The Digital Hub

Apple spent the first decade of this century focusing on the idea of The Digital Hub. It started with Mac + music, then they added photos, movies, TV shows, books, and all sorts of things. With the launch of iCloud, they’ve taken the next major step in that strategy and they are dominating the market, cumulatively.

Samsung might make a good Android-based phone, but where’s the tablet that’s better for reading and games? Where’s the set-top box that shows my media on my TV that I can control with my phone? Where’s the ability to stream the cool thing I found on my tablet to the TV so everyone can watch it? Where’s the computer that streams my terabytes of music, photos, movies and TV shows to my devices? Where’s the ability to walk from room to room and bring my music with me to the nearest set of speakers?

Samsung doesn’t have that, and neither does Google. Google TV and the Nexus Q were unmitigated disasters. The Android experience on tablets still sucks (I have Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” running on my HP TouchPad). There is no ecosystem at play in the Android universe.

Microsoft’s dark horse

While reading a post by Ken Seagall, I watched this video:

Suddenly something occurred to me. Something that Microsoft has done a terrible job capitalizing on. Something that, if executed properly, could position Microsoft back in the #2 position behind Apple: The Digital Hub.

Let’s look at what Microsoft has today that already works well together: Windows, Surface, Windows Phone and Xbox. Your Windows Phone and Surface tablet have different use-cases in your life, but they sync together with your Windows PC, and the Xbox is the media hub in your living room. They also have Outlook.com (née Windows Live Mail, née MSN Hotmail, née Hotmail.com), Office 365, SkyDrive, and lots of other services to complement the devices they have.

But Microsoft is so discombobulated internally that it can’t figure out how to put one foot in front of the other. It’s like watching a drunk guy stumble across the railroad tracks.

Microsoft is okay at services (still not as good as Google, but much better than Apple), they have a very mature desktop OS with a massive number of apps, and they have the best selling living room console behind Apple TV. Windows Phone may be nice, but there’s no notable audience for it. And the Surface is, well, junk. (It’s the worst kind of “me too” product out there.)

Can they pull it off?

If (and this is a really big if) Microsoft can get rid of the warring internal tribes, and can set aside empty, doom-inducing rhetoric like Windows Everywhere and No Compromise, I think they may have a shot at being #2 overall. Windows still dominates on the desktop in terms of numbers (I’ll avoid talking about other metrics for the moment), and Xbox is (finally) making money, but they’re failing at everything else.

They need to have a leader with a clear vision and the know-how to execute that plan. They don’t need a loud-mouthed buffoon as a mouthpiece. Their financials are OK, but they could be so much more if they tried harder and focused their efforts behind a singular vision.

Apple has a rock-solid ecosystem. Google & Samsung do not. Microsoft has all the pieces of a solid ecosystem, but they have too many cooks in the kitchen with conflicting visions.

I never thought I’d say this, but I find myself rooting for Microsoft. I really hope they can get their act together and clinch the #2 spot.

I invested in Netflix and Hulu Plus accounts so that I could watch most of my shows, and for the shows that haven’t made their way into the 21 century yet, there are plenty of places online where you can acquire the latest episodes.

If you read my previous post on converting Blu-ray and DVD movies to MP4, this process has a slightly different flow.

Crash Course in Digital Video Formats

These days, if you (ahem) acquire a high-definition copy of your favorite show online (commonly in 720p), it will most likely be in MKV/H.264/AC3 format.

The short explanation is that every video file is made up of 3 different parts: the video stream, the audio stream, and the container. The audio and video are synced-up (a.k.a., “multiplexed” or “muxed”) and are bundled together into a single file using a container format.

If you want to make yourself a little more educated about this stuff, check out the “Video on the Web” chapter of Dive Into HTML5 by Mark Pilgrim.

MKV is a popular container format because it’s designed to be a kitchen sink. You can throw all sorts of stuff inside this container, so people like to stash it full of subtitle files and other sorts of things. AC3 is the name of the Dolby Digital surround-sound audio format. You typically need a dedicated decoder ship to handle this kind of audio, which is common in modern receivers and some TVs.

MKV → MP4

The first thing we need to do download a copy of MP4Tools.

While you can use it without a license, it’s always a good idea to support the independent software developers who write this stuff — especially if its useful.

When you drag your MKV file into MP4Tools, you should see two entries — the video stream and the audio stream.

The video stream should already be in H.264 format. (If it isn’t, stop what you’re doing and run the file through Handbrake instead.) Check the box next to the stream to select it.

If the audio stream is already in AAC format, this will be very simple. If the audio stream is in AC3 format, this will still be simple, but will take a little longer to complete.

1. For H.264 video, choose Pass Thru.

2. For AAC audio (if available), choose Pass Thru.

3. For AC3 audio (if available), choose the highest AAC audio selection you have available (either AAC (2-Ch.) or AAC (5.1)). If you selected AAC (5.1), also check the box for add 2-Ch. Track.

Lastly, choose your intended device. The Apple TV setting tends to have the broadest compatibility in my experience. Leave everything else as the default setting, and click the Convert button.

In a few minutes, you should have a new .m4v file.

Metadata and Artwork

It’s possible that you may have heard of AtomicParsley, MetaX or MetaZ before. They all suck. Check out Subler instead.

Once you have your .m4v file, you’ll want to add the metadata and artwork to the file. As long as the video file starts with a format similar to <show>.s<#>e<#> (e.g., Weeds.s7e1), Subler will be able to determine the right things to search for.

Subler queries TVDB for TV show data, although I’m generally unimpressed with the TV show artwork. For that, I use Get Video Artwork and download the iTunes-compatible, square-shaped TV show artwork.

While Subler does a good job of checking the right boxes automatically, you’ll want to check the Other Settings and make sure that the resolution and media kind are set correctly for your new .m4v file.

Renaming

I prefer to keep my video files sorted by <show>/<season>/<file>. I also go so far to name my files as S.E - Title.mp4 (e.g., a recent episode of Supernatural was labeled 8.15 – Man’s Best Friend with Benefits).

Going episode-by-episode can be very tedious, so I wrote up a Mac OS X service to handle this for me. The only prerequisite is to install a package called mp4v2 from MacPorts.

sudo port install mp4v2

Once you’ve installed MacPorts (if you hadn’t already) and the mp4v2 package, you can install the OS X service by double-clicking it. (It’s an Automator action, so feel free to take a look at what it does before installing it.)

With everything installed, you can now right-click on one or more video files, choose Services, then “Rename video to 1.01 – Title.mp4″.

Within a few seconds, the Automator workflow will read the contents of the video file for the season number, episode number, and episode title, and rename the file automatically.

Streaming from iTunes

I’ve already covered this in my previous post, so I’m not going to go over it again here.

Once it’s in iTunes, you can sync shows to your smartphone, iPad, or stream them to a variety of devices throughout your home.

Because of this, I choose to exercise my fair-use right to format-shift my movies into something more convenient. Making a personal backup of movies you own is in a legal gray-area in the U.S. Historically, this sort of thing fell under fair use law, but the DMCA (1998) makes it illegal to crack the encryption. This is why backing-up CDs is commonplace while backing-up DVDs and Blu-rays is frowned upon. The encryption is where the line is drawn. You’ve been warned!

Hardware

The Mac used for this tutorial is an 17″ MacBook Pro (early-2011) with a 64-bit quad-core 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, OS X Mountain Lion, and a standard, built-in Superdrive. The external BD-R drive is a Buffalo MediaStation 6X USB 2.0 Portable Blu-Ray Writer.

Backing-up your discs

Pretty much every Mac since the early 2000s has shipped with a DVD drive, so these are easy to come by. For backing up personal DVDs so that they can be format-shifted, RipIt is highly recommended. A license is a paltry $25, and I recommend supporting the developers of this software. Backing up is as simple as inserting the DVD, launching RipIt, and choosing “Rip”. You can expect a rip to take 15-30 minutes, depending on the size of the disc.

For Blu-ray discs, you first need a Blu-ray drive. For backing up personal Blu-rays so that they can be format-shifted, MakeMKV is highly recommended. We won’t be making .mkv files, but it has support for backups. A license is somewhere in the $60-$80 range, and I recommend supporting the developers of this software. Backing up is as simple as inserting the Blu-ray disc, launching MakeMKV, and choosing “Backup”. You can expect a rip to take 45m-1h15m, depending on the size of the disc.

If you’re on Windows, check-out AnyDVD and AnyDVD HD.

Format-Shifting to MP4/H.264/AAC

Video files are a lot more complicated than most people realize. You may have heard words like MKV, MPEG-4, AVI, MP3, AAC and other acronyms.

The short explanation is that every video file is made up of 3 different parts: the video stream, the audio stream, and the container. The audio and video are synced-up (a.k.a., “multiplexed” or “muxed”) and are bundled together into a single file using a container format.

If you want to make yourself a little more educated about this stuff, check out the “Video on the Web” chapter of Dive Into HTML5 by Mark Pilgrim. For this exercise, just know that we want to end up with an H.264 video stream and an AAC audio stream, wrapped up inside an MP4 container.

For this, we’ll use Handbrake. Handbrake will take our personal backups as input, and produce an .mp4 (or .m4v — same thing) file as output.

Handbrake comes with a good set of default settings. If you don’t know what you’re doing, feel free to use those. I’ve tweaked my settings a bit as I prefer higher-quality files at the cost of a larger file size.

See the following screenshots for information on my presets.

• DVD: Video, Audio, Subtitles, Advanced, and Chapters.
• Blu-ray: Video, Audio, Subtitles, Advanced, and Chapters.

The biggest difference between these is that the video bitrate for DVDs is 3,000 kbps while for Blu-rays it’s 10,000 kbps.

To get started, click the Source button in the upper-left corner of the main Handbrake window. Find your backup directory, and choose Open. Handbrake will parse the files and make sure it has a complete backup to work with. If you’re using my presets, choose DVD (480p) if your source is a DVD backup, or Blu-ray (1080p) if your source is a Blu-ray backup. It may also be helpful to check out the Handbrake Quick-Start Guide if you’re new to the tool.

Next, click the Add to Queue button. Once you’ve queued-up all of the movies you want to format-shift, click the Start button. On the reference hardware listed above, DVDs typically take 45m-1h30m to fully encode a new MP4 file. Blu-rays take 4-6 hours. In both cases, Handbrake will leverage as much of your CPU and RAM as possible, so don’t expect to be able to do much with your computer until its done.

With these settings, expect a 480p MP4 to be around 1 GB/hour of video and a 1080p MP4 to be around 5 GB/hour of video. If having a 15 GB copy of Titanic is too much, lower the video bitrate for the Blu-ray (1080p) setting from 10,000 kbps. The lower the setting, the worse the quality, but the smaller the file size.

One more tip: 1080p video has a resolution of 1920×1080. The smaller the screen, the less there is for your eyes to notice, so you can be more forgiving of lower-quality. However, if you’re stretching 1920×1080 across your nice new 55″ LED TV, a low-quality file will make your whole movie-watching experience suck. The bigger the TV, the better you want the quality to be.

Metadata and Artwork

Once you have your .mp4 or .m4v file, you’ll want to give it a proper name and add the metadata and artwork to the file. The format I use is <name of movie> (<format>).mp4 (e.g., My Favorite Movie (1080p).mp4).

It’s possible that you may have heard of AtomicParsley, MetaX or MetaZ before. They all suck. Check out Subler instead.

Subler queries The Movie DB for movie data and artwork, and uses TVDB for TV show data. While The Movie DB has a pretty awesome selection of movie artwork, I’m generally unimpressed with the TV show artwork. For that, I use Get Video Artwork and download the iTunes-compatible, square-shaped TV show artwork.

Save your changes, and Subler will write the video metadata and artwork into the file.

Streaming via iTunes

I have an Xbox 360, a Playstation 3, and two Apple TVs at home. I also have an iPad 2, iPad 3 and an iPad mini. Needless to say, I watch a lot of movies and TV shows.

Because the video files tend to be so large, I use an external hard drive attached to my Mac to store the video files. I then tell iTunes where to find the movie by option-dragging the MP4 file from Finder into iTunes’ Movie pane. The option-drag tells iTunes “here’s a pointer to the movie, but don’t copy it onto my built-in hard drive”.

Now it’s time to watch your movie!

1. As of iOS 5, iPad supports 1080p video. Simply sync the movie to your iPad and watch it on-the-go.

2. As long as your computer running iTunes and your Apple TV are on the same network and are both configured to use the same Home Sharing account, you should be able to start streaming the movie to your Apple TV right away. (I would always recommend a hard-wired network connection, otherwise a Wireless-N connection. A Wireless-G connection is likely going to require more buffering or have choppy playback.)

3. To stream to your Playstation 3, you’ll need to be running a DLNA server on your Mac. Medialink ($20) can be installed as a System Preference and automatically serve your iTunes content to your Playstation 3.

4. To stream to your Xbox 360, you’ll need to be running a similar server which the Xbox understands. Connect360 ($20) can be installed as a System Preference and automatically serve your iTunes content to your Xbox 360.

5. Since MP4/H.264/AAC is the industry-wide standard for all modern-age video, pretty much any smartphone, tablet, laptop, operating system, and streaming device created since 2004 can play this format out-of-the-box. Even ancient OS’s like Windows XP have been updated to support this format. Go nuts.

H.264 and HDTV

Today, most TVs support 1080p, although most content (TV shows, most video games) are only 720p. Blu-ray movies and a handful of video games are “Full HD” (aka, 1080p). This is all thanks to a video codec called H.264 (aka, “Advanced Video Coding”, or AVC for short).

H.264 is what makes Blu-ray exist, and what allows you to watch Netflix and other video on your TV, computer and mobile devices. H.264 did for video what MP3 did for music.

CES 2013 and “4K” Ultra HDTV

At the CES 2013 trade show this month, companies like Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic and others were showing-off prototypes of their new 70+ inch TVs that support a new resolution called 4K — otherwise known as the small version of Ultra HDTV). (Kinda like how 720p is the small version of HDTV.)

The approval of H.265 makes 4K television content possible. H.265 (or possibly the future H.266, depending on how long Blu-ray sticks around) will be the basis of whatever format replaces Blu-ray discs. DVD had a good 12-year run as the disc format du jour (1998-2010). Blu-ray debuted in 2006, so if we give it the same 12-year run as DVD had (circa 2018), Blu-ray has about 5 years left before its successor overtakes it in popularity.

(As much as I would love to see Blu-ray be the final disc format, falling by the wayside in favor of all-digital streaming and downloads, I don’t think it’s going to happen just yet. The content industry needs something to sell and the average consumer needs something to buy. God forbid the general public is forced to figure out the epic clusterf**k known as UltraViolet DRM. But I digress…)

Higher quality, smaller size

For the forward-thinking folks who have already moved to all-digital, H.265 takes up half the drive space for the same quality file compared to H.264. All of my movies encoded with H.264 that take up 8-10 GB each, would only take 4-5 GB each. Alternatively, I can keep them at 8-10 GB each, and get resolutions of 3840×2160 (which would require a 4K TV to appreciate).

Then again, if your TV is bigger than about 40-46 inches, 1080p starts to lose clarity as the pixels become more noticeable. A 55-60 inch 4K TV would be equivalent to your iPhones, iPads, and other devices with a Retina Display — pixels so small that you can’t see them unless you get really close. Of course, an 80-inch “8K” Ultra HDTV with matching H.265-encoded movies would be freaking epic! Goodbye IMAX, hello my living room!)

This also means that watching video on-the-go on your smartphone or iPad will be faster, the picture will be clearer, and video will eat-up less of your monthly data plan.

What’s missing?

There are still some important pieces missing from this equation — notably hardware decoders and video content.

Decoding the video’s format into something that you can watch is a very intensive process. Doing the decoding in software requires much more processing power than decoding in hardware. Hardware decoding is what allows your iPhone, iPad or other device to play movies smoothly.

Contrast that with Android devices that support Flash. Animation and FLV playback tends to be stuttered, jarring, and chews through your battery because all of the decoding happens in software. Over the next 12-18 months, expect to start seeing H.265 decoders being shipped in new devices — especially mobile devices.

The other major piece of this equation is having H.265-encoded content. What’s the point of having all of this fancy H.265 hardware if there’s nothing to watch?

The first content will come from the hacker communities as Blu-ray movies encoded at 1080p with H.265 will start showing up on torrent sites. (These are what I call the super-alphas.) Over the next 3-5 years, the rest of the world will catch up as H.265 makes its way into the streaming content market (e.g., Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Verizon, Comcast). Finally, H.265 will hit the mainstream in whatever disc format replaces Blu-ray — just a couple of years before H.265′s successor (presumably H.266) is approved, and the whole process starts over.

Not that nerdy… no, really

I said all of that to say this: H.265 may sound esoteric, but it unlocks a very bright future for video content (movies, TV shows, video games, web video, etc.) moving forward.

The world is now a worse place

The tech world is abuzz with the news that, at only 26 years old, Aaron Swartz decided to take his own life. I heard about it last night when I opened up Tweetbot, and saw two tweets back-to-back in my timeline:

We lost @aaronsw.

— Alex Payne (@al3x) January 12, 2013

Fuck. tech.mit.edu/V132/N61/swart…The world is now a worse place.

— dustin curtis (@dcurtis) January 12, 2013

RSS

Being part of the web world, I certainly knew Aaron by reputation. I first heard about him back when I started tinkering with RSS in 2003. While I may have started a project that simplified RSS for a legion of PHP developers, Aaron literally wrote the spec — and at 14 years old, I might add.

Cory Doctorow had this to say:

I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.

Creative Commons. PACER. Demand Progress.

Every so often throughout the last decade, his name would pop-up around topics that I was also interested in. Creative Commons. Opening up public access to court records. Demand Progress. He used technology to fight for the same sorts of causes that I fight for, evangelize for, or are otherwise close to my heart. Namely:

• the over-criminalization of American citizens by its government, and…
• the fact that the people we elect to represent us in government would throw us under the bus in a heartbeat if it meant more money, power and political cachet.

Cory Doctorow continues:

At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access. After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated him, and for a while, it looked like he’d be on the pointy end of some bad legal stuff, but he escaped it all, and emerged triumphant.

Aaron was involved in the creation of an organization called Demand Progress, who “works to win progressive policy changes for ordinary people through organizing, and grassroots lobbying. In particular, we tend to focus on issues of civil liberties, civil rights, and government reform.”

It was here where I first learned about the Senate’s proposed PROTECT-IP Act (later renamed “PIPA”), and it’s House sibling, the ill-fated SOPA Act, whose negative repercussions would have been felt for generations to come.

Download too much, go to jail

From a New York Times article dated July 19, 2011:

Demand Progress said on its site that it appeared Mr. Swartz was “being charged with allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web.” It quoted the group’s executive director, David Segal, as saying, “It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

Cory Doctorow:

Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn’t an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn’t done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.

Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who’d tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.

And Larry Lessig:

But all this shows is that if the government proved its case, some punishment was appropriate. So what was that appropriate punishment? Was Aaron a terrorist? Or a cracker trying to profit from stolen goods? Or was this something completely different?

Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured “appropriate” out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.

And an article from September by Tim Cushing from TechDirt:

Swartz, the executive director of Demand Progress, was charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a catch-all designation for “computer activity the US government doesn’t like.”

Swartz had accessed MIT’s computer network to download a large number of files from JSTOR, a non-profit that hosts academic journal articles. US prosecutors claimed he “stole” several thousand files, but considering MIT offered this access for free on campus (and the files being digital), it’s pretty tough to square his massive downloading with any idea of “theft.”

Prosecutor as bully

Larry Lessig continues (reformatted paragraphs, mine):

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way.

The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good.

He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying.

I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government [against] you.

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”

And again from TechDirt:

There are now 13 felony counts in the new indictment, derived from claims of multiple instances of breaking those four laws. In specific:

• Wire Fraud – 2 counts
• Computer Fraud – 5 counts
• Unlawfully Obtaining Information from a Protected Computer – 5 counts
• Recklessly Damaging a Protected Computer – 1 count

It’s beyond my pay grade to figure out how many years in prison that all could be, when taking into account the complexities of sentencing law. Let’s leave it at a large scary number. Enough to ruin someone’s life.

And the kicker…

So, how do the new charges stack up in terms of a sentence? Tough to say. Each of the charges carries the possibility of a fine and imprisonment of up to 10-20 years per felony. Depending on how many of the counts Swartz is found guilty of, the sentence could conceivably total 50+ years and fine in the area of $4 million. All this over publicly accessed research documents that JSTOR doesn’t even feel the need to pursue further than it did.

In the end

Alan Ellis, a nationally-recognized federal criminal defense lawyer explains:

Nearly 97 percent of all federal criminal defendants will plead guilty. Of the remaining 3 percent who go to trial, as many as 75 percent will be convicted. Thus, nearly 99 percent of all federal criminal defendants will be sentenced. Of that number, 80 percent of defendants will receive jail or prison time.

Specifically:

• 96.9% of federal criminal cases result in a guilty plea. (U.S. Sentencing Commission)
• 75.6% of federal criminal defendants are convicted following trial. (U.S. Department of Justice)
• 99% of federal defendants are sentenced.
• 82.8% of federal criminal defendants receive a prison term. (U.S. Sentencing Commission)

In the end, while nobody knows why Aaron decided to take his own life, I could certainly posit a guess. When the federal government comes after you, you’re pretty much done for. In Aaron’s case, he pissed off the wrong federal prosecutors, and they moved to eviscerate him, legally, over downloading academic journals that MIT provided access to for free.

What a terrible, terrible shame.

Update

As the day has gone on, more people have been sharing their thoughts on Aaron, his case, and the person he was.

A post by Aaron Swartz, dated July 2008:

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

The official statement from Aaron Swartz’ family:

Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.

From the post “My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved.,” by Quinn Norton:

He loved my daughter so much it filled the room like a mist. He was transported playing with her, and she bored right into his heart. In his darkest moments, which I couldn’t reach him, Ada could still touch him, even if only for a moment. And when he was in the light, my god. I couldn’t keep up with either of them. I would hang back and watch them spring and play and laugh, and be so grateful for them both.

Expert witness Alex Stamos, in “The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s ‘Crime’“:

In short, Aaron Swartz was not the super hacker breathlessly described in the Government’s indictment and forensic reports, and his actions did not pose a real danger to JSTOR, MIT or the public. He was an intelligent young man who found a loophole that would allow him to download a lot of documents quickly. This loophole was created intentionally by MIT and JSTOR, and was codified contractually in the piles of paperwork turned over during discovery.

If I had taken the stand as planned and had been asked by the prosecutor whether Aaron’s actions were “wrong”, I would probably have replied that what Aaron did would better be described as “inconsiderate”. In the same way it is inconsiderate to write a check at the supermarket while a dozen people queue up behind you or to check out every book at the library needed for a History 101 paper. It is inconsiderate to download lots of files on shared wifi or to spider Wikipedia too quickly, but none of these actions should lead to a young person being hounded for years and haunted by the possibility of a 35 year sentence.

Update (2013-01-20)

I’ve continued to add to the links below as I’ve come across them, but a few more interesting things are beginning to shake-out from Aaron’s prosecution.

Scott Horton from Harper’s Magazine writes (Emphasis mine):

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz is fighting to hold on to her job, and to avoid an embarrassing grilling in Congress and possible professional disciplinary proceedings. Her prospects look grim. Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), chair of the House Committee on Oversight is pledging a vigorous and critical inquiry into her management of the dubious criminal prosecution of Aaron Swartz, one of the greatest computer prodigies of his generation, who committed suicide a week ago, apparently convinced that out-of-control prosecutors had destroyed his life.

[…]

At funeral services in Highland Park, Illinois, on Tuesday, Swartz’s father charged that his son had been “killed by the government.” While some might ascribe this to the anguish of a bereaved father, scholars and investigators poring over the record of the Swartz prosecution are increasingly shocked at the scope and outrageousness of the prosecutorial misconduct that he faced.

[…]

Although each of these counts bordered on the preposterous, Ortiz and Heymann clearly reckoned that at least one or two would stick during the jury-room bargaining process. More to the point, they assumed that the risk of their success even on bogus charges would be enough to pressure Swartz into accepting a guilty plea on all the counts in exchange for a reduced sentence — which is what they offered him. The process was fundamentally corrupt and shameful. But observers of the American criminal-justice system also know that it was a common one.

