California Light Bulb Legislation

A legislator named Lloyd Levine wants to outlaw incandescent bulbs in California. I am very much opposed to this. Not because I'm against energy efficiency, but because I'm Pro Choice. I want to be able to choose any light bulb I want. This is America, not a totalitarian regime.

I'm against this also because I don't like fluorescent light. It's from the "cold" end of the spectrum, and I like "warm" light. Is that okay? I guess not.

Saving energy is a good idea. It is conceivable even that there should be legislation related to total energy use, or an economic approach, like taxing gasoline: higher rates for usage above a certain baseline. Then I, as a consumer, can perhaps choose a gas dryer instead of an electric dryer, to save electricity. But to tell me I'm allowed to have an electric dryer and an electric water heater and electric baseboard heat, but I'm not allowed to use incandescent light bulbs, is patently ridiculous.

eBay: gone to the dogs?

I'm a big eBay fan. I've bought some large items (cars, trucks) and lots of small stuff on eBay. I've sold things on eBay. I love it.

Yet I think it's going to the dogs. It's dog slow, the interface hasn't changed in years, and the feedback mechanism, which was once innovative and world-changing, is many years old and has been gamed so badly as to be almost counter-useful. You can't rely on it, you can't give anyone negative feedback without retaliation, and the whole thing just seems not to work any more.

The last half dozen or so transactions I've done on eBay have all gone sour in one way or the other. They're all people gaming the system, misrepresenting things, shilling, you name it. It used to feel like an honest marketplace where real people bought and sold things. It feels now like a bazaar with sheisters and "merchants" trying to think of new ways of ripping me off. Some of them successfully. Subtly, but successfully.

I'm sad, because I love perusing the listings and wishing I could buy an old Dodge flatbed or three tractors from a guy in Saskatchewan. I just don't trust it any more. It's not the people on it I don't trust, though that's part of it. It's the site itself that I no longer trust. And that's a shame.

Apple's own Paparazzi

I have long been mildly disgusted by the "rumor sites" that feed on Apple's product launch plans. At times I have been on both sides of it—an engineering manager for iPhoto and iMovie, and as a Mac owner and consumer.

The tone that sites like ThinkSecret take is kind of a smug pride in getting illicit information from snitches at the company or its suppliers, and "predicting" the product plans.  Even followup reviews always contain language like, "as predicted", or "as we previously stated in ", blah blah blah.

My first reaction is usually: "so what?" But worse than that, such rumor-mongering actually damages the company and its product launches—the company that these sites purport to love so much. Let Apple launch their products, and leave them alone. Having been inside Apple, I can tell you that the levels of secrecy and the paranoia about these "paparazzi" leaking product plans significantly hinders and slows the processes of producing great products. And just look at how they bait people into divulging secrets. Shameful, I say.

I am prompted to write this in part by reading about recent pleas by the British royalty to the paparazzi to leave alone Kate Middleton, the 25-year-old girlfriend of Prince William. In the aftermath of Princess Diana's fiery death while being chased by the paparazzi on motorcycles, the hyenas are apparently backing off, at least briefly. But they'll be back as soon as you please, driven, according to them, by the public's desire to see such photos. Bollocks, I say. If they're published, sure, people will look at them. But no one has ever written a letter to the editor requesting more such photos.

What is it with people, that need to pry into the private affairs of others, and take pride in it? Shame on you, Nick de Plume or whatever your real name is, and Ryan Katz, and I hope you get additional spam from these mailto links. You're not to be congratulated on predicting the form factor of the iPhone, or whatever you take pride in, any more than SolarPix is to be congratulated on getting a photo of Kate Middleton retrieving her morning paper from the front steps. Grow up and get a real job, all of you.

Scrabble from MacGameStore.com

I recently bought Scrabble for OS X on the MacGameStore.com site. I have to say that I disrecommend both the Scrabble game itself and the MacGameStore company that sold it to me. The game crashes randomly and frequently and there's no Save so you lose the whole game. I'm posting this here in the hopes it will help somebody before a purchase, as you won't see this on their review site (see below).

I bought Scrabble on Christmas Eve for my daughter and by Christmas night I had counted a half a dozen crashes or so. Emails to MacGameStore went unanswered for a few days, which is understandable during the holiday season, but what I think is bogus is that they didn't post my Review of the game which was negative because my experience was negative. How are other potential customers supposed to get a fair set of reviews if they censor the negative ones? It was balanced and fair, I think, and intended to help future potential buyers. In fact when I went back to look at reviews they had actually removed several of the ones that were there, and somewhat negative (mostly criticizing the game for lack of network support).

