It's fun watching Dave Hyatt's pseudo-open thought processes on Surfin' Safari. Specifically, he's had a couple of posts recently pondering the directions he thinks Safari should move in. The specific two are: Rise of the Uber-Browser and Uber-Browser Take #2: Sherfari. Between them they ponder hi takes on adding some of the functionality of NetNewsWire and/or Sherlock to Safari. The idea is that there's two directions to move in:

• One is that their functionality can be usurped by Safari, and a basic web interface would be all that remains of these apps.
• The other is that these applications use the frameworks that Safaris makes available so that they can more easily embed HTML inside them selves, and continue to exists as separate apps.

I think both of those are the wrong approach.

In Hyatt's second post, he references an article by Jason Kottke asking "Why are Safari and Sherlock two different applications?" Although Hyatt disagrees, I think this is definitely the direction to move in.

I'm lazy. I don't mind having lots of windows open, but I hate having to launch lots of applications. I don't like having to muck with putting them in my login items, seeing them in the dock, hunting them down in my applications folder, or whatever is appropriate. When I think if some specific functionality I like, I like to have it where I tend to already be. I also think that more people write applications the more functionality they don't have to write, that's why Cocoa is popular.

From the user's perspective: Odds are good that if an application has need for an HTML renderer, it's embedding links to other sites somewhere. I don't like having to jump back and forth between applications every time I decide to visit a site. This is the main reason I keep getting irritated by NetNewsWire. I don't like having to jump to Safari and then back. What would be cool, for me, is if there was some sort of drawer that I could slide out of a browser window that had the NNW list-`o-sites in it. the RSS feeds would display in the main Safari browser window, and if they had links in them, they would stay in that window. Brent wouldn't have to worry about implementing printing of those sites or of the feeds, Safari would take care of that, and if I start browsing "normally" after a while, NNW is still there. By opening the drawer in my (probably) already open Safari, I'm opening NNW, and not having to switch to the finder, and then switch to NNW just to read a post then then switches me back to Safari...that's the kind of thing that hurts my brain.

From the application author's perspective: If I want to write a web services type app, I'm probably going to have to do more than just throw around some XML-RPC an display some HTML once in a while. It would be nice if I could just sit inside some other app that would take care of any other silly stuff I didn't feel like writing. If I want to print a weblog post I'm reading in NNW, or print some movie information from Sherlock, they don't need to worry about implementing printing, Safari has done that. Hell, in NNW, if it wanted to instead print the underlying web page instead of thee RSS feed, that'd be a nifty option too.

Overall, one of the coolest things Safari could do, would be to really work on making an extensible interface that makes it easy for other software provider to either add functionality, embed applications, or even potentially replace functionality. This would enable all sorts of nifty utilities, and far outweigh the complaints of folks like Opera.

ugh.

First day of the last semester of school today. In 14 weeks, I'll (hopefully) have my piece of paper, and can worry about getting an income again.

I'm actually not too worried about this semester yet. I took a credit overload last semester to fit some stuff into myschedule, which means I have a (relatively) light load this semester. Additionally, I intentionally took some classes on things like "Digital Security" and "Online Privacy"..I'm hoping I already know a thing or two about that.

February's issue of Scientific American has a good article on the health benefits of beer. It speculates on some of the mechanisms by which beer can reduce the risk of heart attacks and potentially help lower cholesterol. My only issue with it is that, like every other article I've read about the health benefits of beer, they talk about the advantages of one or two beers and conversely the risks of "binge" drinking. Binge drinking is usually referring to 6 or more drinks in one sitting. So, what's the risk/benefit of 3, 4, or 5 beers?

On good days, I like to program. There's something relaxing about really getting into the zone, and knowing that I have that big block of uninterrupted time to just work. I've said that there's two stages to programming. For me, they tend to be the eating and the not-eating stages.

The first one is the eating stage, which can also be the sitting and futzing stage. This is when you know what you're trying to solve, but aren't exactly sure how you want to go about doing it. I tend to spend about a third of the time researching, a third of the time procrastinating unproductively, a third of the time maybe getting other random stuff done, and a third of the time working on my notoriously bad math skills. This part tends to get stretched out as I avoid starting to choose whatever solution I'm going to spend the time implementing. For me this is the eating stage, I like to munch on stuff as a way to waste time while I let my brain mull over possible solutions, and eventually (hopefully) come up with the one I decide to implement.

The second stage is the not-eating, or implementation phase. When you know how to solve the problem, and get into it, you completely lose track of time. Often you're not even seeing the screen, you're just translating whatever model you have in your head into code (hopefully avoiding typos and silly bugs while you're at it). When you're in the throes of this, you don't notice time, don't get hungry, and can't stand having someone interrupt you. You feel that if you lose the current structure that's in your head before it gets translated into code, you might lose it forever, and any interruption might be enough to knock it out of there.

