March 9, 2009
I am about 1/2 of the way through Predictably Irrational and am really enjoying it. While I think much of the topics covered fall into the obvious/previously covered category, it is interested to be reminded at how predictably irrational we truly are.
The first chapter ‘The Truth about Relativity’ covers concepts I’ve known (I’ve been known to (over)use the term ‘it’s all relative’), but provides empirical evidence that really demonstrates how predictable irrational behavior is. It really puts ‘keeping up with the Jones’’ in perspective.
The second chapter covers the concept of an anchor price. Our perception of what what something is worth is based on our first purchase or near purchase of that item, again with some interesting experiments to support the ideas.
Chapter Three covers the cost of zero, or why we alter our behavior when something is FREE FREE FREE!.
Chapter Four is another chapter that rings true for me. The title is ‘The Cost of Social Norms’, IE when it is a bad idea to offer to pay your Mom for Thanksgiving dinner! But for me it reminded me of my experiences developing Open Source software, and how they changed when I got paid.
I could have read the book straight through, but I wanted to take a break so some of the ideas could sink in before continuing. It is amazing how much reading you can get done when you have a sick kid sleeping on your lap all day!
February 25, 2009
I broke down and bought a Kindle.
My interested in eBooks started when a friend loaned me his Sony Reader. It was cool, but not compelling enough. The first version of the Kindle was a breakthrough, but I held off for version 2. Well, version 2 is here.
My first impression when I saw the box tucked in my front door was that that can’t possibly be the Kindle, the box was too small! The packaging is great and certainly in the vein of Apple’s minimalistic packaging. The box contains three items, the Kindle, a combined charger/USB cable, and a quick start guide. The full users guide is an eBook on the Kindle (of course).
I was immediately impressed with the increased speed of the Kindle 2 vs. the Sony Reader. The Sony’s page refreshes were so slow the menus were nearly unusable. The Kindle feels very snappy by comparison. I’m not sure how it compares to the original Kindle other than the quoted ‘20%’ faster. When reading, the Kindle 2 changes pages as fast as you could turn a page in a real book.
The built in dictionary function is very easy to use and unobtrusive. It is a great idea and shows how eBooks can be better, not just ‘as good as’ real books. The ability to search Wikipedia in addition to the current book, the whole Kindle, and Google is great. The browser is passable.
My biggest issue is that I have to go finish the paper book I’m currently reading before I can really dig into a book on the Kindle! I’ll post a more complete review once I’ve used it for a while.
And thanks to Jeff’s Kindle posts for pushing me over the edge, even though he’s sticking with his OLD Kindle. :)
February 12, 2009
I’m a little ‘uptight’ about URLs. I’ve blogged about my frustration with the Java Servlet mapping constraints before, and I’m a believer in W3C recommendations on URLs.
Google just announced a tool for Webmasters that allows users to specify a canonical URL for a single ‘page’, even if you can access it from multiple URLs. This is a nice patch for systems that don’t really conform to the above W3C recommendation but believe in the concept. It also helps clean up Google’s indexes, which is another good thing.
Since their approach is a simple tag added the the section of an HTML document, hopefully the other search engines will adopt it as well. The example from their post:
<link rel=“canonical” href=“http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish" />
January 31, 2009
I came across Appcelerator this week (thanks Andy).
Appcelerator is an open source platform that provides everything you need to build rich web, mobile and desktop applications.
From what I saw Appcelerator is a thin layer on the Javascript API making it much easier to program. It also comes with a set of pre-defined effects that can provide some quick pop to your applications.
A great feature is the ‘Appcelerator in 5 Minutes’ demo. If you need 5 minutes with it to ‘get’ it, you’re a little slow. You can pretty much learn the model in 60 seconds there. The rest is seeing the scope of functionality.
What I found even more interesting is the approach. Appcelerator views the browser as its deployment environment, and interacts with many different backends, including Java, .Net, Ruby, PHP, and more. This separation is an interesting approach and actually matches in concept what James Strachan was talking about in his post ‘JAX-RS as the one Java web framework to rule them all?’. Developing web applications consists of two parts, the UI (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Images), and the backend (Java, .Net, PHP, Ruby, accessed via JSON, REST, XML, etc). Why do we need to build them as one, or with a single technology?
As with anything, there are applications that this approach works well for (Gmail -> GWT takes an all in one approach, but does treat the browser as a ‘real’ deployment environment), and many it does not. If nothing else, Appcelerator is on my list to spend some more time with.
January 21, 2009
I use FeedBurner to track the subscribers to this blog. Google bought them a while back and are working though the ‘digestion’ process now. They are now starting to transition FeedBurner accounts to Google account so of course I tried it out. The transition was easy (but slow, took over an hour for the 4 feeds I track) and they suggested that the subscriber stats would take a few days to level out.