I won't be buying anything else from them, and I'd stop short of recommending them to anyone else. I know good customer service when I encounter it, and they simply did not provide it.

Below is the text exactly as I posted it to the Review page (I had the foresight to copy/paste it because I could tell from their policy statement that they were unlikely to post it on their site). Bear in mind that I had already paid and created an account just so I could post the review, and I had already emailed their support team and waited a couple of days for a reply.

To: reviews at MacGameStore.com
From: Glenn Reid, paying customer

I bought this game on Christmas eve and although it's kind of fun to play, it has crashed a half a dozen times and lacks some basic features that would make it a much better game.

For example, if you could Save a game in progress, or even better, if it auto-saved every time you made a move, then the crashes would be a bit more tolerable because you could continue on. But there are other scenarios where Save would be a welcome feature.

It's basicaly unusable for multi-player, though it offers that feature. It needs to support network play for that to be viable. Though you can play by "not looking", this is unrealistic, and not a good playing experience because you need to study the board while the other person is thinking to truly play Scrabble.

All in all it was not worth the $20 and I didn't hear anything back from the company via tech support on the crashing issue, so I'm posting this review. I see there is an "approval" process. Hopefully that doesn't mean "screen out bad ones". I'll post this on my blog if that's the case.

Here is the less-than-helpful response I got from their tech support team after waiting 3 days; my email to GameHouse.com so far hasn't received a human response (though it's only been half a day).

> I just bought a copy of Scrabble and though I am somewhat enjoying
> it, it has CRASHED 4 times on me in the space of 1 day; I just bought
> it last night! I saved the crash log from the last time if anybody
> there wants to see it.
>
> Given that the multi-player mechanism isn't very good (it should play
> over a network) I would like to return the game for my money back,
> since it is not working properly. Please let me know how to proceed.

Please contact Gamehouse, the creator of this product for technical support
issues regarding Scrabble.

http://www.gamehouse.com/support/

Thanks,

The MGS Staff

------------------------
Macgamestore.com
1404 Laguna Cove
Hutto, TX 78634

If this is helpful to you, leave a comment on this blog posting.

Back to Blogger

I've moved my blog back to Blogger from Bubbler. Sigh.

Not there are any of you readers left, but I have mapped the URL "blog.glennreid.com" here and that will let me move the blog again some day without a huge disruption. So depending on how you got here, click that link and then bookmark it (or RSS it, or delete it, or whatever).

Thanks for all the fish

I'm starting a consulting business. The web site isn't there yet, but email me at glennreid dot com for more information.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Apple iWeb - initial impressions

I was prepared to be "intimidated" by Apple's iWeb, since after all I left the iApps group at Apple to build network software, including web publishing and blogging, and this is right smack in my new territory.

I bought a copy of iLife '06, mostly to get the new versions of iMovie and iPhoto, but also to check out iWeb....

My biggest initial reactions:
+ the templates are visually stunning, as expected from Apple
- you're locked in to your template; you can't change it later
+ very cute to use transparent corners to produce "rotated" photos
- nice font use, but they rasterize rotated text, making it unsearchable
- they upload whole HTML pages; it takes forever to upload
- it takes forever to load/view the pages, too
- your pages are saved locally; there's no way to edit remotely

All in all, it feels like they took Pages (or maybe Keynote, judging from the Inspector) and taught it how to save in HTML, which is nice—but not at all, in my view, the right way to go about web publishing in the new millennium.

The two biggest problems are really the same problem, twice over. You can't change the template, meaning that if you get sick of your pages, you have to completely redo them. And you can't customize your template (at least not that I've found) so you live with it.

It's a lot better than, say, FrontPage. But I think everyone's pages will end up looking the same and they'll be stuck on web.mac.com.

I feel better, now that I've seen it, and the initial awe over the clean, beautiful templates was gradually replaced by a sense that it is architecturally not the right way to go about it.

I have code lying around somewhere that I wrote that rotates photos and leaves transparent corners; may be time to dust that off and put it to use...

