Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Weblog

Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 09:43:24 -0800

(via frijole)

A poem by beat poet Gary Snyder, as published in today’s New York Times:

Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon,

Because it jumps like a skittish horse and sometimes throws me,

Because it is poky when cold,

Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents,

Because it is flighty,

Because my mind flies into it through my fingers,

Because it leaps forward and backward, is an endless sniffer and searcher,

Because its keys click like hail on a boulder,

And it winks when it goes out,

And puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;

And I lose them and find them,

Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted and vanish in a flash at “delete,” so it teaches of impermanence and pain;

And because my computer and me are both brief in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,

Because I have let it move in with me right inside the tent,

And it goes with me out every morning;

We fill up our baskets, get back home,

Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.

Indie Relief

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:41:00 -0800

Birdfeed, the Twitter client Neven and I made, is participating in Indie Relief, a great project Justin Williams and Garrett Murray put together to raise money for the Haiti earthquake relief efforts. All sales for participating applications on January 20, 2010 will be donated to a charity doing work in Haiti (in Birdfeed’s case, Doctors Without Borders). There are a lot of fantastic developers participating, so this is a great opportunity to discover great new iPhone and Mac software while helping a good cause.

"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a..."

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:09:00 -0800

“I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time…It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber.”

- Brian Eno (via Eric Case)

"It may have been a fine cookie. But, since no single person played a central role in its creation,..."

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:41:00 -0800

“It may have been a fine cookie. But, since no single person played a central role in its creation, it didn’t seem to anyone to be a fine cookie.”

- Malcolm Gladwell: The Bakeoff

For years now, whenever the subject of open source product design has come up in conversation, I’ve mentioned this 2005 Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker piece about Steve Gundrum, a tech-minded Silicon Valley baker who decided to pit three software development methodologies (open source, XP, and traditional hierarchical R&D) against each other in a battle to develop the ultimate low-fat cookie.

If you’ve followed the history of projects like Chandler, you’ll probably recognize the “Dream Team” of expert bakers convened by Gundrum as his “open source” group falling into the same sorts of traps (a lack of coherent vision, a reluctance to discount any idea, an obsession with novel and exotic techniques, a mounting frustration as individual contributors struggle to be heard). In the end, they turn in a passable but uninspiring product, while the traditional R&D team wins the competition by acting on a bit of clever insight from its leader.

Cookie baking isn’t a perfect analogy to software development, but I’ve always loved this article because it cleverly illustrates why open source tends to produce competent products that no one really loves, while the traditional R&D approach used by companies like Apple produces the iPod and iPhone. Plus, you learn a lot about the amount of engineering that goes into snack food.

Finn Juhl Cabinet (via stewf) Too bad this is a one...

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 07:24:00 -0800

Finn Juhl Cabinet

(via stewf)

Too bad this is a one off—I’d love to own one.

Wes Anderson’s Stop Motion Acceptance Speech for the National...

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 08:44:16 -0800

Wes Anderson’s Stop Motion Acceptance Speech for the National Board of Review

(via rgrjnr)

"Zelda is brilliant in its minimalism combined with depth. And it was all represented on the screen..."

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:36:00 -0800

“Zelda is brilliant in its minimalism combined with depth. And it was all represented on the screen in what we now think are primitive graphics, but the constraints of the hardware actually led to creating beautiful, iconic imagery. When we think of the “video game aesthetic” it’s these 8-bit graphics that stick with us more than the polygons of a decade or two later. A few pixels leave more to the imagination. Ganon in his 8-bit version at the end of the 9th Labyrinth still seems scarier to me than any incarnation of him that followed, in part because of this.”

- Adam Mathes: What is the greatest video game ever made?

It’s funny how a lot of us who grew up playing 8 bit games like Zelda now look at today’s graphical powerhouses the way adults who grew up reading books looked at TV: “It was so much more fun when you had to use your imagination!” But I think it’s true, and I think these are exactly the reasons I started to check out of the game world after the Super Nintendo. There’s a level of novel-like engagement you get in a game like Zelda that you just don’t in today’s movie-quality games.

I also love Mathes’ description of Zelda as a game about “what it was like to be alone,” because that’s exactly how it felt to me too. When you’re in a labyrinth, the game gives you a palpable sense of being alone, scared, and in the dark.

"The people who are consuming software now are a vast superset of the people who used to do so. At..."