I checked my stats today (two days in) and only 1/2 of the subscribers are represented. Looking through the details, it looks like all the various feed readers are represented except for Google Reader! I guess it is comforting to know Google isn’t ‘cheating’ in its integration of services. In fact, they seem to not work well together at all.
I assume this will resolve in the next few days, but I do find it odd that everything else is working except Google Reader.
January 20, 2009
Today is a day of transitions. I won’t get into the politics of it, but from a technology side, the new administration is up and running.
A blog! (rss) President Obama, or at least his administration is already up and blogging on the Whitehouse website.
The details…
- RSS - The rss feed is summary only, not full text. You will have to click through for details.
- .Net - The website uses .Net. While the main URLs (correctly) keep the aspx extension out, the RSS feeds all have the .aspx extension. You can also tell by the tag ids: ‘ctl09_rptNavigation_ctl02_rptNavigationItems_ctl01_hlSubNav’
- JQuery - It looks like the Whitehouse site is using the JQuery JavaScript libraries
- Webtrends - The government is watching you…
We’ll see how the blog gets used over time. I will be disappointed if it is simply a channel for the press releases but I don’t expect the President to be blogging or twittering constantly either. I think he’ll stay plenty busy.
January 4, 2009
Paul Kedrosky posts a list of things he’s changed his mind about this year. Did you change your mind about anything this year?
I agree with several of his points: too big to fail, ignorance, blogs, AM radio, Hedge funds, Buffett, This time it is different, and oil.
While I’m not convinced that phones do not require keyboards, I’ve certainly softened on that point. My wife’s new iPhone has my jealous of certain features, but I still love the easy one handed navigation of my Treo.
There is one recurring category that I found interesting: ‘It works, until it doesn’t’. He cited Technical Analysis and Wholesale funding model. I think this is an interesting idea in the broader context. There are a lot of ’things’ that work, and work well, for a fixed period of time. Then something changes and they stop working. It is easy to get caught in that trap and not have the proper hedges in place (whether financial hedges or life hedges).
I’ll take this as a lesson for 2009: There are a lot of things that work, until they don’t.
January 4, 2009
I use Blogger to manage this blog. As someone who likes to be in control (but gets lazier over time) I use the FTP publishing option to have Blogger upload the appropriate HTML to my hosting provider so my blog uptime is not dependent on Blogger being up, and I can easily capture an HTML backup of my blog.
The one downfall to this approach is that when Blogger’s FTP publishing service is down, I can’t update my blog (without some non-trivial HTML editing). Unfortunately, the FTP publishing service has been broken/unreliable since before Christmas.
Of course, if you can read this post then it must be fixed. But for now, this post will just sit in my queue waiting to see the light of day.
EDIT: I did finally get it working. I changed from my DNS name to the IP address. Apparently, the change itself may be the key, more than using the IP or DNS. Obviously long term the DNS name is the right answer. This blog post was the best source I’ve found yet for info.
January 1, 2009
A friend of mine worked for Lehman Brothers when they imploded this fall. He recently posted a look back at his experience and frustration with how things went down. It is a great perspective to remember all the people working hard inside Lehman and other firms and companies that are caught up in larger events.
One thing I found interesting was the similarities to Enron in the number of people who had a significant portion of their net worth invested in a single firm. It is easy to sit on the outside wonder how someone could bet their entire financial future on one firm, but as he pointed out it can be very difficult to stay diversified when so much of your compensation is tied to the firm’s stock.
Some of the guys were hit very hard. A lot of the bonus is paid in Lehman Stock, part of the 401K is in Lehman, the firm also promoted personal investing in the stock. All in all, if you were with the firm for 20 years, you have a major percent of your worth tied with the company, and then it’s gone.
Again, it is easy to second guess when you are sitting outside a firm, safely away from to Kool-Aid pitcher. It should serve as a second warning to others though. Diversify, diversify, diversify.
I’m glad my friend landed in another job quickly, but it sounds like he’s still dealing with the reverberations of the meltdown. I wish him the best.
December 10, 2008
Apparently being the governor of Illinois predisposes one to get indicted. For those not familiar, the last governor of Illinois, George Ryan, was convicted of racketeering, bribery, extortion, money laundering and tax fraud.
In comes Rod Blagojevich. Not exactly a popular or successful governor so far, and now an FBI sting reveals the depth of this guy’s insanity. He is trying to ‘sell’ the senate seat vacated by President-elect Obama (the Govenor has the power to appoint a replacment).
I just read through the entire summary on The Smoking Gun and it is unbelievable. How a guy who is already afraid of indictment can have all these conversations over the phone is amazing. The audacity of his efforts to solicit a bribe are staggering.
There are tons of great quotes, but the one that made me laugh out loud was that Blagojevich considered naming himself to the senate seat because he believed that he will be able to obtain greater resources to defend himself if he is indicted as a Senator than Governor, and a desire to remake his image in preparation for a Presidential bid in 2016. REALLY? Either I get indicted and I can defend myself better, or hey, I’ll just run for President. REALLY?