I first learned about this corrupt little trick, long-since leveraged by federal prosecutors, when my best-friend-since-childhood made a stupid mistake one evening that was technically a felony offense — he viewed a 30-second video clip of somebody else committing a felony.

This is the same thing that police do when they’re investigating a bank robbery. The same thing that news anchors do when they show a security tape of people smashing through the front-doors of an Apple Store to steal iPads, “more at eleven”. Had he walked by and seen it happening through a window, he wouldn’t have been prosecuted. But he saw a half-minute recording and they threw the book at him. It’s very much like how prostitution is illegal, but if you record the act, suddenly it becomes porn. Perfectly legal.

50 hours of community service would have been plenty to correct the mistake he made and make him pay more attention to his actions in the future. Instead, trumped-up charges by federal prosecutors resulted in him being sentenced to 2 years in a federal penitentiary, followed by 5 years under probation, and another 15-20 years on the Sex Offender Registry living as a social pariah.

(Studies by the U.S. Justice Department and other organizations show that recidivism rates are significantly lower for convicted sex offenders than for burglars, robbers, thieves, drug offenders and other convicts.)

He lost his home, his career, many of his friends, and because of his registry status he can’t find work — all because he made a stupid mistake. He’s doing everything he possibly can to re-assimilate back into society, but society doesn’t want him. His life was ruined. Fortunately, he’s smart, well-spoken and a hard worker. He was able to start two companies and is able to provide for his wife and 3 children. One of those companies is dedicated to helping people who were likewise abused by the federal justice system and have experienced the injustice of the Bureau of Prisons.

But I digress…

Timothy B. Lee, from Ars Technica, follows-up on Aaron’s Law:

On Tuesday, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) took to the pages of reddit to introduce legislation she dubbed “Aaron’s Law.” Lofgren’s bill would modify the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the basis for Swartz’s prosecution, to clarify that its definition of unauthorized access “does not include access in violation of an agreement or contractual obligation, such as an acceptable use policy or terms of service agreement, with an Internet service provider, Internet website, or employer.” It would make a similar change to the wire fraud statute.

The language was praised by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, a friend of Swartz whose wife organized his legal defense fund. “This is a CRITICALLY important change that would do incredible good,” Lessig wrote on reddit. “The CFAA was the hook for the government’s bullying of @aaronsw. This law would remove that hook.”

And more links:

• A Chat with Aaron Swartz (Blogoscoped)
• Raw Thought: The Weblog of Aaron Swartz in Markdown, PDF, and ePub (GitHub)
• Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out (Harper’s)
• Still More About The Death Of Aaron Swartz (Esquire)
• How the Legal System Failed Aaron Swartz (The New Yorker)
• Darrell Issa Probing Prosecution Of Aaron Swartz, Internet Pioneer Who Killed Himself (Huffington Post)
• Lawmakers slam DOJ prosecution of Swartz as ‘ridiculous, absurd’ (The Hill)
• Did Prosecutors Go Too Far In Swartz Case? (NPR)
• 25,000 People Sign Petition to Remove Aaron Swartz’s Prosecutors (Mashable)
• “Aaron’s law,” Congressional investigation in wake of Swartz suicide (Ars Technica)
• Farewell to Aaron Swartz, an extraordinary hacker and activist (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
• Feds go overboard in prosecuting information activist (Ars Technica)
• Be free (resource.org)
• Aaron Swartz, Precocious Programmer and Internet Activist, Dies at 26 (New York Times)
• AaronSW may have left everything to Givewell, an efficient meta-charity (Hacker News)
• Aaron Swartz’s legacy (Michael Roberts)
• Aaron is dead. (Sir Tim Berners-Lee, W3C)
• Aaron Swartz (Mark Bernstein)
• Aaron Swartz (Brent Simmons)
• Soulmate lost. RIP Aaron Swartz. (Alex Dong)
• Aaron Swartz and me, over a loosely intertwined decade (Ars Technica)
• Aaron Swartz (JSTOR)
• Aaron Swartz, hero of the open world, dies (archive.org)
• Remembering Aaron Swartz (ThoughtWorks)
• US Attorney Chided Swartz On Day of Suicide (Slashdot)
• Remember Aaron Swartz (1986 – 2013) (TorrentFreak)
• Our tribute to Aaron Swartz (Science Citizen)
• $10,000: The Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants (Aaron Greenspan)
• Statement on behalf of MIT (L. Rafael Reif)
• Why Am I So Upset About Aaron Swartz’s Suicide? (John Atkinson)
• The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz (Part 1: The Law) (The Volokh Conspiracy)
• A Data Crusader, a Defendant and Now, a Cause (New York Times)
• Anonymous hacks 2 MIT websites in the memory of web activist Aaron Swartz (hacker9)
• Remembering Aaron Swartz: Commons man (The Economist)
• Remembering Aaron Swartz (danbri.org)
• MIT and Aaron Swartz (Crooked Timber)
• Prosecutor pursuing Aaron Swartz linked to suicide of another hacker (RT.com)
• Towards Learning from Losing Aaron Swartz: Part 2 (Stanford Law School)
• Aaron Swartz: Idealist, Innovator—And Now Victim (The Daily Muse)
• “We’ve lost a fighter”: Hundreds gather to mourn Aaron Swartz (Ars Technica)
• Aaron Swartz’s Lawyer: MIT Refused Plea Deal Without Jail Time (Gothamist)
• The Suicide of a Federal Criminal Defendant (PCR Consultants)
• Aaron (Waxy.org)
• I conceal my identity the same way Aaron was indicted for (Errata Security)
• Aaron Swartz & A Culture of Denial: Depression & Suicide in Tech (PsychCentral)
• The Tragic Case of Aaron Swartz: Unequal Justice for Web Activists vs Health Care Corporate Executives (Health Care Renewal)
• MIT Closet Allegedly Used by Aaron Swartz (Cryptome)
• Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different” (Dan Nguyen)

iTunes, iTunes Match, Last.fm, Spotify & Tracks

I’ve been using iTunes to manage my music since iTunes 4.1 came out for Windows in 2003. Prior to that, I had a folder of music organized alphabetically and used Winamp for playback. (If you’re still doing that in 2012, I’m judging you.)

I use iTunes to hold all of my music, movies, TV shows and digital books. With iTunes running on my home computer, I can stream all of my media to my Apple TV, iPads and iPhones, into every room of the house.

iTunes Match is awesome! If I’m walking through downtown Seattle and have my iPhone with me, I can listen to any song in my library. If I’m riding the bus to work, I can pull out my iPad, do some reading, and listen to any song in my library. If I get to work and open up iTunes, I can listen to any song in my library. It’s super-awesome!

I use Last.fm to take my listening habits and make recommendations for new music that I might like.

I’ve spent time with both Rdio and Spotify, and I ended up settling on Spotify as a way to supplement iTunes. I can check out entire albums before I decide to get them and put them into iTunes. It’s also good for music that I don’t want to clutter up my iTunes library with, such as tracks my Miley Cyrus that my daughter likes.

Tracks is a small utility that scrobbles the music I listen to into Last.fm, and adds keyboard commands for previous/next/pause/play controls.

MakeMKV, RipIt, Handbrake, Subler and MP4 Tools

I prefer for all of my video content to be in industry standard MP4/H.264/AAC formats. It’s also convenient that Apple TV, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, iPad, iPhone and my HP TouchPad running Android 4 can all play this format.

I use MakeMKV or RipIt to make personal backups of Blu-rays or DVDs (respectively) that I own. I use Handbrake to compress the source files from the disc into MP4/H.264/AAC files. I use Subler to lookup and write the correct metadata into the files (artwork, title, chapters, etc.). Subler is far superior to older apps such as AtomicParsley, Meta X or Meta Z.

If a movie spans multiple discs, or if I’ve managed to end up with a file in an MKV container or uses AC3 audio instead of AAC, I can use MP4 Tools to fix and/or merge them.

Once I load the resulting movie into iTunes, I can sync it to any of my devices to watch on-the-go, or stream it to any TV in the house with Apple TV.

Vuze

Vuze is a powerful BitTorrent client. I have nothing else to say on this matter.

Max

Max is a really great audio encoder. I often use it when a friend of mine gives me some FLAC files or WAVs and I want to turn them into MP3s at 320kbps.

Miro Video Converter

I typically use this tool when I’m putting video on my blog, and want to provide browser-native HTML5 formats. It’s also great for creating mobile-friendly versions of video files for the wide array of devices out there.

MusicBrainz Picard

Picard is a great tool for looking up the metadata for my music from the MusicBrainz service. It’s usually pretty good, and if it makes a mistake, you can easily correct it, save the changes, and load them into iTunes.

Ringtones

I use this for making iPhone ringtones out of tracks I have in iTunes.

VLC

VLC can play pretty much any video format. If I’m given an MKV file, a WMV file, and MPG file or something else, I can throw it into VLC and start watching it right away.

Safari

My favorite web browser on the Mac platform. It’s fast, has minimal UI chrome, and has precisely the extensions I need.

I used to bounce around between Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but over the past year, I haven’t felt the pain of anything missing from my browser experience.

Things

Things is a to-do list that helps me get things done. It’s not complex, or even all that fancy, but now that it has cloud syncing across Mac/iPhone/iPad, and the ability to sync from the iOS 6 Reminders app, it helps me keep my to-dos organized.

Mail, Calendar and Messages

These are my trusty, reliable apps for managing my day. Mail and Calendar do a better job together than I’ve experienced with Outlook, Thunderbird/Sunbird/Lightning, Postbox, or even Sparrow.

I used to be a big fan of Adium, but as my needs have changed, Adium hasn’t kept up. I spend more time texting over iMessage than I do IM-ing, and Adium still doesn’t have support for audio/video conversations.

Also, Messages now supports AIM, Yahoo! and Jabber (Google Talk, Facebook Messenger) protocols, so I really have no reason to use anything else.

Fantastical

Fantastical is a handy utility for getting a quick view of my calendar from my menubar, and — combined with the Dictation support in Mountain Lion — I can easily open up Fantastical with a key command, tell it about an upcoming event, and I’m done. Calendar events sync across my devices over iCloud, so I just create the event and I’m done.

1Password

I can’t remember how much harder my life was before the days of 1Password. I use it to store my browser passwords, my software serial numbers, my bank account information (for use with online order forms), store secure notes (the wi-fi password at work, the backup passwords for the secondary-authentication support enabled on my Google and Facebook accounts), social security numbers, etc. My life would be a whole lot worse without 1Password.

Self-Indulgent Weiner

In his editorial, Ed Conway wrote:

Dear Tim,

There’s no easy way to put this so I’ll just come right out with it. I’m leaving you. It’s been great (mostly) but it’s over.

I figured the least I could do is to explain my decision in full – I like to think it might help protect you from nasty break-ups like this in the future.

I can’t help but think of the “self-indulgent weiner” line delivered by Nicholas Cage as Memphis Raines in the movie Gone in Sixty Seconds.

Ed, you’re going to complain in an effort to get page views. You’re trolling the Apple/anti-Apple crowds to get attention. That, sir, makes you a whore.

Long-time Apple user

I’ve been with you, with Apple I mean, for 13 years now – ever since 1999. Perhaps you’ve forgotten: I was a spotty teenager; I bought one of your cute little translucent iBooks. Slowly but surely I painted most parts of my technological life a bright shade of Apple. Let’s see: I’ve owned two iMacs, a number of iBooks, countless Macbooks (I’ve currently got two on the go, for some unknown reason), an iPhone for almost five years, an iPad since the very beginning; iPods, iPod touches, iPod nanos – I’ve had ‘em all. I even invested in an Apple TV and, wait for it, a G4 Power Mac Cube (yes, that was me!).

So, you’ve been an Apple user for a long time. That’s awesome. It’s made your life better, hasn’t it?

I’ll admit I became dependent on you – clingy, even. When I went to the States a couple of years back I shelled out hundreds of dollars to ensure I wouldn’t be without an iPhone – even though I was back at college and wasn’t exactly rolling in it. And like so many of those who fall in love with you, soon enough I found myself working part-time as your best PR spokesman: I spent hours persuading all my friends to buy your stuff. I even wrote a blog about what made Apple such a dynamic, innovative and successful company.

Blog post. You wrote a blog post, you idiot. A “blog” is a collection of posts, not a single one. You don’t “write a blog”, you “write a blog post“.

But that’s neither here nor there. It simply gives me a baseline of your intelligence so that I know whether I can gear my language and logic up or down. Clearly, it’s down.

The hype

Like millions of others, I really believed the hype.

Yes, because Apple’s success has been built on hype, and hype alone. (If you believe this, then I have some ocean-front property in Arizona to sell you.)

Apple builds some of the fastest, thinnest and lightest computers with incredibly high build quality. The ones with some of the best displays (in terms of resolution (2880×1800), pixel density (326ppi) and color accuracy), best resale value, and have the highest consumer rating. They’re #1 in U.S. unit share for notebooks (Mac) (née laptops), and #1 in worldwide unit share for tablets (iPads).

The’ve created not one, but two of the most user-friendly consumer operating systems on the market. They redefined not only one, not even two, but three separate industries. And all of their devices work seamlessly together to create a really fantastic experience.

But no, it’s just hype.

More uninformed stupidity

I never thought I would utter these words, but here goes: I’m leaving you. I have already traded in my iPhone for a Samsung.

A Samsung. One whole Samsung. *facepalm*

Now, I know you don’t like lists (at least I presume that’s why you avoided including a task application in Mac OS and iOS for so many years) but it’s only right that I run through the issues:

There has been a task manager in Mac OS (classic) as far back as System 1.0, AFAICT. Mac OS X has had a task manager since back in the NeXTStep days (1990′s). iOS didn’t support multitasking until iOS 4 (2010), and even then has chosen not to allow rampant or unchecked multitasking for user experience and battery life reasons. Every single detail about your last paragraph was 100% incorrect.

iOS 6

Yes, I know I’m hardly the first to mention this – but that doesn’t make it any less valid as a complaint. It is truly, truly awful. I’m usually ready to forgive one or two niggles in a new iteration of operating system. After all, they’re usually outweighed by the improvements. In this case, I honestly can’t think of a single new feature that in any way enhances the phone. Every change you’ve made is negative.

There are zero features of iOS 6 that are positive? So then you must think that every single one of these features is a bad thing.

• User must confirm access to Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Photos and Location Data when an app requests them.

• It’s easy to keep contact information up-to-date with Facebook integration.

• Asynchronous Game Center integration which allows for fantastic games like Letterpress to exist.

• Built-in turn-by-turn navigation. 3D flyover views in Maps.

• Siri has been improved, supports more types of information, and is available on more devices.

• Facebook and Twitter notifications at the OS-level.

• Shared photo streams (accessible to everyone, not just Facebook users).

• The immensely-useful Passbook allows me to start keeping track of gift cards, tickets and other things without having to keep them in my wallet.

• FaceTime conversations over cellular (3G, 4G and LTE).

• Faster JavaScript, and improved CSS 3 and HTML 5 support in Safari.

• The ability to decline calls (regardless of which view you’re in) then send the caller a message instead if you can’t talk right now.

• Do Not Disturb settings for all of those overnight notifications, texts and drunken phone calls.

• Automatic syncing of tabs between Safari on Mac/iPhone/iPad over iCloud.

• Further-improved accessibility settings for people who need them.

The maps application is utterly horrendous; you must have known this is among the most commonly-used of all functional parts of a smartphone and that to change it quite so substantially would be seriously disruptive.

The new Apple-powered (instead of Google-powered) Maps app has been an overwhelmingly positive experience for me. Maps load faster (thanks to vector-based rendering), I get turn-by-turn directions with voiceover for free (this used to cost $50 for a third-party app), and the 3D “flyover” view has allowed me to discover a bunch of cool things in downtown Seattle that I never knew existed.

The only “loss” I experienced was transit maps. This forced me to discover a number of transit mapping applications that are way better than what I used to use Google Maps in iOS for. Two apps that I use frequently are OneBusAway and Lumatic City Maps. In a pinch, I can use Google Transit Maps in Safari.

Take iTunes Match. In the previous iOS I could download any individual song in my iTunes Match library, so I could listen to it overseas without data or when in the Tube. Now your dreadful new operating system will only let me download whole albums […]

This is partially false. I use iTunes Match all the time. Yes, they’ve removed the one-by-one icons for downloading individual songs. This is a little disappointing, but not super disappointing. I often use playlists (including Smart Playlists) in iTunes, so it’s pretty easy for me to add a song that I want to a playlist, then sync down that playlist.

[…] and then won’t let me delete them afterwards, so my iPhone gets clogged up with stuff before arbitrarily deleting precious chunks of data when it reaches capacity.

Not true, but deleting songs is more complicated as you need to turn off iTunes Match, then manually delete individual songs one-by-one from the list view.

This argument is less moronic than the others… so far.

As do I find the fact that you now seem to have decided to allow the iOS to decide unilaterally to use the telephone network rather than wifi when it so chooses.

What? I have no idea what you’re talking about here.

Given how badly you screwed up with the whole secret GPS-tracking of iPhone users, I’d have thought you realised we don’t like it when you behave creepily like this. It’s seriously not cool, but then more on that later.

Oh, you mean how the complete opposite of your statement is the truth?

All the new, exciting apps you’ve brought in are, I’m afraid to say, rubbish.

Let’s take a look.

Podcasts: dismal and buggy.

Yes, Podcasts 1.0 was a terrible app. But we’re no longer talking about iOS 6.

Facebook integration: should have been there years ago.

Apple gave you what you wanted, and now you’re complaining.

Passbook: erm – seriously?

One of my favorite additions, actually. I use it frequently.

Siri’s improvements are lost on me because, like most users, the only time I’ve engaged with Siri is to see how many swear words he/she/it understands (answer: a surprising number).

I’ll now have to take back my not-so-moronic statement about you that I made earlier.

Finally, for some reason iOS also seems to have broken the tilt-scrolling in Instapaper, which I resent because, well, I just use that app a lot.

So do I. And it works. Or were you using the iOS 6 Beta which was in, you know, beta status?

You’ve lost it

This is going to sound awful, but I can’t think of any big product you’ve re-imagined well since the iPad, and that was almost three years ago.

Stupidity should be painful. It seems as though Ed believes that if things don’t change radically from one iteration to the next, then they suck. Dude, take your Ritalin and calm your ADHD-ass the **** down.

iCloud? Not as good as dropbox, and actually more confusing. FaceTime? Slick, but still pales in comparison with Skype. iMessages? Mostly annoying, particularly when it sends messages twice. Siri? See the previous point. Safari? Not as good as Chrome or Firefox. Safari’s Reader function? Not as good as Instapaper. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Apple has been doing this for a while, so I’m surprised that Ed — a 13-year Apple veteran — hasn’t been paying attention.

Apple does not try to replace existing apps and functionality. Rather, it seeks to chase them up the bean pole. In other words, Apple comes in to the entry level of the market (informing some people that such a market exists in the first place), and challenges the incumbents to provide mid- and advanced-level features for people who want more.

• iCloud: Handles your fundamental syncing tasks across devices with zero effort.

• FaceTime: Always-on. Just tap the contact info of a friend or family member with a Mac, iPhone or iPad, and the call begins. No signing up. No ads. Simple.

• iMessages: I can send and receive messages to other Mac/iPhone/iPad users from my Mac/iPhone/iPad. Messages sync across all devices so I never have to wonder where they went.

• Siri: Fantastic. Easy to send text messages to people via voice while I’m driving. Easy to look up turn-by-turn directions. Easy to find a list of nearby Thai restaurants, with user-submitted reviews, ratings and price information.

• Safari: Safari is incredibly fast on Mac and iOS. It’s become by preferred browser over both Chrome and Firefox because of this.

• Safari’s Reader function: Most people don’t realize that you can read websites with all of the ads and crap stripped out of them. Instapaper led the charge, but Pocket is also coming along. Safari Reader is an entry-level feature.

Plus, my Mac simply doesn’t work that well any more. The contacts on my iPhone don’t seem to sync very well with my laptop. Aperture is extraordinarily slow and buggy, Pages and Numbers are a bit of a nonsense. It just feels like you don’t make the best software anymore. And it doesn’t fit together as seamlessly as in the past.

SOMETHING IS WRONG! FIX IT! MAKE IT WORK!

I don’t have any of the technical problems Ed’s talking about (i.e., contact syncing). I like Pages, but I prefer to write in Markdown using iA Writer. I have no need for Numbers. Since all of Ed’s assertions are unqualified and he fails to explain anything, it’s clear that he’s just ranting about things he doesn’t (or hasn’t taken the time to) understand.

You’re not cool anymore

Again, this is probably a body blow, but it’s also true. It’s not merely that I now have to put up with your products being used by my mother. The fact is that Apple used to be edgy; it used to be associated with the counterculture; it used to be rebellious. I liked that. I liked the fact that you were uncompromising. […]

Yes, and Apple also almost went bankrupt in 1996. They were rebels without a clue. Now they’re wildly successful because they chose not to follow in the footsteps of other companies… and you’re mad?

When you introduced the iMac you ditched the serial ports and insisted everyone had to make do with USB ports, despite the fact there was approximately one printer in the world which worked with USB. You were the first to ditch disc drives and DVD drives. I’m not alone but I liked the way you refused to put Flash on your devices. Plus I liked the fact that unlike Google and pretty much every other big company you and your fellow execs would never go to navel-gazing networking conferences like the World Economic Forum in Davos. There was something cool about that attitude.

None… (reading…) yep, none of those things have changed.

These days, you’re all too ready to compromise. Do you want to know the beginning of the end of our relationship? It was when you decided to include an SD slot in your MacBooks. Why? I can’t imagine the Apple of old ever doing this; there is no inherent reason why you need one in your laptop, save to compromise. And in compromising, you’ve become too complex.

User research showed that lots and lots of people were using SD cards in their cameras and other devices, so Apple added an SD card reader into their laptops. Apple did what made things simpler for users.

I remember the first iMac: it was the first computer you didn’t really need an instruction manual for. When iOS came out I found myself having to download the manual and wade through its 156 pages (156, FFS Tim!) to find out what you’d done with the settings I used to use. That’s the first time I’ve ever had to use an Apple instruction manual.

You swipe. You tap. If you want to check out the settings, you tap on “Settings”. It’s really not complex. Both my son and my daughter (elementary school age) were able to pick up my iPhone (and later my iPad) and begin using them immediately with zero instruction.

What does that say about you, Ed?

Apple used to be about purity, which in turn made its products simpler and more reliable; somewhere along the way, this got lost. Or rather, Apple under Steve Jobs used to be about purity: when he wasn’t at the helm in the 90s, it also made the kind of compromises I’m talking about here.

By “compromise”, Ed means “gave customers what they were asking for”.

You’re screwing us

No: the final straw was when you decided to replace the dock on the bottom of all your iPhones and iPads with the new “lightening dock”. I’ve heard your explanations: that it’ll allow your devices to be thinner, that it’s a faster connector and all that. I don’t buy it. The main reason you did this is the main reason you seem to be bringing your products out in ever shorter product cycles: planned obsolescence.

*facepalm*

You’re aware that the more frequently something is out-of-date, the more often we’ll have to buy more Apple stuff. Now, I was willing to put up with that when it felt as if there was genuinely progress between iterations, when there was a shred of aspiration about it, but by the time you unveiled the lightening connector I wasn’t so sure. All it means is that I have to throw out all the devices I’ve bought over the past years which plug into my iPhone: adaptors, radios, speakers and so on. It’s a really low-down thing to do – particularly since the lightening connector is patently not that much faster than the existing dock.

Firstly, it’s spelled lightning.

Secondly, I haven’t thrown out a single device I’ve purchased since 2003 when the 30-pin dock was introduced. This is mainly because I’m not a moron who goes around throwing things out. But it’s also because you can spend $29 on a converter.

My chargers are all USB chargers, so I was able to plug the new USB-based Lightning connector in where my old USB-based 30-pin connector was. Yes, I’ve invested a grand total of about $60 buying multiple USB-to-Lightning cables so that I have one for my car, my office, and my home, but considering how many years it’s been since I had to buy a cable, I’m not that stressed about it.

Lastly, Apple has said that Lightning will be the standard for “at least the next 10 years” (as per Phil Schiller). With all of Apple’s new Macs supporting USB 3.0, I’d wager a very healthy sum of money on Lightning supporting USB 3.0 speeds. It also allows the devices to become even thinner and lighter over time. This is A Good Thing™.