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 07:08:00 -0800

“The people who are consuming software now are a vast superset of the people who used to do so. At one time, especially on the Mac, we’d see people chose software based upon how well it suited their requirements to get a job done. This new generation of software consumers isn’t like that – they’re less likely to shop around for something rather they shop around for anything. These are people who want to be entertained as much as they want to have their requirements met.”

- Guy English: Software Sea Change

Guy English’s thoughts on what he calls “Pop Software” mirror a lot of my own recent thoughts about the iPhone App Store, and why, in so many cases, the qualities that make people successful Mac developers are unhelpful (and possibly even harmful) in the iPhone market.

Unlike English, I’ve never really been involved in creating games or what you might call “novelty” applications. I learned my trade in the old school worlds of indie Mac software and Silicon Valley engineering, both of which are very focused on creating utility, maintaining quality, and ensuring correctness.

Since I’ve lived in New York, though, I’ve been exposed to a subtly different breed of software developer—one that thinks of software less in terms of utility and more as media. I think I first realized this when my friends at Magnetism Studios told me they were putting out a series of the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books as iPhone apps. It surprised me that that they had managed to make that happen, mainly, I think, because it would never have occurred to me to simply call the company and ask if they wanted to do a publishing deal! But it occurred to them, because they’re used to thinking of software as media.

Traditional “utility” software isn’t going away, but I think English is correct that the App Store has turned native application software into a mass medium, like the web. Perhaps this will change as mobile web technology becomes more viable for a broader range of applications and the overall market matures beyond its novelty phase, but for now, those who think of applications as content will continue to rule the App Store.

Stevie Nicks Singing “The Wild Heart”...

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:16:44 -0800

Stevie Nicks Singing “The Wild Heart” Backstage

(tedroden)

"There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better..."

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 07:02:00 -0800

“There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.”

- Plan 9 from Bell Labs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (via socmoth)

Apple IIc Scrolling Explanation (via timoni, stewf)

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:02:00 -0800

Apple IIc Scrolling Explanation

(via timoni, stewf)

"In most cases, the reason I don’t do special requests has to do with the customer’s..."

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 11:14:00 -0800

“In most cases, the reason I don’t do special requests has to do with the customer’s reason for making it. Most of the time when a customer makes a special request, it’s not about the food but about his own desire to be in control and to establish his own specialness. Making people feel special through this kind of ass kissing is one of the services that a restaurant can provide to people who need it, but it’s not a service that I want to provide.”

- Kenny Shopsin, “Eat Me: The Food & Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin”

I think anyone who has ever developed software has had to deal with this syndrome. I call it “user entitlement.”

"The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards..."

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 13:47:00 -0800

“The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here’s my recommendation: Don’t. Don’t do any of that shit, and don’t run off to make membership badges for the Treehouse Club quite yet. Instead, just iterate and ship.”

- Anil Dash: The Twitter API is Finished. Now What?

This zeros in on what I believe is probably the major reason for Twitter’s success: the rule of least power, or its informal cousin “Worse is Better”.

If, for example, you convened a standards body of experts to design an infrastructure to handle all of the world’s electronic commerce, what you would have ended up with would almost certainly be very different from HTTP, the protocol we have today. It would probably boast many more features, have some more obvious provision for state maintenance, and have a high degree of security baked in. But instead, when you purchase a book from Amazon.com, you do so using a bare bones, 20 year old protocol that has been creatively adapted for the purpose. Why? Because HTTP is simple, and thus is widely implemented and applicable to a wide variety of scenarios its creators could never have anticipated.

I think the Twitter API has succeeded where ostensibly better-suited technologies (such as RSS and Atom) have failed, for precisely the same reasons. It has grown very organically over time, and thus has its quirks, shortcomings, and aesthetic warts but it’s simple enough for even the most casual programmers to work with. It sets aside many of the Byzantine concerns that have bogged down other syndication technologies, and strips the API for accessing a stream of content to its simplest core. And it’s here, now. Like Dash, I think it has a bright future—as long as its future stewards remember what made it successful in the first place.

The Long Tail of Humor

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:00:00 -0800

I never got around to writing anything about the end of Favrd, and more than enough has certainly been written about it by now, but, since it’s gone, I wanted to take a moment to mention my friend Andrew Wooster’s similar service, Tweeteorites.

