Apr 12 2008
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From zetahydrae:
Holy balls. I can’t believe that they aired this on mainstream television; it’s way too sensible and accurate for them.
Wolf Blitzer gets three pundits on the air to discuss the latest political spectacle, Clinton and McCain ganging up on Obama for “belittling” the people of Pennsylvania. This was after a speech wherein Obama said that the people of Pennsylvania were bitter at Washington, left behind in economic frustration. It’s an utterly ridiculous situation, and Clinton and McCain get thoroughly served, especially by Cafferty at the end.
Maybe there’s hope for “news” TV after all.
Apr 11 2008
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Phish - The Squirming Coil (Live at Madison Square Garden, New Year’s Eve 1995)
I almost forgot about 90’s Friday! It’s been a Phish week for me, and this is a great performance of theirs. Enjoy.
(I’m also proud of my geek skills: it’s a 10-minute song that I encoded to 10,182,797 bytes, just 295 KB below the Tumblr audio-size limit, by using a LAME ABR of 133 kbit/s. And it sounds great.)
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“ Somebody quote that so I can reblog it!
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“ I feel so proud of myself. Apparently a search for “naked girls playing squash” brought my site. It must be pretty far down the results, though. I bet somebody was disappointed.
— Dan (squashed) on Google Analytics
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“ I’ve met both professionals and (mostly) students who believe that when class or work is over, it’s time to take off the designer hat. Design is not a hat, it’s a full body tattoo. It does not come off.
— Nicole Guinta: Design on Your Own Time. We see the same effect with programmers: the ones you want to hire are the ones who do side projects at night because they love the craft, not the ones who clock out at 6 and never care about code outside of work.
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The new iPhone SDK bubble
When Apple announced the iPhone SDK, they launched the next bubble. […] There’s just one problem: there are no engineers to write these apps. There are maybe 3000 Cocoa engineers on the planet, and most of them work for Apple. Three years ago I wasn’t sure how I was going to feed a family writing Macintosh software. Now I turn down more money in a day than I’ve made in my entire career. People in the valley who are eyeballing the huge money cloud are coming to the resource pool and finding it dry. There simply are no engineers.
I’ve been half-assed-trying to learn Cocoa and Objective-C for a few years, but from the perspective of an outsider, it’s an ugly, verbose language and a massive, barely documented framework with no substantial guidance, examples, or community.
I recognize now that it’s better than it looked. But that’s how it looks from the outside, trust me. And the truth isn’t much better. There’s still only one book worth getting, and there’s still absolutely zero public community.
For those who were willing to look past the initial discouragements and actually learn Cocoa and Objective-C, their prospects were… writing only desktop software, only for the Mac, in the golden age of platform-agnostic web applications and the dusk of most desktop software. Not a very appealing prize.
And good luck ever getting a job with that skill. Most employers probably think Objective-C is a typo on your resume, and you meant to say something like “object-oriented C”.
“So, Mr. Arment, uh… does this mean you know C++? We’re looking for someone with 15 years of .NET experience.”
But iPhone development is incredibly attractive — for the first time, any smart person can get instant distribution to the hottest platform in the massive mobile phone industry, in which millions of people are willing to pay money for simple applications. (To a Web 2.0 programmer, this is novel.)
You keep 70% of the revenue, and you only need to pay Apple $100 for the right to sell your app. Once. Know what it takes to make an application for a Verizon phone?
The iPhone SDK was finally the motivation I needed to learn Cocoa and Objective-C — for real this time, with an actual, attainable project (or three) worth building.
Now, a few weeks later, I’m finally becoming fluent in the Objective-C syntax and some of the Cocoa conventions. I’m matching the standard naming and formatting styles. I’m not clear on autorelease yet, but I finally know when I’m supposed to retain and release. And I’m actually understanding all of the code now instead of just pasting example code blindly. I’m making progress.
And when I finally get good at this, I’ll have unintentionally qualified myself to develop Mac software as well. That’s a nice side benefit, but it wasn’t good enough by itself to overcome the learning curve.
The real attraction here is the iPhone. The hardware is amazing, the SDK enables a ton of functionality, and the app marketplace is going to reinvigorate the nearly-extinct independent developer.
Apr 10 2008
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Just got back from my afternoon trip to ‘bucks (see yesterday). I’m not sure what is going on, but I don’t like it. Every day for the last year we’ve curved the line around the rope/divider, inside. Today is the 2nd day the masses have decided to forgo the clear divider and take the line directly out the door, into oncoming pedestrian traffic on 42nd St. Why? It’s so organized on the inside. Why are we doing this? We know how it’s been done. It worked that way. Just because it’s nice weather, doesn’t mean we should take it outside and wreak havoc on the sidewalk. I turned to the lady behind me and said “this isn’t right.” She didn’t care.
I drew a diagram to better illustrate my point.
I love this. This is exactly the kind of everyday minutia that I think about all the time.
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“ We’re spending large sums of money to kick highly qualified gays or lesbians out of our military, some of whom possess specialties like Arab-language capabilities that we desperately need. That doesn’t make us more safe.
— Barack Obama (via squashed)