Anyway, I guess you could say it was a Eureka moment. Finally, I realised that you’ve been working your way here for years: the fact that you give up supporting old Macs far quicker than before; that you won’t let us download and delete our own music from your cloud. You realise there isn’t much money long-term in being a pure manufacturer. You want to turn yourself into a quasi-service, where we constantly need to buy or subscribe to one of your products. I see the point – it’s economic genius. The problem is that it’s not inspiring in the slightest; and the products are no longer wowing us enough to detract from the venality of it. And I’m just tired and, worse, bored of it.

Again, 100% of this statement is complete fiction.

Thus far, iOS devices (with the notable exception of the first-generation iPad) have received the latest OS updates for 3+ years. This is in stark contrast to Android-based devices which are lucky to see a single update ever.

Macs tend to be supported with the latest updates for 5-6+ years. The latest OS X release, Mountain Lion, supports 2007-era and newer Macs. Considering that the earliest possible Macs that they could support are the first Intel-based Macs (released in 2006), this is pretty darn good.

I don’t need you any more

I was between iPhones and I filled the lonely miserable gap with an HTC Android phone. And while I tried to ignore it at the time, the fact is, it was actually pretty good. Yes, there were niggles and a few annoyances, but we got along surprisingly well. And I’ll get on pretty well with it again, because the fact is, Tim: I’m leaving you for an Android. I can get everything I need from a phone from them as well.

Oh, you’re only looking for a phone? Well hey, knock yourself out.

Last year, I wrote about why Apple’s ecosystem is unmatched and how Android still has a long way to go. If you just want a phone that does some smartphone-like stuff, Android is just fine.

My email, my messages, maps that work, my contacts (they’re stored with Google anyway and that integrates far better into an Android phone); Evernote, Instapaper, Whatsapp, my tube timetables and bus times. I’ll probably ditch iTunes Match in favour of Amazon Cloud Player or Google Drive, and, frankly, good riddance after the way you’ve treated us mobile users of the service. I’ll miss some of the apps, I’m sure – Reeder to name just one. I’ll miss the hundreds of text messages sitting on my iPhone. I’ll miss… Actually, I can’t think of anything else right now.

If you’re invested in the Google platform for your contacts, calendars and email, then the Google mobile OS might be a good fit for you. I used Google for contacts and calendars for 4 years and have used Google for email since I got into the Gmail beta in May 2004.

But I’ll tell you: Moving my contacts and calendars to iCloud has been a very positive experience. Not only does contact syncing over iCloud work better, but sharing calendars with other people allows for notifications about changes for all people involved. I couldn’t get this with Google Calendar.

I’ve used Amazon Cloud Player on Android 4.0.4 (CyanogenMod 9) and iOS, and quite frankly, it sucks. It crashes often, it doesn’t use my album artwork, and it only supports the popular-but-inefficient MP3 audio codec. It also doesn’t integrate with iTunes on my Mac. DoubleTwist is tolerable, but the integration isn’t as good there either.

Google Music still requires you to upload all of your music. I have hundreds of gigabytes, so that simply isn’t going to happen.

I’ll hang onto my iPad for the time being. I’ll certainly keep the Macbook Air – I’m not quite ready to return to Windows yet.

Might not buy a Mac, but not ready to go back to Windows? Where else is there to go? Desktop Linux?

Don’t take it personally. Well, do, if it helps inspire you to make better and bolder products. This need not be forever. You can still win me back: but you’ll need to do something special again, like you did in the good old days. Reinvent the TV, like you reinvented the phone. Revolutionise finance. Overhaul the home entirely. Think Different – as your predecessor Steve Jobs used to say. Perhaps the problem is you’re not the same person any more. You’re not Steve. Perhaps.

Reinventing TV takes time. You can’t just take an ancient, out-of-touch industry and change it overnight. Apple took 10 years to build out a successful media platform and top-notch mobile devices.

It’s nice that you want Apple do revolutionize everything, but understand that Apple is a business and they need to have the right motivation and opportunity before they can tackle a new market.

And by mentioning Steve, your ignorance is showing. Moron.

Either way, I’m tired of settling for mediocrity from you these days.

Some of the best made, best selling products of all time. Blockbuster, record-breaking sales around the world. But because Apple is continuing to hone their skills and continually improve their products over time, they’ve become mediocre.

Again, go find your Ritalin and settle your ADHD-ass the **** down.

Conclusion

So, Ed, let me get this straight.

• You like your MacBook Air and you don’t want to go back to Windows.
• You like your iPad (that presumably has iOS 6, and you didn’t mention how anemic the Android tablet market/experience is).
• You’re frustrated that the tech bloggers complained loudly about Maps and iCloud, even though both work really well.
• You complain about Apple not supporting their devices, then say you’re going to move to Android.
• You want Apple to reinvent everything, ever. But they haven’t, so they suck.
• You want Apple to introduce radical changes to their devices, but complain loudly when they change their mapping provider or introduce a new dock connector.

You, sir, are clearly the king of the morons. Congratulations.

Bias is bias

First of all, everybody is free to have their own opinions. If these guys prefer Android-based OSs and non-Apple hardware, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you’re in the business of reporting information, however, make sure you have your facts straight and aren’t misleading anybody by leaving out relevant information.

Anything less than that is simply sloppy reporting.

“Apple vs. Android: iPhone 5 and Galaxy S3 Specs”

In the recent episode entitled Apple vs. Android: iPhone 5 and Galaxy S3 Specs, Mauricio Balvanera (producer) and Jackie Talbott (host) compare the new Apple iPhone 5 to the Samsung Galaxy S III in a number of factors. Here are some highlights:

Being pedantic

First of all — and yes, I understand how completely pedantic I’m being — let’s break-down the accuracy of the title of the episode: “Apple vs. Android: iPhone 5 and Galaxy S3 Specs”.

• Apple is a company, which makes both the phone hardware, as well as the phone software.
• Android is a base operating system, which hardware vendors take, modify, and re-release as their own custom operating systems. Android is built primarily by Google.
• iPhone 5 and Galaxy S III are both (hardware) phones made by Apple and Samsung, respectively.
  • Apple’s iPhone 5 runs iOS
  • Samsung’s Galaxy S III runs Samsung’s modified version of the base Android OS. I have no idea what the product name of their custom OS is.

This is just plain sloppy.

Leapfrogged

Mauricio: So we’re going to go over the technical differences between the two and basically decide whether or not Apple has leapfrogged Android technology.

Has it already been decided that iOS has been leapfrogged by Android? If so, I wasn’t aware that this decision had been made. There are several cases where Apple and iOS have left other devices and mobile platforms in the dust. Were these not taken into account when the decision was made that Android was ahead?

Device size

Mauricio: So, the S III obviously takes the cake on size, while the iPhone beats out the S3 on thinness […]

Yes, the S3 is physically larger. Does that mean it “wins”? I would argue not, but Mauricio seems to imply that requiring two hands is a feature. The be fair, however, he and Jackie both made it a point to mention that it can all boil down to a matter of preference, so there is neither a winner nor a loser here. Although I think they could have done a better job addressing this up-front, I’ll let this one slide.

What they didn’t talk about, however, was the weight. The iPhone 5 feels considerably lighter than both the glass-backed 4 and 4S models, and clocks in at 3.95 ounces (112 grams). The Galaxy S III clocks in at just over 4.69 ounces (133 grams).

Now, I own an iPhone 4 which clocks in at 4.8 ounces (137 grams). Various co-workers of mine have iPhone 4Ss, which clock in at 4.9 ounces (140 grams). The new iPhone 5 is 28g lighter than the 4S, and 25g lighter than the 4, and the difference in your hand is substantial. It would be reasonable to infer that being 21g lighter than the Galaxy S III would be nearly equally substantial.

Camera

There was too much banter here for me to transcribe, but they basically compare 8 MP to 8 MP with 1080p recording for each, and leave it at that. What they completely leave out is the quality of the lense, the aperture, low-light boosting, etc., which really make or break the quality of the photographs.

Now, I’m not going to pretend to be a photography buff who knows the difference from one aperture size to another, but what about providing real-world photographs comparing one device to another to see what the real-world differences are?

And that’s only for still shots. What about the quality of the recorded video? 1080p is a shorthand reference for 1920-by-1080 resolution; this has nothing to do with quality. And what about things like image stabilization during recording? I know first-hand that the last couple of iPhones have had awesome image stabilization. How does the Galaxy S III stack up?

Lightning port

First, Mauricio makes a comment about replacing the old proprietary dock for a new proprietary dock (*womp, womp*) — implying that proprietary is inherently bad. Mauricio’s bias is showing.

Mauricio follows that up by explaining that the Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP) Forum chose to endorse Micro USB for power and data transport in 2007. He also added that Apple was “notably absent.”

This reminds me of the story about how Teddy Roosevelt’s own mother didn’t even vote for him! Why does the OMTP story remind me of Teddy Roosevelt’s mother? Because both statements are both true and entirely misleading. What Mauricio leaves out of his explanation are some additional facts:

• The OMTP forum was a collection of for-profit corporations, and not an unbiased standards organization.
• The OMTP existed from 2004-2010. It no longer exists.
• Micro USB was selected for power and data transfer — because those are the only two things that Micro USB is capable of.
  • Apple’s 30-pin and Lightning connectors support video-out.
  • Apple’s 30-pin and Lightning connectors support controlling the iDevice from another device (including stereos and car adapters).
  • Apple’s 30-pin and Lightning connectors wrap additional functionality around the base USB 2.0 implementation.
• Teddy Roosevelt was elected before 1918, when the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed to allow women to vote.

USB is a “dumb” protocol, and requires the primary machine’s CPU for any data transfer. FireWire, the 30-pin and Lightning connectors are much more intelligent protocols which use an on-board device processor, allowing for more efficient data transfer than Micro USB does — even over the same USB 2.0 protocol. Most USB 2.0 devices are lucky to get 280 Mbps (35 MB/s) of real-world throughput.

Now, although the current version of the cables come in the USB 2.0 variety, do we know if the iPhone 5′s connector is capable of newer protocols such as USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt? I don’t know what the answer is, but it seems to me that starting with USB 2.0 support makes the most sense because that’s what the overwhelming number of customers have available.

During a teardown of the iPhone 5 (which, to be fair, didn’t happen until after this episode of App Judgment was recorded), Ars Technica points out that Lightning might be USB 3.0-compatible. If the Lightning connector is supposed to last us another 10 years (as claimed by Apple), this seems to make the most sense.

Things that are missing

No Micro SD […]

Yay, because:

• Micro SD is more than 10x slower than the built-in SSD drives, and…
• Having multiple drives attached would complicate the UX of the device.

No NFC (Boo!) […]

Near-Field Communication (NFC) is still (arguably) a solution in search of a problem. It’s a cart-before-the-horse situation. If NFC really does unlock some fantastic uses that make my life easier/better in some way, by all means, show them to me. I’d love to be proven wrong.

Phil Schiller explains the majority of use-cases that people want NFC to fit are addressed by Passbook. Passbook is still new and apps are few (iOS 6 was released to the public only 11 days ago), but being an all-software solution means that developers can deliver new features quickly without requiring third-parties to purchase and integrate new NFC hardware.

Let’s see which way the real-world usage actually goes. Realistically, it’s simply too early to tell.

No Barometer […]

What? How useful would such a feature be in the real world, when weather apps are a dime a dozen? I have no idea why this was on the list, other than to be a kitchen sink item.

And no wireless charging capabilities.

This would be an interesting feature in theory, but I’m not convinced that I’d want a bulkier phone in exchange for this feature. Also, when I plug in my phone to charge, I also want it to sync. While the iTunes WiFi Syncing in iOS 5 and later addresses this, it’s more important to me to have a faster connection while transferring data — especially with movies, TV shows and games that are typically in the 500 MB–2 GB range.

So, I’d argue that it’s an interesting feature, but I don’t know how well it’d work out practically.

Conclusion

Mauricio: Apple — at best — have matched Android hardware […]

From there, they sit and mock Apple and new new stuff they recently put out. They did say that Apple’s build quality is better (it is, actually), but the rest was simply mocking.

They left out all of the software-related topics (since a piece of hardware is completely worthless without matching software), and they focused exclusively on hardware specs instead of actual features (also known as “feature checklist dysfunction“).

All-in-all, I find myself so frustrated by such ill-informed reporting, that I’m rather put-off at the moment. I really hope that the hosts of App Judgment will avoid such opinion-filled, faux-reporting drivel in the future, and take the time to support their assertions with things like facts and empirical evidence. Tell the whole story, guys.

[…] but there is no benchmark, no tech spec, to measure nice. But you can feel it.

And that is what resonates with millions of people around the world.

As soon as I read this, I was struck by how true this statement is for companies like Intel, Google and [redacted] that claim to be “metrics-driven”. The unfortunate side-effect is that they focus so much on metrics that they end up being driven only by metrics — which ultimately results in consistently sub-par experiences. Companies that are driven by metrics — at the exclusion of instinct and humanity — will never produce the kind of quality that they truly need to in order to create the best experiences for their customers.

Claiming to be both “metrics-driven” and “customer-obsessed” is going to be an untenable stance unless you’re willing to both hire and enable people who really, really understand the fundamentals of how to make really great products.

Explanation

There are few things that technical people are more annoyed by than technical recruiters. A very large segment of the technical recruiting industry has made a bad name for the rest of their industry by relentlessly spamming technical professionals after having not done their homework. These people hock job openings the same way that sleazy salesmen hock used cars.

These recruiting companies need to radically change how they do business with the technical crowd, and the Clueless Recruiters series is an attempt to call out clueless technical recruiters who contact me for jobs that are clearly a terrible fit. Everything here is posted from real exchanges between myself and recruiters, entirely uncut. Enjoy!

Abhishek Banerjee from SACC Inc. is a giant douchebag

Normally, I will remove or otherwise censor the names and email addresses of the recruiter and the company that they work for. This allows us to focus on the idiocy of a large sampling of the technical recruiting industry and have a few laughs while we’re at it. But not this time.

This time, I’ve had enough of one technical recruiter in particular — Abhishek Banerjee from SACC Inc. Reps from SACC have been spamming me for years. Not just 1-2 years, but more like 5-7 years. They’ve been spamming me so long, that they still send emails to an address that I haven’t used since my domain name was skyzyx.com. Yeah, that long!

I have asked Abhishek Banerjee from SACC Inc. to stop emailing me on several occasions. I’ve asked to unsubscribe. I’ve asked him to remove my information from his company database. I’ve asked him to never contact me again. I have done everything that I can think of to let this guy know that I don’t want him contacting me at all. But despite my efforts, this guy continues to send me completely irrelevant recruiting emails over and over and over again.

So now, I’m calling you out, Abhishek Banerjee from SACC Inc.

Recruiter Schlock

Dear Ryan:

Hi,

If interested and available, pls. respond back asap.

FOR THE ZILLIONTH TIME, STOP CONTACTING ME! I HATE YOU AND YOUR COMPANY AND I NEVER, EVER, EVER WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU EVER AGAIN.

LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

INTERACTIVE PROGRAMS WEB PRODUCER

DESCRIPTION:

NOTE: Local candidates preferred. Face to face may be required.

I live in SEATTLE! Why the **** are you sending this to me?!?!

The Interactive Programs Sr. Web Producer sits within a production team and is responsible for the day-to-day production of our client’s .com supply chain content.

Their main focus is to manage and lead production efforts related to downloads, public evaluations and support content and deliverables, leveraging innovative self service delivery tools and project management techniques.

Each interactive producer is expected to understand the complexities of managing supply chain web properties, how to align cross-functional teams to a common deliverable, and is highly accountable for quality control as well as precise timelines and release dates. Candidates should have experience delivering consistent and quality deliverables within working with business owners from web marketing, product marketing, IT and engineering.

Translation: I know how to work the Business Jargon Machine™ that we have sitting in the office.

In reality, you’ve said ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about ANYTHING. You’re a complete and utter moron, and you suck.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Collaborate with web marketing managers, release managers and application development teams to drive the development of engaging web properties that deliver value to the customer and leads for the company.

Translation: We’re looking for a grunt to be told five different things by five different managers. None of these managers have any idea WTF they’re doing, and if anything goes wrong, they’ll blame you.

Oversee the direction, development, and production of international and domestic web properties, with a specific focus on product life cycle activities to meet customer acquisition, retention and adoption goals.

Translation: Make a website.

Ensure that site design and workflows enhance the customer experience, making it easy for customers to understand, evaluate and purchase products.

Translation: Even though you’ll have absolutely no voice or input into anything that actually matters for the site, we’ll blame you for anything that goes wrong.

Work with cross-functional teams to develop site design documents, schedules, and functional specifications to ensure the successful delivery of web programs and initiatives.

Translation: We don’t know what the **** we’re doing.

Participate throughout the product launch process to guide timelines and manage specification documentation and content deliverables.

Translation: We really don’t know what the **** we’re doing.

Support initiatives to increase site traffic and improve lead generation and purchase conversions.

Translation: We’re the used car salesmen of the web.

Communicate regularly with internal teams to ensure content maintains a high level of accuracy and relevance.

Translation: Talk to the people you work with.

Work with web marketing managers and editorial teams to create, implement and maintain standards around SEO and content tagging.

Translation: We don’t know what SEO is… only search engine spamming. And we don’t know how to do that very well either.

Maintain a working knowledge of all brand and usability guidelines, and ensure that all web properties conform to these guidelines.

Translation: Remember stuff.

Create, manage and maintain development and QA deployment process and schedules.

Translation: DO ALL OF THE WORK!

Manage the adherence to and creation of materials for the software development lifecycle. These include information architecture layouts, wireframes, process/information flow diagrams to be included in business and functional requirement documentation.

Translation: We have no idea what we’re doing.

Clearly communicate service level agreements and enforce those standards with internal and cross-functional teams.

Translation: Our customers are businesses who also don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re paying us a lot of money.

Prepare traffic and usage reports on an as-needed basis.

Translation: Prepare traffic and usage reports on an as-needed basis.

REQUIREMENTS:

5+ years online production experience in fast-paced, highly creative, and goal driven environments.

Translation: We don’t want slackers.

Proven contributions to web program development and execution, including content, processes, procedures and/or technologies.

Translation: We don’t want idiots.

Demonstrated success with full cycle marketing project management, multi-tasking and ability to prioritize on a real-time basis.

Translation: We don’t want slackers.

Experience working on commercial web sites with a proven understanding of web technologies, browser compatibilities and limitations, content and process management, and site implementation.

Translation: We’re asking for an entry-level web developer.

Excellent verbal and written communication, as well as leadership skills that inspire others to embrace teamwork and collaboration.

Translation: We’re looking for a grunt who will do whatever we say.

Team oriented, motivated self-starter who thrives in a fast paced dynamic environment with demonstrated customer relationship skills.

Translation: We want someone who does a good job, but who we can blame when something goes wrong.

Experience with technical content management, SEO, site analytics and Web site/Internet technologies.

Translation: You need more experience than what we want to pay you for.

Focus on user experience information design.

Translation: These words sound like they kinda make sense together, don’t they?

Working knowledge and understanding of content management systems and web technologies, including HTML, DHTML, Flash, XML, etc.

Translation: We don’t know that DHTML went the way of Flash, which in-turn went the way of the Blackberry.

BA/BS degree or equivalent work experience.

Translation: You have to be smart and experienced, but your pay will not be commensurate with your background. You will be overworked and under-appreciated the entire time.

Loc: Palo Alto, CA
Dur: 6+ months

Translation: And on top of all of that, we’ll treat you like a second-class citizen.

Best Regards,

Abhishek Banerjee
SACC Inc.
(650)413-4715 (Desk)
(510)396-0691 (Direct)
abanerjee@saccinc.com
www.saccinc.com

For the bazillionth time, never contact me again. I don’t ever want to hear from you ever. Ever. Freaking ever.

Explanation

There are few things that technical people are more annoyed by than technical recruiters. A very large segment of the technical recruiting industry has made a bad name for the rest of their industry by relentlessly spamming technical professionals after having not done their homework. These people hock job openings the same way that sleazy salesmen hock used cars.

These recruiting companies need to radically change how they do business with the technical crowd, and the Clueless Recruiters series is an attempt to call out clueless technical recruiters who contact me for jobs that are clearly a terrible fit. Everything here is posted from real exchanges between myself and recruiters, entirely uncut. Enjoy!

Recruiter Schlock

Here’s one I got this morning from a clueless recruiter. For reference, here is my résumé.

Subject: Freelance opportunity (4-week engagement)

I… I don’t even… sigh

I found your resume online and wanted to reach out about a freelance opportunity with our company.

Oh, really? Where? Where is my online résumé?

Y’know, the one that has a link pointing to a write-up about how to prevent technical folks from hating technical recruiters.

We’re a software development firm based in River North (Chicago), and need a front end developer to help us out on a month-long project.

Since you’ve seen my résumé, and know where I live, you’d also know that I have a good job with a good company, and that I’m not willing to pack up my kids during the school year to move them halfway across the country…

…for a month.

The bar is extremely high for this project and would (first and foremost) require someone with knowledge around accessibility. Our client has their own guidelines that were specifically produced for this project, and these are stricter than the standard recommended practices.

Ah-hah! Eureka! This is the single keyword that you searched for which brought up my (and many other people’s) email address to spam.

HTML5/CSS best practices are an absolute must, and Javascript experience would go hand-in-hand with that.

Can you, [recruiter], articulate the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5?

Also: You misspelled “JavaScript”.

Not necessary, but a huge plus, would be if you had experience in .NET (particularly in .NET MVC).

Right. Because I have .NET experience on my résumé. Y’know, the one you found online? The one you actually took the time to read?

If you feel like you have these skills and are interested [...]

Muffled snicker

[...] please reach out to me with some code samples.

You mean, besides the links to the projects on my site? And besides my GitHub account which has dozens of projects I do or have worked on?

We’re looking to fill this position ASAP (ideally starting this week) [...]

It’s Wednesday. Seriously?

[...] and working remotely would be acceptable as long as we can maintain proper communication.

Because, otherwise, I’d have to pack up my kids during the school year and move to Chicago. For a month.

What kind of relocation package does the company offer?

I look forward to hearing from you!

Oh-ho, I bet you do!

If the offer meets or exceeds $100/hr, I will give it serious consideration. Otherwise, it simply isn’t worth the inconvenience and hassle.

But with all seriousness: If you would’ve put in anything above the most minimal amount of effort, you’d know better than to send me — someone who has written plenty about what’s wrong with the technical recruiting industry — this kind of schlock.

Please remove me from all future communications from yourself and the company you represent.

Thank you.

Naming

I was way off. I did not think that they would call it “iPhone 5″, but here we are. They did the complete opposite of what I’d anticipated.

Louie Mantia had the following to say about the name:

God dammit Apple. “5″? Really? YOU HAD ONE JOB!!

Let’s see how The Infamous They did with their predictions.

An announcement on Sept. 12th and shipments on Sept. 21st

True. Daring Fireball discusses more about this rumor.

A redesigned body with a larger screen

True. Engadget discusses more about this rumor. I went out on a limb and said the following:

[I]f this is true, I’d bet on 1024×640 or 1536×960 (16:10) instead of the more awkward 16:9)

The iPhone 5 has an 1136×640, 16:9 display.

A new 8/9-pin connector

True. It’s an 8-pin, reversible connector. The Verge discusses more about this rumor. While it appears that it still uses a USB cable, I’m hoping that they’ll provide a Thunderbolt-based cable for those of us with 64 GB devices and lots of media.

Fast LTE networking

True. It’s a single-chip for data and voice, and runs on all of the major providers in the U.S. (i.e., Verizon, AT&T and Sprint; No, T-Mobile doesn’t count).

In addition, they improved their 2.4 GHz wireless-N networking to support dual-band 2.4/5.0 GHz to take advantage of the additional channels. BGR discusses more about this rumor.

Near-Field Communication (NFC) sensor

False. There was no mention of NFC in the keynote. C|Net discusses more about this rumor.

Larger storage options

False. It still tops out at 64 GB. I was really hoping for a 128 GB model. Gotta Be Mobile discusses more about this rumor.