Why do I bring this up? I'm the first stage, but only because i know I only have 1.5 hours before I need to go elsewhere (banjo lesson), and that's not enough to get into the zen-coding state. So I'm looking to waste time, and none of my usual blogs are updating, making procrastination very difficult. I was forced to catch up on bills instead.

Salon has been one of my favorite online publications for a while...ever since the early days (1995?) of theglobe.com when we did the original implementation of salon1999.com's Table Talk using a beta version of Tango on top of Butler SQL.

It looks like they're trying a new version of their subscription system. It'll be interesting to see how this goes for them. They're one of the places we looked at when trying to figure out how we wanted the premium version of Goats to work.

I expect it will frighten off lots of people, but that's ok, it's only going to be the people who weren't paying anyway, and they're just a drain on the system. I also think that before, only certain areas of their site were subscription only, so if I was a "Tech & Business" reader, I had no incentive to pay, because those were almost always free. This way anyone interested in any section has to subscribe. I wish them luck, it'd be a shame to lose their journalistic voice, hopefully if it works well enough they can expand to more original investigative reporting again.

Every once in a while there are those little things that irritate you, but not enough to get you to actually do something about them. I dealt with two of those today.

The first was, that for my wedding, I had gotten the groomsmen pewter flasks from the Walsh Brothers in England. Although most of the flasks were in great shape, they screwed mine up. The front was caved in, and there were some scratches around the engraving. My supposition is that the engraving machine pressed a little too hard, pushing in the flask and scratching around the letters as well. They promised to replace it, and claim to have sent one, but it never arrived, and repeated email requests since then have gone unanswered. Since I finally needed it again for jon's wedding, I had it out today. I finally decided to think about the problem, and realized that all I had to do about it being caved in, was to increase the pressure on the inside relative to the surrounding atmosphere, so I poured in a little water, and stuck it in a pot of water which I proceeded to heat. It popped out the back as well, but that was much easier to press back into shape than it had been to pull the front out. So although I will never buy from the Walsh Brothers again, I can at least now fit the full complement of whisky into my flask.

The second, less physics inspired, solution was that I haven't been able to run Apple System Profiler on my machine for a while. So I finally did my Macintouch search and found out that Norton now sucks more than I had originally thought, and even when uninstalled it hadn't cleaned up after itself, leaving a link in the /System/Library/Extensions/ directory to an entire directory in /Library/Application Support/, this was causing Apple's System Profiler to crash.

I feel much better....as Adams once said "their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."

A potentially more positive aspect of the Eldred vs. Ashcroft case comes from Balkanization where he asks "Is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Unconstitutional under Eldred v. Ashcroft? "

We can hope.

If anyone were reading, this is where I would warn them that things will be slow here this weekend due to Jon's wedding.

Joel wrote yesterday about Local Optimization, or, The Trouble With Dell. It's about how Dell has almost eliminated inventory from their system:

Unfortunately, the dirty little secret about Dell is that all they have really done is push the pain of inventory up to their suppliers and down to their customers. Their suppliers end up building big warehouses right next to the Dell plants where they keep the inventory, which gets reflected in the cost of the goods that Dell consumes.

Although this specific technique is what has made Dell famous, the overall type of business practice isn't unique to them. In school we talk a lot about "sustainable competitive advantage" , we talk about it because in business school everything has to be boiled down to a silly phrase so that you don't think about it too much. Usually, with a SCA, they look at the words Sustainable and Advantage together. The idea being to see how difficult it would be for your competitors to copy what you're doing. However, there's something to the word "sustainable" on its own too.

While the press always praises how well Dell can keep those inventory costs down, all Dell is doing, as Joel points out, is offsetting it to their suppliers. This also gives Dell huge leverage over these suppliers, because now they have warehouses sitting right next to Dell's plants, so they have to sell to Dell, and they have huge sunk costs in building these facilities. So Dell can use their leverage to kill their suppliers' chances at profits, driving margins to almost zero, and the suppliers don't have a choice. In this business its extra bad, because then they have less money to reinvest in technology, making it easier for other companies to catch up.

Outside of computers, Walmart does the same thing. They're so huge that if you produce commodity widgets, you need to sell those widgets through Walmart, or you're not going to have a large enough market. Walmart uses this leverage to kill the margins that producers otherwise would be making. Short-term, this is a great for Walmart, they can extract more rents from the value chain. Long-term, they're just pissing these people off. We'll ignore the similar effects they have on the communities they move into.

