Potato I have

Words and the widgetification of stuff

Dave — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 10:33:12 +0000

Another welcome reminder that words are our friends, this time applied to the dogged, never as simple as it ought to be widgetification of stuff. Eighteen months into GTD, and still so much room for improvement. This simple verb chart is now at the top of my actions file, and on a post-it on the wall. By itself it looks useful; as I add my own language it will only get better. Déclic.

All these years of badgering developers to use the right words in their code, and I forget to apply it in my own pursuits.

Note that this is from some nearly lost GTD materials that look to be worth the search.

If you’re into GTD and you somehow haven’t come across 43folders, check it out now. Merlin gives geek cred to something I probably would have otherwise dismissed, and that would have been more than unfortunate. Getting this from a geek who is living and breathing the stuff makes a huge difference.

Just three stories

Dave — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 22:42:12 +0000

I missed reading Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford this past June, but it showed up on digg a few days ago and I found it pretty good. Here’s a text transcript and a youtube video (14:33). Being a confirmed story addict, I like his “just three stories” format.

I’m setting off in a new, uncertain direction myself, and so I especially appreciate this:

you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

And I share his “death is your friend” sentiment as well — is that morbid?

“a thousand tiny shackles on innovation”

Dave — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 23:42:26 +0000

The NY Times has a good portrait of another industry fighting innovation; this time, it’s real estate.

In February, [Redfin] introduced a Web site that automates the bidding process — and the commission rebates. The sale of a $500,000 house, for example, typically yields a 3 percent commission of $15,000 for the buyer’s agent. A Redfin customer would get $10,000 back.

“At that point we became a true pariah to the industry,” said Rob McGarty, Redfin’s director of West Coast operations.

Interesting to note that all this fighting to keep the current commission model doesn’t really benefit anyone:

Some economists wonder why agents fight so hard to maintain this pricing system when it is making so few of them rich. In every housing boom, the number of new agents entering the market tracks the climb in home prices. As a result, the average agent sells far fewer homes and makes less money. On average, agents earn $49,300 a year, according to the National Association of Realtors, and that is before paying for their own health insurance and retirement benefits.

“It’s a case where nobody wins,” Chang-Tai Hsieh, an associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said of the current system. Mr. Hsieh, who has studied real estate commissions, said that they did not vary much from 6 percent and did not generally change in good times or bad. He said it was a form of price fixing, but an odd one. “Consumers pay a lot of money, and even the people who do the price fixing don’t win,” he said. “So it is a colossal waste.”

Traditional agents spend very little time brokering a deal, Mr. Hsieh added. Most of their time is consumed looking for new clients, which is of no benefit to consumers. An agent working for a salary, he said, would be freed of the need to prospect and would thus be more inclined to focus on negotiating.

One of my jobs while a university student in the mid-80s was as a licensed realtor in California, and even then it seemed kind of strange that I was poring through M.L.S. books for clients when all that stuff was languishing in a database somewhere.

A consummate listener

Dave — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 22:37:30 +0000

From the Economist’s obituary of Naguib Mahfouz:

He was a perfect gentleman: self-effacing, tolerant to a fault, and a consummate listener. Into his 70s he prowled far across the city on solitary early-morning walks, typically ending up in one of the many cafés where he was greeted as a returning son of the quartier. Into his 90s he rarely missed his weekly gathering of intimates at some public watering hole. There he soaked up the endless tales of woe, the political gossip and wicked jokes that provide the spice of Egyptian life.

I don’t read many novels lately, but his Cairo Trilogy is back on my shortlist.

Open data, standard formats

Dave — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 23:39:00 +0000

Simon Phipps has an excellent post on open data formats. Looking for a connection between a lot of new desktop tools, he notes:

all of these tools have worked out that lock-in is the new lock-out

And later:

injecting the network into society removes the commercial benefits previously achieved by closed behaviour […]. Truly open formats are creating the new market, and those who attempt to subvert the trend with pseudo-openness will fail.