Faster quad-core Apple A6 CPU

Maybe True: Yes, the iPhone 5 includes the Apple A6 CPU that is “up to twice as fast” as the A5 chip. (The A5X chip wasn’t compared.) What we won’t know until the tear-downs, however, is whether or not the A6 chip is quad-core, or how fast it is in absolute measurable units (i.e. gigahertz). C|Net discusses more about this rumor.

More memory

Unknown. We’ll need to wait for the tear-downs for this.

Conclusion

This appears to be a really solid update. Beyond these features, there were several other features that were added. I’m only a couple of months away from the end of my contract with AT&T, and I’ll be dropping some coin on the new iPhone 5.

iPhone 5 or iPhone 6

“iPhone 5″ is the name that people have most commonly assigned to the upcoming iPhone, but there are a number of problems with that guess. The first of which is that it’s not the fifth iPhone — it’s the sixth. We’ve had (in order):

1. The original iPhone
2. The iPhone 3G
3. The iPhone 3GS
4. The iPhone 4
5. And the iPhone 4S

Because of this, I believe that we won’t be hearing about the “iPhone 5″. It also doesn’t make sense to jump from iPhone 4 and 4S straight to iPhone 6. Instead, I believe that when Tim Cook gets on stage next month, he’s going to call the device “the new iPhone”.

But for those of us who are geeks and care about the way that this model will be described over time, there are two obvious possibilities…

The New iPhone (5th generation)

If you’ve watched Apple for any amount of time, you may have noticed that all Apple devices have a model identifier. For example, the new 15″ Retina-enabled MacBook Pro has a model identifier of MacBookPro10,1. The third-generation iPad with Verizon LTE networking is iPad3,2, while the WiFi-only model is iPad3,1.

Let’s look at the aforementioned list of iPhone models again, this time with their model identifiers.

• The original iPhone (iPhone1,1)
• The iPhone 3G (iPhone1,2)
• The iPhone 3GS (iPhone2,1)
• The iPhone 4 (iPhone3,1 for AT&T, iPhone3,2 for Verizon)
• And the iPhone 4S (iPhone4,1)

If we follow the pattern, the next iPhone will have a model identifier of iPhone5,1. This means that it will be the fifth-generation iPhone according to Apple’s own internal naming scheme.

Most recently, Apple switched the iPad from versioned naming (i.e., iPad, iPad 2) to the take-off-your-coat-and-stay-awhile style of naming (i.e., “the new iPad”), and only refers to it by its generation when it needs to explicitly differentiate between models.

Apple’s iPod lineup has always followed this naming convention. There was the original iPod with the mechanical scroll-wheel, followed by the iPod (2G) with the touch scroll-wheel. The first iPod I owned was a 15 GB iPod (3G). The first iPod to support photos was “iPod photo” (4G). The second iPod I owned was a glossy black 60 GB iPod (5G) with video. I currently own a 160 GB “iPod classic” (6G). Even the iPod touch has followed the same pattern. The current model is an iPod touch (4G).

The problem with the iPhone following this model is that there are different kinds of “Gs” floating around for phones that would only cause confusion. For example the iPhone 3G was not the third-generation iPhone — it was the iPhone with support for a third-generation wireless network.

The next iPhone is widely expected to have support for LTE wireless networking (i.e., real 4G), but it would be the fifth-generation iPhone. I can hear the confusing conversations amongst clueless teenagers now:

“My iPhone has 5G, but yours is only 4G.”

“Actually, mine is 3G and yours is 4G.”

“No, mine is called ’5G’, so it’s better than your 4G.”

“You mean my ’4S’?“

…and so on. There is no way that Apple will begin throwing extra Gs around all willy-nilly like that.

The New iPhone (2012)

Because the Mac lineup has been around for so long, Apple doesn’t give their computers names like 3G, 3GS or 4. Just like with the new iPad, Apple simply refers to them at introductions as “the new iMac”, or “the new MacBook”.

When it comes to tech support, however, they use specific identifiers to determine the model. For example:

• My home computer is a 17-inch MacBook Pro (early 2011, Core i7 2.2).
• My work computer is a 13-inch MacBook Pro (mid 2012, Core i5 2.5).
• My previous home computer was a 17-inch MacBook Pro (early 2006, Core Duo 2.16).
• My previous work computer was a 13-inch MacBook (mid 2009, Core 2 Duo 2.13).

While the names are about as verbose as “HP Pavilion dv7t-7000 Quad Edition Entertainment Notebook PC“, or “Dell New Inspiron 17R Special Edition with Truelife“, they’re far more descriptive.

iPhones only come out with one model a year, where the only difference between devices of that model year is internal storage capacity. Following this pattern, the original was the iPhone (2007). I currently own an iPhone (2010) and am looking to replace it this fall with an iPhone (2012). They’re all iPhones. The model year only matters when you need to be more specific than that.

Of course, if I wanted to be even more specific, I would say that I wanted to get a “white iPhone (2012; 128 GB; Verizon LTE)”.

If I were a betting man, this is where I would put my money.

Whither the next iPhone?

The next iPhone is expected to be announced in less than a month. The most recent rumors I’ve read suggest that the next iPhone will be announced on September 12, and begin shipping on September 21.

The Infamous They also suggest that it will have a redesigned body with a larger screen (if this is true, I’d bet on 1024×640 or 1536×960 (16:10) instead of the more awkward 16:9), a new 8/9-pin connector, fast LTE networking, a near-field communication (NFC) sensor, larger storage options, a faster quad-core Apple A6 CPU, and more memory (duh).

In a few weeks, we’ll find out what I’m going to be shelling-out $399 for.

Dieter Rams had the following to say:

“A designer who wants to achieve good design must not regard himself as an artist who, according to taste and aesthetics, is merely dressing-up products with a last-minute garment. The designer must be the gestaltingenieur or creative engineer. They synthesise the completed product from the various elements that make up its design. Their work is largely rational, meaning that aesthetic decisions are justified by an understanding of the product’s purpose.”

Steve Jobs had something very similar to say:

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

If you are doing UX work in an organization that either doesn’t understand or doesn’t appreciate the science of design, keep your chin up.

Here’s one I got this morning from a clueless recruiter. For reference, here is my résumé.

Hope all is well. I wanted to reach out to you in regards to an opportunity I’m working on with [company] located in San Jose.

Hello [name], I am doing well. It’s good to put a face to a name (http://[domain-name].com/about/team). I’m curious, however as to why you’re emailing me about a position in California since I haven’t lived in that state for a few years.

A company led by a team of experienced executives, designers, and engineers from TiVo, Netflix, Vudu, Disney, MTV, MGM, Apple, Best Buy, E!, eBay, Yahoo!, and WebTV. I’m working with [name], VP of Engineering and he is looking for a solid Ruby Developer. The company is backed by blue-chip venture capital firms including NEA, Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, BV Capital, LA angel investor [name], and independent investors from the entertainment and technology industries. Please let me know if this is something you would be interested in. I have included the job req below.

When you leave Silicon Valley behind, you realize that people find the strangest things enticing about positions. Personally, I’m not even remotely interested in “status” as much as whether or not the work I’m doing will have a positive impact on the world.

[Description of company and their product.]

I know. I’ve played with it. It’s… meh. It tries to be too many things without actually being good at any one of them.

About the Position

We’re looking for a strong autonomous general programmer with great Ruby knowledge and with capacity and will to evolve. We’re currently using a custom Ruby stack with Rails components and a MongoDB backend, but are looking for someone with enough experience to adapt to new technologies as needed.

Well, this clearly doesn’t sound like me. You Googled my name before contacting me, right? To make sure that I was actually a reasonable fit for this position?

Since I know how awesome the overwhelming majority of technical recruiters are about doing their homework before contacting people, let me make sure you’ve seen my resume.

1. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Ryan+Parman
2. Click “Resume”
3. Read the resume.

Because, I mean, I’d hate to think that a technical recruiter was making a cattle call by sending messages to anybody who had “Ruby” in their resume somewhere. I don’t look like a cow, do I? (Lie to me if you think I do. It’s the hair, right? I need a haircut, don’t I?)

Desired Skills
Ruby proficiency

Somewhat.

MongoDB

Nope.

Other distributed databases (Riak, Memcached, Redis, Cassandra, Hbase, etc.)

Nope.

Strong Traditional SQL Experience is a plus

Nope.

API Design, client-Server communication experience

Yes.

Caching techniques

Somewhat.

Testing (TDD & BDD knowledge is a plus)

Yes.

Start-up mentality

Yes.

Autonomous

Yes.

Desired Interests
* Scala, Go & concurrency

No desire.

Solr & search optimization

No desire.

In memory caching and indexing

Some desire.

Fault-tolerant service architecture

Well, yes. I work for Amazon Web Services.

Multi-data center and distributed data

Again, yes. The whole AWS thing.

If digital entertainment is your passion, Fanhattan is for you:

Oh really?

an obsession for user experience…

Clearly not. The UX of the app is arguably pretty terrible.

disruptive technology…

WTF does this even mean?

high-profile investors…

Not even a little bit.

and an experienced team of designers…

Yes.

engineers…

Yes.

and executives…

Most executives are buffoons. How are the Fanhattan execs different?

from both the technology…

Awesome!

and entertainment industries.

You mean the broken industries who are attempting to destroy the United States through bogus legislation? No thank you.

[name] | Technical Recruiter | [company]
Engineering, Product, Development, Leadership
Tel: [phone] | Cell: [phone]
[email address]

You are receiving this email because you are a member of our private contact database. If you do not wish to receive similar email messages in the future and to see our contact information please click here. We respect your privacy. This email fully complies with the CAN-SPAM Act.

I’ve actually sent unsubscribe messages before on multiple occasions, and my requests keep getting ignored. I actually have Gmail filter “@[domain-name].com” emails directly into the Trash because of it. I only saw this message because I accidentally deleted something and needed to pull it back to my inbox.

Internet Issues: SOPA/PIPA

I am a Washington State voter, and I want to urge you to denounce, reject and vote against the SOPA & PIPA bills currently working their way through Congress.

Information: http://americancensorship.org

The MPAA/RIAA lobbyists (who naturally have an anti-technology, pro-censorship bias) have managed to get our “representatives” to push these bills into Congress in an attempt to allow private corporations to censor the Internet.

The Internet is a public utility. What if AT&T or Verizon could decide who you were allowed to call? Or who was allowed to have a telephone number at all? What if FedEx or UPS were allowed to decide whether or not you had an address to deliver packages to?

It’s anti-American, it’s unconstitutional, and it’s just plain wrong.

When the opportunity to vote on these bills comes your way, please vote with the people you represent — not with the lobbyists.

Thank you.

P.S. I find it interesting that there is no “Internet Issues” selection on your contact form. “Internet” is different from “Science and Technology”. It’s 2012. The Internet is a critical component of how people communicate and get work done.

I would encourage you to pay attention to pro-Internet voters, because there is an entire generation of millennials who will very soon make up the majority of American voters.

I encourage you all to contact your representatives in government and let them know about your disapproval of these laws (in America), or similar laws in other countries.

Update: Response from Sen. Maria Cantwell

Dear Mr. Parman,

Thank you for contacting me about the internet streaming of copyrighted material. I appreciate hearing from you on this issue.

This isn’t what I contacted you about, and both SOPA/PIPA go way beyond the simple law enforcement of streaming copyrighted material.

On May 12, 2011, Senator Leahy (D-VT) introduced S. 968, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property (PROTECT IP) Act. While I am supportive of the goals of the bill, I am deeply concerned that the definitions and the means by which the legislation seeks to accomplish these goals will have unintended consequences and hurt innovation, job creation, and threaten online speech and security. On November 17, 2011, I signed a letter along with Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) objecting to the bill as it is currently written.

You are correct. This is really, really bad.

On December 17, 2011, Senator Wyden introduced the “Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade” (OPEN) Act (S. 2029), of which I am an original co-sponsor.

/me raises eyebrow…

The bill has been referred to the Senate Finance Committee, where it is currently awaiting further review. The OPEN Act is a more effective approach to stopping foreign web sites that are found to be primarily and willfully used to infringe intellectual property rights. The OPEN Act builds on the existing legal framework used by the International Trade Commission for addressing unfair acts in the importation of articles into the United States, or in their sale for importation, or sale within the United States after importation.

The United States government is working beyond the realm of its jurisdiction here. It might be currently legal, but this is still a bad thing. Who determines what “primarily and willfully used to infringe intellectual property rights” even means? How is this really any better?

And you’re a co-sponsor of this legislation?

Our trade laws have yet to catch up to deal with the global digital economy.

Incredibly, incredibly true. As a matter of fact, copyright law itself can be placed in this very same bucket.

The OPEN Act recognizes that the Internet has created new opportunities for foreign products to reach the U.S. market and that there is little difference between downloading a pirated movie from a foreign website and importing a counterfeit movie DVD from a foreign company. For those foreign web sites that are determined after an investigation to be primarily and willfully infringing, the International Trade Commission will issue a “Cease and Desist” order. The “Cease and Desist” order may also be served on financial intermediaries that provide services to that foreign web site, compelling financial payment processors and online advertising providers to cease doing business with the foreign site in question. This would cut off financial incentives for this illegal activity and deter these unfair imports from reaching the U.S. market.

*facepalm*

Pay attention, because this is important: THIS IS ENTIRELY THE WRONG SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM.

The entertainment industry has failed to innovate. They have failed to remain competitive. People want digital content. The entertainment industry has the opportunity to provide that to their customers. The fact that they often choose not to is not the fault of pirates. This is not the government’s problem to solve. Additional legislation is not the correct solution.

The OPEN Act addresses the same challenges as the PROTECT IP Act, while protecting freedom of speech, innovation, and security on the Internet.

How, specifically?

The challenge of rogue web sites is one that many nation’s face.

Provide an objective definition of “rogue web site”. Also, you have a grammatical error here. You don’t use an apostrophe when pluralizing words — like “nation”.

The United State has always been seen as a leader on Internet issues.

*blink*

No. No we have not. Especially in the 13 years since the Digital Revolution was ignited.

And we are the “United States”, not the “United State”.

Laws we establish in the United States regarding the Internet are likely to be used as models around the world.

You’re right. And the purpose of creating laws is (or rather, should be) to protect the freedoms of individual citizens, not to further limit our freedoms. Remember that.

And because the Internet is global in nature, it is important that we carefully consider how the laws and policies we adopt in this area may be received and translated by other countries.

Precisely.

Thank you again for contacting me to share your thoughts on this matter. You may also be interested in signing up for periodic updates for Washington State residents. If you are interested in subscribing to this update, please visit my website at http://cantwell.senate.gov. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future if I can be of further assistance.

Sen. Cantwell, your lack of understanding of the core of the issue at hand makes me realize that you are not a person who truly represents the people of this state.

You will not be receiving a vote from me come election day.

Here’s one I got yesterday from a clueless recruiter. For reference, here is my résumé.

My name is [recruiter] with [recruiting agency]. Please go through the below requirement and let me know your interest ASAP. Reply with your update resume and expected hourly rate

You’ve already seen my résumé since you took the time to Google my name before initiating your search. Clearly, you emailed me because you thought I’d be a great fit. Thank you for maintaining the utmost integrity in your job and providing the kind of quality service that I’ve come to expect from technical recruiters!

I don’t, however, have an hourly rate because I don’t take hourly gigs.

Job Category: Information Technology

Title: SR. System Engineer

Location: Atlanta, GA (30324)

Duration: 6+months (Expected to be 36months)

A Senior System Engineer? That sounds like it’s right up my alley! Based on my interests and work experience (which you’ve seen because you’ve done your homework about me before contacting me), this could be the perfect fit!

Oh, and it’s all the way across the country! Fantastic! I can pack up my family and move my children across the country in the middle of the school year! How wonderful that will be for their academic development!

Job Description:

The Encore Environment Engineer shall possess expert level technical architecture skills including in-depth working knowledge and experience with a wide array of network topologies and protocols, Linux x86 (some Sun Solaris (legacy)) server configuration options, BEA Weblogic Application Server, CAMEL, web server (Apache), database server (Oracle), Cisco, F5 or other load balancers, firewalls, server virtualization, transaction modeling and software deployment methodologies in a multi-datacenter scenario.

Perfect! I have a background of 10 years as a front-end web development engineer, followed by nearly 2 years as a SDK developer focused on the PHP development community! I’ve spent tons of time with network topologies and protocols, Solaris, BEA, CAMEL, Oracle databases, Cisco components, F5 load balancers, and multi-datacenter scenarios!

You can tell by reading my résumé (the one you read before you sent me this email) that I’m just the man for the job!

Environment Engineer must collaborate closely with software and solution architects to design highly scalable, cost-effective and reliable physical architectures supporting Encore phases.

Ooohh! Encore phases! It all sounds so exciting!

Environment Engineer shall thoroughly diagram and specify system, interface, network, security and datacenter solutions meeting or surpassing rigorous performance criteria.

Awesome! I can’t wait to do all of that diagramming!

Candidate shall have successfully implemented technical architectures supporting real-time communications and high transaction volumes in large scale environments. Candidate shall also possess excellent written and verbal communication skills

Yep, that’s definitely me. It fits my background in PHP and web development perfectly!

Skills Inventory

Expert-level Cloud hosting, physical architectures (Required)

Entry-level Server, network, capacity & transaction analysis (Required)

Expert-level Networking, HTTP, VIP, certificates (Required)

Expert-level Wireless & Internet Comms Protocols (Required)

Yep, yep, yep and… yep. No problem. I know all of this like the back of my hand.

Expert-level Cmd Line, grep, snoop, wireshark, scripting (Required)

Nope. Never done this before. Ever.

I understand HTTP, network topology and wireless communications protocols, but I’ve never used the command line, grep or a packet sniffer.

Expert-level Application Servers, CAMEL, Weblogic (Required)

Expert-level Web Services, COMET, Resful APIs (Required)

Intermediate-level Agile/Iterative SDLC, Jira (Required)

All yeses!

Expert-level Software deployment (Required)

Nope. As a web developer who has experience with cloud computing services, I’ve never deployed software before.

Expert-level Verbal, written, documentation, diagramming (Required)

Unfortunately, no, I don’t know how to write, speak, document or diagram effectively. I hope that this doesn’t disqualify me!

Disclaimer: We respect your on-line privacy. This is not an unsolicited mail. Under Bill 1618 Title III passed by the 105th US Congress this mail cannot be considered Spam as long as we include contact information and a method to be removed from our mailing list. If you are not interested in receiving our e-mails then please reply with a “REMOVE” in the subject line or click here to remove your name from the mailing list. I am sorry for any inconvenience.

Unsolicited? You’re quite right. I agreed to receive these emails — nay, I ASKED to receive them!

And Congress says this isn’t spam? Well then! Since Congress has been doing such a bang-up job lately, they must certainly be the definitive source for all things truthful and accurate!

And it’s okay. I forgive you for the inconvenience!

I thought to myself, “you couldn’t move a mountain if you put your mind to it, so whoever said that must be full of crap.” It wasn’t until I took a step back from the literal and started to look at the intended meaning that it finally began to make sense to me.

Putting my mind to it

I figured the first part out in my early twenties. I put my mind into doing the best job in college that I possibly could, and I graduated at the top of my (admittedly very small) class. I was determined to drive my career from the bottom to the top.

My first post-college job gave my a pay bump of $15,000 a year. My next jump was by almost $30,000. My next jump was by another $35,000. By working hard, studying my craft, striving for excellence, and continuing to aim for the top, my annual salary jumped by $80,000 in just 4 short years.

Smarts vs. Hustle

It would be misguided to say that it’s only about smarts. There are a number of people whom I’ve encountered over the years who are all incredibly smart. Some of them were doing as well as I was, some better, but many were doing worse. Why? Because they lacked hustle. By being smart, they’d gotten lazy in school and never really learned how to apply themselves.

When I was a kid, I was the same way. Year after year after year, my parents would come home from the parent-teacher conferences with the same feedback from my teachers: “Ryan is a smart kid, but he just doesn’t apply himself.”

My parents were frequently frustrated when I’d bring home bad grades from school. They’d ask why. “It’s boring,” I’d reply. “It’s too easy.” I could see the blood vessel in my dad’s forehead pulse with frustration. “Well, if it’s so easy, why don’t you just do it?” I didn’t have a good answer for him at the time, but once I figured it out in high school, it was something along the lines of “why would I go do something so boring on purpose?”

Motivation

I had no motivation to do homework. I had no motivation to do well in school. Teachers would tell me how important it was to learn this stuff, but I just didn’t see the practicality of it all. Still to this day I don’t understand why I needed to learn that the Mayans grew maize, or how to multiply matricies. It was all too abstract and irrelevent. It didn’t help me meet girls, and it didn’t teach me how to play guitar, so what was the point?

It wasn’t until the day I found out I was going to be a father that I finally found my motivation to do the very best job I possibly could in all things. I was going to have a new baby girl, and she deserved the very best that I could provide for her. I knew that wasn’t going to happen delivering pizzas, so I went back to school to get my Bachelor’s, found a better paying job with a great group of people. I really started to focus on how I could provide the best possible life for my new bride and our little baby girl.

…But that’s not what I came to tell you about.

I came to tell you about the other part of the lesson — the part that most people completely overlook.

Yes you can

You can tell yourself “I can” all day long, and if you really believe it, and you’re willing to work for it, you can absolutely accomplish anything you put your mind to. Determination + Hustle (+ Perseverance) = Success.

But what if you tell yourself “I can’t”? Or how about “it’s too hard for me”? Guess what. Whether you believe that you can, or you believe that you can’t, you’re right.

My long-time fear

I’ve always had a hard time talking to girls. Well, not always, but I’ve always found that it’s easier to talk to a female as a friend than it is to talk to a female that I’m interested in. Without even meaning to, I find myself trying to come up with interesting things to say, and they always come out as inane banter. It’s when there’s no pressure and I’m comfortable being myself that I can chat up the ladies with no problem.

A couple of months after your mom left, I was out by myself exploring a new spot along Lake Washington I’d never seen before. It was nice, and the weather was great, and after a while of hanging out, I decided to go find something to eat. I was wandering around this few-block section of town where there were a lot of restaurants and ended up at this little Thai restaurant.

As I walked inside, I noticed only a single patron in the entire restaurant — a tall blonde with blue eyes and a beautiful smile. I was somewhat intimidated because she was beautiful and I was immediately attracted to her. I found another table across the restaurant, sat down, and ordered my food. The restaurant was small and we could see each other across the way. We kept making (then breaking) eye contact while we were each waiting for our meals. I thought to myself “there’s no way I can talk to her. She’s too hot, and I won’t have anything interesting to say.”

I was wrong

After spending about 10 minutes stealing glances back and forth, I finally decided that the worst thing that would happen is that a complete stranger would blow me off. Was that really a big deal? No. So I got up, walked over to her table and asked if she minded if I joined her. She said no, so I sat down, introduced myself, and asked her how she ended up at a restaurant that was so empty.

From there we ate and chatted for about 45 minutes. Then she asked me if I was interested in getting some frozen yogurt and going for a walk with her. I absolutely was, so that’s what we did.

I spent just over two hours getting to know this really cool, beautiful, attractive woman, and it made for a really fun Saturday afternoon. The little voice in my head had switched from “I can’t” to “I can!”. All I had to do was take a chance, and I was able to prove myself wrong. From there, it made it much easier to strike up conversations with people I didn’t know. Some people blew me off, sure, but it wasn’t the heartbreaking rejection that I had always thought it would be.

Yes you can

So, if there’s one lesson to learn here, it’s that you can do anything you put your mind to, even if it’s “I can’t”. The trick is to suspend your fear of whatever it is that’s holding you back — rejection, failure, shyness, or something else — and just go for it. What do you really have to lose?

For a number of years now, I’ve been taking notes. Sometimes these notes are funny, sometimes endearing, and sometimes very serious. But all of these notes are about experiences from my own life where I’ve learned something valuable.

Baz Luhrmann is credited as the writer of a song called Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen. Toward the end of the song, it says:

“Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”

So today, I’ve decided to take my list of notes, pick one of the topics to write about, and start a new category on my blog called “Life Lessons“. These are letters and lessons written to my children. I don’t know when they’ll read them, but I just hope that I can avoid a situation where all of my life’s experiences will someday become stories with no point.

Enjoy.