TurboTax rocks

I'm doing taxes tonight, and I have to rave about TurboTax.  It is a great, great program, and it really doesn't have to be. People would use it even if it was marginal, because it's so much better to use a computer than pencil and paper to do taxes.

But Intuit, year after year, keeps making TurboTax dramatically better.  It keeps getting easier to use, faster, and simpler.  That's no small feat.  My hat is off to those guys. It's one of the few programs that actually makes me smile at all the good ideas that are lurking within it, the attention to detail. It is just plain great software.

I've you're not already completely converted to TurboTax, I recommend that you get a copy and do this year's taxes with it.  Even if you use a professional, risk the $39 to do it yourself and see how your return compares to the tax professional's. If they are within $39 of each other (or if TurboTax saves you money) you should skip the professional help next year and just use the software.  For one thing, it imports the previous year's tax return so you have less work to do than the first time you use it.

Caveat: I use the Mac version, and have since it used to be MacInTax, before Intuit acquired them. I don't actually know if the Windows version is as good, but I'm assuming that it is, since the same company is behind both versions.

"white list" vs. "black list"

There are two basic approaches to filtering or moderating content. They are called "white list" and "black list". Each is, in a sense, the opposite of the other. A "black list" is a list of things (bad words, IP addresses, photos, etc) that you want to filter out. A "white list" is a list of things (people, IP addresses, etc) that you define ahead of time, and only things on that list can get through.

An example from the spam email industry. A black-list approach is to, say, filter all incoming messages looking for "Viagra" or "Home Loan" and act on any matches, perhaps moving them to a special mailbox for suspected spam. A white-list approach might be to only accept email from people who are in your address book. Period. If they're not on the white list, the mail doesn't get through. The "challenge/response" email filters are a white-list approach, where people can put themselves on your white list by proving they are a human being (not a robot) by typing in some characters, etc.

The white-list model is much safer (better for children, for example), but much more restrictive.

In the world of user-contributed content to web pages, it is trickier because there is no single recipient to make these decisions. Something posted to the web goes to "everybody". So this becomes an issue for the site administrator.

A white-list model requires human intervention of some sort: content can only go live if someone has approved it. A black-list model can be easily automated, but it is also easily circumvented (alternate spellings of "bad words", or substituting the digit '0' for the letter 'O' for example).

A third model that is gaining popularity in the world of online communities is the idea of site visitors reporting objectionable content. This is, on the one hand, a lazy way to do black-listing: wait until somebody is offended by it. It is also prone to abuse, in cases where the content is not truly objectionable, but someone wants to be a nuisance.

There is no clear winner in terms of approach. If what you want is to block "most" spam product advertisements posted as comments to a blog, maybe a black-list model works okay, because it greatly reduces the volume, though some legitimate content may be filtered out, and some bad content may be missed. Since this type of content is usually automated, having a human moderator going through it is time-consuming.

On the other hand, if the problem you're addressing is a malicious user uploading extremely objectionable content to an unwelcoming audience, a black-list approach may not work at all, because of the repercussions if bad content is missed by the automatic filtering.

No Escape from Spam

I'm irritated at Microsoft. I try to be neutral on platform issues, despite preferring a Macintosh myself, but I'm totally irritated with Microsoft. Here's why...

It used to be that if you were careful with your email address, you wouldn't get any spam. If you didn't put your email address on a web page, or didn't fill out forms on questionable web sites, you could go years without getting any spam. I am careful about email addresses, and for years I didn't get any spam on some addresses that I keep very private, and share only with, say, my extended family.

But that's all changed now. All you need is to email someone who is running Windows (which is, of course, most of the world), and if they add you to their address book, you are a sitting duck. Sooner or later, if that person gets a virus, or even some other "legitimate" program gets hold of their address book, you are now on a spam list -- forever.

So your email experience can be ruined simply by having friends or business associates who use Windows, and who are perhaps not savvy enough to keep their computers completely clean of viruses FOREVER.

This bothers me because Microsoft could easily fix this. They could easily fix a lot of the problems that plague Windows, but they choose not to. Why, I don't know. But they could make the address book encrypted or otherwise unavailable to viruses and trojan horses. They could make mouse movements and keystrokes unavailable to programs other than the frontmost app, thereby preventing spyware from being able to function. They're not doing these things, despite years of abuse and fairly obvious solutions.

All of my previously sacrosanct email addresses have been compromised. I don't have any left that don't get spam. This really irritates me, because it isn't my fault. It's Microsoft's fault, actually. They are directly responsible for my receiving spam, and I don't like it.

