Posts filed under 'Main'
I realized today that when it comes to programming, I’m a bit like a stick in the mud.
I remember when I first made the jump up to HTML4.01 from whatever cock eyed layout we were using back then. Then came learning CSS and I struggled but adapted.
I quickly forgot all the Perl I knew as soon as I found PHP. Then I just stopped.
I’m great when it comes to PHP, MySQL, HTML, and Javascript – it’s the new stuff that I’ve been reluctant to learn.
Give me a web server and the first thing I do is install cPanel and webalizer – even though they’re both very outdated. Even the tools I use are a bit outdated – opting for editplus and wsftp still.
The world is changing, people are using Ruby and postgresql now. Xhtml and Jquery have replaced html and regular old javascript. But I haven’t updated my ways.
To be honest, I just haven’t had the time. I still get to choose the structure of any site I work on, and it’s just way more productive for me to keep going LAMP than to learn something else.
What about you? What made you finally learn and use a new technology? Did you do it on your own or did you do it as part of your job? What are the trade offs of productivity vs learning a new language?
September 16th, 2008
The more I’ve been thinking about the current presidential race, the more I’m realizing that Obama isn’t going to win. Come November, John McCain will win the white house and America will still not learn its lesson.
This was our year Dems. After the last 8 years of Bush, we democrats were licking our chops at the chance to retake the white house. The mid-term elections came and we re-took control of congress. America had had enough of this administration and they were exercising their voice. Things were looking great.
We’re still going to lose, and there’s really nothing we can do about it. As long as McCain and Palin are allowed to outright lie and change whatever facts they want, the Democrats can’t win.
But we’re winning you say. Recent polls show that Obama has a few point lead on McCain. That’s the problem. How can it only be a few points? I just don’t see it.
Looking at all the newspaper articles, senate voting records, and candidate speeches, how can this race even be close? It doesn’t make sense.
McCain is an echo of George Bush – the current president who has a measly 30% approval rating. That explains 30% of McCain’s votes, but what about the other 20%? What the hell are these people thinking? Do they want 4 more years of this crap?
Palin is a creationist who is against all forms of birth control, yet she’s being hailed as a step forward for women. Are you serious? A woman in the white house is great, but her views serve merely to further repress woman’s rights. The anti-abortionist Palin said it was her daughter’s choice to keep the baby. Bristol gets a choice, but the rest of America shouldn’t? Makes sense to me.
McCain is pro business and pro Bush. Put some tights on him and he’d be the perfect sidekick. One need only look at his voting record (when he managed to actually vote – McCain missed more senate votes than any other senator) to see that he voted with Bush over 90% of the time.
He calls himself a war hero, often touting that he’s more experienced to manage the Iraq war. I don’t see how he can even mention the Iraq war though, having only voted in 4 of the last 14 senate measures concerning it. How well do you think he’ll handle a war that he’s too busy campaigning to even vote on?
I’m also not too sure about the usage of “hero” here. A “hero” is somebody who saves lives. McCain got shot down and captured. It seems to me that all he did was endanger more lives by failing in his mission. Failure doesn’t make you a Hero. It just makes you a veteran like every other soldier. Either way, military service doesn’t really matter to me when it comes to being president.
What matters to me is technology, business, innovation, and the economy – all of which McCain fails to understand. He’s pro patents, pro DRM, anti net neutrality, hates economists, and is in favor of regulating the internet. This is the man who introduced a bill that would require websites to be held criminally responsible for the comments on their sites.
This is a man who voted against the GI bill, against social security, and against raising the minimum wage.
This is a man who completely changed his position on everything as soon as he was upgraded from senator McCain to candidate McCain. While the senator spoke out against drilling in America, the candidate urges that we do it. The Senator voted against the Bush tax cuts, but the Candidate wants to make them permanent. This is the senator who once responded to a letter I sent him with “We’re sorry but Senator McCain doesn’t have the time to address the concerns of those outside of his voting district.” Senator McCain only cared about Senator McCain, what do you think Candidate McCain’s main priority is?
You’ve probably seen the McCain ad where he bashes the bridge to nowhere, bear DNA program, and woodstock museum as “pork barrel spending”. Were you also aware that McCain actually voted in favor of the DNA program, and wasn’t even present for the votes on the bridge or Woodstock museum? Last time I checked, “doing nothing” didn’t count as “taking a stand against wasteful spending.”
Speaking of spending, if I have to hear Palin talk about putting the state plane on eBay one more time I’m going to start pulling out hair. WHy has this been in every one of her speeches? Sure, she put the plane on eBay, great. But guess what? It wasn’t her idea – it was state policy made almost a year before she took office. Furthermore, it didn’t sell on eBay. It sold through a broker after sitting on the auction site for 2 months and costing the state over $60,000 in payments on the plane and listing fees. The would have saved that money had they simply gone through a broker in the first place.
Sure, she fought against the bridge to nowhere project, but that didn’t stop her from requesting $453 million in other earmarks. That’s almost $800 per person living in Alaska.
That’s a lot of lies, but despite all those McCain will still win the election.
It has nothing to do with Obama being black, or Muslim (by the way, he’s actually Christian.)