I’d heard that he’d recorded a live special and was making it available, DRM-free, for $5. That’s right — five bucks. I briefly considered torrenting it since I’m sure it’s all over the place by now, but in the end I decided that watching him rant and rave was worth the five bucks.

As I clicked through to buy the video, I saw that he’d posted the following:

To those who might wish to “torrent” this video: look, I don’t really get the whole “torrent” thing. I don’t know enough about it to judge either way. But I’d just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without “corporate” restrictions.

Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.

Sincerely,
Louis C.K.

If creators of content are willing to bite their thumbs at the idiocy of the entertainment industry by going to their customers directly, then we need to be willing to support them if we ever want things to change.

Whether or not you like Louis C.K., we should all be willing to vote with our wallets. For a comedian who is willing to cut out the middle man and offer his content DRM-free for $5, I would gladly support him. If you plan on checking the video out, I would ask that you support him too.

(Hat tip: one37)

Matt Alexander, writing for one37, in his piece entitled “That’s Enough, RIM”:

The Playbook is dead.

It’s taken a while for you to realize that, and I’m not convinced you’re fully aware, but you should really come to acknowledge it, RIM.

Bargain hunters are not going to pick up a Playbook and say, “Wow! I can’t believe everyone spoke so negatively about this!” They’re going to say, “Well it looks a lot like a Kindle Fire, but it has none of the functionality.” Considering the Kindle Fire came so long after the Playbook, but is already becoming such a household name, that’s just embarrassing.

Stop pushing a dead product. Cut your losses and leave it be.

Jim Dalrymple, writing for The Loop and commenting on Matt’s piece:

It seems to me the problems with RIM come from the top and until the co-CEOs are replaced, the company doesn’t stand a chance of making a comeback.

Further reading…

• What’s really wrong with BlackBerry (and what to do about it) by Michael Mace
• BlackBerry vs. iPhone by John Gruber

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

(This is not an Amazon-endorsed job description. These are my words and thoughts, so imagine that we’re at a meetup or conference and I’m talking to you one-on-one. If you don’t like what I’ve written here, blame me instead of Amazon.)

About me

First off, I’m not a recruiter. My name is Ryan and I’m the creator of the AWS SDK for PHP.

In 2007, I created Tarzan (later renamed to CloudFusion) which became the focus of Jeff Barr‘s book “Host Your Web Site In The Cloud: Amazon Web Services Made Easy“. In 2010, Amazon hired me to fork CloudFusion and create the official AWS SDK for PHP. I now lead the PHP team at AWS Developer Resources.

What we want

We’re eagerly looking to hire some exceptional PHP developers to help us create the next generation of our SDK, build better PHP developer tools, and a bunch of other top-secret things that haven’t been announced yet. We have lots of really awesome ideas, but we don’t have enough people to make them a reality — that’s where you come in.

About you

Our ideal cohort would be both a PHP developer as well as a computer scientist (computer scientist for the interview process, PHP developer for the actual work). Recruiting wants to see a résumé, but I want to see a GitHub account.

Demonstrable open source work/contributions and prior experience with AWS are pluses. Knowing WTF you’re doing, and having an on-fire passion for delivering the best possible user experience is a requirement as far as I’m concerned.

Our mantra

I’m a firm believer that our SDK should be so mind-blowingly awesome that it causes you to have an involuntary bowel movement when you use it. If it isn’t, then we’re not meeting our bar for quality, serendipity and user delight (the measurable metric of which is the number of tweets and blog posts gushing with praise for the SDK).

The SDK should be so intuitive that it doesn’t require a user manual — yet at the same time we should strive to provide the best documentation and learning experience on the planet.

What we do

Here is a list of things that we do regularly, so experience with these things or an aptitude for learning to swim after being thrown in the deep-end will take you far:

• PHP and web development.
• Unit testing, integration testing, code reviews and QA.
• Customer support, documentation and usage examples.
• Code profiling and benchmarking.
• Linux, networking, web server configuration, processing lots of log files, regular expressions.
• Compiling and debugging
• Agile/Scrum
• Some Ruby, some JavaScript, lots of XML and JSON.
• Knowing the difference between done and perfect.
• Fixing random weirdness in the middle of the night because your on-call pager went off.
• …and a bunch of other stuff I can’t think of right now.

Culture

We work in self-directed, self-managed teams. If you’re the type of person who needs to be told what to do by a manager, you won’t fit in here.

If you can see a need, develop a solution through to completion, hassle other teams for any dependencies, and deliver in a timely manner, you’ll do well.

If you thrive in a startup environment, you’ll thrive here.

If you have strong opinions but still know how to check your ego at the door and work together to find the best solution for the customer, you’ll do well here.

If you don’t like how we’re doing something, propose something better — but be prepared to show us the evidence that backs up your assertion.

What we’re looking for

We’re not looking for rockstars, ninjas or whatever the current recruiter-speak is these days. Rockstars are egomaniacs, and you can never tell where the heck a ninja is or what he’s doing. Instead, we’re looking for someone who is passionate, inspired, has awesome engineering chops, and will bring their A-game every single time.

Programming is easy. Putting a dent in the universe is hard. You should come work with us, and help make that kind of impact in the PHP community.

P.S.: We’re also eagerly looking for Ruby, Node.js, iOS and Android developers. Heck — if you’re an exceptional developer, we want to talk to you.

Here’s one I got today from a clueless recruiter. For reference, here is my résumé. Also, please note that the email contained multiple fonts and colors.

[COMPANY NAME] HAS AN OPENING!

[Company] prides itself on being a [blah, blah, exciting description of the recruiting firm, blah.]

[Company] is currently searching for a Web Designer / Graphics Designer for one of our largest clients in [city].

WOW! That’s 2,200 miles from where I live! I’ll bet that this “large client” is going to be one heck of a company!

This is a 1+ year contract with possible yearly renewals; Must have updated Online Portfolio to present with your resume.

“Even though I’ve seen your résumé and know that you’re employed full-time, why not uproot your family during the school year to relocate halfway across the country for a contract gig?”

I’m sure that they offer a really compelling salary, benefits and relocation package!

This resource will provide progressive visual designs for Intranet Redesign effort to assist in introducing improved capabilities to employees for example; Home and subpage designs, Video Portal, and Enterprise Wiki design comps. These comps should present a modern and forward thinking approach while promoting intuitive visual design.

Which resource is this? Oh, me? I see.

Hmmm… since I know you’ve read my résumé and have an idea of how many thousands of developers I support, you still think I should come to this new company to work on an intranet site, where I would work on a homepage and subpages! Isn’t “intuitive” precisely what forward-thinking design is in the first place?

Oh, and you forgot the period that comes after “…improved capabilities to employees”. You’ve ended up with a run-on sentence that doesn’t make grammatical sense with the semi-colon used in that way.

• Will translate information architecture and business requirements into page designs. The pages will be prototyped in Photoshop or XHTML;
• Create working prototypes of applications for use in validating requirements, testing target audiences and training customer support representatives;
• Models will be developed with a combination of XHTML, CSS2, Active Server Pages, SQL databases and JavaScript or dynamic HTML as identified in the approved design and specifications;
• Apply visual design principles in defining page layout, creating images and graphics and implementing visual treatments for fonts, background;
• Graphics and images will be created in standard web formats (gif, jpgs) with consideration for file size and display constraints.

So, wait. I thought that this was going to be one heck of a company. You want me to leave my current position at my current company (which you already know about, since you read my résumé before emailing me) to become a lowly, entry-level code monkey? And with a Microsoft-centric backend, no less?

Technical Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree (BA/BS) or equivalent experience in Web/Graphic/Media/Digital Design
• Six+ years experience in website design; Experience making there own templates (not just using things like Word Press or Content Management Systems)

Yes, I have these. Also, you misspelled “their” and “WordPress”.

• Must have excellent visual design skills and posses deep understanding of web design principles
• Expert in XHTML, HTML 4 or 5, CSS 3, and good understanding of JavaScript (no coding from scratch, more of moving things into code)

I must be an “expert” in HTML 5 and CSS 3. Heh. Which modules of the CSS 3 spec? And which version of the HTML 5 draft spec? What about the sub-specs that were extracted from the main spec?

• Experience with Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Microsoft Office

Yes folks, Microsoft Office.

I typically pass on candidates who explicitly list Microsoft Office on their résumés, and here’s a company who lists it in their job description. Did they want me to know how to use Acrobat Reader too?

• Must be self-motivating and able to work well with a diverse group of people
• Must have good communication skills, both written and verbal

“Corporate mumbo-jumbo.”

• Must have excellent understanding of web usability and design interaction principles

If I talk to the hiring manager about WCAG and ARIA in the interview, will they know what I’m talking about?

• Experience in designing for mobile a plus
• Online portfolio or links to examples of work (required)

Oh look, a requirement that’s required. Yahtzee!

CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECK & DRUG SCREEN WILL BE REQUIRED PRIOR TO EMPLOYMENT!

“EVEN THOUGH I’M THE ONE THAT SPAMMED YOU (WHICH IN ITSELF IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY AND A VIOLATION OF U.S. FEDERAL LAW), YOU’D BETTER NOT BE A POT-SMOKING CRIMINAL!”

If interested, please contact [RECRUITER'S NAME IN ALL CAPS] at [phone number]; please email updated resume to [email address]

No, thank you. I’m perfectly happy putting a dent in the universe in my own neck of the woods.

Classes

• Support for Traits (i.e., mix-ins; addresses the multiple-inheritance problem).
• Support for chaining from the constructor: (new Class)->method()
• Support for Class::{expr}() syntax.
• Closures inherit $this from the outer scope.
• Added ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor() to create a new instance of a class without invoking its constructor.
• Added a new typehint: callable

Improvements

• Array dereferencing and short array syntax: echo [1, 2, 3][0]
• json_encode() now supports these additional flags: JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE, JSON_BIGINT_AS_STRING, JSON_NUMERIC_CHECK, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT and JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES.
• Multibyte support is enabled by default.
• Faster unserialize() and ternary operator performance.
• IPv6 support.

Fixing the cruft

• ext/mysql, mysqli and pdo_mysql now use mysqlnd by default.
• Removed magic quotes, safe mode, register globals, allow call-time pass-by-reference, and more!
• Default character set is now UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1.

Not all recruiters do these things so I don’t hate them all, but generally speaking, the entire technical recruiting industry has made a very bad name for itself amongst the people they’re trying to recruit. Speaking for myself, and a number of people I’ve worked with over the past 10 years, here is a list of things that drive us nuts as well as suggestions for how things could be better between us.

The key to this business is personal relationships

For those who have never seen Jerry MacGuire, Jerry is a sports agent who one day has an epiphany about how to radically improve the way his company works with its clients. Thinking back, he recalled what his mentor had to say: “The key to this business is personal relationships.” Fewer clients, less money. Jerry wrote up a manifesto, delivered it to everyone in his company, and was fired the next day.

He was mocked and abandoned by everyone he knew except for a single client who decided to stick with him. In the end, Jerry’s new philosophy pays off in spades for himself and his client. Instead of trying to be the biggest, he decided to be the best.

This is precisely what the technical recruiting industry in desperate need of — to re-focus on building personal relationships.

Who’s the customer?

I believe that this is the reason why relationship-building has fallen by the wayside: Who’s the customer? Who’s interests are the recruiter’s aligned with? Technical people or companies? The answer for most recruiting firms is the companies who write the checks.

This is how they make a living, so it’s not unreasonable, but it tends to cause a breakdown in how recruiters and professionals see each other. The companies are the customers, and we technical-folk are the products. You procure products for the customers, and let the customers pick and choose which products they want — kind of like picking out the apples you want to buy at the grocery store.

But we technical-folk don’t see ourselves as a product to be collected and sold to the customer. We see ourselves as the customers, looking for the right products (i.e., companies) to invest in.

Speaking from personal experience, there was once a recruiter who was very nice to me when I approached her about companies that may be hiring. She had one hawt startup that was looking for a rock star, and sent me some information about them. I read through it, called her back, and told her that I didn’t think it would be a good fit because they were looking for someone who did things that I didn’t, and I wasn’t particularly interested in their problem-space.

She then told me that I would never get anywhere in this industry if I wasn’t willing to grow, and decided to schedule an interview for me anyway. She asked me when I could talk to them, and I naïvely said “in about an hour” thinking it would be a phone interview. She scheduled an in-person interview instead, even though I lived two-hours away. I caved, told her to push out the interview by an hour, and went and talked to them. After the interview, I still felt like it wasn’t a good fit. I called her back, told her that I wasn’t interested in pursuing this company any further, and asked if she had anything else. I never heard from her again.

Because of who writes the checks, recruiting agencies typically align themselves with the companies they’re hiring for instead of the people they’re trying to recruit. Out of necessity or not, this alone puts technical people at odds with technical recruiters.

Should you send that email or not?

One of the things I learned in college was how to put together a quality résumé, and how to apply for a professional job.

We had the opportunity to have a chat with an HR/Recruiting manager from a local business who explained that businesses get tons of résumés every day, and that a lot of people were applying for positions that they were clearly not qualified for. So she explained to us:

“Do your homework. Don’t apply for a job where you’re clearly not a good fit with the hope that maybe you’ll have a chance.”

I really wish technical recruiters would have taken that same course.

There’s a game that’s played during the recruiting process called “Buzzword Bingo”. Both sides play it, but because technical-folk have the skills that the companies are looking for, technical-folk play it a lot better than recruiters do.

A technical résumé might explain a process by which a very large dataset was iteratively filtered down to a singular result. The hiring company knows that this process is called MapReduce. The technical person knows that this process is called MapReduce. Recruiters don’t typically know that this is called MapReduce. So, technical people will explicitly list “MapReduce” on their résumé so that it can get matched in recruiter databases.

Unfortunately, some recruiters will simply search their databases for “MapReduce” and send messages to everyone that matches. The hiring company may be doing MapReduce in Java in a traditional datacenter, while a technical person may be doing MapReduce in Python in a cloud computing environment. The hiring company is not a match for the technical person, and vice-versa.

As a result of last week’s Clueless Recruiters piece, there was a little more conversation that happened after I had stopped writing, where it was explained that that firm’s thought process is, “Well, what’s the harm of sending the email? If it’s not a good fit, most people just ignore it. But not you.”

This is exactly what’s wrong with technical recruiting agencies — they don’t do their homework first before sending an email. In doing so, they waste everybody’s time and attention with what ends up being tantamount to spam.

Don’t ask for my colleagues’ information

We technical-folk are very aware that they way recruiters make money is by matching people with companies. It’s pretty ballsy, and quite frankly rude, when you ask “If you or anyone you know is interested…”. We don’t believe that you’re trying to help anyone get a job. What we do believe, however, is that you’re trying to get paid. True or false, this is what we believe. When we read this, we can’t help but think “Wait, you want me to do your job for you? No thanks.” You clearly didn’t bother to do your homework when you contacted me. Why would I think that you would treat my colleague any better?

Stop being lazy and do your own job.

Don’t call me at work, or email me at work

If you do, you are a particularly stupid person. For obvious reasons.

Stick to professional networks

There are plenty of social networks that are geared toward professionals. LinkedIn, Plaxo, Zerply, and good ol’ email. If you’re going to try to recruit someone, stick to places like these. Even Twitter is tolerable.

You know what’s intolerable? Here’s a message I received this morning on Facebook from someone I don’t know.

Hi Ryan,

i have a JAVA position in Santa Clara,CA,PLZ Send me your updated to resume to [email],if you are interested.

I swear I can’t make this shit up.

But you know what will earn you an I-will-punch-you-in-the-throat,-bitch reaction? Trying to recruit me on Match.com.

Over the summer, I was meeting girls and going on dates. There was one girl who was cute, and we seemed to have a lot in common. We were talking, trying to figure out the details of our first date together. After we settled on the time and place, we had the following conversation over text message:

Her: So, do you know Java, JBoss or Spring?

Me: ‘scuse me? No. Why?

Her: Shoot! I have an open req’ to fill, and it would make me a lot of money. Do you know anybody who does?

Me: Hold on — you’re asking me to pimp out my professional network to you before we’ve even had our first date? Are you a recruiter or something?

Her: Yeah, why?

Me: I’m sorry. You seem like a really nice girl and I wish you the best of luck, but I don’t think this is going to work out.

I was so completely appalled by this woman’s behavior, that I just sat there with stunned speechlessness for about 20 minutes. Now, granted, this was a pretty extreme abuse of social networking, but it does happen.

Conclusion

I generally find that whenever I talk about my distaste for technical recruiters, to technical recruiters, the responses typically fall into one of two camps:

1. Defensive: These are the people who defend what they do, come Hell or high-water, and then turn around to accuse me of not knowing anything about recruiting so I should just shut-up. These are the recruiters who think that they’re doing us all a service and we should be thankful for their work.

2. Understanding: These are the people who know that the recruiting industry is a mess, and are actively trying to change the reputation their industry has developed with technical-folk. These are the people I’m far more inclined to work with.

Recruiters claim that they don’t have enough time to Google each and every person they send messages to. That’s… unfortunate. I’m certain that if more effort were applied to ensuring that the messages that recruiters sent to technical-folk were a likely fit instead of simply blasting out cattle-calls, people wouldn’t hate recruiters so much, and there would be a better working relationship all the way around.

See Also…

Here are some similar thoughts by other people, which bear a striking resemblance to the qualms I have with the technical recruiting industry:

• Why are technical recruiters so clueless?
• Death By Recruiters
• Recruiters suck
• Why most recruiters suck and what you can do about it
• An open letter to technical recruiters
• Another Year, Another Reason to Hate Technical Recruiters

Update (2012-02-28)

Speaking of people who send out emails without actually bothering to do any homework first, here’s a great example of the kind of idiocy that these people portray. While this person isn’t a technical recruiter per sé, he has shown the same sort of neglect for the details that the majority of technical recruiters do.

In case you’re not sure what you’re looking at, this person emailed Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, about promoting Rackspace on his personal blog. Rackspace is a direct competitor to Amazon Web Services in the Cloud Computing market. If Zach Burton had bothered to do even a few minutes worth of homework before opening his mouth (or keyboard), he wouldn’t have made so much an ass of himself.

These are the kinds of people that I enjoy skewering in my Clueless Recruiters pieces — the people who are simply too lazy to do a good job.

Update (2013-03-23)

Matt Youell has some very similar thoughts on the matter.

“Tech companies seem to be having trouble finding good technical talent. Maybe I can help. For you, the hiring person who is having trouble finding programming talent, I’ve created this brief hiring guide. It is based on my experience over the years both as a prospective employee and as a person doing the hiring.”

Here’s one I got today from a clueless recruiter. For reference, here is my résumé.

Hi Ryan,

We have an exciting opportunity with a client in the networking and telecommunications industry. Looking for an overall awesome Front-End Designer/Developer who would enjoy working for a global company that promotes a start-up environment.

I already work for a global company that promotes a start-up environment. You would already know that if you spent 12 freaking seconds to Google my name.

Location is Santa Clara, CA. Might you be interested? If so, please send a copy of your resume along with your required hourly rate. This is a 3-6 month contract.

Yes, let me leave my full-time job in Seattle, and uproot my entire family during the school year to move to Santa Clara for 3 months. Great idea!

Interested candidate must have an understanding of the practical benefits and limitations of Web technologies…

ALL OF THEM!

…and comprehensive knowledge of interface design principles and best practices for content organization, user-centric design, and site navigation patterns.

Responsibilities
* Develop front-end code using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
* Collaborate with product managers, designers, engineers, and infrastructure teams to build a quality experience for users.
* Create a compelling user experience using code polished to near perfection, leaving no detail unfinished.

In other words, be a typical code monkey. *yawn*

Requirements
•7+ years of Web application and web service development.
•Passion for developing great user interfaces, Experience in creating user-centric design.
•Thorough understanding of user behavior and interaction design patterns

Sure I have these. But if you’re looking to fill a 3-6 month contract, you’re not actually looking for them.

•Thorough understanding of SharePoint Master Pages, Page Layouts and CSS files
•Experience with using the SharePoint content deployment features
•Experience with SharePoint Designer for master page customization, style sheet modification, data view configuration
•Experience migrating content from one SharePoint tier or site collection to another
•Thorough knowledge of “Web 2.0″ features of SharePoint: Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking (Profiles & Communities)
•Understanding and previous experience with Blogs, tweets, RSS, CHAT and other collaboration and communication technologies as it relates to social networking and intranet integration
•Working knowledge of SQL Server and scripting skills
•5+ years working with Microsoft Web development tools
•Microsoft .net framework, ASP, .Net, and C#
•SQL Server Reporting Services integration experience

Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft. Clearly I’m a great fit because I have all sorts of Microsoft-centric experience on my résumé.

•Java Scripting, Visual Studio, HTML, XML, HTML & Client side scripting (Javascript, AJAX, JSON and JS libraries (jQuery, YUI, etc),DHTML, XSL, XSLT, XHTML, CAML)

Oh, you can script Java now? That must be a new thing. (See what I did there?)

•Experience with creating content types and site columns

application/vnd.rparman.my-content-type+sarcasm

•Portfolio that includes sample web-based projects (required)

Oh look, a requirement that’s required!

•Computer Science or related degree

So… you want a designer with a CS degree?

Seriously? And people wonder why I hate recruiters. (Actually, no. No they don’t.)

Update

I’m sorry, Ryan, I didn’t mean to fuel your hatred for recruiters.

I forgive you.

The search was keyword generated.

“MY ENTIRE INDUSTRY IS COMPLETELY DISCONNECTED FROM THE REALITY OF HOW TECHNICAL PEOPLE WORK!”

I know it must be a nuisance for great and awesome people such as yourself, but for some who may be really in need of an opportunity to come his or her way, who I may miss without the particular tool that recruiters use…

You’re helping? Really? By not making any attempt to learn about what best fits me? What about paying attention to relationship-building more than cattle calls?

…your hatred and sarcasm are shining personality traits I have accepteed to welcome my way.

Ah, see there? You can do sarcasm too!

But for the most part, my apologies.

My mother taught me that saying sorry means you’ll never do it again.

Update #2

Finally, something honest.

Evils of recruiting… really, unfortunately I’m not smart enough to code something that will give me good results based on my 50 mile radius search of resumes (you’re in WA, how did that happen?), nor fast enough to read each and every resume out there in time to meet the client’s expectation of submittals right away.

The answer is simple: Fewer clients, less money. The key to this business is personal relationships. Just ask Jerry MacGuire.

I really do feel your pain. I honestly just don’t think that wishing death to recruiters is, well, nice.

Technical people hate technical recruiters. That much is a fact. The question is, what will you do to change the perception that technical people have of recruiters? How can you be better than the status quo?

And no, I wasn’t being sarcastic by saying you’re awesome and great and that your shining traits include hatred and sarcasm. They were genuine. As genuine as your displeasure with recruiters. Truly. No, like, really.

This whole correspondence is actually funny. Disagreement is healthy and hopefully there is no super personal offense on your part because there is none on my part- though you tried to slice me with your sharp words or make me cower with your ‘wittiness’. (Again, I reserve the right to disagree.)

No personal offense on my part. Just — be better than the other people in your industry. Prove to me that I’m wrong about technical recruiters.

Have a nice day. I hope this left you smiling on some level. A grin. A smirk. Anything resembling a smile. I am smiling as I type this. Wait, can we be facebook, linked in friends? (That was a joke. Or not.)

Yes, this was fun. Let’s do it again sometime, eh?

Update #3: Response from their co-worker

Ryan is just one of those “I’m better and smarter than everyone else” types and spends way too much time replying to recruiters just for the sake of being snide.

Nope. Just you.

For every one of you little sarcastic haters out there, we have a dozen people who thank us cheerfully for the service we offer them.

Good.

We do more in depth recruiting, but [recruiter] was only using a tool that starts things out by helping to get the word out quickly.

I don’t think your tool does a very good job, then.

Rarely do we get a reply as neurotic and pathetic as yours but it does happen on occasion.

Neurotic and pathetic? Shoot. I was going for sarcastic first, then educational.

Usually we post these type of replies on our blog (of course we remove your name and other telling info), and share it for the enjoyment of others.

Awesome! I want to be Internet-famous.

Also as a warning to people on the market as how not to reply to an email as IT and Software is a small world in many ways. I’ve had some real whammies, people who say they hate Indians, etc, usually good for a laugh because of the absurdity (which is what I did when I read your replies).

