss your chance to hear from the double-fisted wizard of Cores both Data and Animation.

• Colin Donnell will be speaking. He has great hair and brains to match.

• I sometimes judge a conference by who I met and keep in touch with. Last year I met Ryan Nielsen and the previously-mentioned Dan Burcaw.

• In fact, the conference has such great mojo that last year Dave Wiskus was in town — for other reasons, only coincidentally in San Jose — but he hung out with us at night. And a year later he’s a successful indie iPhone developer and a speaker at 360 iDev. Imagine if he had actually attended the conference. He’d probably be an App Store billionaire by now. (Which is just $150 million in regular money, but still nothing to sneeze at.)

  (That App Store money thing didn’t make any sense. Sorry.)

  What I’m saying is: this conference has the power to launch entire careers!

• Check out the entire list of speakers. Julio will be there! Joe-with-the-hat! More! It’s a great line-up.

• TapLynx is a sponsor. That means, yes, we’re paying for some of your fun and awesome learnings. :)

• It’ll be months before WWDC. Hard to wait, right? Especially with all this cool iPad grooviness.

Anyway... you should go to the website and check it out. Here’s the registration page.

Also, they might set up Rock Band again. You haven’t lived till you’ve seen Joe Pezzillo do No Sleep Till Brooklyn. You can hope.

Anyone got any good recipes? Easy to make? I'm a meat and potatoes type of guy - don't like a lot of vegetables (except as seasoning, or "plate veggies" like corn, green beans, peas, etc.) and I'm not a huge fan of sauces.

We've been eating at home a lot more lately, so if you've got a fairly good recipe, post a link to it in the comments (or post the recipe) and we'll have a look and perhaps give it a try.

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Who in the heck believes in the End of Days? You have to be a fundamentalist Christian to believe that, don't you? Or do other religions really talk about it quite a bit.

2012 is said to be the "End of Days" in the Mayan calendar, or something like that, and they weren't Christians, but it seems to me that the two concepts aren't necessarily related to each other - the Mayans just ran out of calendar or something while the Christian concept really has no set date (and is, most likely, just a concept that shouldn't be taken literally).

But if someone can tell me more, by all means, I'm interested in hearing it.

P.S. The End of Days is essentially a concept in The Lost Symbol, so I don't doubt that's why it's on my mind.

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It would be easy to read this and feel superior, but don't.

Imagine you knew nothing about computers and somehone handed you a Macintosh and told you to figure it out.

How long would it take you to figure out what each of the applications did, or even what an application is, and how they differ and how they're similar.

Suppose you found your way all the way to WordPress, think about how many layers of menus and user interfaces you had to master just to get there.

There's the menubar at the top of the screen. The dock at the bottom of the screen. Then, when you launch the web browser, there's a new menu at the top of the screen (and did you notice or did you just think it was the same menu). Then when you get to WordPress, it has its own menu at the top of its screen. But above that menu there are things you click that kind of act like menus that take you away (toolbar icons). WordPress has several kinds of menus. The one running across the top of its screen and the one running down the left.

Okay, someone told you to click OK when the machine asks you to install new software. You have to enter your special password to get it to do that. But don't click OK when you're at a web site or in an email. How do you know which you're in?

And icons. Sometimes you click them once and sometimes you click them twice.

You don't see all of these layers of complexity either because you were around when each one came online (I was) or you just forgot what it was like to be presented with it for the first time. I have no idea what it was like to be a child who had these things since before they can remember, but I know a few undergrads at NYU who I'm going to ask about this.

My mother, on the other hand, has been using computers since before they were born, she started with the Mac in 1985 or so, but like someone who learned to speak another language as a child, she sees the bewildering complexity of our language whenever she does things that we take for granted.

You might say don't worry, her generation won't be here much longer, but that's my mom you're talking about. And further, how much effort are we wasting pushing around all these unnecessary concepts? Too much.

This is a bit of a follow-up to my post from yesterday…

I've read (or will read in more depth) Dan Benjamin's posts on Buddhism, but they're more so about meditation than Buddhism in general.

I'd like to read a bit about Buddhism - not so much the ancient stuff, any conflicts, etc. - but about modern Buddhism and how it can be applied in a Western world. I'm aware that there are several variations of Buddhism, and I'd like to look at those and see if one stands out as "making more sense" (and/or being more practical). What separates the variations?

Meditation will likely follow, as it's a part of every form of Buddhism (so far as I know), but for now it feels like I'm getting ahead of the game. Is there anything like the "Dummy's Guide to Buddhism"?

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© iacas for NSLog();, 2010. | Permalink

We had an interesting meetup at NYU last night, the first in what may become a series of Thursday night meetups patterened after the meetups we had at Berkman in 2003 and on.

The meeting was supposed to follow the BloggerCon rules of moderation, but most people don't know about these, so it takes a while before it feels normal. I had that experience trying to boot up BloggerCon-style meetings in Nashville and Palo Alto. If the people don't know how it works, it just doesn't work.

So about half-way through the meeting I stopped moderating and let the discussion go where it would naturally go. And I learned something from this. I guess that's not surprising.

In Silicon Valley, if you let a discussion wander, it ends up centered on the point of view of the technology industry. You have users and they generate content. Everything revolves around that model. It's pretty inhuman, because the people who do the generating are sometimes "experts" who invest their whole lives in understanding stuff, and then want to share it with others because that's what humans like to do, even if they aren't being paid. Of course the tech companies are all about being paid, for doing what they do. The users are like hamsters on a treadmill. Do you ever think about paying hamsters? I don't think so!

Okay, everyone says NY is where the future is. I'm afraid this might become hype just like the story you hear about Silicon Valley. It's a way of saying the rest of the world doesn't count. Of course people like to think that they live in the one place that makes a difference, it's simpler that way. The world is so complex, who wouldn't want it to be simpler. But who would be happy if they thought the center of the world was somewhere else? So the battle is constant. And for a while people believed the center was in Silicon Valley. I think the worst thing in the world is to live in the center. There's no where to go but down from there. Upside is better. So I choose to think where I live is somewhere off-center. It's also more interesting.