It has nothing to do with any of that. When Americans go into the polls, they’re going to vote based on the lies they’ve heard on TV – and as long as McCain and Palin are allowed to say whatever they want, people will believe them.
Others will vote along the party line like they’ve been doing since they voted for Eisenhower – having never noticed the changes in the parties since Nixon.
Doing the research is more than most Americans can be bothered with.
After all, I could spend a few hours researching the actual facts about the election, but then I’d miss tonight’s episode of Prison Break on Fox.
America didn’t learn its lesson the last 4 years, and we’re not going to learn it the next four either.
September 15th, 2008
Somebody I was friends with in elementary school just passed away recently. I never spoke to him after elementary school, even though we graduated together.
Anyway, it was a wake up call to me. I’m only 27, I’m way too young to be thinking about death – yet I am.
That’s some scary stuff that most people my age just don’t want to deal with right now, but we probably should. Hell, my dad is around 60 and if he’s got any plans, I sure don’t know about them.
Thinking about death just isn’t fun, so I can see why many of us just don’t think about it.
What about you? Have you made any plans for your death?
Vacaria Update: Apparently Steve was the 3rd member of my graduating class to pass on. We lost one to a motorcycle accident, one to cancer, and one to drugs. It’s sad – we’re too young to die.
September 12th, 2008
Back when all the hype was new, I pre-ordered a copy of Spore from Amazon. Now that I’ve got it, I noticed it has the Rootkit DRM installed on it. Basically, installing Spore installs what can be described as a virus along with it. This virus runs in the background every time you start up your computer, and it doesn’t get removed if you uninstall the game.
As if that’s not restrictive enough, EA also limited the game to 3 installs – each one phoning home to check if you’re allowed to install it. For people like me who still play games that are well over 10 years old (for nostalgic value) that means I eventually won’t be able to play Spore. Who’s to say that in 4 years EA will keep up the verification server? That will render my copy of the game useless.
I’m not buying Spore, like I thought I did. I’m only renting it.
I honestly don’t know if I should install this or not, as the only way to remove the rootkit is to re-format your computer.
What would you do?
By the way, I’m not alone. There’s over 1500 negative reviews on Amazon.
September 9th, 2008
I’m in a very cynical and nasty mood today – perhaps related to the DDOS attack that’s happening against one of my websites right now. I think I’ve got it handled though (if you target me at the domain level, i’m just going to re-route all that traffic back to you :))
anyway… I’ve been looking at the TechCruch50 and it seems that most of the companies fail from the same thing most startups fail from: they don’t solve a problem and they have no path to revenue.
let’s take a few examples:
blah girls sounds like nothing more than a comic or a cartoon. How is this new? This is nothing special.
Tweegee is aimed at “tweens” which tells me 2 things: actual tweens will want nothing to do with it, and they won’t get more than $0.25 CPM for any ads on it. Tweens don’t have money, and as MySpace has proven, they don’t click ads or buy stuff from them. They also don’t want to be tweens, they want to do what the older kids are doing. All this will do is drive more people toward MySpace and Facebook.
Banking for kids? You’re kidding me right? Kids don’t have jobs or money. My middle school tried this once, and it failed miserably – despite them even giving us $5 and a free pencil for opening an account.
hangout should go hang out with Tweegee (and maybe even Shyrk too) so they can all fail miserably together. Of course I haven’t seen it yet, but it looks like a SecondLife ripoff. They’re claiming without privacy fears and what not, but come on can you really tie into social sites and eliminate privacy concerns? That’s a bigger oxymoron than “Microsoft Works” or “Airline Food.”
I’m not really sure what LiveHit does, but they use cool words like “velocity-based tracking and dynamic-predictive modeling.” It’d be nice if they told us what they actually do, but I know how some VCs have a tendency to favor fancy words and powerpoint presentations over actual business models – so hey, take your money now while you can.
Quant the News is another one of those companies that “was formed to develop and deploy advanced textual sentiment analysis applications that leverage its unique, AI-based natural language processing and data mining technology.” Again, some great fancy words that don’t tell me a damn thing about what you do.
Seriously, every time Techcrunch50 and Demo roll around I feel like starting a bunch of companies based around a nonsensical domain name and a few social APIs and seeing how much money I can get. Somebody else’s API + Adsense is NOT a business model. When are we going to see something that actually does something useful.
Here’s the questions I’d like to see them all answer:
1.) What unique unsolved problem are you solving?
2.) What’s your path to revenue (and you can’t say adsense.)
If you’re thinking of investing in some of these companies I have a better offer for you. Give me the money, and in 12 months I’ll give you back 1/2 of what you gave me. I guarantee you’ll get more ROI with my plan.
September 8th, 2008
If you’re like me, you pay most bills right away when they come in the mail. You’ve probably seen all those “renew your subscription to” letters come, and just paid them. It’s pretty standard. Have you ever looked at the little coupon though and compared it to the expiration date on your magazine?
For those who don’t know, your subscription expiration date is listed on the mailing address label of your magazine. If it’s not, then they’re violating US laws.
