This is what happens when kids like my (almost) seven-year-old son grow up. Hilarious – thanks, Liz!
Archive for January, 2005
Tim Bray points out this terrific (if long) article from Joel Spolsky from last month on software pricing. Anyone who’s at all interested in how to price software or online services really needs to read this whole article.
A sample:
And, in fact, you can’t even be sure that the demand curve is downward sloping.
The only reason we assumed that the demand curve is downward sloping is that we assumed things like “if Freddy is willing to buy a pair of sneakers for $130, he is certainly willing to buy those same sneakers for $20.” Right? Ha! Not if Freddy is an American teenager! American teenagers would not be caught dead in $20 sneakers. It’s, like, um, the death penalty? if you are wearing sneakers? that only cost $20 a pair? in school?
I’m not joking around here: prices send signals. Movies in my town cost, I think, $11. Criminy. There used to be a movie theatre that had movies for $3. Did anyone go there? I DON’T THINK SO. It’s obviously just a dumping ground for lousy movies. Somebody is now at the bottom of the East River with $20.00 cement sneakers because they dared to tell the consumer which movies the industry thought were lousy.
You see, people tend to believe that you get what you pay for.
Every time I read one of Joel’s articles I wish I was in the market for bug-tracking software so I could try his FogBugz software. Seems like a product from someone who thinks so intelligently and writes so well would at least be worth a good look.
Dan Updegrove sends along this nice interview with Mitch Kapor in news.com
Mitch has become a wonderfully influential person in the high tech Internet community, as well as continuing his role of encouraging social responsibility among us, and it’s nice to see him get more widely known.
It’s especially nice to see him give Mitchell Baker her props for her amazing quiet leadership work at the Mozilla Foundation.
I think it was like the Harry Potter of open source. You know how all the movies open with him living with his aunt and uncle, who give him no respect and lock him up? People had written off Mozilla on multiple occasions. I felt like and continue to feel like she does a remarkable job in a low-key way in shepherding that project through unique and difficult circumstances. I think the renaissance with Firefox and Thunderbird–without her this would not have happened. Mozilla was like the Harry Potter of open source. I respect her leadership, which is very low-key and not charismatic–the opposite of the Larry Ellison style. She has been effective in the face of real challenges.
Yesterday was supposed to be the second week of ski lessons this year for my almost-seven-year-old son, but we got cancelled yet again.
While the California resorts have been buried in snow, our local Northwest resorts have struggled to open at all. So far this season we’ve had either wet weather or cold weather, but not the two together. So yesterday Snoqualmie Pass ended up with nine inches of new snow, but that got topped with a quarter inch of ice and a power outage as the warming trend came in. Today the forecast is for heavy precipitation, but the snow levels are supposed to be well above the elevations of our local ski resorts.
Oh, well – we went for a lovely walk yesterday on the trail to Foster Island in the Arboretum. The bird viewing was terrific – we saw lots of winter ducks (buffleheads, scaups, hooded mergansers, goldeneyes), great blue herons, a kingfisher, and two bald eagles – one perched high in a tree as we were playing frisbee down below. Is this a great city, or what?
Last week I attended a meeting of the CalConnect Calendaring Consortium (well, I attended the first day of the meeting and then had to go off to a workgroup retreat of our Learning Technologies group at the wonderful Sleeping Lady retreat center near Leavenworth, WA).
While I’ll wait for the official press releases and reports from interop testing so as not to steal anyone’s thunder, this meeting saw significant real progress made in achieving interoperability between disparate calendar systems. Several different systems actually demonstrated that they could schedule with each other using the new CalDav protocol. That’s the most progress we’ve seen on this front in years!
It looks like CalDav is gathering a good head of steam to actually be a widely adopted protocol. This is good news, and it’s largely due to the efforts of Lisa Dusseault from OSAF, along with Cyrus Daboo from ISAMET and Bernard Desruisseaux from Oracle. Nice work, all!
Jim Goldberg at Pace/MacGill Gallery in NYC
Published January 13, 2005 Uncategorized Leave a CommentMy old college roommate Jim Goldberg is currently having an exhibit of his photography at the Pace/MacGill Gallery on E. 57th St. in New York.
I sure wish I could go see the show – Jim is an amazing and courageous artist, and he’s worked hard at his art for a very long time.
There’s a nice brief review of the show in the Village Voice.
If you’re in Manhattan, go by the gallery and see the show.
Over time I have managed to mess up my configuration of Movable Type, mostly as I tried to recover from the comment spam floods. I’m tired of dealing with errors, and with not being able to turn comments on.