So when the New York conversation drifts, it doesn't end up where the Silicon Valley conversation ends. I guess this is no surprise, right? Where it ends up is with the (forgive me I don't know the terminology) the guy writing the story that informs everyone else. Who is everyone else? It's the hamsters again! This time the hamsters, instead of generating content, are generating revenue! They're clicking on the tip jar, causing micropayments to flow to the author (and his or her editors) so they can earn a living while informing all the other hamsters who are happily paying for all this good stuff. But what happens if the knowledge that everyone wants isn't in the reporters' heads but rather resides with the hamsters? What then?

In the past there was a simple answer. No sale. The information just doesn't get there. But that answer is no longer good enough.

Two cases in point. One, the prototype -- This American Life did a special called Giant Pool of Money -- which should win a Pulitzer for explaining the financial crisis of 2008 in terms anyone with a mind could understand. Everyone who heard it probably remembers exactly where they were when they did. I was walking on Marin Ave in Berkeley. It was great. Before I heard it I had no clue what the financial crisis was about. After hearing it, I got it. And everyone agrees -- we need more of this. But, I found out last night, much to my chagrin, that it took months to produce this episode. And there's the rub, and why the people who are invested in the NY-based system are so enamored of this example, because it proves that You Need Us. Without heavily and expensively produced content, they say, you won't be informed.

So I provide a counter-example. One that fits my model, which I proudly think of as being neither Silicon Valley-centered or New York-centered. I (of course) think my model is reality-centered. (Yes, I am arrogant, I cop to it.)

The counter-example is this. A fantastic FreshAir episode, one hour in duration, recorded live, with almost no production, that completely explained the options for universal health care in the US just as the debate was beginning. It was timely, complete, wonderful and super-inexpensive. Why? Because an individual did all the work. It was paid for by a publisher of course, and he is a professional writer, so while it was expensive, it's part of a reservoir of value that thinkers on both coasts tend to ignore, and in doing so, I think -- miss where the answer is going to come from. The question is -- how will we satisfy the enormous thirst people have for information when the economics of information no longer support vast budgets, or vast amounts of time, to produce expensive wonderful programming like Pool of Money. The answer: From the sources. The people who know what's up.

Sure, This American Life produced something sexier, with great production value, and FreshAir is a talk show. But it was still riveting. I remember where I was when I listened to it (driving from Santa Cruz between Los Gatos and Fremont). I found, last night, when explaining it, I could name each of the models the author described, and it's been six months since the program aired. It obviously made as much of an impression as Pool of Money did.

So the moral of the story is that neither coast has the answer, but the answer is out there all the same. Let's not gravitate to an assumption that the cursor has moved 3000 miles to the east and bring all our sloppy thinking habits with us. We have minds, let's use them, and our minds have information, and let's distribute it, to whoever wants it, no matter where it comes from.

Joseph Linaschke:

The handling of multiple changes is astonishingly good. Let’s say you crop photo_01 in the desktop library, and adjust exposure on photo_02 in the mobile library. Then let’s say in that mobile library, you add metadata to the same photo_01 file that was cropped in the desktop library. When you merge the libraries, everything is synced correctly—the desktop-cropped photo_01 will gain the metadata added to the same photo_01 in the mobile library; the exposure adjustment on photo_02 will be applied.

I didn't expect The Lost Symbol to change my life. I just started reading the book a few days ago, but as is the case with escapist type literature, it's best read in large doses so that you can remember the details and really almost transport yourself into the story. It's not the type of book you need to put down and think about.

If you've not read the book but want to some day, you may want to stop here.

However, the denouement contains some interesting tidbits that really say a lot - to me - about Christianity. These parts essentially put forth the idea that 99.99% of Christians have it wrong - that there really is no "God" per se. Rather, "God" is the "global consciousness." That each person is a god or is capable of becoming a god. There are several passages in the Bible - and many other religious texts - which refer to the body being a temple, and to look within yourself, and to become "one" with some sort of spiritual force.

Of course, there's a bunch of junk science and stuff thrown in there too, but if you can get past the parts about how one character "weighed a human soul" the last few chapters are fairly riveting from a thought experiment standpoint.

I've never studied the Bible very much, so for all I know Dan Brown made a bunch of stuff up, or relied on coincidence or distorted things, but I know enough of the phrases exist and even if they didn't, seemed to connect some dots.

The problem with Christianity may very well be that it's practiced by human beings. I've never gotten really deep into studying the Bible because most of what I'd heard of it came from people who were trying to teach it to me - in Sunday school, chats with friends that lasted for hours, etc. Not once did their interpretations resonate with me. Not once did I care about the differences between the thousands of different forms of Christianity - who cares if one group believes you should wash your feet before you take communion?

I've long believed that the Bible, written by man, is a book of parables, a book of allegories, a book of riddles and rhymes. I've rejected out of hand the fundamentalist beliefs that it's to be read literally. And given this, that makes Christianity the practice of properly interpreting the stories, riddles, rhymes, parables, and allegories.

The Lost Symbol puts a new twist on this - for good or bad - and frames the Bible in such a way that it can be interpreted in an entirely different way. There's a commonality in those thousands of variations of Christianity - that there's actually some "God" somewhere - that's entirely different from the concept of "thought" or "consciousness" being a "god" that each of us possess.

Every religion in the world is after the same "truth." I've long found it, well, stupid that one faith belittle another faith or say "unless you believe as I do, you aren't going to heaven." I said it a few days ago: no god worth believing in punishes people for seeking the truth.

If one best interpretation of the Bible is that that we're all gods and it is our global, international human collective that makes us so, then that makes a lot of sense to me. It not only drastically closes the gap between, say, Christianity and Buddhism and every other religion (that I know of), but it makes Christianity itself a lot more powerful.

Part of the problem I have with Christianity is that its practitioners often seem at odds with things I accept as fact. They cannot fathom an instance in which, as I wrote before (first link) that God created the Big Bang. Some try to tell me the earth is 20,000 years old and that man has never changed form - we've always looked like we do now, for the most part, and that we certainly didn't come from apes.

Yet The Lost Symbol contains a sentence in which one of the characters says that "God's image" (because mankind was created "in God's image") isn't our physical form, but rather our mental form. It's our minds that God created in his image - our bodies are simply the ways to access them.