I do the same thing, as a warning to technical people about how bad technical recruiters tend to be.

And apparently it’s absurd that I want a recruiter to take a few minutes to ensure that I’m a likely fit before they contact me. Oh wait — it’s the tool’s fault. My bad.

Sorry that the weather in Seattle has you so depressed that you spend so much time out of your days trying to make others feel bad.

I didn’t want you to feel bad as much as I wanted to raise the awareness of how bad the recruiting experience is for “better and smarter than everyone else” people. Like me.

Here in California the days are bright and we’re all nice people.

I grew up in California, and you, sir, are a liar.

[recruiter] did you too much of a courtesy by apologizing to you.

Most definitely.

You don’t know the life of a recruiter, just as we are not engineers and therefore couldn’t know the life of a hack such as yourself. To tell us the best way of doing our job is like me telling you how to be a code monkey. No we don’t Google each of the hundreds of people we talk to per day, and neither can we read each single line of each resume.

And that’s exactly the problem. Precisely. To the T. You’ve nailed it.

Unfortunately, it sounds like you think your lack of research is a good thing.

Don’t worry, we wouldn’t bother contacting someone like yourself again.

Oh, good.

No way we could get you hired anywhere. LOL.

I think of it as a win-win.

A miracle that you have a job at all with that attitude but I’m happy for you that you’re employed with a market like this. Have fun in your little world where you are the king of the world and everyone is here to listen to you try to be witty.

I will. Thanks.

Update #4

My very gallant co-worker and mentor took offense on my part. Please spare him?

Oh, that’s perfectly fine. It simply goes to show how completely disconnected technical people and technical recruiters are.

I’m not really angry and hateful — I’m just tired of all of the spam (emails from recruiters who don’t bother to do any homework before contacting me). You’re right, I don’t know what it’s like to be a technical recruiter. I won’t pretend to. But what I DO know is that the actions that are commonplace in the recruiting industry are loathed by people in mine.

I would love for someone to change my perception — prove to me that there’s a recruiting firm worth talking to, who cares about placing me somewhere that’s a good fit for me, rather than simply trying to get paid for an open req. The first step in providing this level of customer service is taking a few minutes to learn about the person you’re about to contact.

Whatever perceptions I currently have about recruiters, [co-worker] simply reinforced them. He can deflect blame for his industry’s approach all he wants, but until he’s willing to help bridge the gap between technical people and technical recruiters, I really couldn’t care less what he thinks of me.

Anyway, you’ve turned out to be quite cool. Have a nice day.

Update #5

*sigh* I think it would be too much to ask for you not to reply to [co-worker] anymore? I did the same but he probably would, still. At least it looks like your email is happier now- with smiley face. I’m glad we did that for you.

Talk to you soon… (and I apologize in advance if you get a ‘spam’ from us again, it’s um, unavoidable, which we do try to avoid, honestly.)

No, I’m done. Take care.

From PCR Consultants, citing POLITICO:

In a disheartening turn of events Senator Webb (D-Va.), a long-time supporter of criminal justice reform in the United States Senate, had his bill shot down. The bill in question would have established a commission to review and propose changes to the criminal justice system in America. [...]

Individual Republican senators said they had come under pressure from local district attorneys and judges in drug courts to oppose [Senator Jim Webb (D-VA)]. But the Democrat countered that he had strong support from the drug court judiciary and the model for his proposal was the influential presidential commission on crime and the judicial system in the mid 1960’s led by then-Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.

Webb said that 40 years later it is reasonable to have a second review, especially given the high incarceration rate in the U.S. at a time of relatively low crime rates.

“Our criminal justice system is broken in many areas,” he told the Senate in his own floor comments. “We need a national commission to look at the criminal justice system from point of apprehension through reentry into society of people who have been incarcerated.”

It is troubling how partisanship can play so heavily to a major issue facing the United States, which incarcerates almost 25% of the entire globe’s prisoners.

25%? Wow. I didn’t know it was that high. But if you look at things, a Kindergarten boy kissing a Kindergarten girl on the cheek is considered a sex crime. Seriously? Now Congress is trying to imprison people who sing along to songs and post them on YouTube. In some cases, Congress is trying to bypass the vote of the American people all-together by signing treaties that were crafted in secret.

Right now, people are marching on Wall Street. We shouldn’t stop there.

What’s happening to Netflix?

Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, recently wrote a blog post to customers about some upcoming changes to the Netflix we know today:

It is clear from the feedback over the past two months that many members felt we lacked respect and humility in the way we announced the separation of DVD and streaming, and the price changes. That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology.

Translation: “We’re sorry that we did a poor job of telling you bad news, but the bad news was going to happen no matter what.”

Many members love our DVD service, as I do, because nearly every movie ever made is published on DVD, plus lots of TV series. We want to advertise the breadth of our incredible DVD offering so that as many people as possible know it still exists, and it is a great option for those who want the huge and comprehensive selection on DVD.

“We have a crap-ton of content available on DVD.”

DVD by mail may not last forever, but we want it to last as long as possible.

“DVDs by mail is a dying business.”

I also love our streaming service because it is integrated into my TV, and I can watch anytime I want. The benefits of our streaming service are really quite different from the benefits of DVD by mail. We feel we need to focus on rapid improvement as streaming technology and the market evolve, without having to maintain compatibility with our DVD by mail service.

“DVDs are old and busted. Streaming is the new hotness — the new shiny.”

So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently.

“Blah, blah, internal corporate structure, blah.”

It’s hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”.

“I’m retarded.”

A negative of the renaming and separation is that the Qwikster.com and Netflix.com websites will not be integrated. So if you subscribe to both services, and if you need to change your credit card or email address, you would need to do it in two places. Similarly, if you rate or review a movie on Qwikster, it doesn’t show up on Netflix, and vice-versa.

“Nevermind that web services and data integration are commonplace across the web in this day and age. Bring back the 90′s!”

The additional streaming content we have coming in the next few months is substantial, and we are always working to improve our service further.

Let’s bookmark this.

The Reaction

The reaction is overwhelmingly negative, from tech industry insiders and non-techies alike.

When I first read Reed’s blog post on Sunday night, there were 245 comments. This morning, there were 11,237 comments. As I write this, there are 21,747 21,872 comments — nearly every single one of them is outraged by what this means for customers.

As usual, Twitter is aflutter with comments:

Deanna Raybourn:

So Netflix nearly doubles prices, and — by way of apology — makes doing business with them twice as time-consuming and inconvenient? Superb.

Paul Medico:

Announcing a new company/brand with an apology is not a great way to instill confidence in your investors. #qwikster #netflix

Ben Zibble:

Netflix: “we heard you don’t like paying more for dvd+streaming, so we’re also going to make them not work together anymore. You’re welcome.”

Matt Dudley:

Imagine if @Netflix and Qwikster combined services… unlimited DVD rentals and streaming. Now THAT would be awesome.

And here’s my personal favorite, from Wonderella:

I just got an email from Netflix’s CEO telling me to — and I’m paraphrasing — “Please start torrenting”.

(Bonus: The Oatmeal and The Joy of Tech chime in.)

Personally, I’ve not only been a Netflix customer for a long time (since 2005-ish), but I’ve also been a Netflix fan. I didn’t mind so much when they split up the DVD/streaming accounts and started charging a little more. Netflix + Hulu has completely replaced my cable package.

I suppose my concerns are mostly around the usability of everything. There are lots of third-party services trying to make it easier to watch what you want, regardless of the service. I look up movie/show descriptions on IMDb, movie posters from The Movie DB, stream content from Hulu or Netflix, download content from iTunes, or get a DVD by mail from Netflix (for titles that aren’t available digitally). I would love to see more integration, rather than fragmenting the services even more.

A Fundamental Change in the Product

Joshua Porter of Bokardo.com had this to say:

Netflix is taking a huge risk here. They’re changing the user experience of their web apps to model the new company structure, not a structure that is most friendly to people. This is an extremely common problem in user interface design. Netflix is in serious danger of breaking the user experience they are well-known for.

If you read through even a fraction of comments on the aforementioned Netflix blog post, a very large percentage of users agree with this analysis. Almost everybody has the same concern.

As one commenter complains there will now be two separate movie queues, one on Netflix for DVD and one on Qwikster for streaming. Hastings’ response is dismissive:

We already have two queues. The two “sites” are a click between each other, so we think not that much different than two tabs on one site.

Technically, Hastings is right about there already being two queues. But he’s dead wrong about it being much different. Obviously he’s never watched people use web applications before. Changing websites is not even close to the same thing as changing tabs. When you change websites you go somewhere different, you get a different UI, you’re using a different username, and you probably have to log in. You have a different payment system. Different family members to add. Different recommendations to look at. And that’s just for starters. [...]

This is a fundamental change in the product, and Hastings just dismisses the concern with a wave of his hand.

Clearly, the team at Netflix — known for its engineering prowess — has overlooked how its “not that much different” changes will affect the overall customer experience.

Also, people don’t think they’re buying two services right now…they’re simply buying Netflix. As another commenter points out:

You’re continuing to make a classic mistake: thinking you’re something different than what everyone believes you are. You’re not a DVD company and a streaming company: you’re where I go to watch movies. That’s it. The future clearly is streaming, but by separating and charging more for access, you’re wildly less valuable to me. I’ll likely cancel. You haven’t listened to customer feedback. You’re delusional and you’re lost.”

Railroad companies failed to understand that they were in the transportation business and were surpassed by the airlines. Newspaper companies failed to understand that they were in the information business and were surpassed by blogs. Record stores failed to understand that they were in the business of selling music and the were surpassed by the Napster Revolution. It’s a classic mistake.

Catalog Size, Deintegration and Price-Hikes — Oh My!

Netflix’ current streaming selection is, at best, abysmal. A couple of months ago, I was getting ready to move and decided to digitize my DVD collection so that I wouldn’t have to drag them along with me. I figured that most of my movies would be available for streaming, so that would save me the time of digitizing the DVDs that I didn’t need to.

As it turned out, I ended up having to digitize the majority of my DVDs because they weren’t available for streaming. I’m still working my way through the stack.

Earlier in the summer, Netflix decided to separate the DVD and streaming plans into separate offerings, with separate pricing for each. Despite Netflix’ best efforts to spin it positively, customers didn’t buy the explanation. Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch said it best:

Raising prices for those of us who opt for both streaming and DVDs would have been fine if Netflix had a deeper streaming catalog. But the gap is still too big, and the price hike seemed premature. Your customers are extremely loyal. Don’t piss them off.

(Aside: Bill Gurley from Above the Crowd makes a very interesting case for why he believes Netflix was forced to raise their prices. I would likely end up quoting his entire piece here, so I’ll just link to “Understanding Why Netflix Changed Pricing” instead.)

A few months before that, Netflix removed the ability for customers to add movies to their DVD queues from non-computer devices. If you look up a movie on your iPhone, iPad, Android phone, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Wii or other non-computer device, and it isn’t available for streaming, you need to do the search all over again from your computer before you can add it to your queue.

Now Netflix is looking to make a move that is making customers even angrier: Not only are they separating the DVD and streaming queues into separate websites, but they’re also separating user accounts, credit card updates, ratings, reviews, recommendations, and everything else. Instead of the simplicity of one location for your movies, you now have to deal with two.

Whither Qwikster?

Back to Reed Hastings’ blog post:

Andy Rendich, who has been working on our DVD service for 12 years, and leading it for the last 4 years, will be the CEO of Qwikster. Andy and I made a short welcome video. (You’ll probably say we should avoid going into movie making after watching it.) We will let you know in a few weeks when the Qwikster.com website is up and ready. It is merely a renamed version of the Netflix DVD website, but with the addition of video games. You won’t have to do anything special if you subscribe to our DVD by mail service. [...]

Some members will likely feel that we shouldn’t split the businesses, and that we shouldn’t rename our DVD by mail service. [...] But going forward, Qwikster will continue to run the best DVD by mail service ever, throughout the United States. Netflix will offer the best streaming service for TV shows and movies, hopefully on a global basis.

Streaming is the future. Everybody knows it. You know it, I know it, Reed Hastings knows it, and Andy Rendich sure as heck knows it. When was the last time you decided to add a movie to your DVD queue if it was already available for streaming? When is streaming ever not your first choice?

Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch breaks down the numbers:

Still, it’s not enough to offset the drop-off in DVD subscribers. Of the 1 million fewer subscribers Netflix now expects, 800,000 will be from DVD-only subscribers. The remaining 200,000 decline will come from streaming-only subs, with the number who pay for both remaining steady. Out of Netflix’s expected 24 million subscribers this year, 21.8 million will have access to streaming in some form, and only 2.2 million will stick to DVD-only subscriptions.

That doesn’t sound like a very large business. As a matter of fact, that’s a business that’s shrinking. Surely Andy Rendich has seen these numbers, so why would he agree to become the new CEO of a born-to-fail business?

Crazy or Genius?

Looking at this series of events from the outside, I can only see two possible rationales that explain why they’re doing what they’re doing.

1. They’re bat-shit crazy.
2. They know something that we don’t, which will make all of this headache worth it.

Reed Hastings and Co. have always seemed like a sharp bunch. They started the company with the notion of putting the customer first and over time they have built a successful business around that premise.

Recently, Netflix and Starz decided to end their business relationship, yet Reed Hastings said:

The additional streaming content we have coming in the next few months is substantial, and we are always working to improve our service further.

I can’t help but compare present-day Netflix to Apple in 1985. The Macintosh was clearly the future of computing, but after a solid start, sales were starting to drop off. There weren’t enough applications and the hardware was considered too expensive. The Apple II, on the other hand, was a cash-cow with a large application library at its disposal. Steve Jobs ended up losing his job over the “failure” of the Macintosh. Fast-forward to today: Macs are selling like hotcakes — faster than the entire computer industry — and the Apple line of computers died out 25 years ago.

I think Netflix currently finds itself in a similar position. They know that streaming is the future, if not the now. They are working to grow their streaming content library every day. No, the amount of content comes nowhere near that of their DVDs-by-mail business, but it will.

Qwikster will eventually fade into a footnote in history — and I believe that this has been the plan all along. What better way to sunset the legacy product and grow the new product than to remove the distractions entirely? All of the built-up brand equity is staying with their newer product, streaming video, while the legacy product gets pushed out the back door with a stupid name and a $20-bill pinned to its collar. This isn’t an accident.

I hope that the team at Netflix continues to ride the fine line between crazy and genius for all it’s worth. That said, I can’t help but feel that in their rush to move into the future, they’re bungling the present. Hastings and Rendich need to take a moment to slow down, listen to what customers want (instead of just what they’re asking for), and make this transition from DVDs to streaming as smooth as possible.

An Explanation

Marco Arment, writing about customer culture:

This culture of compromise has been cultivated by Apple’s relentless pace of forcing progress and killing legacy support. Apple’s implicit message is simple: “We know what’s best. If you do things our way, everything will work very well and you’ll be happy. If you don’t like it, that’s fine with us.”

People who aren’t willing or able to compromise on their needs regularly are much more likely to be Windows customers. The Windows message is much more palatable to corporate buyers, committees, middlemen, and people who don’t like to be told what’s best for them: “You can do whatever you want, and we’ll attempt to glue it together. It won’t always work very well, and you might not like the results, but we will do exactly what you asked for.”

I (being someone who tends to fall squarely into the Apple camp) have observed this before, but was never able to put my finger on what it was. I think that this description of The Windows Culture hits the nail on the head.

Windows 8′s “Ribbon UI” in Explorer

I’m also quite fascinated with the responses to Improvements in Windows Explorer. While I felt that the Ribbon UI was a huge improvement for Microsoft Office 2007, I find the new Explorer UI in Windows 8 to be both appalling and downright backwards-minded. I was quite surprised to read how many positive comments there were.

WOW! this looks great!

Recently I moved to a TabletPC (Acer Iconia Tab W500). I normally use a FAR Manager for my file operations, but this is because I am a keyboard guy. However on a tablet I immediately moved back to explorer (I user WIndows 7 now). What I notice is a lack of things you can do by clicking your finger:) – this includes lack of Up button and other things. I think what you doing here is great! [...]

Thank you! I hope windows 8 will fit into 2 GB of ram and 30 gb of HDD and I can install it on my Iconia at some time.

No plugins in Metro IE

Conversely, Microsoft recently discussed Metro style browsing and plug-in free HTML5. I think that this will be a fantastic improvement for users of Windows 8 Metro on upcoming tablets. They’ll be more secure, they’ll have better battery life, and browsing will be much faster. This is an excellent move on Microsoft’s part. However, in the comments… [emphasis mine]

Wow…. you know one of the defense of Windows is the fact that it’s a full OS, not a mobile one. Doing this makes IE10 essentially a mobile browser. Sure these plugins are security risks and do drain battery more, but it’s ultimately up to the user to install the plugins. How about Microsoft regulates the plugins with the app store to make sure they aren’t security liabilities and what not. Killing off Flash effectively kills off millions of cross platform applications that run through web browsers. I think being able to run Flash the best out of the bunch has been a highlight of why these Mobile browsers are behind. This article just uses video for its argument, but not web design or application/game development.

The arguments being made in this comment are so completely foreign to me that I don’t even know where to begin dissecting it, but this is common thinking among those who have embraced The Windows Culture.

The next few years of the mobile space will be very interesting.

What is a web browser?

Not sure what a web browser is? Check out WhatBrowser.org, watch the video, then come back here.

Ready? Good.

Let me tell you a story…

Let’s say you’re visit a new place, and you have this really cool cab driver driving you around so that you can go site-seeing. This cab driver has agreed to be like a tour guide, taking you wherever you want to go so that you can explore all of the interesting (web)sites. This driver — let’s call him Mr. Firefox — takes you all sorts of places that you want to go. He always knows the best routes to take, and always makes sure you get there safely. As your cab driver, you trust that he will get you there safely.

Following me so far?

But there’s something you don’t know about Mr. Firefox: He’s retarded. Like, completely and utterly retarded. Like, little yellow school bus retarded. If you told him to drive into the lake, he would. He’s that stupid.

On the up-shot, Mr. Firefox knows that he’s retarded, so to deal with this he surrounds himself with a bunch of really good people that he knows he can trust. These people — let’s call them the Authorities — look out for him, and teach him which places are safe and which are not. This way, if you were to ask Mr. Firefox to drive into a lake, he would know that this is a bad idea and won’t do it (or will at least tell you how bad of an idea it is).

A dirty cop

Now, what if it was discovered that one of these Authorities was a dirty cop? This dirty cop has been taking bribes from Iranian terrorists to tell Mr. Firefox that it’s perfectly safe to drive you into a lake. Or that the bridge that was under construction is finally ready to drive across, when really it would collapse. Even though you don’t have a gun being waved in your face, you’re still in danger even though you can’t see it.

You trust your cab driver, who trusts the Authorities — one of which is a lying douchebag.

It really happened!

Well, this is what has happened to the Internet over the past few weeks. You trust your web browser, your web browser trusts the Certificate Authorities, and two of these Certificate Authorities were hacked by Iranian terrorists. These terrorists generated security certificates so that they could impersonate and eavesdrop on sites you know and love: Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, Google, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Mozilla, and even the C.I.A. Over 250 511 sites in all are affected by this (and still counting).

To stay safe, browser makers (Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Apple) have started issuing updates that revoke their trust for these hacked Certificate Authorities. As such, you need to make sure you’re running the very latest version of your web browser.

How do I stay safe?

The best way to stay safe is to update your browser to the very latest version. If you’re not sure what browser you’re running, check out WhatBrowser.org. It will tell you.

• If you have a computer running Microsoft Windows and/or are running the Internet Explorer web browser, make sure you run Microsoft Update (formerly Windows Update) and install all of the available updates — specifically Security Advisory 2607712.
• If you have a computer running Mac OS X and/or are running the Safari web browser, make sure you run Software Update and install all of the available updates — specifically Security Update 2011-005.
• If you’re running the Mozilla Firefox web browser, make sure you update to the latest version (6.0.2 at the time of this writing).
• If you’re running the Google Chrome web browser, you get automatic updates, so you probably don’t have a lot to worry about.

Where can I learn more?

Here are some links about what has happened. I’ll group them into two categories: less technical and more technical.

Less technical

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12847072
• http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20046340-281.html
• https://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/08/ssl-certificates-whats-left-to.php
• http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/comodo_hack/
• http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/index/~3/3Vj5zxvMwGw/comodo-hacker-i-hacked-diginotar-too-other-cas-breached.ars
• https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/DigiNotar#Issuance_of_fraudulent_certificates
• https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Comodo_Group#Breach_of_security

More technical

• https://blog.mozilla.com/security/2011/08/29/fraudulent-google-com-certificate/
• https://blog.mozilla.com/security/2011/09/02/diginotar-removal-follow-up/
• http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/08/update-on-attempted-man-in-middle.html
• https://blogs.technet.com/b/msrc/archive/2011/08/29/microsoft-releases-security-advisory-2607712.aspx
• https://blog.torproject.org/blog/detecting-certificate-authority-compromises-and-web-browser-collusion
• http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002128.html
• http://pastebin.com/u/ComodoHacker

Update: Bankruptcy (2011-09-25)

DigiNotar has filed for bankruptcy:

This is unsurprising, since a report issued by security audit firm Fox-IT, who has been hired to investigate the now notorious DigiNotar breach, revealed that things were far worse than we were led to believe. [...]

All CA servers were members of one Windows domain and all accessible with one user/password combination. Moreover, the used password was simple and susceptible to brute-force attacks.

“Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

This quote in particular is one that Steve Jobs has brought up on numerous occasions, and is far more revealing about Apple’s internal culture than I think most of us realize. It is certainly the most salient explanation for Apple’s intense focus at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.

Mobile

Over the past couple of years, I’ve started paying an increasing amount of attention to Apple and it’s competition — mostly in the mobile space. Before 2008 when I bought my first iPhone, I really couldn’t have cared less about mobile. I’d had a couple of feature phones, then moved up to a BlackBerry Pearl in 2006.

When Steve Jobs got up on stage at the Moscone Center in January 2007 and introduced “[…] an iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator… these are NOT three separate devices!” I was stunned. I’d heard the rumors about an alleged phone from Apple, but this thing was simply astounding! Over the next 6 months, the blogosphere worked itself into an absolute frenzy over the iPhone. Ultimately, the iPhone has gone on to be a raging success — raking in two-thirds of all of the profits in the entire mobile industry.

Hardware and software

Since Apple makes both the hardware and the software for all of their products, when you buy an iPhone (or iPod, or iPad, or Mac) you know that the hardware and software work together seamlessly. With the exception of HP/Palm (up until recently) and RIM, Apple is the only company that does this. Even Google’s Nexus line of phones is actually made by third-party handset makers (HTC for the Nexus One and Samsung for the Nexus S).

In order to properly establish a baseline showing how Apple completely rocked the mobile industry in 2007, we need to break the competition down into hardware and software categories.

Hardware

Here’s what the competition shipped in late-2006/early-2007:

• 
  RIM BlackBerry 8800
• 
  Motorola Q
• 
  Nokia E70
• 
  HTC Excalibur
• 
  HTC Touch
• 
  Palm Treo 755p
• 
  Palm Treo 700wx

Software

Here’s what the competition shipped in late-2006/early-2007:

• Palm OS 5
• Windows Mobile 6
• Symbian OS
• Android

Queue the industry scramble

People in the mobile industry knew this was going to be big, huge, EPIC. Phone makers began scrambling to create products that could be the next iPhone-killer. Motorola, HTC, LG, Palm, Microsoft, Nokia and others were knocked completely sideways by the iPhone. It was so far ahead of anything at the time that nobody knew where to begin.

As the first touchphones started hitting the market, they all failed. Utter, complete failure. But why? Their phones had all of the same features, so why weren’t they selling? Arguably, the exact same discussions are happening now — especially since tablets are joining phones in the mobile space.

There is no tablet market — only an iPad market

Verne G. Kopytoff and Ian Austen of The New York Times note:

“Computer makers are expected to ship only about 4 percent more PCs this year than last year, according to IDC, a research firm. Tablets, in contrast, are flying off store shelves. Global sales are expected to more than double this year to 24.1 million, according to Forrester Research. More than two-thirds of those tablets, however, are sold by Apple. Sales of its iPad pulled in $9 billion in just the first half of the year, or 30 percent more than all of Dell’s consumer PC business in the same period. The joke in Silicon Valley is that there is no tablet market, only an iPad market. (That was also true of Apple and the iPod market.)