Long term, what this means for companies like Dell and Walmart, is that growth is dependent on screwing their suppliers. Once those margins are at zero, growth becomes increasingly difficult. It also means that as soon as there's an alternative, suppliers are happy to move to someone who treats them better. I would hate to sell a product through Walmart, and if I had just created the "Next-Great-Thing, I would avoid them for as long as I could. Long-term, I just can't believe that that's good business sense on their part.

can you tell I'm bored/procrastinating today?

I just noticed an entry on Ed Felton's Freedom To Tinker regarding the deal between the RIAA and tech companies. The statement includes:

The role of government, if needed at all, should be limited to enforcing compliance with voluntarily developed functional specifications reflecting consensus among affected interests.

What I'm curious about is why the government should have to enforce these "voluntarily developed functional specifications"? I can voluntarily decide a lot of things, but just because I write on paper that it would be nice for the government to enforce my decisions, doesn't meant that it's their obligation, or right, to do so. I hope I'm misunderstanding their intent.

Cringely recently wrote why "Why Apple is Pulling Away From Microsoft and Can't Afford Not to Do It". It's an interesting read on: why Keynote; why Safari; and how MS, in another of it's classic examples of innovation, is copying Apple's Digital Hub strategy:

With Redmond periodically threatening Apple with an end to Microsoft Office for the Mac, this is Apple saying, "We dare you."

A complete office application suite requires a word processor, spreadsheet, web browser, database, and presentation program, so with these new programs and its FileMaker database, Apple already has on sale three-fifths of an office suite.  Who is to say that next year Jobs won't announce the other two applications, either of which is frankly easier to make than the applications announced this week?

One of the interesting parts about this that he doesn't mention is that, to a large extent, this will be possible because of the choice to go with NeXT as the foundation for Mac OS X. One of the cooler parts about NexT was that it was amazingly easy to build applications. The large amount of foundation classes and the ease with which they integrated into the programming environments, thus encouraging their use, made the few developers who signed on very happy. I remember seeing some NeXT demos as an undergraduate where they would build word processors and such for you on the spot. Obviously rigged, and they weren't too full featured, but it showed the potential.

That became Cocoa, and its not coincidence that Apple has been writing all these new apps in that environment. NeXT was always touted as being about 10 years ahead of its time, which means that should be right around the corner.

Everyone and their mother will be posting about it, but it deserves the coverage. Lessig says it quite succinctly as: "the Supreme Court has rejected our challenge to the Sonny Bono Law." I can't say I'm surprised. As much as I think the law sucks, it was never clear to me that it was so much unconstitutional as just ..well...sucky. The proper place to get this fixed in in Congress, but until there's some kind of campaign finance reform so that the entertainment cartels can't buy influence, that's not likely to happen.

via Scripting News, a list of relevant links.

This month's Crypto-Gram is out today. Because its only monthly, and therefore doesn't intrude too much, this is something I tend to read every month. This month, some of the reader feedback on previous months' newsletters is pretty good.

I'm finally, three weeks into my "break", caught up enough that I can start the project was going to work on for the entire 5 weeks. Goats: the search. Thanks to the work of Simon Larsen we have data from the first 5 years of the strips in a database, so first I have to re-vamp that database to get it into "Goats Approved®" format, and then I can get on with getting an Indexing solution in place.

I want to get the strip meta-data into the DB first, because indexing is something that I may as well do for news, forums, and the strip all at the same time once I have it all in place.

John Robb comments on a New York Times article regarding the sorry state of pension plans.

I seem to recall that it wasn't too long ago that companies were using unrealistic stock market forecasts to artificially inflate their pension plans results, and therefore earnings. GE, I seem to recall was one of the worse violators. How much of this "crisis" is caused by those faulty forecasts vs. by the current crappy market?

So, technically this should now be live, though it is unclear to me how anyone will find it yet.

I was going to host it at a new domain, and just have this live at the root, probably beer.goats.com or something. But the more I thought about it, the more good beer sites there already were, and therefore there was no reason for me to start YA-one, so here it is.

I also really wanted to have it up and at least pseudo-running before school starts on the 28. Partly this is because I'll have less time at that point, and partly this is just because I want to have somewhere to bitch and moan about school once it had started. On the plus side, it's my last semester there.

How sad is it that Just Married is number one at the box office? Is there really nothing better to see?

Luckily, instead of suffering through that, Lauren and I finally made it to see Gangs of New York this weekend. Its a fun movie, but as most people have said: while the story is relatively mediocre, the visuals are cool. Via imdb, I came across this article which goes into the faulty history. Its a shame about some of this stuff, because real life in NYC at that point was pretty wild without the embellishments.

In one of the rare cases of me being on the same side as religious folk, France is worried that good beer might compete with wine, it seems.