To say that I've "believed" in a spiritual system at all is a bit of a stretch - the system I talked about a year ago was more like a pet thought experiment than anything "real." Yet even that system speaks to some level about the mind's quest for peace and eternal happiness. There's no "God" in my pet system - just a similar global consciousness and a lot of emphasis on the mind or soul as the "key" piece.

In a perfect world, I could explore this stuff for the next week, month, or decade. I could seek out people to talk to, I could read extensively, and so on. But this world isn't perfect, and doing all of that is not only impractical but selfish. I have money to make, family to enjoy, and food to eat.

For now, though, it's something to think about. I wonder, as I write this, if I'll be making fun of myself in a few days for attributing so much to such a book, but I suppose I'm not really - it simply served as a catalyst of sorts to a lot of thought.

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© iacas for NSLog();, 2010. | Permalink

Peter Ammon:

Every divisor has a magic number, and most have more than one! A magic number for d is nothing more than a precomputed quotient: a power of 2 divided by d and then rounded up. At runtime, we do the same thing, except backwards: multiply by this magic number and then divide by the power of 2, rounding down. The tricky part is finding a power big enough that the "rounding up" part doesn't hurt anything. If we are lucky, a multiple of d will happen to be only slightly larger than a power of 2, so rounding up doesn't change much and our magic number will fit in 32 bits. If we are unlucky, well, we can always fall back to a 33 bit number, which is almost as efficient.

Kontra:

Unsure of its ability to successfully roll it out as an independent product, Google must have then decided to force feed Buzz through its Gmail user base of 175 million. Google executives likely reckoned that in a single day Buzz would garner more users than Twitter has been able to in two years after all that celebrity publicity. That really is why Gmail users woke up one day to find their private account details exposed to the public, unannounced and unprepared, because without such default exposure Google executives likely didn’t believe they could deliver a critical user base for Buzz. That’s not “improper testing,” it’s a platform strategy.

On the whole, I’m very happy with the new features and interface improvements in Aperture 3. Many of the changes have been discussed elsewhere, however I wanted to mention a few points that I haven’t seen covered:

Face Detection

I’ve been putting off keywording people in my photos because I assumed that face detection was on the way. Now that it’s here, I’m not sure how much I’m going to use it.

In one of my projects, the faces were totally messed up. Aperture detected “faces” in solid-color areas near the corners of the photos, completely ignoring the prominent people in the middle of the frame. I manually added some faces, drawing rectangles and naming them, but Aperture forgot this as soon as I clicked on another photo in the browser. The only way I could get faces to work with this project was to delete the versions and re-import the masters. Luckily, these versions did not yet have any keywords or adjustments because they would have been discarded.

In my other projects, at least the dozen or so that I’ve gone through since upgrading, the face detection seems to be working properly, pretty much like in iPhoto.

Face Naming

There was some confusion when multiple people had the same first name, or the same first and last name with different middle initials. Also, the Address Book integration didn’t quite work the way I expected. Now that I see how it works, I think it’s adequate, but I would rather that Aperture not get cute and try to abbreviate to ambiguous first names.

The “Unnamed Faces” strip doesn’t seem to offer a way to zoom out or jump to the original photo. As a result, there are some faces that I can’t identify because I can’t see enough context. I don’t want to click Skip, because then how do I get back that list of untagged faces? But if I don’t click Skip, it seems the strip will be forever filled with those same unnameable faces.

Face Storage

Aperture uses a sensible storage model (which I first saw in Mail and copied for EagleFiler) where an “index” database is used for speed but the data and metadata are stored in flat files and XML. If the database is deleted or damaged (or not backed up), the data and metadata remain intact, and the database can be reconstructed from the other files.

Unfortunately, this does not seem to be true for faces. It looks as though Aperture stores the face information in the Faces.db SQLite database but that it does not save it in the XML files along with the other metadata. (It does export faces as keywords in the JPEG files, but that’s not particularly helpful when reconstructing a library.) This makes me wary of spending lots of time tagging faces and possibly losing that work if there’s ever a problem with my Faces.db.

I’m considering using the face detection to aid in assigning keywords. However, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to generate and assign keywords from faces (other than exporting) or to assign faces from keywords (if I were reconstructing a library where the face information had been backed up in that way). It’s a shame because, although Aperture has good support for keywords, the faces feature is better suited for tagging people (though, alas, faces don’t show up in the various metadata displays).

Core Data

Aperture 1 and 2 used Core Data, but Aperture 3 seems to have dropped it in favor of using SQLite directly. As a user, this doesn’t particularly matter to me, but as a developer making heavy use of Core Data I wonder about the reasons for the change. It’s curious that Mail, iTunes, iPhoto, and Aperture are highly visible “database” applications, none of which use Core Data. Does Apple think that Core Data is the wrong kind of technology for these applications? Or are there limitations/flaws that make the dog food unpalatable? My hunch is that for what Mail needs to do it’s more efficient to use SQLite directly. However, Aperture seems like exactly the kind of application that Core Data was intended for.

Backups

The folder structure inside the library package has been improved so that Time Machine backups should be much more efficient, especially if you rearrange your projects and folders. The thumbnails are now excluded from Time Machine backups, as is the BigBlobs.apdb. Other large database files are included, however: Faces.db, History.apdb, ImageProxies.apdb, Library.apdb, and Properties.apdb. My guess is that, except for Faces.db, these could all be reconstructed, so I’m excluding them from my CrashPlan backups.

Performance

Even after face detection completed (and I rebooted), Aperture 3 seems slower and more RAM-hungry than ever. I’m using a 2009 MacBook Pro, maxed out with 4 GB of RAM, and my library has about 34,000 versions. Aperture 2 was sluggish at times but bearable. Aperture 3 often locks up itself—and the rest of my Mac—for seconds or minutes. I’m going to see whether DiskWarrior helps.

I stopped using it when I saw all the stuff it dropped in my inbox. But I'm still curious -- are you using Google Buzz? Have you had any good discussions? Please add links to threads on Buzz you think are interesting, so those of us who are just lurking can learn.

