Posts

Dave Johnson on why he’s migrating his build scripts for Roller from Ant to Maven: I was a Maven hater and resisted it for a long time but over the years Maven has gotten much better, it’s well supported in IDEs and as far as I can tell, Maven has replaced Ant as the de facto build system for Java projects. If you want new developers be able to easily build, debug and run your code via command or their favorite IDE then Maven is the way to go, and that’s especially true for open source projects like Roller. ...

The good news is that Tivo is releasing a new DVR. It looks awesome. I have been a Tivo customer for many years, in fact, Tivo is perhaps my favorite product of all time. The bad news is that Tivo is a perpetual money loser, and lost 730,000 subscribers last year. For many years I’ve had a DVR provided by Time-Warner hooked up to the second TV. It is the worst product I use on a regular basis. The interface is terrible, the remote is ungainly, and the performance of the device is pathetic. But what we’ve learned over time is that people are not willing to pay the premium for the Tivo experience – the cable company DVRs are good enough for most people. I doubt that many people even know that the Tivo is so much better. ...

Here’s Scott Berkun on The Cult of Busy: The phrase “I don’t have time for” should never be said. We all get the same amount of time every day. If you can’t do something it’s not about the quantity of time. It’s really about how important the task is to you. When I was in college around 20 years ago, I remember a friend telling me that he tried to read the Wall Street Journal every day. I told him I didn’t have time to read the newspaper, which was a ridiculous statement, because I always had plenty of time to play Tetris in the dorm or go out and eat cheap Tex-Mex. He told me that it wasn’t a question of time, but of priorities. I don’t know that I ever claimed not to do something because I didn’t have time again. This was one of the few really useful lessons that I really picked up early. ...

Fred Clark argues that on health care reform, Democrats are playing Jeopardy while Republicans are playing Family Feud: At the recent health care reform “summit,” Republican leaders made it clear that they’re not interested in playing Jeopardy. That would be a losing proposition against President Ken Jennings. Obama was eager to show that he really does have the right answers – cost containment, near-universal coverage, lower premiums, better quality care, deficit reduction. All of that is well covered in the plan he’s pushing and any attempt to challenge him on the facts would be doomed. ...

Robert Wright breaks down the numbers on Toyota’s safety record given all of the recent reports of uncontrolled acceleration: My back-of-the-envelope calculations (explained in a footnote below) suggest that if you drive one of the Toyotas recalled for acceleration problems and don’t bother to comply with the recall, your chances of being involved in a fatal accident over the next two years because of the unfixed problem are a bit worse than one in a million — 2.8 in a million, to be more exact. Meanwhile, your chances of being killed in a car accident during the next two years just by virtue of being an American are one in 5,244. ...

About a month ago I asked what people would use to build a new Web service from scratch, without providing any real details on what the application would do. People seemed to all agree that basing the service on JSON was the best way to go, and that’s the route I took, so I thought I’d write it up. In this case, I have a PHP front end talking to a Java back end that uses Spring and Hibernate. The application in question is the administrative console for a test harness for a SOAP Web service. We use a third party SOAP service and needed the ability to provide responses that are guaranteed to always be the same for the purpose of creating tests. So my test harness stands in for the third party service, requiring only a URL change, and returns the data managed via the client application to which my question referred. ...

So what happens when vast numbers of social networking citizens find another law that they consider irrelevant? Anil Dash on the political implications of millions of people uploading derivative works with no regard for copyright law.

ArsTechnica explains why they ran an experiment Friday that hid their content for people running ad blocking software. It’s a very grown up and pragmatic explanation, and it’s almost too obvious to even quote. The point I found interesting was the discussion of the advertising death spiral – when advertising impressions go down, sites have to take on ads that pay more per impression – those are the ads that take over the whole page, hide the links you want to click on, and so forth. Those ads are awful for users and many publications are running them on the front page. If I ran an advertising-funded site, and I could increase (or maintain) revenue by either shutting down ad blockers or presenting more obnoxious ads to the people who aren’t running ad blockers, the decision would be a no-brainer. I’d prefer to inconvenience the people who think they should get my content for free every time. ...

Meeting social and environmental standards is not optional. I firmly believe that a company that cheats on overtime and on the age of its labor, that dumps its scraps and its chemicals in our rivers, that does not pay its taxes or honor its contracts will ultimately cheat on the quality of its products. And cheating on the quality of products is the same as cheating on customers. We will not tolerate that at Wal-Mart. ...

In yesterday’s post about URL literacy a little debate broke out in the comments about whether it’s worth it to add usability features for novices if they make life more difficult for experts. On that note, last month’s Dwell had an article on universal design, a school which argues that designers should be trying to create designs that work for everyone, regardless of their level of experience or capabilities. This is the position I was arguing in the comments, and is an approach I’m fond of. I generally reject the notion that experts and novices require wildly different interfaces or devices, although obviously there are outliers in any group whose tastes may differ. ...