Friends don't let friends run Windows, I guess. Or at least they don't email their friends who run Windows.

Here is a signature file that you might use in your email program:

---

If you are running Microsoft Windows, please do NOT add me to your address book. Thanks.

Fear of "bad content"

Almost every customer we talk to has a similar fear of "bad content" appearing on their site, if users are allowed to participate and upload things.

There is no inherently easy answer to this paradox. If you want, and allow, user participation, there's no guarantee that it won't be abused in some way. One can imagine all sorts of things that "might happen".

The answer boils down to two things, in my mind: pragmatism, in dealing with real problems, rather than imaginary ones, and tools, that give the site owner some control over the process through which users can participate and upload content.

These two things balance each other: tools can be put in place before "something bad" happens, but you can't know if they prevented abuse or if there just wasn't any impetus to abuse the system. And there's always the possibility that the perpetrators will find some way around the safeguards.

So the balance is in anticipating as many problems as you can, and being poised to deal swiftly with anything that comes up. And, of course, the tools to be able to detect and address any kind of "bad content" that might be feared.

In my experience, abuse is rare, and the benefits of participatory media far outweigh the potential negatives. Even dissenting voices are to be encouraged. It's just those misguided "hackers" that present a real challenge, not unlike the challenge of terrorism: it's almost impossible to prevent terrorist attacks, and perhaps the best way to avoid them is simply to avoid creating a world in which a terrorist feels the need to attack.

The addictive quality of Browsing

Browsing can be addictive, let's face it. Whether it's shopping (online or brick-and-mortar), "surfing the web" from the old days, or traversing a social network site, the temptation of clicking just once more to see what might be there can be almost irresistible.

This is a good thing.

Addiction, in a lesser, slightly diluted form, is simply motivation. If someone is motivated to traverse a site and learn what's there, and to truly participate and add value (posting comments, buying products, rating photos), the value of the site increases exponentially.

This is why web-based, hyper-linked, visual, experiential web sites are the perfect way to deliver a community experience; it can truly draw everyone in, even those who just want to browse...

Should I Stay?

A key ingredient in forming a community is to provide a reason to stick around, or a reason to come back. This is true of a backyard barbecue as well as a web-based community site.

If the premise of a site is clear, and the benefits can be seen or even just imagined, it might be enough to create a sense of wanting to stick around.

Sheer activity is another way to accomplish this: if people are showing up to a party, you're tempted not to leave just yet. If you can see a community growing on-line, you're curious to come back to see how much it has grown, and what interesting people might have joined. Or if the site itself is changing and growing, offering more functionality, that can keep people around too.

Searching and Browsing

The word browsing has a popular meaning that for most Westerners brings to mind the idea of going through a book store, or a retail store, looking around, interested, but not exactly shopping for anything in particular. You're looking, but you're not feeling goal-oriented.

Searching, on the other hand, is goal-oriented. You have something in mind, and you're looking for it as specifically as you can.

These two concepts are interrelated and co-dependent, but they are two distinct concepts. It's hard to search for something without doing some browsing, but you can in fact browse without really searching.

Consider the use of a popular search engine, like Yahoo or Google. You're combining these two concepts. You type in search criteria, and what you get back are search results, which is a misnomer. There is no such thing as a single result to a search. What you're really getting back is a subset of the information that's available, and you're invited to browse that subset of information.

Apply the same thought process to, say, people on Match.com, a popular dating site originally built by some friends of mine, Sterling Hutto, Thede Loder, and Piyush Shah (and others, of course, but I'm name dropping so I get to pick the set of names)....

In Match.com you know you're not looking at all of the world's population, you're looking at the subset who have registered with the site. So you're already browsing a subset of the world's population, just by entering the site. But you probably will narrow the search a little bit by constraining the browsing to male or female, and perhaps apply an age range.

This is where it gets interesting. Are you searching, or are you browsing a filtered list? I claim they're the same thing. That the concept of search is actually just the act of applying criteria to the process of browsing. How you traverse the data, how you actually do the browsing, is independent.

For example, Google gives you search results, a set of short descriptions of the pages it has indexed, and link to each. It presents them to you in "pages" or sets of 10 or so at a time, with a set of links to additional pages across the bottom. This has become a standard paradigm.