FWIW, I chose "a little" because I rarely post, though I check the home page and two other pages (both golf-related) several times per day. Quickly.

I don't use any real applications and I typically hide everything I can, like gifts and other apps people are playing.

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Yesterday afternoon I called in, at 4:30 as directed, and listened to the message. My heart sank jut a little: the number printed on my jury summons was well within the range that was obligated to report the following day.

I reported at 8:30 with a copy of The Lost Symbol on my Kindle and a copy of The Golfing Machine in hard cover.

I found my way to the proper room - room 211 - without any trouble. I told them my name and they gave me form to fill out along with an "Erie County JURY" button I was told to wear on my chest at all times.

I wasn't asked to produce ID. In fact, at no point in the day was my ID confirmed.I took a seat in the corner of a large room. I was roughly 35th of about 100 people that would eventually show up. I filled out my form - which asked me questions like "I believe that a police officer is more likely to tell the truth" (Yes/No) and general questions about my job, my home county, etc.

At no point was I told to turn off my phone, so I got on Facebook and posted an update about how there were no minorities. Eventually two arrived - out of about 100 people.

We watched a video with a local judge telling us about the process we'd endure today. I found it odd that he made a point of saying that there was nothing you could say to guarantee you'd get on - or not get on - a jury. Apparently a lot of people really want to be on a jury. Weirdos.

The woman who was running the whole thing - the "jury coordinator" or something - told us that we'd be given $9, that parking was only $3 if we had our tickets stamped, and that taxes wouldn't be withheld so we had to make sure to declare the nine lousy dollars on our taxes. I kinda wish I had the chance to decline the $9 just to avoid the hassle of declaring it as miscellaneous income.

Cue up another hour of waiting. By this point it's 10:00. 35 or so people's names are called and they're pulled to go to jury selection.

Half an hour goes by. I'm pulled - as the 32nd of 35 potential jurors - for an aggravated assault case from in front of a club in Erie in May, 2009. Both lawyers were given the chance to ask us questions like "do you have any physical ailments that would prevent you from being able to do this?" or "have you or anyone close to you ever been a victim of an assault?" Of those who raised their hands, all were asked if they could put that aside and render an impartial decision. Both took steps to clarify that everyone should have chosen "No" to the policeman question.

The entire time the defendant was seated at the desk on the right side while his girlfriend/wife and two small children were seated behind him in the gallery where all of us were seated.

After conferring for 45 minutes, the two lawyers passed their final list on to the judge's assistant (I'm sure she has a title, but I'm going with "assistant" for this). Names were called out and jurors were selected. They got to 13 by about juror #26, so the rest of us returned to the waiting room.

After 15 minutes - it was now 11:45 - they came in and released us to lunch. We had to return by 11:15.

I went to find a bank because - stupid me - I'd assumed parking was free for jury duty members and I had no cash. I did that, then met up with some fellow jurors at McDonald's. We joked that we were eating there so we could legitimately fake a medical emergency later on. The oddest moment came when the defendant in the assault case came in and sat a table away! Weird…

So we wander back and sit again for another hour. At 2:00, the 50 of us remaining (I was #47 called) were taken to a civil suit trial. A woman was rear-ended at a stop sign, and the defendant - a former police officer and current part-time sheriff (or something) claimed that he had been rear-ended himself, causing the woman's injuries. She supposedly had lower back injuries, had been on drugs, couldn't work the same types of jobs she could before, and so on. Basically, the jury would be responsible for figuring out whether she was full of shit. The accident occurred in 2004 - so I'm a bit surprised it wasn't in court until 2010.

At any rate, the question-and-answer section - voir dire - lasted much longer with 50 people and questions like "have you or anyone in your family or friends ever worked for an insurance agency?" "… in the medical profession?" "… ever had back pain?" "… ever been in an auto accident?" After each person was questioned they were asked and answered the only question that really mattered in the end: can you be impartial?

A good number of people - primarily the ones who had back injuries or were very close to someone with a back injury - claimed that they'd be unable to be impartial. This elicited groans from those of us who couldn't think of an excuse to try to remove ourselves from consideration.

Finally, at 4:30, 14 jurors were selected (ending somewhere around juror #35, leaving plenty of space before they got to me) and the rest of us were excused.

We were told to leave our buttons. We didn't even get a 50 cent button as a souvenir. I joked that maybe if I kept the button, they'd keep their $9.

P.S. One of the jurors looked just like Darlene from Roseanne (or the scientist on Big Bang Theory - the same actress). Just like her. Freaky.

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I got email asking me if I was doing some kind of public shunning of Kevin Ballard. By no means! He’s a totally great guy — smart, friendly, funny, way more interesting than I was at his age — and I’m sorry I didn’t see him at Macworld. It’s just that 1) he’s fun to tease and 2) he’s a super-good sport.

My kind of fella.

Now pretend you didn’t read all of the above. :)

DSLRU is now in private beta testing. If you'd like an invitation, get in touch with me. The invitations I had previously have been accepted.

One of the main goals? To populate the forum. The forum is 100% free, so if you're looking to get in on a new photography forum, this could be a place for you to quickly become "one of the old timers."

There's no obligation to buy anything at this point (nor will there ever be).

We're going to officially launch when we're comfortable with the feature list and bugs. I don't know when, but sooner is preferred over later, obviously!

P.S. If you're interested in selling any courses, you really want to get in touch with me. As with the App Store, it should be good to "get in early" and claim some potentially valuable courses.

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Sitting in a Starbucks on 2nd Ave at 9th St. I knew this place was here cause I used to stop in after eating at the 2nd Ave Deli, which used to be a block away.

What's there now? A Chase branch. The kind with no people in it.

Not saying anyone did anything wrong, just thinking about how the universe allocates real estate, and how it's changing. I know the 2nd Ave Deli re-opened uptown, on 33rd betw Lex and 3rd. Not on 2nd Ave. It's a Jewish soul food restaurant, very much about people. Chase? Who knows what that is anymore. A subsidiary of JP Morgan? A bailed out government agency with the name of an old bank. Where was the government when the matzoh ball soup and pastrami needed bailing out?