Anyway, the publishers must be wanting money lately, because last week I received renewal forms for MacLife, MacWorld, InformationWeek, and Sports Illustrated.
The only problem? My MacLife expires in 2010, MacWorld in october 09, information week in Febuary, and SI in 2011.
So why are they sending me renewal notices now? Simple: Most people will pay them. It’s technically not a scam, as they just increase my subscription length – but I’d rather hold on to the money myself instead of giving it to the publisher. Wouldn’t you?
September 8th, 2008
I keep laughing at stupid news articles advising not to download Google Chrome because it’s just Google’s way of gathering more information about you.
If you’re a journalist working on such a post, please pay attention:
Chrome is open source – look at the code, you’ll see that it doesn’t send any such data to Google.
Despite this fact, I’ve still seen at least 15 articles from places like Wired, Guardian, computerworld, national business review, etc all claiming otherwise.
Do journalists not do research anymore? I know it’s fun to just run with whatever story sounds good, but next time you might want to make sure what you’re claiming is actually happening.
If you’re curious about what data Chrome actually sends, you can look at this post.
September 5th, 2008
One of my friends just asked me where I read some of these crazy things I talk about from, well mostly RSS feeds that constantly flash across my browser while I’m working. Here’s what I’m reading (all links are to the RSS feeds)
Ted Dziuba – He’s a general asshole who used to work at Google and now runs pressflip. He’s good and telling you why certain web2.0 startups suck.
TheDailyWTF – Great stories about programming mishaps.
Techdirt – Mike usually has a great take on all things technical. Mostly patents, copyright, lawsuits, etc.
My Demoxi Pipe is a Yahoo pipe of all the privacy, security, and identity theft blogs that I monitor closely for work. I just realized that it may be interesting, so check it out. It’s also got some voting blogs there too.
Freaknomics blog. Hey, I loved the book and the blog is just as good. It’s just a shame that the NYT won’t let them publish a full feed. I hate going to the site to read it.
Matt Cutts is head of Google’s webspam team, but he also blogs about gadgets and other web culture stuff.
Fark pre-dates Digg in user submitted content, and is still vastly superior in humor.
Of course I read Slashdot and Wired too.
So that’s what I’m reading. What are you reading?
September 4th, 2008
Marc from BrandLabs and I were talking about business today, and he introduced me to a term called HiPPO. HiPPO stands for “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion” and it’s a great acronym to describe a phenomenon that occurs in a lot of companies. HiPPO occurs when employees are afraid to challenge the ideas of their bosses.
Often times the CEO of a company knows what’s best – that’s why he’s in the decision making position. Sometimes though, his ideas aren’t always the best. This usually happens when somebody in management is making a decision in an area where they don’t have much experience. It’s these times where the boss is counting on everybody else to guide him, and it’s these times where you shouldn’t just blindly agree with him.
CEO’s come up with bad ideas too, and as an employee it’s your job to let them know when they do. Bad companies run with bad ideas. Good companies run with good ideas – even if the person who came up with it doesn’t have an office with a window.
Take a look at your company. Are you currently slaving away on a project that you know is destined for fail? Do you know a better way to do it? Can you back up your ideas with numbers or research? If so, why haven’t you spoken up? This civil rights lawyer in Indianapolis will fight for your equal rights in the workplace.
Don’t let the HiPPO consume your company.
August 27th, 2008
I must admit, I’m not a very big Digg user. By the time most stuff gets to the Digg homepage I’ve already read it from it’s original source. It’s part of my job to monitor social media, and as such I see a lot of articles every day.
I’m starting to notice an interesting trend in Digg though. Most articles on the front page are from sites that have a Digg widget on the site. How much is this little Digg widget (I have one) actually helping the articles though? My guess is that it’s a major factor in a website getting on Digg.
Here’s why:
The other day I submitted an article to Digg and then monitored what happened to it.
After 27 seconds, that article was near the bottom of page 2 of upcoming articles.
After 1 minute it was at the bottom of page 4.
After 2 minutes, page 13.
Call me crazy, but I have a hard time believing that people search through 13 pages of articles deciding what ones to “digg.” There’s no way in hell more than a handful of people saw this article.
Does this mean that the best way to get on Digg is to have a large following of people clicking your “Digg this” button?
I know that the creme always rises to the top, but I’m not talking about the viral articles here, or the Scobles or Arringtons. These people have followers who not only click their “digg this” links, but also try to submit their article. I’m talking about a normal unknown blogger who just happens to write something good. (yes, it can happen) It seems to me like nobody will see their articles.
Don’t take this as me being bitter that none of my stuff gets on Digg – I’ve gotten on Digg and Fark and everything else before and I’m not really obsessed with it. Other than SEO there’s really no benefit to it (certainly not in people clicking ads) and I don’t care about SEOing my blog. I just find it interesting to examine what makes it and what doesn’t.
It seems to me that there’s a bias toward sites that already have pre-existing communities. That’s well and good, but there’s lots of good stuff out there from unknown people too. How can that stuff get noticed? Social media and news aggregators are still in an infancy, and whoever can solve this problem will certainly have room to succeed. Maybe that’s why sites like stumbleupon are doing so well.
August 26th, 2008
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