But the pages of search results are not themselves anything but a subset of the pages that they've indexed, although they are arranged in an order that makes them (according to Google) probabilistically more likely that you'll find them interesting.

Now consider a "rating" site like Hot or Not , which I didn't even know existed until I started researching this stuff. Hot or Not has a different mode for browsing: they show you each member of the site one at a time, and you click, effectively, a "Next" button to go to the next one in the list. It's amazing how addictive this is, behaviorally, since you don't know what (or who) is coming. They disguise their Next button as "Rate this person on a scale of 1 to 10" or "Yes" or "No" in terms of whether or not you want to meet the person. But rating someone as a 5, or clicking "No" is effectively "Next".

Now go back and think about Google search results, and imagine if they presented the search results to you, not in a list, as they do today, but with the actual page of the first result, with a "Next" button at the top, so you could literally look at each of the sites in sequence, one at a time, rather than poking through the list of results.

I am sure there are reasons that Google didn't choose this approach, but I use it as an example to point out that the acts of searching (or constraining a set of data by specifying criteria) and browsing are independent.

Community Building

This is a post devoted to the nuances of community building on the world wide web, which is a loosely defined category including social networking, affinity groups, fan bases, and interest groups.

The phenomena of Friendster and MySpace and Facebook have shown amazing growth and have garnered great interest. But what are they? What is a social network anyway?

A community is built around a premise. The premise behind Match.com is clear: meeting people for dating and marriage. Similarly, the premise behind Friendster and Facebook are easily discernible; Facebook is wildly popular in its target community, college students.

These so-called social-networking sites start with the premise, and try to build a community around it. There are a lot of other community sites that you've never heard of where the premise might be reasonable, but the site doesn't catch fire, for whatever reason. I think of these as speculative communities, where the premise is established (fans of "The West Wing", perhaps) and an attempt is made to establish a community around the premise.

The difference between a real community and a premise for a community is subtle, but critical.

Consider the "community" of people who are interested in Harley-Davidson motorcycles. There is, conceptually, a single, large community around this single premise. There's even a word for it: "bikers". But is it really a community? It's actually a large number of individual real communities. Local chapters of the Harley Owners' Group club. A dozen or so folks who congregate at Alice's Restaurant on Saturday mornings. The set of members of an online community, perhaps....

So there may be a single "virtual community" (the premise), but there are likely many splintered real communities, some of which overlap, some of which do not.

A real community that already exists, that needs a better way to communicate, is a much more tangible thing, and target for software, than just a premise.

Servers are the new Apps

My career has, until recently, been devoted to building applications. What this used to mean is programs that you ran on your computer do get stuff done. Photoshop. Microsoft Word. TurboTax. Excel. Most applications have been document-centric--you open and save documents, usually on your local hard drive.

All that has changed. Even Microsoft is starting to build the venerable Microsoft Office suite as a service instead of an old-style application.

What does that mean?

It means, fundamentally, that you should quit thinking in terms of documents and start thinking in terms of transactions. When you create a blog entry for your weblog, you're not "editing a document", you're posting a transaction to a database. The old way of doing this was to open your existing "web page" as a document in a "web page editor" like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, "save" your document with the new text it it, then "upload" the document.

All of that is out the window.

The word "server" is old-fashioned, but it's the closest word we have at the moment. What it really means is that your information is centralized or, as a better way to phrase it, "in the sky somewhere" and you access your data over the network, interacting with it in a series of transactions.

That makes the "server" into the "application", because that's where your data is being maintained, and it's the server that's doing the work of editing it. You're editing it by remote control, through a transaction metaphor.

What this means is that all document-centric software will be history relatively soon. I mean all of it. The idea of "open" and "save" will just go away. Photoshop will have to learn how to edit photographis transactionally over a network, rather than loading the whole thing into memory and "saving" it. Word will learn to edit text through transactions to a remote database, not a monolithic document model.

The nay-sayer in you is saying that this will never happen, yet it is already happening. Web pages are increasingly built through this model, because they are already in the sky somewhere, so the whole round trip of download-edit-save-upload makes no sense. Other document types will follow, until there is no such thing as a document or even a "file" any more.