While my sensitivity is not nearly as evolved as Mark Pilgrim’s outrage, Apple’s mostly closed data models are a doggedly nagging annoyance in my otherwise pleasant Dive Into Mac one year ago. I know where I want to go, and over time I’ll migrate my digital life into apps and formats that make me feel like the stuff is actually mine. It would be just ideal if Apple would move in this direction faster than I do, because I am so not in a place where I want to spend time doing what Fowler did here.

But how many people understand or care about open data? Far from enough to nudge Apple in a different direction I suspect.

(via t.bray)

Jazz at YouTube

Dave — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 23:57:34 +0000

I’ve been listening to this music for twenty years, but like a lot of us I wasn’t able to watch Coltrane or Evans or Wes Montgomery. Now I see YouTube starts to have some old concerts and TV shows.

I particularly like this one of Coltrane’s Quartet playing Naima somewhere in Europe (on Arte!) in 1965. Grainy B&W, very good camera work, and Elvin Jones is literally steaming – how great is that?

What do you make of Cecil Taylor’s facial expressions after he finishes playing here?

Someone in one of the comment threads laments the extreme paucity of recorded video of this amazing era; at the moment, I’m mighty happy to have stumbled on to some of it here.

Nature and the web

Dave — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 23:03:35 +0000

Nature is not afraid to experiment with a core process — peer review — that they believe is working well, to see what the internet might bring: they are piloting one variation of an open peer review process, and have initiated a web debate (good supporting content from those links). Here’s an organization fully engaged with the question of what the web does.

From the comments on the oreilly post, a reminder that Nature was also behind the Britannica-vs-Wikipedia study last December that found W close to B in accuracy.

(via oreilly radar)

Modern day heros

Dave — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 20:47:26 +0000

I’m much more visual than aural, but podcasts are proving a really good channel for me, somewhat to my surprise. Here’s one where Cory Doctorow discusses DRM and related stuff in “Europe’s Coming Broadcast Flag” (thanks again IT Conversations), recorded at last year’s European Open Source convention. Cory is an excellent presenter, and these are important topics. To paraphrase one part of the talk:

security systems have sender(s), recipient(s), and attacker(s)
DRM is a security system that considers the user(s) — who own the content — as the attacker(s)!
users can therefore not be allowed to modify the system (so, no open source solutions)
we can’t know if a system is secure if it is not “published” (=open source)

Lots of other interesting viewpoints on copyright, innovation, etc in the digital world.

Cory has also accepted a Fulbright at USC to work on DRM.

Wiki as framework

Dave — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 13:14:44 +0000

In a comment on another post, Barry points me to TiddlyWiki. This is an interesting implementation: it’s very ajaxy and opens entries in the current page, in the context of the other entries you’ve already opened. Furthermore, all the data and code lives in a single html file that you access directly with your browser: there is no server or other software, so this is a very convenient PersonalWiki approach. Put it on a key for mobility. And here’s a clever feature: edit functionality is present when browsing via file:// but degrades to view-only with http://.

Barry also points out GTD TiddlyWiki, which is an excellent illustration of wiki-as-framework. This can serve as an easy entry into GTD, as it is a basic, illustrating implementation that can then be further modified to suit. It’s open source, and clear text on disk using basic, standard web technologies; very geek-friendly. It’s very light entry — if you’re at all interested, I encourage you to save either wiki file and start playing with it. Or save both, and look how the one was used to make the other — whether or not you call this 2.0 mashup, it’s a compelling approach to making apps.

Finally, Barry has documented something he calls PocketGTD, which gives PocketMod-like printouts of GTD TiddlyWiki. I haven’t tried it, but having GTD actions printed out in a nice, fold-up pocket booklet sounds really excellent, covering a real-world gap for those of us with nearly entirely digital GTD implementations. At first glance these things don’t fit well with my current GTD, PersonalWiki and MultipleDesktop implementations, but some of these features are compelling enough that I’m looking for how to integrate them.