The below is an email I sent to a fellow Mac developer on reasons to support 10.6 and up on his next major release. (It’s barely edited: I just changed a couple sentences that would have made identification easy.)

Here are the reasons to go with 10.6 and up:

1. Millions of people are using 10.6. Every new Mac since last September or whatever is running 10.6. Apple is selling lots of Macs. Lots of people have upgraded to 10.6.

2. People who don’t upgrade their OS are, in general, the kind of people who just don’t buy software anyway. (Particularly in the case of 10.6, given how inexpensive the upgrade price was.)

3. Every second you spend dealing with 10.5 (in terms of testing, code, whatever) is a disservice to your customers and your software. It’s very nearly irresponsible.

4. Quality is the most important aspect of your software. Quality drives sales. Dropping 10.5 support means you can spend more time on polish; it means you can use 10.6-only features that make your app better and easier to maintain. Continuing with 10.5 support means that your software is not as good as it could be.

5. Rule of thumb: don’t ever code for a shrinking OS version.

Wayne Gretzky: "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."

There will be n 10.5 users on the day the next version of your app is released. The next day there will be n minus some number. A month later it will be n minus some big number — but you’ll still be supporting 10.5, you’ll still be writing software for people who don’t buy software anyway.

There are x 10.6 users today. Tomorrow there will be x plus some number. A month from now it will be x plus some big number.

6. Current users of your app still on 10.5 have a perfectly awesome piece of software to use.

7. If you don’t drop 10.5 now, when do you drop it? On a major release is when it’s easiest, and you don’t want to wait for the major release after this next one.

I have a rule, formed by many years of experience, that I wait for 20 minutes, then I leave.

Before I had the rule, I'd never know when to leave when someone was late because it's impossible to know how late they're going to be.

A couple of extreme examples.

1. In 1990 or 1991 (approx) I had a meeting with a vice-president of Apple. It was hard to get the meeting, and my company desperately needed their cooperation because Apple was fudding our product, basically keeping developers from building on it. I flew back to Calif just for the meeting. I was on time. His secretary kept calling the restaurant saying he was on his way, but he never came. I waited three hours before giving up.

2. A few years later I had a meeting with a division manager of Microsoft at a Portola Valley restaurant. I waited and waited. A half-hour after the appointment I ordered. Ate my lunch, left an hour after the appointment. An hour after that I get a call from the restaurant asking where I was. (This was a meeting I totally didn't need, I was having lots of success without Microsoft. I felt I was doing him more of a favor than he was doing me.)

Those were two extreme examples, but people are regularly late. I am late too, sometimes, and sometimes I'm more than 20 minutes late, but it's very rare. In my experience you have to mean it to be that late. So I have a hard and fast rule. After 20 minutes I leave. That takes the guesswork out of it.

There's a very practical reason. If someone is very late, all they're going to talk about is how sorry they are. The person who was on time says "It's no big deal," but nothing ever gets done at those meetings. Much better if you just say "I have a rule" and blame the rule for the fact that you weren't there when they finally arrive.

I thought this kind of disrespect was just a west coast thing, but it's part of east coast culture too. I've never written this rule up, now I have. Please, if you make an appointment with me, try to be on time. And if you're more than 20 minutes late, you'll find I'm not here.

"Privacy" seems like such an abstract concept.

So your privacy was violated. Get over it.

Here's what happened. When Google rolled out Buzz last week they activated an unknown number of users and chose people for them to follow automatically based on who they email most frequently with. Presumably these people had to also be on Gmail. And the list of people you follow is public. Therefore the list of people you email with most frequently is now public. They are now trying to close this hole as quickly as possible. But the damage is done, people have to realize that -- the information was already disclosed. You can close the door after the horse gets out but that doesn't get the horse back.

This never should have happened. But now that it has, it requires a CEO-level apology and statement of contrition and an explanation of what policies he's putting in place to be sure this never happens again.

That has not happened, and does not appear likely to.

What if it were Eric Schmidt's privacy. I wonder if he'd feel differently. I wonder if he uses Gmail, and if he does, did they reveal the list of people he emails most frequently? I can think of all kinds of problems that might cause, with the stock market, or the SEC, partners, wives, despots, girlfriends. I imagine Nick Denton at Gawker would like to see that list, and that Schmidt would not want him to.

We all have those kinds of concerns. People might get the wrong idea if they saw the list of people I email most frequently. Or they might get the right idea.

Sometimes as I'm entering a message into Gmail, I wonder if the ethics of Google prohibit them from reading the mail. Sometimes I email with execs at companies that compete with Google. I think "They'd probably like to know this." I wonder if they look.

Yet Google, so far, has only said they're sorry for the "concern" they've caused. That shows that they're not owning up to the breach they caused. They can't possibly be so stupid as to not understand what they revealed about users of Gmail. It's just the kind of weaselly response to a building crisis that PR pros tell you not to do, that covering up will only make it worse when people realize what's really been going on. But that assumes a competent and vigilant press. That would be too much to assume in the case of Google and its coverage.

The Don't Be Evil smokescreen was pure brilliance. As Michael Gartenberg said on Twitter, if Microsoft had done what Google did, there would already be lawsuits. It would be a scandal of huge proportion.

The NY Times won't call it a breach of trust by Google. Instead they attribute the claim to "privacy experts." I raised this point, and predictably people say that the Times shouldn't make factual statements about companies who screw up anywhere but in editorials. That's ridiculous. A fact is a fact, and belongs in reporting. It's a fact that Google revealed sensitive information about millions of users, and now they're scurrying to try to cover it up. And the press is helping them buy time. Why? I have no clue, but I don't like it.

I walked the length of the (unfinished) Highline today. It was great. Just wish it went all the way to 34th St. Much easier walk than on sidewalks. You don't have to stop for anything. :-)

Been a while.

Google says there's been over 9 million Buzz posts and comments so far. Impressive. But there hasn't been a single link in my tweet-stream from Buzz, except for the one I posted, when I first tried it out (and quickly shut off when I saw the mess it created in my Gmail inbox). What does this mean? Well, it hasn't gone viral, at least to the people who I follow on Twitter.