Is it really expected that our current administration would worry about 10 million Iraqi refugees when they're working so hard to impose economic sanctions on their own country's bottom 90%.

I've been sitting watching the Steve Jobs' MacWorld Keynote. And as much as I like Apple, I really think that Steve's RDF is either:

• starting to run thin.
• not transferrable via MP4 stream

My summary of it is:

• people have upgraded to OS X.
• If I skied I could get a jacket that costs more then my iPod to put it in.
• all the apps they've been trying to get us to use (iTunes, iPhoto, etc.) they will continue to try to get us to use....but now they're going to make us use all of them....I actually think this is cool, but not the amazing news its made out to be.
• They think that futzing with bookmarks makes a browser innovative.
• I can get another version of Powerpoint for $99.
• ok...the new TiBook is cool.
• g is faster than b. (802.11, that is.)
• My understanding is thar most Firewire devices are really IDE drives in Firewire enclosres, and therefore limited to IDE speeds...if that's the case, is Firewire 800 that much more compelling? Or am I behind, and they've started to make real FW drives now?
• I like the new ad.
• damn...I need a new hard drive for either my backups or my MP3 collection...I was hoping they would finally release a standalone stereo component (with expandable HD) so I could stop using my Mac for that...I guess I'll have to get the drive, though.

Dave is giving up on VCs. I was pretty much there already, but from the other direction, I don't think the need for VC is there for most businesses. However, Dave Winer is going into education. I can only hope he's not doing that in order "to find another way to finance the leading edge". Education (specifically higher education) is increasingly dominated by the same big corporate interests that caused the bubble...there's not likely to be much of a better situation coming out of there unless they get away from focusing on profits and back to focusing on research and learning.

via Scripting News: The Register details "Microsoft's masterplan to screw phone partner - full details"

Big day...I like to keep Goats (and this site) running on two machines. It makes failures easier to deal with. In November we had a power supply fail on one of our web servers.

As it wasn't the first time we had had this problem (this was a replacement power supply for a similar failure about 1.5 years before...there's a reason VA Linux had to stop selling hardware), we decided to scrap that machine and replace it, which we did. However, since our redundant server is the exact same configuration, and has a bunch of empty slots, it seemed a shame to completely scrap the old box.

Today I'm taking our "good" web server out of production, and doubling the RAM and the number of CPUs (to two). Since the replacement server (from Dell) had a free second 40 Gig drive in it, I'm swapping out the three year old 9 Gig drive for the new one too, and therefore have to reinstall RedHat and all the services, cron jobs, content, etc that we need on the essentially new machine.

woo hoo...hours of fun for the whole family.

Real Beer's BeerLog points to an article at philly.com regarding why Philadelphia residents can't buy beer over the internet. The interesting (for me) part of the article was the list at the end of "Beer of the Month" type clubs:

• www.RealBeer.com, home of the Michael Jackson Real Beer, Great Beers of Belgium and the American Brewers Club.
• www.BeerontheWall.com, with hard-to-find California brews.
• www.beeramerica.com, the Internet's largest beer-of-the-month club.
• www.beermonthclub.com, with micros from coast to coast.
• www.microclub.com, with selections from winners at the Great American Beer Festival.
• www.worldbeerdirect.com, with micros and premium imports.

It's amazing, with what's potentially at stake, a known aggressor state being a creator of nuclear material, that there isn't more press about the whole North Korea thing. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is doing a good job of following, and explaining, what the situation and the problems are, but the lack of coverage in what I consider to be the mainstream press, relative to the continued saber-rattling over Iraq, is stunning to me.

Argh. I wanted to add a copy of What Einstein Told His Cook to my amazon cart, but they seem to have removed that option for me. I can "order for in-store pickup" from a variety of Borders stores in different states, but I can't order it from amazon. This must be some strange new business plan they're trying where you can't buy stuff from them.

The Arizona Republic has a quicky on skunk and bubbles. If that doesn't satiate all desires to learn about bubbles in carbonated beverages, Scientific American has a more comprehensive article about champagne bubbles...with some gratuitous beer references thrown in.

uh oh...barley prices are up. Sadly, I bet this will hurt smaller brewers more than folks like AB who can hedge against these vagaries of nature.

After reading others for so long, I've decided to get on the Blog Train, and start my own. I'm going to be posting as I get this thing set up, even though it's not live. Hopefully that'll mean that there's some existing content once I get my templates happy, and such.

I'm using Movable Type to generate the blog, but I want to use Mason to manage the site as a whole, due to some other stuff I want to add later, so I'm figuring out how to get all the interactions happy. My plan is to edit the MT templates into actual Mason pages, so that MT writes the pages to disk, and then they get processed by Mason for my site-wide templating.