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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: August 2005 (page 2 of 5)

Equal time

Tim O’Reilly responds to Phil Ringnalda’s post publicizing O’Reilly’s participation in the search engine spam game. I was particularly interested to see his response because his company has so much credibility that they never even needed to say anything like, “Don’t be evil.” Everybody already knows that O’Reilly isn’t evil. Now w’re confronted with a case where O’Reilly’s behavior does seem a bit evil. Anyway, after a list of observations, Tim boils it down to a key question:

It’s pretty clear that the practice of “cloaking” — that is, hiding links so that you’re selling only the page rank — is illegitimate. But what if someone pays you for a real ad, even if you know that they are paying you primarily because of your page rank rather than your targeted audience? As long as there’s no deception as to the nature of the sponsored link, and a legitimate opportunity for click through, isn’t this still an ad?

He then goes on to post the questions that follow from those, and attempt to answer them. Here’s his conclusion:

In business and life, however, things are rarely simple, as Phil notes in his comments on “violent ambiguity.” Net-net: I’m uncomfortable with these ads, and have tasked my team with coming up with an alternative as soon as possible. These ads are running under a long-term contract, and we’ll think hard before renewing it. We’ll also ask 3Genius to remove the links to the overtly deceptive ad that I discovered. However, if we were to shut off this type of advertising today, we’d also have to shutter many of the O’Reilly Network sites.

Google Talk

As was widely rumored, Google has released its instant messaging client, Google Talk. The download is small and the installation is quick, and the UI is rather simple as you might expect. I haven’t even used the instant messaging features yet, but I’m pretty enamored with its functionality as an incoming email notifier for Google Mail, which I’m currently using for nearly all of my personal email. Feel free to ping me if you like — my ID is rafeco.

Update: I’ve been IMing with a couple of people via Google Talk. It is as you would expect — small, clean, simple. I like it better than most other IM clients (even Trillian, which I use for AIM and Yahoo). Right now it doesn’t turn your smileys into graphics, it just turns them blue. I wonder if that’s just a stopgap measure or if Google is philosophically opposed to smiley-munging. Time will tell.

Another update: this Search Engine Watch article provides a good roundup of what Google Talk offers, including a useful chart that compares Google Talk’s features with those of other leading IM clients. They rightly point out that unlike Gmail, which revolutionized web mail, or Google Maps, which was a quantum leap ahead of other online mapping sites, Google Talk does not blow you away right out of the gate.

I think the killer feature from a user standpoint is Google’s decision to use XMPP as their IM protocol and thus open their service to any XMPP (Jabber) client. They have also thrown down the gauntlet before the leaders in the IM space to interoperate via XMPP. Hopefully they’ll respond by doing so, the lack of interoperability in the IM world has irritated me for a long time.

Good news for democracy in Iraq

Eric Umansky notices the following today:

Only the Journal highlights a crucial bit of procedure: If two-thirds of the population of any three of Iraq’s 18 provinces vote no in a constitutional referendum, then the political process goes back to square 1, requiring not only a new draft constitution but a new transition parliament. So, how many provinces are Sunni-dominated?

Is there anything better to get Sunnis to embrace politics than to give them the ability to torpedo a Constitution that they strongly object to? I’m pretty certain that there are at least three provinces in Iraq that are dominated by Sunnis, who will have a huge incentive to vote, regardless of whether they love or hate the government. This is the most hopeful sign I’ve seen in some time.

Here’s a map of Iraq’s provinces. A bit of research reveals that Sunnis have a majority in Anbar, Salah ad Din, Ninawah, and Diyala.

The ownership society

Mr. Jalopy has some interesting thoughts on what it means to own something. Inspired by the outrageous cost of a replacement part for a Chevrolet pickup truck, he writes:

With the rise of DIY, hardware hacking and the rise of basement tinkerers, perhaps this is the time to demand our rights to truly 0wn our equipment. It’s like DRM. When I pay for things, I want to own them. I won’t buy Itunes tracks, because I find it offensive that I need to learn and play by a set of arbitrary rules foisted upon me. Just as I am able to play 8 tracks and 78 RPM records, I know that I will always be able to play a CD, but I don’t have that feeling when buying an Itunes track.

Similarly, I hate not being able to get inside my MacMini or Ipod. To not be able to get inside, to not have schematics and to not have the required special tools, is to give up a critical piece of ownership. To be Maker friendly or hacker friendly, also means that you have a servicable platform for repairs.

Ain’t that a shame

Looks like O’Reilly has added its name to the list of companies whoring out their PageRank to search engine spammers. I expect better from them.

By the way, don’t miss the comments on Phil’s post, inspired by the fact that Shelley Powers mentions that she has the same links on her site and that they help her make her car payment. I guess my position is that publishing those links on your site isn’t the most unethical way to earn a buck, but it is unethical. Publishing these links makes the Web a little bit worse for everybody. I guess a person could rationalize it by saying that the things that make a site a worthwhile spot to put those links in the first place adds value to the Web, and so it’s justifiable to post those links and offset some of the value being added to the Web in exchange for profit, but I still don’t like it.

My current thinking on Iraq

Last week I attended the local vigil in support of Cindy Sheehan organized by moveon.org at the behest of my neighbor. About 100 people showed up here in Raleigh, which was more than I would have expected. Even though I sympathize with Cindy Sheehan, who is trying to deal with the fact that her son died for a cause that she doesn’t beliieve in, I was a bit ambivalent about the vigil, because I’m not a committed member of the “leave Iraq now” camp.

To me, the gravest indictment of the Bush administration is it has put this country in a situation that suggests no sensible, feasible next steps to move forward toward ending the war or actually making things better for Iraqis. Despite the fact that I follow the news diligently, I honestly have no idea what’s going on in Iraq, other than that the government is trying to write a constitution and lots of people are dying.