Fred Wilson, an investor in a bunch of companies in the BuzzSpace, has his review.

Wondering if anyone is thinking of creating a wonderful webmail product that's just webmail, no tricks. With Google-quality spam filters. I'd pay $100 per year for the service. But no tricks! I don't want any new products to launch through your product. I don't want to reach into my email box one day and find a snake!

In other news, Mike Arrington says TED is a sleeper.

Last night Twitter sent out an update on oAuth. They saved the best for last. In June they plan to turn off Basic Authentication in favor of oAuth. They say developers should hurry up and switch now so they don't have to panic come June-time. But they don't say which oAuth developers should adopt. Problem is there are three, and Twitter says, in the very same email, that they like all three. I hear that a lot of people at Twitter read my posts, so please read this: I suppose it's okay to turn off Basic Authentication, if you really must. You're going to lose some apps when you do. I won't convert very many of mine, but at least I can since I've implemented oAuth 1.0. But I'm not in any hurry to implement the others for a couple of reasons: 1. They're moving targets. 2. I'm not investing much time in Twitter development these days, I'm busy with other things. So come June, a bunch of my remaining apps will die. I think it would be better to hold on to the developer momentum and go really slow on the deprecation.

Google says the reason they don't support the Twitter API is that it's not an open standard. Two comments. 1. WordPress and Tumblr thought it was good enough for them. 2. Isn't Google the company that scanned all those books and published them on the web without the authors' permission?

My Roadrunner package will arrive today according to Fedex. According to the instructions, I should have service after I install the modem and call the office. Made total sense until I got a call from Time-Warner yesterday saying they had to send an installer out to turn it on. That won't happen until late next week. But the previous tenant in my apartment had Time-Warner Internet. Seems to me they can turn it on without having to get into the apartment. I'm sure all the wires here are still connected. I love big companies. (Not.)

Had dinner last night at a wonderful West Village restaurant called Po, recommended by the illustrious Matt Terenzio. One of the great things about the neighborhood I live in -- lots of great restaurants. I need to get some exercise today!

It's a sunny day so I think I may go explore the Hudson and the Highline.

Having lunch with Dan Farber who is now the Editor In Chief of CBS.Com. I knew Dan when he was knee-high to a grasshopper, and just Editor In Chief of MacWorld. Also ran into Eric Hippeau who is now CEO of Huffington Post. These are the guys I grew up with in tech. Now they're in NY running things. Proves the old motto, be kind to those you meet on the way up.

Once again Jeff Pulver honors me by making me the opening speaker of his #140Conf here in NYC, April 20. I must have been very kind to him at one point! On after me are the esteemed John Borthwick of Betaworks and the honorable Jay Rosen of NYU.



I wonder if Jeff knows the counter-culture significance of 4/20?

Something I threw together for some friends who are interested in news of the East Village.

http://east-village.org/

If you know of any blogs that cover the East Village, please post a link here. Thanks!

This is a great essay by Doc Searls. Read it.

Eventually advertising will evolve into information, companies with products will go direct, they won't need go pay Google to reach them

When that happens who will pay for the millions of Google servers and the electricity and cooling they consume?

This is for folks new to the Mac, iPhone, and iPad development community who are going to their first conference...

You might wonder if this “networking” thing you’ve heard about is really a thing. “I’ve got Xcode,” you think. “Do I really have to, you know, meet people and stuff? Isn’t networking something my Dad did? What about the meritocracy?”

While you’re busy asking yourself questions, other people are having a good time.

Here’s the deal: you don’t actually need to know anybody else to be successful. You totally don’t. It’s fine.

But it helps.

It’s not really networking, anyway. Or, at least, I’ve never gone into a bar or a party thinking I’ll advance my career or my software. That would be weird and yucky.

Rather, there’s a great community of developers and journalists and bloggers, and they’re roughly in your age range, and you have some interests in common, and almost everybody is nice, and — hey, it sounds like kindergarten, I know — but you can make friends.

That’s all there is to it. It’s not networking: get that dumb word out of your head.

Okay, here’s some practical advice.

Two types of geeks

The first type is exactly what you’d expect: they’re the technologists, the guys who would invent computers if they didn’t already exist. On their nth beer they can discuss the fine points of objc_msgSend_stret().

While they’re talking to you they’re also, in their heads, optimizing the queueing algorithm at the bar, writing their first quantum computing application, and stepping through the code they wrote just an hour ago.

The second type is tech-inflected liberal arts types. (I sometimes wonder if this surprises new computer science graduates.) Journalists and bloggers are often of this type — but a perhaps-surprising number of developers are too. They’d rather discuss Gogol and Gaga, Kafka and Kubrick, Borges and Black Eyed Peas.

What both types have in common, though, is Apple products. “Hey, how ’bout that iPad, huh?”

Both types also love well-designed software.

Some things not to do

Remember that everyone sits at their desk most of the time working on hard things. But not at the moment you’re talking to them. At that moment it’s time to have fun, take a little break from the hard things.

I think many of the technologists can deal with bug reports and feature requests in person. For others it’s too much like being back at the desk. (For me it is, anyway.)

I don’t know anybody who likes being cornered or monopolized, or who can stop what they’re doing to spend 30 minutes looking at a demo.

What you should do

Remember that all geeks are shy, just like you. Even the boisterous ones. Or especially. The word “shy” is so universally applicable among geeks that it means nothing: it’s no excuse for you or anybody else. (What do you think beer is for? It’s not just a FIFO stack.)

But if someone ever seems stand-off-ish or awkward — take it as shyness. That’s all it is. (Countless times I’ve heard people say “so-and-so doesn’t like me, I think” — when it’s always just that geek social skills are a little rough-edged. Mine included. In some cases these people have become best friends.)

So, yes, remember that they’re all people, just folks, not different from you in some fundamental way.

Though I will caution you not to stare directly into my third eye, or make fun of the extra head on the side of John Gruber’s regular head, or try to grab Wolf’s tail.

And if you think you actually just saw Thor himself, well, yes, but we call him bbum (the Norse god of Tequila).

(And, one more time, though it should go without saying by now — if you find yourself anywhere near Kevin Ballard, just slowly back away and move to the other side of the bar. Don’t move too fast — his eyes are freakishly sensitive to motion. You’ll be okay. Eventually. I know it burns.)