The other observation that is no joke: Apple is the only maker with strong PC growth. Spending on desktops and laptops grew 16 percent in the latest quarter, while Dell’s consumer product sales increased 1 percent.”

Here’s what John Gruber from Daring Fireball had to say:

“I’m not trying to cherry-pick data. I’m simply observing, based on Apple’s sales data and Google’s activation data, that the tablet market doesn’t today look anything like the smartphone market ever did. The iPad didn’t enter the tablet market. It created the tablet market. The iPad’s role in the tablet market much more closely resembles the iPod’s role in the digital music player market a decade ago than it does the iPhone’s role in the 2008 phone market.”

And Marco Arment:

“There’s an iPad market, and the iPad could be classified as a tablet, from a hardware-centric viewpoint. But the market for non-iPad tablets is about as big today as it was before the iPad, which isn’t nothing, but it’s close enough to nothing that Apple doesn’t need to worry about it.

How many people do you know who wanted or received an iPad for Christmas?

Alright, same question, but this time, for the Samsung Galaxy Tab or any other tablet that’s not the iPad. (Kindles are not tablets. The new Nook Color might be. You can count it if you’re arguing with me.)

Now, from both groups, exclude those who know what RSS is, because we don’t represent the bulk of the market. How big is that second group now?”

Others are saying the same thing. But why? Companies like Samsung, Acer, Motorola and others have been making consumer electronics for years. Microsoft has been kicking around the idea of the tablet computer since at least 2000. Why is the iPad (which debuted in the spring of 2010) eating everyone else’s lunch?

The reason is something so blindingly simple that you’re going to feel stupid for missing it. Ready?

It’s the ecosystem, stupid!

The fatal flaw of Android phones, TouchPads, XOOMs, Playbooks, Galaxy Tabs, and pretty much everything else on the market today is the lack of a cohesive ecosystem around the product. These handset and tablet makers — for all intents and purposes — seem to think that the experience stops at the phone or the tablet. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I bought an HP TouchPad during their firesale. When reviewing the product, I compared it to my iPad. I’d purchased it for my kids so that they’d have something to play with so they’d leave my iPad alone. What happened? They decided that they didn’t like the TouchPad. They wanted the games, the books, the movies, the music and everything else that my iPad has.

Now sure, the TouchPad can technically do those things… but its not a cohesive experience. It’s not simple. It’s not easy.

When you buy an Apple product — whether it be a Mac, an iPod, an iPhone, an iPad or an Apple TV — you get all of Apple’s ecosystem working together in harmony along beside you.

• Syncing your digital media from iTunes to your iPod, iPhone, iPad or first-generation Apple TV (which uses syncing; Apple TV 2 streams instead of syncs), it all happens very seamlessly with very little effort on your part.
• Industry-standard audio and video (MPEG-4/H.264/AAC) is fully supported at the hardware level for each of Apple’s devices which means that videos play smoother and battery life is much better than competing devices which don’t support these standards at the hardware level.
• The iTunes Store has over 18 million songs; thousands of movies, TV shows, videos, podcasts, and books; and over 100,000 virus-free apps — all of which are available in just a few clicks/taps. You can also rip your own CDs and DVDs, as well as convert your favorite content into ebooks if you want.
• iTunes Home Sharing allows you to share all of your content between all of your devices either by syncing or streaming.
• AirPlay (née AirTunes) allows you to stream your music to any speakers that are either connected to an AirPort Express or support the AirPlay protocol.
• You can stream your movies, YouTube videos and other video content to any TV connected to an AppleTV also using AirPlay.
• You can control what’s playing in iTunes or AppleTV using your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad as a remote control.
• Apple’s third-party cottage industry is second-to-none with tons of integration options for home audio, car stereos, device cases, sex toys, knick-knacks, doo-dads and the like.
• Apple devices are supported with updates for a very long time. It wasn’t until iOS 4.0 that the original iPhone was dropped, and the iPhone 3G wasn’t dropped until iOS 4.3. Everything that supports iOS 4.3 will also get iOS 5.
• Apps are targeted at OS versions, and sometimes by device (iPhone/iPod touch vs. iPad). iPads can run all iPhone apps (although non-optimized apps run at the iPhone’s resolution). For example, Netflix runs on all iOS devices running iOS 4.0 or newer (everything except the original iPhone and first-generation iPod touch).

Compare all of this to, say, Android.

• First of all, there is no Android-based equivalent to the iPod. Smaller form factors are (so far) all phones. Larger form factors are (so far) all tablets. There’s nothing small and cheap that you can plug headphones into and jam with it in your pocket.
• Some Android devices have hardware decoders for audio/video playback, some don’t. Burn battery, burn!
• There is no equivalent to the iTunes Store for Android devices. Yes, Google has Google Music, but it’s brand-new, untested, and it’s not a store where you can easily purchase whatever your heart desires in just a few taps.
• Android viruses, malware and fly-by-night operations are on the rise: “Android Malware Explodes, iOS Remains Safe”, “Android-targeted malware jumps 76% in Q2, McAfee says”, “Why Android Viruses Are Growing, and How To Stop Them”, and “Warning: Fake games in the Market today”.
• There is no equivalent to iTunes Home Sharing for Android devices. You have to sync everything from one device to the next. Can’t store your entire media collection? Too bad.
• There is no equivalent to AirPlay for Android devices. You can burn a CD and put it in your home CD player, or take your ripped movie and put it on your PS3 or Xbox 360 for playback, but that can be an awful lot of work.
• There is no equivalent for remote controlling playback of your media content for Android devices.
• What Android cottage industry?
• Updates? Good luck with that. Maybe the manufacturer will release an update, maybe they won’t. Who knows?
• Apps are targeted at whatever the easiest-to-support devices are. For example, Netflix only runs on a small subset of devices based entirely on that device’s capabilities.

Apple’s Strategy

Apple’s ecosystem strategy didn’t come out of nowhere. Apple didn’t just wake up one day and decide to make the iPhone or the iPad. These products have been several years in the making. In fact, Apple talking about the digital hub dates back to at least 2000 with the iMac and their Rip, Mix, Burn campaign. iTunes was just coming out for Mac OS 9, Mac OS X hadn’t launched yet and the iPod was still a couple of years away.

Over time they launched:

1. iTunes (2001)
2. Mac OS X (2001)
3. Apple Retail Stores (allowing people to walk in, play with stuff, ask questions and get help; 2001)
4. iPod (2001)
5. Bonjour (née Rendezvous; 2002)
6. iTunes Music Store (2003)
7. AirPort Express (2004)
8. iLife (2004)
9. Added video capabilities to iPods and added video to the iTunes Store (2005)
10. AppleTV (2007)
11. iPhone (2007)
12. iPhone Music Store (2007)
13. iPhone App Store (2008)
14. iPad (2010)
15. iCloud (2011)

All of these products work together in concert to provide a seamless experience across the board. It’s this ongoing seamlessness and support that has allowed Apple to earn my trust as a consumer — something that Samsung, Motorola, RIM or Google hasn’t yet earned.

Skating to where the puck has been

Right now, everyone in the entire industry is chasing Apple. Everyone.

• Microsoft was chasing Apple with Windows Vista and Windows 7 (although with Windows 8, they’ve decided to go to crazy-town).
• Google, RIM and Nokia are chasing Apple with Android, BlackBerry OS and Meego, respectively.
• Google, Acer, Samsung, Sony, Lenovo and others are chasing Apple in ultra-portable notebooks.
• Motorola, RIM, HP, Samsung and others are chasing Apple in tablets.

As technophiliacs, it’s easy for us to go down a rat hole about this tech or that tech (see: iOS v. Android flame wars).

Aside from Apple (and arguably HP/Palm), vendors have a bad habit of shipping second-rate products in a variety of (mostly incompatible) configurations using a marketing strategy that is equivalent to throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. For example, Samsung now offers 2.8, 3.2, 3.5, 3.7, 4, 4.3, 4.5, 5, 7, 7.7, 8.9, and 10.1-inch Android devices. Really Samsung?

In “Dear tablet makers: You’re doing it wrong“, Zach Epstein writes:

“Repeated cold and lukewarm launches will either push vendors out of the tablet space or open their eyes. Consumers don’t need oversized smartphones. I’ll type these all-too important words a second time: slapping Android on a slate and shoving it out to market simply isn’t an effective strategy. The real problem might be that OEMs are looking at Android wrong. What might happen if vendors stop rushing duds out to market and actually concentrate on using Android as a platform rather than a complete solution?”

These products are soulless knock-offs of the original. Apple put its heart and soul into the iPod, iPhone and iPad, and it shows.

Skating to where the puck is going to be

Robert S. Andersen recently tweeted:

“Every product is an opportunity to create joy in someone’s life. If you’re not doing that then you’re in it for the wrong reasons.”

Apple has invested in constantly growing and constantly improving its ecosystem of products so that they all work together in concert. The experience is delightful.

It’s not that Google, Samsung, Motorola, RIM and others aren’t competing — it’s that they’re not even playing Apple’s game. Apple’s game is one of putting the user’s experience first, eliminating as much frustration from the process as possible. If you put the customer first, the sales will come. If you put making the sale (or grabbing at market share) ahead of the customer experience, you’re no better than a used car salesman. How many used car salesmen are you excited to buy from again?

I’m going to end with a quote from one of my favorite shows, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip:

Harriet: I got a laugh at the table read when I asked for the butter in the dinner sketch. I didn’t get it at the dress. What did I do wrong?

Matt: That’s one laugh out of thirty you’re going to get tonight.

Harriet: What did I do wrong?

Matt: You asked for the laugh.

Harriet: What did I do at the table read?

Matt: You asked for the butter.

If you’re a tech company, let me give you a piece of advice: Stop trying to be Apple. Nobody is Apple but Apple. Be yourself. If you suck, if you’re boring, then don’t expect your date to like you.

The only way to even come close to competing with Apple is to start working on your overall ecosystem of products. Make them seamless. Make them compatible. Make them Just Work™. Building knock-off hardware and slapping a second-rate OS on it won’t help you compete.

Yes, you might have enough checkboxes in the feature list to pick up a sale. Congratulations. But they’re not buying your product for you — they’re buying it because it’s close enough to an Apple product for what they need.

Think about that for a second and tell me how sad that makes you feel about yourself.

Update: HP Envy (2011-11-16)

If I forgot to add them before, let’s go ahead and add HP to the list of Apple wannabes. They just released the new HP Envy.

I feel like I’ve seen this somewhere before…

Update: Fun with numbers! (2011-11-24)

In his piece entitled “Fun With Numbers”, John Gruber from Daring Fireball analyzes an NPD Group report about tablet sell-through numbers (i.e., real sales numbers to consumers, not the fake we-shipped-zillions-to-stores-but-don’t-know-who-actually-bought-them numbers).

That’s one way to put it. Another way is that 92 percent of U.S. tablet buyers considered an iPad, and 89 percent bought an iPad, which means 97 percent of tablet buyers who merely considered an iPad bought an iPad, and if not for the 8 percent of tablet buyers who for whatever reason did not consider an iPad, none of these companies would have sold even 100,000 tablets over the first nine months of 2011. […]

PC manufacturers are not dominant in the tablet space. Companies that provide a complete ecosystem — hardware, software, app stores, movies, TV shows, books and periodicals — are. PC manufacturers are utterly failing in the tablet market.

He finishes off his analysis with the following food for thought.

The only thing you can learn from NPD’s report is that tablet market share numbers sure do look different when you don’t count any of the tablets that people are actually buying.

“At the 25th hour, Jobs returned. He quickly re-installed his vision. And this time, the timing was exactly right. His vision seemed perfectly in line with the world at large. The result was a 14-year run that took Apple from near-death to the most valuable company on the planet. It wasn’t just hit after hit after hit. It was homerun after homerun after home run.”

One More Thing… by M.G. Siegler.

Preface

I feel that I should start by saying that I’m an Apple guy; or more specifically that I’ve always been an Apple guy. I was converted to the Mac platform back in the early 90′s when my Junior High school’s library got a new shipment of Apple Macintosh LC IIs. I’ve never really looked back.

That said, this certainly isn’t a blind love for Apple. Over the years, Apple has earned my trust by providing high-quality products, software and support that puts the consumer first. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve liked every single decicion they’ve made, but all-in-all I have Apple’s back because I believe that Apple has mine.

Let’s look at the competition:

• RIM: RIM is dead. Sell your stock.
• Microsoft: Irrelevant in this day and age.
• Google:
  1. They’d screw me in a second if they could sell more data about me to advertisers.
  2. Google values engineering above all else. Unfortunately for Google, Design > Engineering.
  3. Andy Rubin has as much dumb stuff come out of his mouth as Steve Ballmer.
  4. Google recently kicked off a whine-fest because they lost a patent auction.
• Palm: CEO was a high-ranking lieutenant at Apple in charge of the iPod. Lots of former Apple engineers. Sweet new OS for mobile devices. Hmmm…

Piqued Interest

I have no interest in Android. I’m a bit of a quality snob, and an ease-of-use snob, and most of Google’s products are just not there. Android in particular (and Microsoft’s Windows CE, palm-sized PC, PocketPC, Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC Phone Edition, Windows Mobile, Windows Embedded Handheld, Windows Phone 7 Series, Windows Phone 7 devices) all suffer from what’s called The Paradox of Choice (TED video) (Wikipedia summary). The short version is that while people like Steve Ballmer and Andy Rubin are all touting how wonderful it is to have a plethora of devices available, it’s actually harmful to the customer experience.

So when Palm/HP announced the TouchPad, I was intrigued. I’d always thought that Palm’s webOS was a clear stand-out among mobile OSs, but the faulty Pre hardware and a poor at-launch partner (Sprint), and terrible marketing all worked in concert to kill Palm’s chances of making a dent in the marketplace. Palm also was in the poor position of needing a serious influx of cash if they were to continue operating. That kind of split focus is never good for a company.

Seeing some gorgeous screenshots of the OS and devices on Sebastiaan de With’s blog pretty much sealed the deal for me: I was a webOS fan. Unfortunately for Palm/HP, there was no way I was going to spend money on a TouchPad when I could get an iPad.

Comparing the TouchPad and the iPad 2

I ordered my iPad 2 at the end of July, so I’ve only had my iPad 2 for about 3 weeks. I also have an iPhone 4, so picking up and using an iPad was effortless. Because of this, the iPad has set an awfully high bar in my mind.

After spending a little less than 24 hours with my new 32GB HP TouchPad, here are my thoughts:

Pros

• Palm/HP definitely got the packaging right. It’s the most Apple-like experience for any non-Apple product I’ve ever seen.
• webOS is gorgeous, with an emphasis on black/charcoal colors, the Prelude system font, and high-quality iconography derived from the circle shape (Palm owns the circle). If you believe (as I do) that a software environment should look as good as it works, webOS is fantastic.
• The TouchPad hardware is nice to the eyes and the touch. It has a sturdy (although somewhat plastic-y) feel to it.
• Neither Netflix nor Hulu are filtering the TouchPad’s user-agent string. Hulu seems to maintain a black list for devices (Hulu has to pro-actively block devices), while Netflix seems to maintain a white list for devices (Netflix has to pro-actively allow devices). While I can watch Hulu content on my TouchPad (which comes with Flash), I can’t watch Netflix content (which requires Silverlight).
• The bezel/cards UI is awesome.
• Built-in support for several third-party accounts, including Skype and Dropbox. While iOS (and Mac OS X Lion) also has this, webOS’s integration seems to go a lot deeper — specifically in being able to do a decent job of merging contacts together across the various services.
• The Facebook app (developed by Palm) beats the pants off of the phone-only iOS Facebook app. The closest competitor available for the iPad is an app called MyPad+.
• The Last.fm app is also designed for the TouchPad, easily beating the phone-only iOS Last.fm app.
• The photo app has built-in support for Facebook photos and videos built right in.
• The on-screen keyboard has digits as part of its first screen. You don’t need to tap shift to get to them.

Cons

• It’s a lot heavier than my iPad 2.
• The screen and iPhone 3G-ish style back attract fingerprints like its their job.
• The UI doesn’t track finger movements as quickly as iOS, so the touch/scroll responsiveness feels laggy compared to the iPhone 4 and iPad 2.
• Actually, the whole OS is a bit laggy. It’s as if it takes a moment to “spin-up” after I launch an application or switch from one screen to another.
• The TouchPad uses a non-standard Mini-USB cable, so my cache of leftover cables from my BlackBerry Pearl days are still as useless to me as they’ve been since I upgraded to the iPhone.
• It doesn’t seem to charge when connected to my computer, so I need to disconnect it, climb down underneath my desk, and plug it in to get it to charge.
• Ever heard of BeatsAudio? It’s the technology that powers the Beats by Dre headphone that are so freaking awesome. Yeah, not feeling it here. The iPad 2 speakers are better.
• The app selection is downright awful. All of the apps that I take for granted on iOS (e.g., Netflix, Hulu, Twitter, Instapaper, Flipboard) are nowhere to be found on the HP App Catalog.
• While the photo app supports Facebook, it doesn’t support Flickr which is where I have a 6-year investment in photos.
• Although the webOS browser is based on WebKit (the same engine that powers Safari and Chrome on the desktop and the web browsers built into iOS, Android and Blackberry OS 6), it is much slower than those other devices. As a matter of fact, I’ve been trying to run through the Browserscope test suite for the past couple of hours and it’s still nowhere near complete.
• The UI doesn’t change between portrait and landscape modes. iOS understands that the portrait orientation is narrower than the landscape orientation, so it adjusts the UI accordingly (see Mail). In webOS, it simply takes the UI and squishes everything together in portrait orientation.
• Syncing sucks. Even with the HP Play software that you can download, it’s still a pretty awful syncing experience.

Conclusion

All-in-all, the TouchPad is a mixed bag.

I think that the core of the experience (i.e., webOS itself) is a good OS with lots of potential. Remember iPhone OS 1.0? Or even 2.0? webOS 3.0 is clearly a better user experience and I believe that with more resources, webOS could definitely be a contender in the mobile space.

Unfortunately, the rest of the experience is pretty poor. The hardware — while feeling and looking good — is too slow to be of any real use to anybody. The TouchPad doesn’t charge over USB from my computer (early 2011 MacBook Pro), and doesn’t support standard-sized Mini-USB cables. The selection of apps is so paltry that it only took me about 15 minutes to look through every single app in the entire store catalog.

Would I have paid $499 or $599 for one of these? Not a chance. How about at $100 off like they were last week? No way, José. But $150 for a 32 GB model still feels like a good deal. Maybe a touch high ($129 would feel like a more appropriate price), but I don’t really have any regrets about yesterday’s purchase.

A couple of years ago, the kids would play with mine and Sarah’s Nintendo DSs when we were all in the car. Unfortunately, we only had one copy of New Super Mario Bros. and they would constantly fight over who would get to play it. In the end, we decided to spend $40 on a second copy of the game. The result was the wonderful peace and quiet that came from two happy children playing video games in the back seat. Totally worth it.

Likewise, I bought the TouchPad primarily for the kids to play with so that they stop stealing my iPad from me. When we’re at home, one of them is typically playing video games in the living room while the other is playing with the iPad. I think it was money well-spent to have two movie/music/game-playing tablets available for trips and long car rides. My daughter, Julianna, is also getting to the age where a computer is starting to feel more appropriate, so I think that the TouchPad will be a great device for her.

If you’re looking for a tablet for yourself, though, I would definitely say to skip the TouchPad and every single Android Honeycomb device out there. Spend the $499 on an iPad instead. You’ll get a better value per dollar spent with an iPad than with anything else right now.

Epilogue: Side-by-side Photos

In this first photo, you can see their shapes. The TouchPad has a much larger border radius than the iPad. In both cases, the displays are nice and bright.

Here they are at a slightly different angle with the displays turned off.

Here is a comparison of their thicknesses. As you can see, the TouchPad is roughly twice as thick as the iPad 2.

(Photo credits: First photo by HP/Palm. Second and third photos by Sebastiaan de With. Fourth, fifth and sixth photos by Ryan Parman.)

Update: Micro-USB (2011-08-25)

Thanks to a comment below, I’ve learned that there is apparently a new USB port size du jour called Micro USB. The TouchPad uses the Micro-B flavor, which is why my Mini USB cables didn’t work. However, I would argue with the commenter’s assertion that Micro USB is “the primary standard for every single other device on the market.” I have plenty of other devices at my fingertips that don’t use Micro USB.

Update: Hulu (2011-08-25)

Over the past couple of days, Hulu has now added the TouchPad to their blacklist. Sorry, but no more Hulu for TouchPad users.

Update: Preware (2011-08-25)

Last night, while I was digging through webOS-related resources, I discovered Preware. Preware allows you to install homebrew apps, much like Cydia and Rock Your Phone for jailbroken iOS devices. The difference here is that because of the relaxed sandboxing that webOS uses, you don’t need to jailbreak anything to use it (Palm/HP is actually quite OK with this community).

As part of digging around, I found a write-up by Jeffrey Van Kamp of Digital Trends entitled “Got a slow HP TouchPad? Here are 3 easy ways to speed it up.” The first thing you learn is that webOS does a ton of logging in the background. While potentially useful for debugging, it also uses up a tremendous amount of system resources. The article discusses how to turn it off by enabling developer mode, installing Preware, and then installing a homebrew package that disables the logging. Also, if you’re interested in squeezing even more juice out of your TouchPad, the article also discusses how to overclock your TouchPad from 1.2 GHz to 1.5 GHz.

Another article by John Biehler entitled “How to install Preware onto your HP TouchPad on a Mac” suggests a few other packages you can install to improve the general responsiveness of webOS on the TouchPad. There are a few others you can install to just make life a little simpler as well. I chose to install the following patches:

• Advanced Reset Options
• Faster Card Animations HYPER Version
• Increase Touch Sensitivity and Smoothness 10
• Just Charge By Default
• Muffle System Logging
• Private Browsing
• Remove Tap Ripple
• Unthrottle Download Manager

That last one is interesting. I had wondered why downloads seemed so slow on the TouchPad compared to my iOS devices. As it turns out, webOS throttles download speeds down to 64 kbps. Applying the patch to unthrottle the download manager sped up my TouchPad downloads dramatically.

(I want to start by stating that what is written here are my own thoughts, and not representative of any past or current employer.)

Start

Typically the process starts with an in-house recruiter sending a stack of résumés to my manager. My managers have usually taken a swag at filtering out the ones that are clearly junk, and then pass them off to me to make a determination as to whether someone is worth a phone call for the position.

Now, I’m going to start by saying that my approach to résumés is greatly influenced by “A Glimpse and a Hook” and the follow-up, “A Brief Glimpse“. Like the author, I update my résumé every 3-6 months whether I’m looking for a new gig or not.

Your Name

I’ve been around. You might call me an Internet slut. If you’ve done something notable on the Front-End/HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP front, I’ve probably heard of you. That’s already going to be a plus.

Address and Phone Number vs. Your Blog, Twitter and GitHub

I don’t need to know where you live. I don’t care. I’m not going to mail you a letter. An email address is good at the very least. Providing a contact phone number will probably save us a step, but isn’t strictly required.

However, I am keenly interested in where you live on the Internet. I want to see your personal website, your blog, your GitHub/SourceForge/Google Code account, your Twitter account. I like to know what you think about (Twitter), write about (Blog), and the kinds of problems you like to solve (GitHub).

Not having these — as a Web or PHP developer — is a red flag for me. I wouldn’t necessarily expect someone with a Java or .NET background to use Twitter or GitHub (nothing against Java or .NET developers). But if you’re working in PHP, Ruby or the front-end, I expect to see these things otherwise I’m going to suspect that you’re out of touch with what’s happening right now.

Objective

If you have this on your résumé, get rid of it. It sucks. It doesn’t tell me anything about you, and it’s usually either a mish-mash of bogus keywords or something so mind-numbingly obvious that you don’t need to waste the words on a page to tell me.

“To secure a position with a well established organization with a stable environment that will lead to a lasting relationship in the field of technology.”

Well, no shit.