Unfortunately, I was too preoccupied with Birdfeed work to plug Tweeteorites when it was first released months ago, but it came out of an IM discussion Andrew and I had one day. We were talking about Twitter, and I mentioned a feature I have always wanted to see: a timeline of tweets favorited by people I follow. Not a Favrd-style leaderboard showing the top favorites, mind you, but a stream of everything the people I think are interesting or amusing enough to follow think is interesting or amusing. The idea came from the way Briana, my girlfriend, found almost everyone she follows on Twitter: by looking at the favorites of a few people she knew she liked, following some new people she found there, looking at their favorites, and so on. I had always wanted to create something that flattened that tree-like favorite trawling process out into a single stream.

Most people would have just nodded and said “Yeah, that’d be cool,” but Wooster, being the bad-ass, can-do kind of engineer he is, went off and actually built the damn thing! Here’s my stream, for example.

As I’ve used it, I’ve found I like Tweeteorites better than the Favrd leaderboard for the same reason I like Foursquare but not Yelp; or the reason I like the Last.fm page that shows what my friends are listening to, but not actual music recommendations; or the reason I like my Delicious network or Tumblr dashboard but not Digg. The latter services are usually only reliable ways to find the broadest possible stuff, because things have to appeal to the masses to bubble up to the top. The former services, however, show me what individual people whose opinion I respect think is cool simply by allowing me to observe them appreciating (if this sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve written about this principle before).

A perfect example of the kind of “long tail” humor I tend to find through Tweeteorites that would fall through the cracks in competing services is the following tweet, by Twitter user @mary_block:

In order to find that funny, you would have to realize, as I did, that Caravan of Dreams is a sort of dorky, overly sincere, hippy-ish vegan restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village. Seeing that tweet, favorited by my friend Frank, gave me that same special chuckle of recognition midwesterners must feel when MST3K sneaks in a reference to some obscure Wisconsin burger joint. I would never have found something like that in the broad, Leno-esque world of the Favrd leaderboard.

So, if you haven’t tried Tweeteorites yet, or have tried it and just thought it was a bad Favrd knockoff AND HOW DARE THEY, give it a try for a week or so. You might be surprised how much it grows on you.

8 Kilomètres (via sarabethhayden) A French New Wave trailer...

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 06:36:00 -0800

8 Kilomètres

(via sarabethhayden)

A French New Wave trailer spoof of “8 Mile.” Part of a series of Stella Artois ads. I love the background music—a jazz take on Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.”

"There’s this problem, which is, programming is so much of an intellectual meritocracy and often..."

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:15:07 -0800

“There’s this problem, which is, programming is so much of an intellectual meritocracy and often these people are the smartest people in the organization; therefore they figure they should be allowed to make all the decisions. But merely the fact that they’re the smartest people in the organization doesn’t mean they should be making all the decisions, because intelligence is not a scalar quantity; it’s a vector quantity. And if you lack empathy or emotional intelligence, then you shouldn’t be designing APIs or GUIs or languages.”

- Joshua Bloch, quoted by Peter Seibel in Coders at Work (p 203) (via wka)

Tibor Kalman Florent Poster (via jlangenbeck) I only had the...

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 10:18:00 -0800

Tibor Kalman Florent Poster

(via jlangenbeck)

I only had the opportunity to go once before it closed, but even I miss Florent. How many other places do you know of that would serve you steak frites at 4 AM?

The Jam: In the City Introduced by Tony Wilson, who I love.

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:29:28 -0800

The Jam: In the City

Introduced by Tony Wilson, who I love.

Apple Retail “Easy Pay” Video (via frijole)

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:55:59 -0700

Apple Retail “Easy Pay” Video

(via frijole)

“Twitter Peek” Dedicated Twitter Device (via...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:29:00 -0700

“Twitter Peek” Dedicated Twitter Device

(via 60gritbeard)

From the very beginning of the development process, I always wanted Birdfeed, the iPhone Twitter client that Neven Mrgan and I built, to feel more like like a telecommunications app (think SMS or email), than a frontend to a social web service. I think time has shown that this was the right way to think about Twitter’s future. As Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey himself has said, “Twitter’s a success for us when people stop talking about it…[when] people just use it as a utility.” More recently, I really liked the way Paul Graham explained Twitter’s importance:

Twitter is important because it’s a new protocol. Fundamentally it’s a messaging protocol where you don’t specify the recipients. It’s really more of a discovery than an invention; that square was always there in the periodic table of protocols, but no one had quite hit it squarely.

While the gadget blog I linked to above may still sneer at Twitter as a pointless tool for narcissists, I think the emergence of dedicated Twitter devices only further prove what Dorsey and Graham are saying: that Twitter (or whatever it evolves into) is the future of communications.