This is the last Macworld Expo where you won’t see iPads. I’m nostalgic already.

Tim Bray on being well-informed or not: “This might signal a new kind of stratification in society.”

Crazy Apple Rumors Site: “It’s a Cinderella story.”

The Expo and trade show is during the day. Walk the floor. Pay special attention to the smaller companies — that’s where you’ll usually find the most interesting things. I tend to avoid any exhibit with a big video screen, and that’s served me well.

In the evening is when you get more of a chance to meet people and talk. It’s easy to find out where to be:

1. Consult the Hess Memorial party list.

2. If you’re an indie developer, be at the Chaat Café 6 pm Thursday.

3. Follow Mac developers and journalists on Twitter — they usually make themselves pretty easy to find. (And you’ll often find that a bunch of them are at the same place.) (They’re very needy people. It’s sad, really. At that hour what they usually need is a beer.)

4. Trust your iPhone Map program. Search works.

Also, as always, drink plenty of water, remember to eat and sleep, and see some of San Francisco if you’re new to the city. And, for the sake of all that’s good and right in the world, do not engage Kevin Ballard in conversation.

I’ve had a bunch of people ask me about the thin-server RSS syncing system I talked about yesterday.

The main question: what are the benefits?

First let’s define things a little. A thick-server RSS syncing system is something like Google Reader, NewsGator, Bloglines — where the server actually downloads the feeds, and client apps talk to the server rather than to the original sources.

There are lots of benefits to this kind of system. There’s every reason for this to be widely used — it’s the right choice for lots of people, probably for most.

A thin-server syncing system doesn’t read the feeds: it only knows about users, subscriptions lists, and the status of news items. No actual feed content. Loosely coupled to the actual RSS readers.

Here are some of the benefits of a hypothetical thin-server system (in no particular order):

No latency

The thick-server systems have to read millions of feeds. So they don’t usually get updates the moment they happen — they check a feed once an hour or whatever. (Maybe it’s every 15 minutes or whatever for popular feeds.)

This means that news gets to the client apps a little less quickly than it would otherwise.

With the thin-server, the clients read the feeds directly, so they get exactly what’s available at that time.

Security

Say you read a password-protected feed. A thick-server system would have to support that, and you’d have to send your credentials to that system. That system would have to store the content: it would treat it like any other feed it reads.

It’s not economical for thick-server systems to handle password-protected feeds, since each one can’t be re-used. It’s one copy per username/password pair.

With a thin-server system, you never transmit your username and password. It never sees the feed data, just the URL of the feed and IDs of news items. No problem syncing password-protected feeds.

Reachability

Say you read feeds from a local intranet that a thick-server can’t reach. You can’t sync these, since the thick server can’t read the feeds.

But, again, a thin server doesn’t care. All it sees are feed URLs and IDs of news items. No problem syncing intranet-only feeds.

(This also applies to things like script subscriptions. A thick server isn’t going to run an AppleScript, for example, but multiple clients might run the same script. The news items status would still be syncable.) (But not the script! No way would I want to sync executable code.)

Server downtime doesn’t prevent you from getting your feeds

If a thick-server system goes down, you can’t get your feeds. (Unless you turn off syncing.)

With a thin-server system, you still get your feeds. The clients wait to sync up.

Decentralized

So far, all the thick-server systems are on one big (conceptual) server. This means one point of failure for everyone who uses that system. Downtime is a big issue.

It’s conceivable that you could write a thick-server system that can run anywhere. Something open source, something easy to install. But it would use so much resources and bandwidth (reading the feeds every hour, returning entire feeds to client apps) that it would be prohibitive for many people. You couldn’t just install it on your account at your web provider and hope to get away with it. (Well, depending on lots of factors, of course. If it was just for you, and you didn’t have too many feeds, it’s probably okay.)

A thin-server system, on the other hand, would be easy to run. Minimal bandwidth, no content system where it downloads and stores feeds. It should be easier to set up and run than WordPress.

Easier to move from synced to non-synced and back

The thick-server systems rewrite the feeds, and usually substitute their own unique ID for whatever was in the feed. (Though, in the case of Google Reader, it also provides the original unique ID, if there was one.)

Because the feeds are rewritten, it can be very difficult to match up a non-synced item with its synced equivalent. This can make turning on or off syncing very rough, as you end up with duplicates.

Longer limits on news item status

This isn’t inherent, but it’s practical. Thick-server systems tend to serve a ton of people, so they have to have limits on the length of time news items status data will be stored.

For instance, NewsGator’s was two weeks or 200 items, whichever was first. (If I recall correctly.) Google Reader’s is, I believe, roughly twice that (but with some special cases, like when you do a mark-all-read in Google Reader and when you first subscribe to a feed).

But a thin system can afford to keep news item status data longer. Make it six months or a year.

No data loss

Because thick-server systems rewrite the feeds, they’ll often toss out parts of the original feed that they don’t care about.

Again, this doesn’t have to be inherent, but for practical reasons it’s often done this way.

With the thin server, you read the feeds directly, so you miss nothing.

Twitter and other feed-like things

This system would work for anything feed-like: it just needs a URL and individual item IDs.

Imagine pointing not just your RSS readers but also your Twitter clients at the server — your Twitter clients could know which items you’ve already read. Want that? I do. :)

Your data in your control

You could use someone else’s server, if they allowed it. Maybe there’d be inexpensive for-pay services.

But, at least conceptually, you could run it yourself, and control all your data yourself. The opportunity would be there, at any rate.

Anyway

That’s all I have in my head at the moment. There are more benefits, surely, but I think the above is plenty.

Here’s Jens Alfke on RSS syncing with a couple interesting suggestions. (Jens has a lot of experience in this area.)

Google Reader is an RSS reader that can be used for RSS syncing. Bloglines used to have a very basic syncing API (maybe it still does). NewsGator had a syncing API. FeedSync is a way to use feeds to sync other stuff (as far as I can tell). Sync Services (MobileMe syncing API) is a generalized syncing system that might be able to do RSS, but works just between Macs.