So now I’ve completely reinstalled MT, using version 3.14 (the latest and greatest) at a new address: http://staff.washington.edu/oren/weblog2/
The RSS feed also has this new address: http://staff.washington.edu/oren/weblog2/index.rdf
I exported the database and imported into the new installation, so absolute URLs to previous entries have changed (this must be the result of having deleted some old entries over time).
Comments are enabled, but you’ll have to have a TypeKey identity to leave a comment.
Other changes include moving my list of blogs I read to a different page, which also includes a list of the latest links I’m interested in enough to bookmark in del.icio.us but not to write about. That page uses RSS Digest to generate the html dynamically from the del.icio.us rss feed, and the list of blogs is generated automatically from my subscriptions at Bloglines, which is the web-based aggregator I use to read weblogs. It is extremely cool that there are all of these services out there that can be used in this building-block fashion to cobble sites together – definitely an example of Levi-Strauss’ bricolage:
To elaborate on his definition of mythical thought, Levi-Strauss drew an analogy to “bricolage”: “Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual ‘bricolage’” (p. 17). The French verb, “bricoler,” has no English equivalent, but refers to the kind of activities that are performed by a handy-man. The “bricoleur” performs his tasks with materials and tools that are at hand, from “odds and ends.” He draws from the already existent while the engineer or scientist, according to Levi-Strauss, seeks to exceed the boundaries imposed by society. “The scientist creating events (changing the world) by means of structures and the ‘bricoleur’ creating structures by means of events” .
- from Janine Mileaf on Levi-Strauss, “Science of the Concrete”
Update
I realized when I looked at the link to my old home page that I hadn’t changed anything there in years, so I removed the link to my old home page from the weblog, and I’ve made the weblog synonymous with my home page. I guess that means the blog is my online home. Well, duh.
I’ve just perused the announcements of the new Apple gear that Steve Jobs must’ve announced this morning at MacWorld (why did they decide not to broadcast the session?).
The coolest new thing in my view is the Mac Mini – a G4 Mac that’s 6.5 inches square and 2 inches high for $500 – wow! (no keyboard or monitor included). I think this will sell a whole bunch for personal media servers, low cost web servers, etc.
The iPod Shuffle is a flash-memory based iPod with 512 MB or 1 GB of capacity. It’s got features that many people may like that grab random tunes from iTunes playlists and play them in random order. The feature that I really like is that it plugs right into a USB port.
iWork is the bundling of the new version of Keynote with a new word processor called Pages. These might be useful for lots of folks. I’m still astounded that Keynote doesn’t export html files, though the new version exports QuickTime and Flash in addition to PDF. I’m sticking with BBEdit and Eric Meyer’s S5 web standards presentation software.
There’s also new versions of the iLife programs (iTunes, iPhoto, Garageband, iDVD, and iMovie) and of Final Cut Express.
[CSG-Winter-2005] Chandler Westwood Advisory Board Meeting
Published January 6, 2005 Technology Leave a CommentWe had the usual Westwood Advisory Board meeting this morning. It was good to touch base with the OSAF folks, and I finally got to meet Ted Leung face-to-face (after all, he only lives just across the Sound from us on Bainbridge Island).
The agenda from the meeting is here.
Some points of interest were work on Chandler 0.5 is proceding, with a March release planned.
There’s a lot of progress on the draft CalDAV standard, and there is an upcoming CalConnect interop test and roundtable meeting in Seattle next week (that we’re hosting. We expect to actually see some folks testing initial implementations of CalDAV at that meeting – now thats exciting.
OSAF is working with ISAMET (formerly Cyrusoft) to develop a version of the Apache Jakarta Slide WebDAV server to be a CalDAV server. The intent is that this will end up as part of the main Slide distribution as much as is practical over time.
The Chandler folks are working hard on making it possible for Python developers to develop applications and extensions to Chandler – Ted’s experience on the Apache project is particularly relevant in that effort. The plan is to do both a Sprint and a Chandler development tutorial at Pycon 2005.
There was a spirited (if inconclusive) discussion of what the relationship is between Chandler and the current Mozilla calendaring effort which is also working on CalDAV. This is an interesting set of topics, particularly given Mitch’s recent blog posting titled When Browsers Grow Up.
It was nice to see Chao, Mitchell, Mitch, Lisa and the rest of the gang – we’re likely going to schedule another Chandler-Higher Ed calibration meeting before the next CSG meeting.
