Posts

The New York Times has an article on the pschology of conformity and the forces that lead people to participate in wrongdoing and what leads them to reject it and blow the whistle. Interesting stuff.

I’m glad I’m not invested in the argument over Movable Type’s new licensing terms at all, having written my own craptastic weblog software before Movable Type, Blogger, or any other package besides Radio Userland even existed. I read Jason Kottke’s post supporting the new licensing, and thought, that makes sense to me. (Even Kottke says he’s not sure which license category he fits into.) Then I read Ginger Stampley’s real world problems with the licensing terms, and they made sense to me as well. I guess the bottom line is that Six Apart had to make some pricing changes to grow their business, and there’s no way you can do something like this and not screw things up for some of your customers. If they’re smart, they’ll consider the feedback they’re getting and figure out how whether they can mend fences with some of their existing user base. It strikes me that a lot of this is just inevitable when you’re growing a business. If Six Apart is going to provide a return on the venture capital that they’ve accepted, they have to grow their revenue base a lot, and the way to do that is to sign up bunches of new customers at a reasonable price. Keeping the current base of grumpy customers is less important. I heard on the radio this morning that Rockingham, North Carolina and Darlington, South Carolina are losing Nextel Series NASCAR races (the Nextel Series is the big leagues of NASCAR), leaving Rockingham without a race altogether. I’m not a NASCAR fan but I do live in North Carolina, so I know how big NASCAR is here. It’s hugely popular, and more than that, this is NASCAR’s home turf. However, with their growing national fan base, they’re finding it expedient to dump the small towns around here and move races to big cities all over the country – that’s where the money is. The races around here draw crowds just as big as they’ll draw anywhere else, but there’s TV, and merchandising, and all that stuff to consider as well. Anyway, my point is that the local NASCAR diehards are sort of like the existing Movable Type user base. There’s no doubt that the people who looked forward to the local races are infuriated by the fact that those races are just going away. From a business perspective, though, the best way to make more money is to go nationwide. I guess the short story is that paralysis in the face of pissing off old customers is often a surefire way to prevent a business from growing. Hopefully, Six Apart can mend fences with the user base, but even if they can’t, the disgruntled folks will probably find some product that does please them, and Six Apart will probably succeed as well. That’s business. ...

The horror of Nick Berg’s beheading is perhaps best expressed in the bizarre conspiracy theories that people are taking solace in to convince themselves that he wasn’t just a random victom of brutality and hate. Within the past 24 hours, I’ve witnessed a discussion among left leaning people who are speculating on whether or not the execution was somehow staged to distract the American people from the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. I could try to explain these theories, but I honestly don’t understand them. By the same token, this morning I heard people talking about how Berg was perhaps an al-Qaeda sympathizer who was executed because he made the mistake of trusting the terrorists. I have no idea whether there’s any truth to these theories, but I suspect that the people who are coming up with them don’t know either. Apparently the idea that Nick Berg was what people said he was, a businessman who was on his way out of Iraq when he was abducted by terrorists, is just too much to take. ...

When I initially saw the pictures from Abu Ghraib, the Stanford Prison Experiment immediately popped into my head. In fact, I think the first item I posted about the pictures linked to the web site that documents that experiment. Yesterday, Slate’s William Saletan wrote a piece explaining how the Abu Ghraib situation differs from the experiment and more importantly why the abuse can’t be dismissed based on the nature of the situation. The Stanford Prison Experiment is instructive, but there’s a lot more to the story. ...

As you probably know, I’ve experimented with just about every news reader that will run on a Windows box, and more than one server hosted RSS reader as well. (I even used the old Netscape news reader that was part of My Netscape back in the day.) Anyway, after a couple of months with Feed on Feeds, which I really like, I’m considering wholesale migration to Bloglines. Feed on Feeds is simple, and great, and completely under my control. The problem is that my subscriptions list has gotten rather large, and it takes about 10 minutes to update during the day. The problem is that Feed on Feeds doesn’t have a no-brainer way to mark items read and unread, so what I usually do is update everything, read it all, and then mark all the new items as read. If I set things up so that the feeds were updated in the background via a cron job, it would be a pain to keep track of what I have and haven’t read. Bloglines handles all of this a bit more elegantly. The Bloglines Mozilla Toolkit is another compelling reason to think about switching to Bloglines. For now, I’ve moved all of my baseball-related subscriptions to Bloglines, and I’m trying that out. (Yes, I subscribe to lots of baseball-specific blogs.) If all goes well, I’ll switch over all my subscriptions. ...

Even though I haven’t written anything about the horrible video of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi beheading Nick Berg, I have been thinking about it, a lot. There just wasn’t much for me to say about the beheading (I confess that I have not watched the video). We already know that the Zarqawi group was willing to kill Iraqis with bombs, their willingness to brutally murder an American merely confirms their depravity. The questions that has really plagued me since the video was released has been, what was the purpose of releasing the video? None of the explanations that I’ve seen so far have really satisfied me. The Bush administration line on it makes the least sense – given American reaction to previous terrorist attacks, the idea that it was intended to intimidate is us certainly incorrect. If anything, Americans have shown that we are generally angered by violence against us, not intimidated. I also don’t believe that the video was intended to provoke a disproportional response that would further divide Americans from Iraqis. I think that the key to answering the question of why the video was made is figuring out the intended audience for the video. The video was originally released when someone posted it on a message board at alansar.biz (a site that’s now gone), where it would be seen by people who are interested in al-Qaeda web sites. It seems to me that the video was intended to be used as a recruiting tool for prospective terrorists – Zarqawi wants to reach out to people who feel humiliated by the fact that Americans are in Iraq (and are torturing Iraqis), and who feel powerless to do anything about it. The video is intended to demonstrate that he is willing to do something about it. ...

Want to help out children in Afghanistan? Send them some pens.

File this under Web sites you don’t want to have to look up: Poison Ivy, Oak, and Sumac Information Center. I hate itching.

An industry research firm reports that Eclipse usage is spreading like wildfire. That’s hardly surprising. Eclipse is already great, is becoming even better rapidly, and is free. What’s not to like? I’d love to know what IBM’s strategy behind commoditizing the Java IDE industry is. Is it to provide a compelling, free alternative to Visual Studio to buoy the war between Java and Microsoft, or is it to drive other companies out of the Java business? ...

Is it just me or is Muqtada al-Sadr’s Army of the Madhi turning into Iraq’s version of Hezbollah?