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not featured, not well-considered

Why Everyone Uses Google

Mar 21, ’11 11:12 AM

This is on PyPI, the canon­i­cal python pack­age repository.

django is second on the list

Search, index­ing, and auto­mated rel­e­vance is hard. It's often not worth the effort to shoot at bet­ter and miss.

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Android's Community Personality

Mar 20, ’11 8:32 AM

Part of what to like about Android is the devel­op­ment com­mu­nity — how peo­ple are doing out as much for fun as for profit.

One of my favorite music play­ers, cubed, has all sorts of inter­est­ing brows­ing abil­i­ties, but most off them are depen­dent on album art. The devel­oper is flat-out against sim­ple lists off music that you click through. His fans finally con­vinced him to add a list-driven menu. He named this theme Boring.

If you don't find that funny, then android might not be for you.

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Language Slide Bar

Feb 21, ’11 9:56 AM

language slider

Taken from the demo ver­sion of Dungeons.

Pos­si­ble left and right values:

  • baby coo­ing — sous chef cursing
  • engi­neer­ing func­tional spec­i­fi­ca­tion — mar­ket­ing brochure
  • politi­cian speech — gov­ern­ment bud­get meeting
  • end user license agree­ment — donut receipt
  • post-coital pil­lowtalk — mar­riage breakup
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Details Matter

Jan 21, ’11 1:12 PM

An unfor­tu­nate Web 2.0 reflection:

Details mat­ter.

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Weeds in the Android Garden

Jan 18, ’11 8:52 AM

I own an android phone, and love it. I'm a geek, I know it's geeky, and I don't have to worry about what the aver­age user thinks or wants. It was made for me.

I also read about how some iPhone devel­op­ers have a hard time because Apple keeps their gar­den tended, and gar­den­ing takes time and effort. Mean­while, I'm glad that Lev­elUp stu­dio can just update his incred­i­ble Plume twit­ter app as often as he wants–which is often, because he's aggres­sively try­ing to be the best at what he does.

Hav­ing said that, it's also good to laugh at the weeds that appear in the android market:

http://www.appbrain.com/app/the-handwarmer/com.handwarmer

I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't see such an app in the iPhone store. Unless the goal was to sell more hardware.

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Out of Touch Buffer

Dec 22, ’10 9:06 AM
  1. Enjoy a new artis­tic endeavor.
  2. I want to share this with peo­ple who also love good things!
  3. Wait, what if every­one knows about this already? I am out of touch, after all.
  4. Google.
  5. Share with con­fi­dence OR smile and back-fill missed con­ver­sa­tion references.
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Words, Words, Words

Nov 29, ’10 6:58 PM

Read­ing is my pri­mary pas­time. There's a nat­ural incli­na­tion to think that if you don't read books that you don't like read­ing. Books are great, but read­ing isn't all about books.

When I want to learn about cur­rent web tech­nol­ogy and design? Web­sites and web-derived authors: Smash­ing Mag­a­zine. A List Apart. Net Tuts. A Book Apart.

Cur­rent events apart from the day-to-day head­lines? Atlantic Mag­a­zine.

When I have to give a big pre­sen­ta­tion at work? Books. I pur­chase and read Con­fes­sions of a Pub­lic Speaker. (Great book!)

Games. Movies. Rela­tion­ships. Par­ent­ing. Eco­nom­ics. Finances. Pol­i­tics. Phi­los­o­phy. Career. Pro­gram­ming. Fit­ness. Design. Gardening.

Books. Blogs. Forums. Web­sites. Twit­ter. Mag­a­zines. Op-eds. Essays. The Boston Metro that some­one just put down in the Red Line.

And that doesn't count undi­rected read­ing of the ran­dom and inter­est­ing cor­ners of the inter­net.

And then to relax? Fiction.

All read­ing. Read, read, read.

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Spreading the Word

Nov 20, ’10 6:13 PM

I like free ebooks, but why are the free ebook feeds so swamped with bad Chris­t­ian books?

Allie Whit­man is a pro­fes­sional whistle­blower with a knack for sniff­ing out fraud in gov­ern­ment con­tracts. Con­ner Nor­man is a gifted lit­i­ga­tor and together they form Devil to Pay, Inc.

I know that book descrip­tions aren't writ­ten by the authors, so I can't speak to the actual book1, but when read­ing this mar­ket­ing text I'm reminded of the expres­sion "Can't give it away."

  1. And yes, pur­pose­fully not link­ing to the book due to this. ↩
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How to Use Your Google Account for OpenID

Aug 29, ’10 5:57 AM

Copy and paste this url into the form field:

https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id

Note that this isn't a link to a web page, it's a link to a web authen­ti­ca­tion service–you're not doing any­thing wrong when you click it and it doesn't show you a web page.

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Review of "His Majesty's Dragon" by Naomi Novik

Jul 30, ’10 1:26 PM

Brightly writ­ten, started off with ter­rific pace. Strong nar­ra­tive voice, strong tone that made the Napoleonic era feel real. Won­der­ful atten­tion to detail in the set­ting. Then sud­denly down­shifted into what I can only call the getting-ready-for-a-long-series pace. The end­ing was a com­plete surprise–not the con­tent, but: “Oh. Oh! So that must have been the end­ing. This trail­ing mat­ter is an appen­dix of some sort.”

This will prob­a­bly read bet­ter as part of an anthol­ogy, but this first vol­ume wasn’t a com­plete story. A lot of spun plot threads and side char­ac­ters intro­duced, but only the small­est sub­threads resolved. Hey, check out the excit­ing next chap­ter! Noth­ing wrong with that, but the book as inde­pen­dent entity suf­fers con­sid­er­ably for it.

I enjoyed the page by page read­ing, even the book-as-part-of-a-series, but I’m not on board for an open-ended series just now. Novik's up to six and count­ing. A lit­tle quick research on Wikipedia says that she plans to stop at nine. I’ll cir­cle back in ten years and see how that worked out.

Ama­zon link: His Majesty's Dragon

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