Posts

I was more impressed by Amazon.com’s iPhone application before I learned how it works. Even so, pretty cool.

Patrick Mueller has written a pretty good developer-centric overview of where Android stands today. I’m eager to see Android make it onto more handsets, and for the UI to pick up more polish. I find that over time, user interface polish takes on more and more importance for me, and the iPhone’s nicer interface insures that I’ll be sticking with it until Google makes some pretty major improvements to Android, and until they find a hardware partner who designs devices as well as Apple does. ...

Never write code in Java when a Perl script will do. Never write Perl when a simple shell script will do. Never write a shell script when a single shell command will do. When you’re programming, the relentless pursuit of simplicity nearly always serves you well. The specifics of the lesson were that by using curl and cron you can successfully avoid the use of Quartz, Commons HttpClient, and LWP, along with a vast horde of other dependencies. ...

You have to appreciate the honesty of MySQL’s Michael Widenius: Don’t expect that all critical bugs that you may have encountered in 5.0 to be fixed in 5.1. Even if we have fixed a big majority of the bugs from 5.0 some really critical ones still haven’t been addressed.

I was very sad to read that Doris Dungey, a.k.a. Tanta, one of the two bloggers at Calculated Risk, has passed away. She represented everything that’s good about blogging. Erudite, witty, and incredibly informative, she did a great job of making the complexities of the mortgage market understandable to outsiders like myself. Nobody who followed her work over the past two years has been terribly surprised by the great unraveling we’re seeing unfold. ...

The New York Times has a long article on the Netflix prize and collaborative filtering. Very interesting to anyone who’s obsessed with collaborative filtering, as I am. What I found particularly interesting is that customers who pay Netflix but don’t regularly send back movies are bad for the company: For Netflix, this is doubly important. Customers pay a flat monthly rate, generally $16.99 (although cheaper plans are available), to check out as many movies as they want. The problem with this business model is that new members often have a couple of dozen movies in mind that they want to see, but after that they’re not sure what to check out next, and their requests slow. And a customer paying $17 a month for only one movie every month or two is at risk of canceling his subscription; the plan makes financial sense, from a user’s point of view, only if you rent a lot of movies. (My wife and I once quit Netflix for precisely this reason.) Every time Hastings increases the quality of Cinematch even slightly, it keeps his customers active. ...

Stephen O’Grady asks whether we’re still producing documents? Very thought provoking – go read it.

Bruce Schneier’s essay on the fading future of ephemeral conversation is thought-provoking: This has changed. We chat in e-mail, over SMS and IM, and on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. We blog and we Twitter. These conversations – with friends, lovers, colleagues, members of our cabinet – are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails. We know this intellectually, but we haven’t truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we’re being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later. ...

Anand Rajaraman says that any startup that’s not growing is dying, and that if a startup isn’t going to succeed, it may as well die quickly. It’s outstanding tonic for the Sequoia RIP: Good Times presentation that seems to have been absorbed by everyone in the Internet business. I would guess that in five years, very few of the startups that decided to hunker down and wait for better times will be around. ...

Lauren Weinstein considers the likelihood of success of Google’s new SearchWiki feature. Here’s the official announcement from the Google blog. The basic idea is that users will be able to provide feedback on search results, ranking them up or down in the list and entering comments on them. It’ll be interesting to see whether spam and other forms of abuse render this feature useless. I can see the black hat SEOs burning the midnight oil this weekend to figure out how to exploit this feature. ...