Posts

David Simon is making the rounds, responding to commentary on The Wire. First, he stopped in at Matthew Yglesias’ blog to respond to the assertion that the show is overly pessimistic. Here’s a bit of what he had to say: Does that mean The Wire is without humanist affection for its characters? Or that it doesn’t admire characters who act in a selfless or benign fashion? Camus rightly argues that to commit to a just cause against overwhelming odds is absurd. He further argues that not to commit is equally absurd. Only one choice, however, offers the slightest chance for dignity. And dignity matters. ...

Hollywood reporter Nikki Finke offers the following suggestion to her readers today: There is so much traffic on my site right now that I’m having trouble getting the system to update my stories. But keep refreshing for the latest. I’m not quite sure she understands how this whole Web hosting thing works.

Scott Rosenberg’s writing a book on the history of blogging. I have all the confidence in the world that it will be great when it’s finished and already can’t wait to read it.

I think I anticipated last night’s premiere of season 5 of The Wire more than any show I’ve ever watched. For years I listened to people tell me how great The Wire is, but I never bothered to watch it myself until this summer, when I started getting the DVDs from Netflix. Since I watched the first episode, I’ve been completely obsessed with the show. I read everything I can about it online, I listen to all of the commentaries on the DVDs, and at parties and social events I’m always on the lookout for other fans of the show so that we can wander off and discuss the details of the plot and compare our favorite scenes, characters, and seasons. ...

This morning I was thinking about all of the objects in my life that beep at me, and all of the different beeps that they emit. My iPhone rings when someone calls, rings differently when I get a text message, and beeps when it finishes downloading email or I plug it in to sync. My Tivo beeps and blorps constantly. Adium beeps, although a bit less after I told it to stop beeping whenever any of my contacts signed on. My car stereo beeps when I turn off the car in order to remind me to remove its face plate and take it with me. The car beeps if you turn it off with the headlights on. The dishwasher beeps when it’s done, as do the clothes washer and dryer. The refrigerator beeps if you leave the door open too long. The timer on the stove beeps when time runs out and the oven beeps when it’s finished preheating. The microwave beeps. The rice cooker plays a little song when it’s done cooking some rice. Any number of objects beep when their batteries get low although oddly enough, my iPhone does not. ...

The New York Times ran my favorite article so far from this election season on January 2. In it, economist David Leonhardt took a stab at describing the economic philosophies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton based on the policy proposals they’ve made on the campaign trail. This is the sort of reporting I’d like to see a lot more of. The article had all of the attributes of the best political reporting we could hope for. The information is new, it’s useful to voters trying to decide among the candidates, and it’s the sort of analysis that requires both knowledge of economics and research to evaluate the candidates’ positions and see where they shake out philosophically, and it leaves you wanting to learn even more. In a campaign season distinguished mainly by coverage of the horse race, real analysis deserves to be recognized. ...

Tim Bray predicts continued explosive growth for Ruby on Rails, and Joe Gregorio counters by saying that growth in Ruby on Rails has already plateaued (as he predicted), and has some graphs to back it up. It’s inevitable that Ruby on Rails growth will plateau, Tim gets at perhaps the biggest reason why in his post predicting continued growth. He notes that developers on other platforms are paying attention to Ruby on Rails and figuring out how to apply some of the Rails goodness to their own frameworks. As people find Rails-esque features available in platforms they’re already familiar with, they’ll be less likely to learn Ruby and migrate to Rails. ...

Now that it’s 2008, let’s see how I did in my predictions for 2007: Web applications will continue to become more like desktop applications. This turned out to be trivially true. JavaScript libraries continued to improve, and people added more and more desktop-like features to their Web apps, but I don’t think this was a particularly interesting year for innovation in Web interfaces. Comet looks intriguing, but this was more a year in which the industry consolidated its gains rather than really pushing the ball forward. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Google Gears and its equivalents in 2008. ...

Ars Technica reviews the responses of Presidential candidates to a question from Common Sense Media on violent video games. All of the Democrats responded, and only Mitt Romney responded from among the Republican candidates. Bottom line is that all of the candidates appear willing to sign legislation regulating video games, although some are more enthusiastic about it than others.

Here’s a UI design consideration I hadn’t previously encountered, from a discussion of the on board trip computer in the Buick Enclave: The display has a perfect location in the gauge cluster, right where the driver can see it. But the controls are located just below the radio. I guess I could get used to it, but I still have to hunt around to select one of four same-sized buttons. This mid-cabin location has another disadvantage that GM engineers might not have thought of: I’m using it so often (every couple of minutes) that my wife started asking me things like “Why are always playing with those buttons?” and “What are you doing?” and “Would you just stop already?” If the buttons were on a stalk (more on that later) I could press them to my heart’s content without having to undergo the Spanish Inquisition. ...