That John Martin

I dropped in to Thursday’s Open Coffee meeting at the Tequila Bookworm Cafe in Toronto and was pleasantly surprised. There were a bunch of interesting people doing interesting projects and lots of good conversation to be had.

Jenn was up from Boulder showing off Yallery and regaling us of the seemingly impossible amount of startup activity in her hometown. Veronica talked a little about OTR Travel. We marveled at Bunnyhero coming in at 25M uniques according to comScore’s new Widget Metrix. And I, of course, pitched everyone on my little project.

All that and good coffee. I’ll definitely make it back next week.

I’d love a snap-to-grid option on the OS X dashboard. It bothers me that my three clocks aren’t lined up perfectly, and that the space between my CPU and memory monitors is slightly larger than the space between my unit converter and my calculator.

Sometimes it’s the little things.

What am I missing? So far I just don’t get why Silverlight is going to take over the web. Now, I’ve been hacking Python via TextMate on a Mac for the previous year, so I may not be in the target audience for this, but the four years previous to that were spent inside Visual Studio, both on the client via WinForms (using ClickOnce no less, or at least the predecessor of ClickOnce, whatever that was called) and on the web via ASP.NET; I’m no CLR hater, but I just don’t see what the excitement is for.

A commenter on Dare’s post, davidacoder, said exactly what I was thinking:

This is a new attack on a standard format like HTML in the browser. We have seen them before: Java, Flash, .Net full versions. None worked. This one is supposed to work because it is 1) small and runs on more than 2) one browser and on 3) the Mac and 4) is integrated with the MS dev stack.

Everything but 4) is present in Flash already. Has Flash replaced HTML? Do you really believe that integration with the rest of .Net and VS is going to win the battle? Most web guys I know don’t know .Net, they don’t have a skillset in that technology to be transfered to the web.

Good luck, I don’t believe those were the reasons previous attempts failed. People don’t want vendor lock in. Silverlight is super vendor lock in. It is not going to fly.

Granted, WPF/E + the CLR sounds like a better deal than Flash, but it’s a better deal for developers, not users. If there were a killer app for RIAs, then somebody would’ve written it in ActionScript years ago regardless of how shitty the development environment was. People have written Doom in JavaScript, for crying out loud. If there’s an opportunity there, hackers will make it work.

The one area where Flash has been world-dominatingly successful is the one where it’s least Flash-like: video. And I would suggest that the reason it was successful there was because a) the runtime was ubiquitous, and b) it was/felt “lighter” than the alternatives, neither of which are attributes of Silverlight.

Anyway, I reserve the right to be wrong. In the meantime, go and read Mr Pilgrim’s take.

I said it two years ago, and I’ll say it again: Robert Horry is an enigma. And of course, it was from the corner.

BTW, those Raps are still in with a fighting chance. If they can just keep Vince quiet in game six…

Having trouble seeing underscores in Terminal.app? Bump the font height slightly above 1 in the font dialog in the Terminal Inspector (accessible via Command-I or the “Windows Settings…” menu item).

There was a fantastic interview on The Daily Show last night with Zbigniew Brzezinski, a member of Carter’s administration and author of Second Chance. He was very sharp and reasonable and spoke very profoundly.

In reference to the period directly after 9/11 he said:

That was the moment of global solidarity which we then squandered by a war of choice in Iraq.

The clip is below via the increasingly excellent MotherLoad:

I’ve had consistently great service and uptime from TextDrive but today set a new record. Basil, one of their admins, managed to complete an email request (marked as not urgent) to upgrade MySQLdb in around 14 minutes flat, after I was blind-sided by a new dependency in Django. Highly recommended.

Via Daring Fireball, lots of interesting bits in this Fortune article on Apple. Their sales per square foot is hard to fathom:

And not just the architecture. Saks, whose flagship is down the street, generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 — tops for electronics retailers — while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666. Audrey Hepburn liked Tiffany’s for breakfast. But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone’s lunch.

But the thing that caught my eye was the genesis of the Genius Bar:

“When we launched retail, I got this group together, people from a variety of walks of life,” says Johnson. “As an icebreaker, we said, ‘Tell us about the best service experience you’ve ever had.’” Of the 18 people, 16 said it was in a hotel. This was unexpected. But of course: The concierge desk at a hotel isn’t selling anything; it’s there to help. “We said, ‘Well, how do we create a store that has the friendliness of a Four Seasons Hotel?’” The answer: “Let’s put a bar in our stores. But instead of dispensing alcohol, we dispense advice.”

I don’t normally think of Apple being a company that would use a lot of market research. In fact I’ve read several times that they make a point not to. (And wasn’t the Newton largely a product of focus groups?) I guess the distinction here is that they are researching general market attitudes, not fishing for reactions to a design, which, as Gladwell has argued, is frequently misleading. It would be interesting to see how many guerrilla research projects of this type they conduct.