Next up for Wikipedia

Dave — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 02:25:03 +0000

I found this interesting: there is a project to add semantics to MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia and lots of other wikis. The goals page is clear and concise, and here’s a sample of the kind of stuff they want to enable. There is a background page touching on RDF/RDFS and OWL, and how semantic wiki is different from semantic web.

There’s a ton of information buried in wikis; semantic annotation would make it explicit and more directly usable. One challenge is doing this in a way that doesn’t cause usability problems — hopefully anyone who can handle wiki syntax can also handle the annotations.

(via rw)

Podcasts and epiphanies

Dave — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 22:00:34 +0000

Okay, I’ve been bitten by the podcast bug. Listening, not creating. Now I’m trawling through old stuff I missed because I was still reading blogs. IT Conversations is proving valuable.

Here’s one I heard this weekend from Kent Beck on developer testing (recorded November 2004!). TDD and refactoring are the two big software development epiphanies for me in the last 4-5 years, and Beck literally wrote the book on TDD.

In this podcast Beck highlights the accountability aspect of TDD, and it resonated big time for me. I was also encouraged by his comments on his own difficulties writing tests being due to “not being a good enough designer. Yet.” I think that stance/insight would help more developers move into TDD.

This is reflections on, not an introduction to, TDD — for that, I don’t know a better treatment than his short, participatory text. I think it’s hard to really get it until you intentionally write that stupid little hardcoded implementation that you’re going to change in a minute … just after you write the next test.

Forest Whitaker

Dave — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 22:08:09 +0000

From a short profile of an actor I like a lot, Forest Whitaker, who’s just finished playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland:

On the whole, though, I think we’re dictated by our structure, our past, our environment, our culture. So once you understand the patterns that shape a person, how can you not find sympathy?

Ghost Dog is one of my favorite movies, and while it is solidly Jarmuschian, I can’t imagine the film without Whitaker. This year he’s taking his first-ever ongoing TV role, in The Shield; maybe I’ll dig around to see if French cable has picked it up.

(via rw)

What’s a blog to you?

Dave — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 21:31:12 +0000

Jorn Barger coined the term weblog, sees its original sense being usurped, and so would like to take the term back.

the unit-measure for blogging
is the blogger

Housing calculations

Dave — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 20:35:32 +0000

I just read this NYT article from a few months ago; buyers in the bubble today are more than ever dependent on further appreciation:

For new home buyers, prices in New York would need to rise roughly another 13 percent over the next five years for the average buyer to do better than the average renter over that span. In Northern California, where the gap between house prices and rents is largest, home values would need to go up about 19 percent by 2010.

Over the next decade, the break-even increase is about 25 percent in New York and 40 percent in California.

From the article we see price/annual rent ratios of 33 in the bay area, and 25 in the next tier including NY, LA, Boston. And while the equation is different here in France (no mortgage writeoff, for example), our current apartment has a ratio of >30.

But to many people, the psychological benefits of buying are almost impossible to overcome. Owning makes them feel that they have achieved the American dream, or it gives them the secure sense that, if nothing else, they have a tangible asset where they can sleep at night.

Those are nice feelings, indeed. The question is how much they are worth to you.

Our case is a little different. While we hate missing the price runups (first in San Francisco, now in Paris), renting has been a conscious decision to keep life simpler and more flexible, and to live in buildings or locations where we wouldn’t or couldn’t purchase. It’s been the difference between doing and not doing a number of things that we’ve appreciated. And now, current housing purchase prices are helping to make this a logical decision as well.

(via Rebecca’s Pocket)

Big idea, small price

Dave — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 12:54:33 +0000

I’d seen mention of the $100 laptop project but never thought much past the lowered economic barrier part; reading this Wired interview with Negroponte, it’s much more interesting than that.

From this BB post, I found this Clive Thompson entry; the pencil and the mathland analogies are important ones.

The open-source aspect is very interesting too: OSS is already a pretty low-barrier world, what happens when you remove the hardware part? Not only will OSS be used (assuming this takes off) by millions of kids, any of them with any technical inclination will be carrying around their own OSS “mathland” with them. Among other things, Negroponte suggests this will push OSS desktop mainstream.

(via boingboing)