Programming Languages

I've learned a lot of programming languages over my career. I started with BASIC, I think, back in the 1970's. There was Action! (a cartridge for the Atari 800), Pascal, DIBOL, C, sh, csh, and it's not even 1982 yet. In the 80's I learned PostScript, Lisp, and Objective C. In the 90's there was Java, C++, Perl, Python, Objective Pascal (!), and way too many conversions back and forth between C strings and Pascal strings. Now there's Ruby, PHP, and who knows what else?

Why do we (collectively) invent new programming languages? What's the point?

Well, I would say that each programming language really did improve on some shortcoming in predecessors, or at least that was the perception at the time. Some were more interesting than others.

Pascal is what's known as a strongly typed language. You can't assign a long integer to a short integer, even if the value is 0 or 1. The language won't let you. It's supposed to help you write better code. When you're learning to program, this is a good thing, which is why all of us at that time (late 1970's, early 1980's) were taught Pascal first.

You can contradict me, but I claim that C was invented, or at least rose to popularity, because it eliminated all the rules imposed by Pascal. You could cast one type of variable into another, essentially jamming anything you wanted into memory. Kind of like assembly language, which has no "types". C is powerful, like a chain saw or a sharp knife. And yes, people have hurt themselves with C, particularly in memory management, which is explicit (you allocate memory when you need it, and you free it up when you're done). People hurt themselves this way, and programs crash because of it.

C and Pascal are compiled languages, which generate machine code that runs native on the CPU. So you have to compile a C program separately to run on, say, an Intel CPU versus a Sun CPU, even if both are running Linux. This is both an advantage (fast performance) and a disadvantage (need to recompile) of compiled languages.

Java was perhaps the most revolutionary of all these languages, because it "fixed" many of the issues with C: it is an interpreted language (as opposed to being compiled) so it can run (theoretically) without modification on any kind of CPU. Sun marketed this as "write once, run anywhere". In reality it's more like "write many times, run nowhere", but the problems with Java in the late 90's were more that the toolkit kept changing, trying to emulate all existing operating systems. The language is intact, and it really is a nice language.

Java improved upon many other things missing/wrong in C, as well. Memory is "garbage collected" which means you don't have to worry about allocating it or disposing it, and you can't really have a memory crash bug, which is nice. Lack of control over memory can sometimes lead to performance issues, but on balance it's probably a good tradeoff.

My favorite thing in Java is actually the ability to glue strings together with the "+" operator (which can be done in C++ as well but it's more of a hack and requires an object type other than C strings). In Java you can just add strings together like:

myString = "this string " + 27 + " another string";

Java has become a web programming language, mostly because the need for a consistent toolkit across operating systems is greatly diminished. Server-side web programming in particular has been dominated, until recently, by Java.

Now there is PHP and Ruby and other interpreted languages designed specifically for server-side web programming. PHP is the most innovative of these, since it can live in harmony with HTML code in which it's embedded, which is a peculiarity of web programming.

Sorry about all the historical perspective here. I really was starting out to make a point. So here it is...

Programming languages are just tools, means to an end. Depending on what problem you're trying to solve, you may be able to choose from quite a few different languages. This is a Good Thing.

But when I eavesdrop at conventions and in coffee shops and I hear young kids talking about programming languages, what I hear most is, "I learned it over the weekend" or something along those lines. Ease of learning is not a good reason to use a programming language, in my opinion. Balsa wood is "easy to learn" when you're woodworking because it's soft and you can cut it with a pair of scissors. It turns out not to be such a good wood for, say, building a dresser or a bed.

What I observe is that the craft of software programming is being polluted by throngs of young people who are able to "pick up" a programming language and "hack something together" and it sort of works, because CPU's are so blindingly fast and the safety of interpreted languages with memory garbage collection means you don't really ever have to learn any Computer Science to make things work.

But the skill and the judgement of choosing the right tools and materials to build the best possible software are disappearing rapidly, in the same sort of way that house-building has turned into a profession of stapling pre-formed lumber together, and is a profession, when 150 years ago almost everyone knew how to build their own house, could cut and square timbers, and built houses that lasted many, many generations. Those skills and knowledge of materials are disappearing, too, along with the actual lumber, come to think of it.

Maybe nobody "needs" to know the difference between an 8-bit char data type and a 64-bit long integer, and maybe there's value in snap-together software. But I have a feeling that when we get to the point where everything is built out of Legos--houses, software, cars, everything--we will wish they still taught Industrial Arts and Programming in junior high school.