WebDAV is cool. DropBox is super-amazingly-cool. But these are storage systems, not syncing systems for things like RSS.

Not one of the above is a really great system for just syncing RSS between apps.

(For people who remember NewsGator’s system with fondness: it had drawbacks too, including that it was limited to the past two weeks or 200 items for each feed.)

Now, that said, I think Google Reader is cool (both as app and API), and I’m very glad we can use it, and I totally appreciate the help we’ve had from Google. But I do also hear from NetNewsWire users who’d like an alternative.

With everything else I have to do, I don’t have time to create an alternative. But I could make NetNewsWire work with an alternative, if one existed and was worthwhile.

What is a worthwhile alternative?

There are a few criteria to meet, in no particular order:

1. It would have to be more like email servers — that is, not just one big server or cluster of servers somewhere, but the kind of thing people can run on any server. My web service provider might run one for me, the same way it runs an email server. (Or I might run one on my LAN. Or I might install it myself on my own website.)

2. It would have to be free and open source, so that it could be everywhere, so that it would be developed by people who just want to make RSS syncing work. (I’m a capitalist, totally, but there are times when free and open source makes sense.)

3. It would have to work over http and https. REST API.

4. It would have to not require that clients download the feeds themselves from the server. (This is the way Google Reader, NewsGator, Bloglines and others worked. Status info was added to the rewritten feeds. I’m saying this system should not work that way: clients would download feeds directly from their sources, just as they do when not syncing.)

5. The API should be as simple as possible and still get the job done. The job would be defined as syncing subscriptions lists and status of individual news items in RSS and Atom feeds. (And nothing else!)

6. It would have to be easy to configure an RSS reader to use a given server. No more than URL of server, username, and password should be required. (Less, if possible.)

7. It should not be limited to the last 14 or 30 days (like some systems) — it should have a much larger limit, like a year.

8. The server itself wouldn’t ever read any RSS feeds. It wouldn’t have to — it’s entirely just about syncing data between apps. It would only ever talk to client apps.

9. It should use as little bandwidth as possible, and be as fast as possible.

10. Authentication would use standard HTTP authentication. (Not cookies or anything else.)

11. There should probably a PHP + MySQL version, just so it can be deployed as widely as possible. (Though I know you’re thinking Rails.)

12. Despite its being open source, if someone did want to offer it as a for-pay service, they should be allowed to.

Notes about the API

There are some obvious things. Get subscriptions list as OPML-with-folders. (Feeds could live in multiple folders, which means folders are just like tags, so call them tags if you want to.)

API calls would support conditional GET, so getting a subscription list would usually result in a 304.

You’d probably add, delete, edit subscriptions by addressing into the tree. (That way you could delete one instance of a feed that appears multiple times. You could add/remove folders that way too.)

The other half is the status of news items. Most have a unique ID (always in the case of Atom) or a guid (usually, in the case of RSS). For items that don’t, an agreed-upon way of constructing a unique ID would have to be developed. (Pick things that don’t usually change but are enough to identify an item: pubDate in a specific format + link + feed URL, as a UTF-8 string, then MD5-hashed. Maybe. Something like that, something that would be largely reliable.)

You’d sync status incrementally: get all the status changes since a certain date (the last time you made the call). Status would probably be read, unread, deleted, starred, and saved. To set status, it would be great to address each item in individual calls, very RESTfully — but that would be a giant bandwidth waste. Better a single call that takes a structure of some kind (XML, JSON, whatever) with item IDs and status/value pairs, where you can update a bunch of items all at once.

As you can see, the server doesn’t have to do that much. It stores some small bits of data with timestamps. I don’t think it needs any cron jobs (at least not conceptually) — it just responds to requests. It doesn’t even have any idea what this data is about.

You probably have the database schema mapped out in your head already plus more specific ideas about the API.

(I don’t recall if I’ve said before, but a couple years ago we found that the average NetNewsWire user had 26 subscriptions. That should give you an idea of the storage requirements this would need. Obviously some people have hundreds or thousands, of course, but not most.)

Most of the time clients are just getting the subs list (usually getting a 304 back), and getting/setting news item status changes.

In other words, none of this sounds that hard. And it doesn’t sound like a taxing job for a server.

Invitation

If I had time, I would have written this years ago, offered it for free, made it open source, had NetNewsWire support it, and I’d have tried to get other RSS readers to support it too.

But I didn’t and don’t have time to write it.

However, if there are people who are interested in writing this, I can help. I have client apps, and I’ve been thinking about this for years, and I’ve written to several sync APIs.

If you’re seriously interested in writing some software that could end up deployed far and wide, and that would solve a real problem for real people, get in touch with me.

P.S. Here’s the business case

So you might want to make some money. That’s cool. Two business ideas:

1. Charge people money to use the service.

2. Collect information about popular feeds and popular news items. You could provide a real-time view into what people (in the aggregate) are reading. This might be interesting to sell, or it might be interesting as a website itself (where you could display ads). Given all the metadata in feeds, plus your user’s folders/tags, you might even be able to figure out categorization. You might even be able to provide trends, too. Certain topics are gaining/losing ground. Certain feeds are getting more or less popular. Etc. Don’t forget the pretty graphs! All of that stuff would be an add-on, of course, something you’d be able to build because you have the sync system underneath.

Compelling? I don’t know. Just what I thought of off the top of my head.

Peter Hosey: “Welcome, new Cocoa or Cocoa Touch programmer. Here are some things you will need to know.”

Lukas Mathis: “Eventually, you will find yourself in a position where your application contains features it should not. Even if you’ve been vigilant, this will happen.”

Cocoia posts the good stuff, as always.

Macworld: “For Apple, it’s not about killing off tinkerers, but ensuring that not everybody who wants to use a computer has to be a tinkerer.”

Tyree Apps: “I’ve created a little view controller that lets a TapLynx app offer the user a quick way to snap a photo and then email it to someone without ever leaving the TapLynx based application.”

One of my favorite parts of TapLynx is that it’s extendable: you can create new views with new features. (Note to programmers: TapLynx is a static library. You still use Xcode to build apps, though TapLynx makes it so you write code only if you want to.)