If you’re at all involved in marketing research you should definitely check out the ResearchTalk podcasts. They’re a collection of conversations, interviews, and conference sound bytes with various research industry luminaries. It’s surprisingly well produced and the hosts are very sharp. The Daily Research News Online bits in particular are worthwhile — they seem to hover around the 5 or 6 minute mark which makes for really easy consumption.

I wandered over to BarCampSydney on Saturday and it was much more fun and stimulating than I had expected. The number of startups represented was roughly equal to the number of attendees, or so it seemed.

Joel Pobar did a session on Google style scaling. It looks like those guys have put together a slick MapReduce implementation in .NET, all from a garage in Brisbane, no less. I wonder, though, whether it’ll be prohibitive tying a technology such as that to an operating system with a non-zero licensing cost.

Ben Hogan, an old colleague now part of the ThoughtWorks brotherhood, delivered a sermon on agile. I’m still not sold on forced pairing, I tend to defer to Mr Yegge on matters agile, but it was a class presentation, and loads of fun to catch up afterwards.

Mike and Marty gave a talk on all things startup. Marty was good cop, Mike was bad cop. It was loose and interesting and full of anecdotes. The one thing that stuck with me was Mike’s comments about keeping pricing simple. In industries that have complicated pricing structures, a simplified pricing scheme becomes a feature. Possibly even something remarkable, literally. iTunes with 99c songs, all-you-can-eat food and phones and bandwidth, the FreshView guys with email marketing tools at 1c per email. Definitely something to ponder…

More BarCampSydney observations here, here, and here.

Over the past couple of weeks, Beliefnet has been hosting a debate on matters of faith between Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, and Andrew Sullivan, blogger for Time and author of The Conservative Soul. (No prizes for guessing who’s arguing what.) As well as serving up many of his greatest hits, Harris has dropped some brilliant new, biting quotes, in the articulate manner one comes to expect from him.

On Benedict XVI:

The fact that the current pope freely uses terms like “reason” and “truth” does not at all guarantee that he is on good terms with the former, or would recognize the latter if it bit him. Starting with the (utterly unjustified) premise that one of your books is an infallible guide to reality is not a particularly promising approach to inquiry—be it physical, ethical, or spiritual.

On Vatican II:

Your brandishing of Vatican II is just silly, and only bolsters my argument. Are you saying that for about 1960 years Christians (including all the popes) were mistaken about the true doctrine of Christianity? Would you have our readers believe that Vatican II represents some kind of epistemological breakthrough? In reality, Vatican II was just damage control.

He even invokes the FSM:

Needless to say, your attempt to pull theism up by its bootstraps (”since God is definitionally the Creator of such a universe; and the meaning of the universe cannot be in conflict with its Creator”) could be used to justify almost any metaphysical assertion. “The Flying Spaghetti Monster who created the universe” is also “definitionally” the Creator of the universe; this doesn’t mean that he exists, or that the universe had a Creator at all. Many other chains of pious reasoning could be cashed-out in the same way: “Satan is the Tempter; I find that I am tempted on a hourly basis to eat ice cream and have sex with my neighbor’s wife; ergo, Satan exists.”

It’s a fun read. I sense defeat in Sullivan’s most recent reply — though I’m sure he wouldn’t characterize it as such — as he abandons argument and falls back to what amounts to a “just because” justification. He’s been a good sport, however. The faithful could do worse than having him championing their cause.

Ken Norton has confessed to his double space after a period problem. This is a pet peeve of mine — I’ve been known to reply to emails with the quoted text de-double spaced. The cure: watch this snippet from an interview that Scoble did with Bill Hill, Microsoft’s chief typography geek, where he talks about the evilness not only of double spacing but of underlining as well. (The Bill Hill interviews were easily my favourite from those early Channel 9 days.)

The University of Sydney, maker of fine computer scientists, has (sadly) entered into a deal with one of the residential colleges in which the college will renounce rights for some of its land and allow the university to build a new medical research centre with the proviso that it is never used to carry out foetal stem cell research. The agreement doesn’t stop the university from conducting stem cell research elsewhere, which I’m sure it will, but it’s a shitty precedent to set.

Synergy is a brilliant little software utility that allows you to share a keyboard, mouse and clipboard between not just machines but operating systems. It runs on OS X, Windows, and Linux, and it’s open source. Dave from Freshview has a short clip demoing it on his triple monitor setup.

John Paczkowski writes the greatest headlines in tech journalism. Today is his last day at Good Morning Silicon Valley. He’ll be missed, but he leaves it in the capable hands of Dr. Murrell.