Razor Blades

In the computer industry, a common topic of conversation in discussions on "how to make money" is the old razor blade analogy. The idea is that you give away the printer, and make money selling ink cartridges. I think we've all been on the receiving end of that, when you realize how expensive the ink cartridges are, and how quickly you need them. "But I only paid $49 for the printer!" That's exactly how it works.

The other day an actual razor arrived in our mail at home, addressed to my wife. It was from Schick, and it's called the Quattro for Women. It has four blades ! I was sort of amazed that they'd send a whole razor, and some blades, which I knew cost something like $10 at the store. How often does somebody send you a $10 product unsolicited in the mail? Then I realized it was a gambit to try to get my wife hooked on it so she'd buy more blades. The exact same argument we constantly have in the computer industry. I actually chuckled to myself.

I suppose Schick is upset because they have early claim to the invention of the razor, by one Lieutenant Colonel Jacob Schick, in 1926. I am surprised to learn that Schick-Wilkinson Sword is now owned by Energizer (yes, the battery people) and that schick.com gives "404 not found". But I digress.

Gillette made a huge splash a few years ago with their Mach 3, which had three blades !

I remember when the twin-blade razors came out. Now that was a real revolution. It had two blades ! And they had lots of diagrams and pictures to show you how the first blade bent the hair over, and the second blade clipped it. It worked on me, and the 3-blade update even worked on me. I use a Mach 3 from Gillette to this day.

But wait! The 4-bladed razor isn't enough. Gillette fires back with the Fusion razor, which, you guessed it, has five blades ! Maybe this has something to do with Gillette's being acquired by Procter and Gamble. In researching this blog post I see now that the competing Quattro from Schick has been out since last year, but I didn't know about it. Maybe they started carpet-bombing the world with free razors because of Gillette's announcement in September of the 5-blade razor.

This is clearly getting ridiculous. I tried my wife's 4-blade razor and I can tell you it doesn't work as well as the 3-blade razor, and if I were objective and didn't like my Mach 3 so well, I'd probably have to admit that the 2-blade razors are fine, too. I don't know about you, but my face is not flat, and most surfaces that get shaved are not flat, so it's hard to see how more than two blades could be improving the situation much, especially on concave surfaces like underarms. But clearly that's not the point. We live in a culture where more is better almost by definition.

This escalation seems silly, yet there is big money chasing this industry, all because of the original concept of keeping the handle and having to buy the blades.

I'm sticking with my trusty Gillette Mach 3, and hoping that now that all these new-fangled 4- and 5-blade razors are out, my blades will get cheaper. And I have no doubt that Schick is busily at work on the 6-blade razor, and that both companies have skunkworks projects working on 7- and 8-blade razors. I can't wait.

That's Palo Alto for ya...

I had a quick dinner in downtown Palo Alto tonight after soccer practice, with my wife and two kids and one of my daughter's friends. We went to the California Pizza Kitchen.

To my amazement, within a 20-foot radius, also having a quick dinner with their families, was Ross Mayfield, the CEO of SocialText, a popular wiki provider; David Hornik, noted VC and major investor in Six Apart; and Jeff Jordan, the President of PayPal.

And people wonder why so many amazing things happen in Silicon Valley. We could practically have put together a deal right there, over Thai Chicken pizza. Instead, of course, we all enjoyed our dinners and went on our way, spending valuable time with our families.

But who knew? Maybe the California Pizza Kitchen is the new Buck's :)

Little Things for the customer

We've made a few little changes that you might not notice unless you were one of the folks who wrote to our Support team asking for it.

One thing is that the viewer for photographs just got better. Super-large photos are now resized automatically so they display at a good size for computer screens, and there's a navigation link to click through all the photos on a page without closing and opening the windows individually. A little thing, but a welcome improvement.

Podcast RSS feeds can now be subscribed to directly in iTunes (including videos!). This is pretty cool, actually. If you drag some audio and/or video files onto a Bubbler page and click the "RSS Feed" box in web settings, you are now podcasting, and people can subscribe to your podcast directly from iTunes (Advanced menu).

Another is that the "URL" field is no longer required when posting comments. This seemed to confuse some people who don't have blogs or web sites of their own, so now it's an optional field instead of a required field. A little thing, but important.

The Files list used to also include Photos. It doesn't now; it lists the "other" files that aren't photos.

The elves are always working here at Five Across, and although you don't always see the changes, things are always getting better, and faster.