Here’s what I can say for sure. There are lots of armed camps in Iraq, and none of them can keep the peace. Some of them are actively trying to subvert the peace. Counting offhand, we have the coalition forces, the new Iraqi military and police forces, various militias affiliated with political movements, and of course the insurgency, which includes former Baathists, al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists, and who knows who else. Oh, and then there’s the mercenaries and the criminals.

It seems to me that the fundamental problem is that neither the occupation forces (us) or the government of Iraq or the two working together are strong or cohesive enough to clamp down on all of the other armed groups to create anything resembling a stable society. This is complicated by the fact that many of the people in Iraq’s governments are affiliated with varioius militias, and the fact that the Iraqi military and police are rife with people who aren’t loyal to the government.

So the question becomes how to fix the problem. It seems to me that the most rabidly pro-war camp doesn’t have a solution to offer other than keep doing what we’re doing. That course of action has failed over the past two years. We need to try something else. The most rabidly anti-war camp recommends that we simply pull up our stakes and leave. Setting aside the moral responsibility we have for abandoning the Iraqis to a civil war, I don’t even know whether this would save us lives in the long term. The blowback from leaving Iraq to descend into anarchy could stay with us for decades.

The “set a timetable” camp seems to be growing. I guess the idea is that if you give the Iraqis a date upon which we will leave, you placate some of the insurgents whose goal it is to kick America out of Iraq, and you force the Iraqis to get serious about figuring out how to protect themselves. The downside, of course, is that if the Iraqis aren’t ready to protect themselves when we pull out, it could very well lead to civil war.

Fewer and fewer people seem to be saying that what we really need is more troops. In a fantasy world, putting a few hundred thousand more troops into Iraq for peacekeeping would be the ideal solution. There’s no political will to draft Americans to do this job, though, and the Bush administration isn’t going to do what it takes to get foreign troops either. I think that if the goal is a stable, independent Iraq, this course would be the most likely to get us there. Too bad it’s not going to happen.

So what are we left with? I guess if I were elected to the Senate tomorrow, my recommendation would be to set a timetable. I don’t love that idea, but it seems to me that it’s the least bad option among those available to us.

Earn $250,000

The editors of BoingBoing are offering $250,000 to anyone who can provide empirical evidence that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Good luck!

Ruby the gateway drug

The current bit of nonsense floating around among people who think in Manichean terms about programming languages is that Ruby is going to kill Java. Like many other Java developers, I’m not buying it. I think Ruby will be quite successful, but it’s silly to say that Ruby will kill Java. Obviously, Ruby isn’t going to kill Java in the enterprise. Java is legacy at this point, it’s carved out a place in the family of languages that will live forever among Fortran, Cobol, and Visual Basic. There’s just too much code out there behind too many crucial systems for Java to ever go away.

But that’s not really what people mean when they talk about “killing” Java anyway. They mean Java will lose its relevance as a community where interesting, innovative things happen as the innovators move to Ruby. I don’t think that’s going to happen either.

As has been pointed out many times before, Ruby on Rails is basically a port of the state of the art in Java Web application development to a dynamic scripting language. It is more than that, of course, but it was designed to bring tiered architecture, the MVC pattern, and easy object-relational mapping to Ruby.

Those are all staples of the modern J2EE developer, so couldn’t Ruby on Rails serve as a gateway to working in Java? There are lots of capabilities that are provided by commercial or open source Java-based libraries and frameworks that are not yet baked into Rails. If you’ve developed applications with Ruby on Rails, once you’ve learned the Java syntax, you’ll feel quite at home writing Web applications for the Java platform. It was a huge step to move from PHP or Perl CGI to Java. I made that step myself, and getting up to speed took a long time.

Ruby on Rails provides the perfect intermediate step. Of course, for many types of projects there will be no need to bring Java into the picture, but if it does become necessary, knowledge of Ruby on Rails becomes a huge advantage.

In many ways, I think that Ruby on Rails is the best development yet for Java developers. It brings more people into the MVC-centric, test infected, object-relational fold, and it gives us a platform that we Java developers can learn that retains all of our best practices but gives us the implementation speed advantage of a dynamic language. I don’t know about you, but I’m much more like to port my PHP applications to Ruby on Rails than my Java applications.

RSS version 3

I just noticed on Slashdot that Jonathan Avidan has announced RSS version 3. I’m just going to sit back and watch the fireworks on this one.

Update: There’s a different proposal for RSS 3.0 from 2002.

Serendipitous communities

The New Yorker has a little article about how a message board posting about loneliness on an unrelated message board turned into sizable community thanks to Google’s indexing. I’ve been fascinated with the way communities take on lives of their own in surprising ways on the Internet, and that’s one of the reasons I had been so reluctant to support comments on this site. At some point, if things go well (or poorly, depending on your point of view), the comments sections of weblogs become less about discussing the posts and more about people with a shared interest in the site talking about whatever they want.

The article is about a more extreme case. One person posted about being lonely to a popular message board about video codecs, and thanks to Google’s PageRank algorithm, that post became the top result for “I am lonely.” So lonely people just started showing up and started talking to each other.

Back when I wrote one of my CGI books, I had all of the examples from the book online, mainly so that I could test them and make sure that they worked. One of the examples was a message board application, and in truth, I wouldn’t hesitate to call it the world’s worst message board application. I didn’t look at that part of my site for months (maybe years), and one day when I was looking something up for a reader, I noticed that people were posting on the message board. I have no idea how they found it or what they expected, but there were real people posting to a message board that I had assumed nobody knew about, much less actually read. People really do just need somebody to talk to.

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