Elevator Pitch

Your elevator pitch should summarize your value and experience in the length of a paragraph. Assume that this is the only part of your résumé I’m going to read. What’s going to get my attention? I see a zillion résumés; what’s going to make me spend time with yours? Should it tell me every company you’ve worked for? No. You are not your job. Should it tell me about the kinds of problems you like to solve and the things you’re passionate about? Absolutely.

In all seriousness, the one résumé I’ve come across that has stuck out in my mind the most is Noah Stokes‘ résumé. Now I’m certainly not recommending you make yours look like this, but think about the memorability factor. As a matter of fact, as I was writing this, I couldn’t remember Noah’s name. But I sure as heck remembered “ajax the shit out of your site”. A quick Google, and his site came up and I remembered his name. Be that guy.

Alternatively, I’m also a fan of the 1-pager. I first came across this concept through my colleague Christen Dybenko, who in-turn got the idea from a post by David Seah. This idea has also been made popular by sites like CV Parade. It’s separate from your résumé, and is essentially treated as a list of highlights about you, your career and what you’re looking for. It isn’t a résumé replacement, but it’s a good way for you to hook my interest.

Some sites make this easy for you; About.me and Zerply come immediately to mind.

Skills and Software

Skills are more important than software. I care more about you being able to do something than I do about the tools you use to get there.

But even more than that, I want to know the difference between what you’re good at and what you’re not so good at. I’ve seen a lot of résumés that do little more than list out every single programming language they’ve ever heard of.

“Java, JavaScript, C#, ASP.net, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Erlang and Haskell.”

Bullshit.

I recommend breaking your skills down into three groups. The names of the groups don’t matter as much as how they’re classified. On a scale of one to ten, here’s how I group things:

• 1-3: You have limited experience with these things — so I shouldn’t start firing a bunch of in-depth questions at you about them — but you’re interested in growing your skills in them over time.
• 4-6: You’ve got a solid handle on these things, can answer questions about them, and would have no problem working with them on a regular basis.
• 7-9: You have advanced abilities in these skills, teach other people how to do them, and can answer obscure or complex questions about them in an interview setting.
• 10: You are an expert in your field. Not just in your company, but in your field. People on the internet know your name, and you get invited to join working groups or hold advisory positions about these topics. You could write (or have written) a book about the topic.

Most people should have their skills grouped into the first three groups. I personally give these groups the following names: Highly Proficient (7-9), Proficient (4-6), and Limited Experience Worth Mentioning (1-3). I’ve only interviewed an expert in their field once or twice in my career, so I’m certainly not expecting that out of you. But if I ask you how well you know a topic, and you say “10″, I’m going to drill you like a subject-matter expert.

If you bother to list software on your résumé, there should be a good reason for it. For example, I list things like find, grep, and other command-line tools available on Mac/Linux systems. This is useful because instead of saying “Mac OS X” or “Linux”, it tells me something more valuable.

And this is a personal pet peeve of mine: Don’t list Microsoft Office apps on your résumé. If your résumé is so bare that you have to list Microsoft Office apps, Adobe Acrobat or your preferred web browser, you’ve got bigger problems.

Summary of Qualifications

I think Rands says it best in his aforementioned blog post:

Similar to Skills, this is another skip section for me. Here’s a good example from an imaginary résumé: “Proven success in leading technical problem solving situations”. This line tells me nothing. Yes, I know you’re trying to tell me that you’re strategic, but there is no way you’re going to convince me that you’re strategic in a résumé. I’m going to learn that from a phone screen and from an interview.

Unlike Skills, which I find to be a total waste of time, I will go back to Summary of Qualifications if we end up talking. When you write “Established track record for delivering measurable results under tight schedules”, I am going to ask you what the hell you mean on the phone and if your answer isn’t instant and insightful, I’ll know your qualifications are designed to be buzzword compliant and don’t actually define your qualifications.

Most of the time, it’s a bunch of junk that doesn’t tell me anything. I don’t care about stuff that doesn’t tell me anything. If I can’t discern your qualifications from your Elevator Pitch or your skill set, then you’re already in trouble.

Instead, I’d like to get a sense of what it would be like to work with you — warts and all. This is important because I believe that it’s important to know who you are and who you aren’t. If you feed me a line like “I work too hard” or “My work is too perfect”, I’m going to move onto the next résumé. Why? Because you just told me that you’re inefficient and you don’t know how to prioritize effectively.

Me? I have a strong personality and sometimes I steamroll over people if I’m not paying attention. If the team I’m applying for is comprised primarily of easy-going and/or delicate personalities, I probably won’t be a good fit for your team. But if you’re looking for someone who has the backbone to make a decision and commit, and have other people on the team with strong personalities who like to hash out ideas to find the best ones, then I’m likely a great fit.

Give me a sense of what it’s like to work with you. What kinds of things can I expect?

Work Experience

This is the meat and potatoes of your résumé. For most people this is just a bulleted list of things they did at the job. Again, I don’t care about that. There are a few specific things that I look at in this area:

• I want to see what you accomplished (or where your focus was), what you learned, and how you’ve grown.
• How long were you at the job? For a full-time gig, I’d expect to see at least a year. Anything shorter than that is a red flag.
• At the same time, if I see that you’ve been at the same company for ten years, that’s also a red flag. How could you possibly grow in your career if you’ve had the same job for a decade? (Yes, I know it’s possible, but there’s going to be a burden of proof on you.)
• Have you done any open-source work? Yes, that should go here too. This is work experience. Just because you may or may not have received a paycheck for it doesn’t mean it wasn’t work. Having good experience here would likely offset any red flags triggered by the previous points.
• If you list an accomlishment like “raised revenues by 10%”, my very first question in the interview is going to be “how?” Be prepared to back up anything you claim on your résumé.
• Are you passionate about what you do, and does that passion exude from your résumé (or blog, or Twitter, or open-source work)?

Now, I understand that some jobs just plain suck. I’ve had a couple of those myself. How did you make the best of them, and what were your take-aways?

References and Recommendations

References have gone the way of the dodo bird. The thing that services like LinkedIn have made more prevalent are recommendations. Without having to pick up a telephone and ask questions, what do your co-workers, managers, teammates, and other folks have to say about you? A link to your LinkedIn profile (or something similar) will do in a pinch.

Now, I understand that the whole purpose of a LinkedIn recommendation is to show that person in the best possible light. In that way, a lot of recommendations are junk. Knowing that, I’m less concerned about positive or negative spin and more concerned with what they write about you? What language do they use? How well does it seem like they know you, and what kinds of things do they bring up about you? Do I see a recurring theme throughout all of your recommendations? How well do they mesh with how you’ve described yourself?

Education

Generally, I completely skip this section. The only thing I check for is whether or not you have a Master’s degree. What my personal experience has taught me is that a Master’s degree means very little real-world experience, and the experience that they do have is generally pretty useless.

Now, if you have your Master’s degree and know your stuff, then that’s great. But understand that you’re in the minority.

Other Tips

Here are a few other things to think about:

GitHub > Résumé: A GitHub account is better than a résumé. I’ll learn more from looking at your code and the kinds of things you like to work on than I ever will by looking over your résumé.

Have some skin in the game: I’ve gotten jobs before because people knew of my work. They knew my reputation before they knew me. A huge bonus is if you’re already doing the thing that I’m trying to hire for.

Sound like a human being: If you say “planned, designed, and coordinated engineers efforts for the development of a mission critical system”, you sound like a jargon machine more than a human being. Only write stuff that will actually tell me something about you. No mumbo-jumbo.

Spelling and Grammar: If you misspell something or have generally poor grammar, I’m going to move on. Sorry. This especially applies to the following areas:

• Their, there, and they’re
• Then and than
• Lose and loose
• And brand/product names: “I-phone” is very, very wrong.

Conclusion

Now, I know that I don’t speak for everybody. Some people take a very different approach to reviewing résumés, and that’s fine. It’s also possible that I’m not the kind of person that you’d like to work with/for, and that’s fine too.

I know that facets of my approach are used by people that I consider some of the best in the industry, and as such I’ve tried to learn from the best ideas I’ve come across to make the most informed decisions possible when determining whether or not to schedule the next step (i.e., the phone interview).

If you’re involved in creating things for the web, take heed to my suggestions. Even if you don’t follow all of them, definitely make it a point to raise the quality of your résumé.

I set up my new Comcast Xfinity internet service today using the self-install kit. After walking through the necessary questions, it then forced me to download and install their crap-ware onto my Mac before it would register the flow as “completed”. Being given no choice, I begrudgingly ran the installer. Afterwards, I ended up with extra Comcast/Xfinity bookmarks in multiple browsers (Firefox & Safari), and the homepages for both browsers were set to an Xfinity portal page.

Fixing the homepage in Safari was easy — you just change it how you always change it. Unfortunately, fixing Firefox’s homepage was trickier. The installer disabled my ability to change my homepage back to whatever I wanted it to be. BAD COMCAST! BAD!

I did some Googling around, but nobody seemed to know WTF was going on or how to fix it. I ended up dropping into Terminal and running cd /; grep -ri comcast . in order to find the solution. Here it is: they add a custom user.js file to your Firefox profile which overrides certain settings from the about:config panel (including the browser homepage). Ass-hats! This is how I fixed it:

Fixing the issue

1. In your address bar, go to about:support.
   
2. Click the button that says “Show In Finder” (Mac) or “Open Containing Folder” (Windows). This should show you your profile folder.
   
3. Go inside of that folder, and look for a file called user.js. Delete it.
   
4. Go into the preferences, and reset your homepage.
5. Restart Firefox, and your preferred homepage should be back.

Update (2011-11-09):

When I originally posted this, it was after I had hunted across the Comcast FAQ, forums and Google as a whole to try to find a solution. Nothing was written about this issue when I came up with my workaround.

After I posted the solution to this problem and it caught the attention of some bloggers (Brian Krebs from Krebs on Security and Tim Cushing of Techdirt), Comcast wrote up the same set of instructions (although with a less anti-Comcast tone) and added them to the Comcast FAQ. While they didn’t directly rip me off, they didn’t even give me a hat tip for bringing the solution to light.

Stay classy, Comcast.

However, the 3D snake oil salesmen from Hollywood want you to believe that Apple is going to build this low-quality tech into their next iPad. Sylvie Barak, writing for RCRWireless, reporting about a rumored “glasses-free 3D” iPad 3:

“The fact that the iPad 3 is 3D is a dead cert,” one Hollywood insider close to the big movie studios told RCR, adding that the screen would be the real magic. She went on to say that the big film studios were currently running around like blue arsed flies trying to gear up to release plenty of 3D content in time for Apple’s next launch.

There’s only one problem with this rumor — well, only one that I’m going to point out: With the notable exception of James Cameron’s Avatar, 3D sucks, and Apple does not ship crap.

Eric Mack, writing for CNet, picked up the story and had this to say:

I’m left wondering if this anonymous source might actually be Charlie Sheen [...]

I’m left wondering exactly the same thing.

My parodies have always fallen under what the courts call “fair use,” and this one was no different, legally allowing me to record and release it without permission. But it has always been my personal policy to get the consent of the original artist before including my parodies on any album, so of course I will respect Gaga’s wishes. However, given the circumstances, I have no problem with allowing people to hear it online, because I also have a personal policy not to completely waste my stinking time.

Update: Here’s the song, “Perform this Way” on YouTube.

Although I’m no longer with the company, I truly wish the remaining team the absolute best. We had some groundbreaking and innovative ideas, and I hope that a real, viable product will emerge soon.

Thomas Edison — inventor of the lightbulb — once said “I’ve never failed. I’ve simply found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” Up until today, WarpShare has been — by nearly all definitions — a business failure. That doesn’t mean that it will continue to be a business failure, only that the team hasn’t yet gotten to where we/they need to be, even after four-someodd years.

Starting and running an early-stage company has been simultaneously the greatest and worst experience of my entire life, besides raising my children, of course. Here are some lessons that I’ve learned along the way.

Your business plan doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t. At all.

It doesn’t matter because it’s all going to change. Tomorrow you’ll realize that somebody else is doing a better version of your idea. On the other hand, you might realize that this teeny-tiny idea you have is actually much bigger than you’d originally thought, and you’ll need to adjust everything to take the modified idea into account. Perhaps you expect it to change. Perhaps you know it’s not perfect. Great, because at least your either honest or smart enough to know that. Having a business plan written down isn’t bad; just make sure that you treat it as a rough draft at all times. It’s not final, and it never will be. If it is final, then you’re either the very smartest or very dumbest entrepreneur in the entire world.

If you’re planning to go for a venture capital (“VC”) round, know that VCs don’t care about the plan — they care about your team. Rather, they need to believe in your team’s ability to execute a great idea. If you don’t believe in either your team or the idea, VCs will sniff that out and you’ll get nowhere with them. If a VC firm has never heard of you before, you’re less likely to get funded. That’s the long and the short of it. It’s also important to understand the culture of the area where you’re trying to get funded. In San Francisco it’s all about what you’ve done; in Los Angeles it’s all about who you know.

Of course, if you can start a business around selling a product or service that people will pay for, you’re already ahead of the VC-funded crowd. Do that instead, if you can.

Choose your business partners like you would choose your spouse.

You wouldn’t just marry anybody, would you? Well, those of us with brains in our skulls wouldn’t. Some people treat marriage like a revolving door. Don’t select people like that to be your business partners.

First of all, you want to find people who’s personalities and skill sets complement yours. They should be strong in areas where you’re weak. You should be strong in areas where they’re weak. If there’s a critical gap somewhere, find another business partner that fills the gap. Remember, there’s nothing wrong with having multiple business partners.

Secondly, know that your business partners will become like spouses to you. You’re going to spend a lot of time with them as you work together toward a common goal. That also means that if there’s friction, there are two ways to handle it — lock yourselves together in a room and hash it out until you’ve resolved your differences, or you can separate and get divorced. Trust me, the latter is much harder to go through than the former. Fortunately for our team, there were a few things that helped us work through our issues.

1. We had a rule: If you’re going to crap on the table, bring a shovel. What that meant was that if you didn’t like the idea that was currently on the table, bring a better idea.
2. We were all interested in finding the best idea, not simply trying to get the others to accept our own idea.
3. We were all willing to fight for what we believed was the best idea. There was nobody on the team who would just roll over. We all had personalities who were willing to engage, discuss, argue, fight, throw chairs, and anything else that needed to happen in order to find the best idea in the room.
4. We all valued the friendships that we had with each other. Even though I’m no longer with the company and live 1,000 miles away from them, those guys are my family. We’ve been through the fire together, and we’ll be bonded for life.

A good investor meeting means nothing if they don’t write a check.

During the years that I was with WarpShare, we had lots of good meetings, but very few checks were actually written. We had people tell us that they loved our ideas. They said that we could be the next Facebook or Google! But when it came time to sit down and write a check, they hemmed and hawed and floundered around. They would be busy with family stuff. They would be traveling that week, so they’d get back to us next week. They would “forget”. To be fair, we were also trying to fund-raise during the real estate crash of 2008. Some of the people who would have written checks had just lost a lot of money in the crash.

I learned the hard way that a good investor meeting means nothing if you can’t feed your family. If it were only me, I would have no problem sleeping on the couch in the office, coding 20 hours a day, eating nothing but 19 cent ramen noodles all day, every day. I believed in what we were doing that much. But I couldn’t drag my family through that. That sort of lifestyle was not what my family signed up for.

Don’t get starry eyes just yet.

“This could be a multi-billion dollar opportunity!” It was difficult to avoid daydreaming about what it would be like to own 10-20% of a company that big. We could’ve been the next Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, or [insert awe-inspiring startup here].

My wife started making plans based on what we thought would happen in the next 6-12 months. She was a loan officer for Washington Mutual Bank and was suddenly having a tough time closing deals (Washington Mutual ended up getting eaten alive during the real estate crash, and its assets were handed over to J.P. Morgan Chase). Since our startup was sure to be wildly successful in the next few months, she decided to go back to school.

Instead the opposite happened. The housing market tanked and took the investment community down with it. Thousands of companies started shedding employees by the ton. My wife was laid-off and pretty much all of our investment deals fell through — all at the same time. It was the perfect storm. We went from making $150,000 a year to having no income at all, within only a few months. We liquidated all of our assets and maxed out all of our credit cards to try and stay afloat just a little longer. “We did have that good investor meeting, after all. Maybe they’ll write us a check next week.”

While work ethic, determination and perseverance are valuable traits for a startup founder, starry eyes will only deceive you. If you’re successful, you could end up being an accidental billionaire. If not, you could end up being financially ruined.

It will take a toll on your family.

While we started out with four co-founders, one of them was only there to help us get started and offer his network of connections to us. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but in the end, there were three of us who were fully invested in making this thing go. They say that startup founders experience really high “highs” and really low “lows.” This is the truest statement I’ve ever heard with regard to startup life. But when you found a new startup immediately before the whole country goes into a massive recession, you encounter far more lows than you do highs.

Of the three of us, two of us ended up divorced. The one who didn’t was the bachelor of the group. Now, I’m not saying that every startup founder will go through this, and in our cases the startup was not the only factor in the equation, but it will definitely take a toll on you and your family. Plan on it.

While I was going through a complete financial, marital and business meltdown in 2008, I would occasionally tweet obscure references to how I was feeling and what I was going through. I had several of my followers ping me asking if everything was okay. I think they were genuinely worried about me.

I will never cease to be amazed by the kindness of strangers.

Shipping is your most valuable feature.

It doesn’t matter how awesome your idea is or how great those investor talks are going. If you don’t ship, you have nothing.

Let me say that again: If you don’t ship, you have nothing.

Rands once said “shipping a 1.0 won’t kill you, but it will sure try.” Shipping a product is tough. By the time you’ve reached the point where you’re shipping, you’ve:

1. Gotten together your initial team.
2. Burned through some cash.
3. Done a ton of planning.
4. Done a ton of coding.
5. Argued with your team about the right thing to build.
6. A ton of other stuff.

You want to know the funny thing? Shipping a 1.0 is only step 1. After that, you have users, customer service, feature requests, bug reports, scalability issues, and a ton of other stuff to worry about.

So how do you get to a shipping product? You start coding. We encountered some issues with our business a few months after we incorporated that caused us to have to reset. We spent nearly a year trying to recover and get back on-track with an idea that made sense. After we figured out the big idea, we then had to translate that big idea into an actual product. Once we figured out what the product would be, we tried to figure out what it looked like, how it would work, etc.

By this point, we were long-since out of cash. I’d taken on another daytime job to pay the bills. All-in-all, we burned a lot of time and a lot of cash just trying to figure out what the heck we were going to do. All along the way, we’d been trying to get VC funding so that we could feed our families and hire some people to help us make progress in narrowing our focus so that we could build something. Unfortunately, none of the VCs had ever heard of us before, and we didn’t have a product to show them yet.

Finally, in May 2009 we restarted development in earnest. Over the next 10 months until I left to join Amazon Web Services, we were able to accomplish a lot considering how abysmally resource-constrained we were. The next time around, I plan to do a few things very differently.

1. I won’t quit my daytime job until I believe that the idea is going to go somewhere.
2. Focus on building the minimum viable product. In our case, we had to significantly narrow our scope so that we could figure out what to build first. We were all so excited about the future that we couldn’t figure out where to start.
3. Your customers are not venture capitalists, so don’t make the mistake of trying to build something that you think VCs will fund. Instead, build something that users will love. VC money will follow the users. In our case, we didn’t have the resources to build something awesome for users, so we tried to build for VCs to get the money to build for our users. This strategy never worked for us, not even once, and in retrospect it was one of the worst ideas we ever had.
4. Demo, don’t pitch. Again, VCs don’t care about pitches. If you’ve never done a successful startup before, then they’re not going to fund you anyway. If you don’t have something working that you can show them, don’t even bother setting up the meeting. Realistically, you need a working demo to pitch to angel investors. You need a live product with real users to pitch to VCs. If all that you show up with is a tie and a piece of paper talking about what your business plan is, you’ve just wasted the time of everybody in the room — including your own.

Perseverance is paramount.

Once you go all-in on your startup, you need to be truly all-in. If you want to succeed, you need to treat this project like a life-or-death situation. You need to believe that you will live or die by the success of what you’re working on. If you hedge your bet and leave yourself an out, you won’t make it. Paul Graham, a VC from YCombinator, once said:

When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually that they’ve become demoralized. You rarely hear of a startup that’s working around the clock doing deals and pumping out new features, and dies because they can’t pay their bills and their ISP unplugs their server.

Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!

This is the one piece of advice that got me through so many of those dark, demoralizing days. Just keep typing.

Conclusion.

While my own experience as a startup founder has thus far led to a business that hasn’t yet succeeded, it doesn’t mean that yours will end up the same way. Whether you’re trying to do an Internet startup like me, or simply trying to start a consulting business out of your home, all of the aforementioned points apply.

1. Your business plan doesn’t matter. Doing something is what matters.
2. Choose your business partners like you would choose your spouse.
3. If you’re looking for funding, only the check matters.
4. Focus on what you can do here and now — not at some arbitrary point in the future.
5. It can take a toll on your family. Families can’t go on autopilot. Take time away from work to spend with the people you love.
6. If you don’t ship, you have nothing. Or (if you’re providing a service instead of a product) if you’re not currently providing the service, you have nothing.
7. The only person who can make this thing go is you. It will be hard. It will be frustrating. Make it go anyway.

Finally, while this is by no means an exhaustive list, I would recommend spending some quality time digesting the writing from the following authors:

• Paul Graham
• Michael Lopp (aka “Rands”)
• Seth Godin
• John Maeda

This is what I have posted on my LinkedIn page:

Recruiters: Don’t contact me. Don’t contact me. Don’t contact me. Don’t contact me. Don’t contact me. Don’t contact me. Don’t contact me. Don’t contact me. Don’t contact me. Don’t contact me.

No, I’m not interested in your gig, and I don’t know anybody else who is either. I will not whore out my network so that you can do less work. I would rather spend an hour with a sleazy used car salesman than deal with lazy, uninformed technical recruiter ilk. If you message me, I will mark your messages as spam. If you email me, I will add you to my email blacklist.

Do your homework! Spend TWELVE FREAKING SECONDS actually making SOME SORT OF ATTEMPT to see if I’m a good match for the job. Look at WHERE I FREAKING LIVE and stop spamming me with out-of-state jobs. And for the LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, don’t you DARE talk to me about Java or Oracle Portal.

While a small handful of you actually do your homework and try to find good matches for people, MOST of you are just STUPID !@#$ING SPAMMERS, plain and simple. You have made me hate you all.

For technical recruiters who still contact me anyway telling me about some hawt startup, stop spamming me. You are the used car salesmen of the technical world.

Here are some similar thoughts by other people, which bear a striking resemblance to the qualms I have with recruiters:

• Why are technical recruiters so clueless?
• Death By Recruiters
• Recruiters suck
• Why most recruiters suck and what you can do about it
• An open letter to technical recruiters
• Another Year, Another Reason to Hate Technical Recruiters

Back in 2005, I took a job with Stryker Endoscopy as a member of their Internal User Experience team, where our focus was on Usability and User-Centered Design (UCD). (I take no responsibility for how bad their public website is!) I gained some invaluable insight into the usability process and the principles behind UCD that I’ve carried with me over the years as I’ve migrated from UX and Front-End Development toward building Software Development Kits (SDKs) for infrastructure services. The most valuable of these is this:

You can have all of the greatest functionality in the world. But if nobody can use it, what’s the point?

I’m tempted to launch into a tirade against the stunning ignorance of software engineers who think we UX people “make it look pretty.” A Photoshop mockup does not a user experience make. Those same woefully uneducated people don’t understand how much science is involved in producing high-quality user interfaces — nor do they understand that if a person can’t figure out how to use the software, it’s not a problem with the person… it’s a problem with the software. As I’ve shifted toward producing developer-facing software, I’ve always maintained the notion that “developers are people too.” The administration and developer tools of some web applications are a crime against humanity. Of course, that’s what happens when you make the mistake of thinking that corporate stakeholders are your customers instead of Real Human Beings™. [I'm starting to rant. Let me switch gears.]

I ♥ Quality

I believe that documentation is equally — if not more — important as the code itself. It’s a critical part of the user (i.e., developer) experience right up there with API design and SDK design. When I was building CloudFusion (the pre-cursor to the AWS SDK for PHP), I spent quite a bit of time trying to find a high-quality documentation tool that delivered what I believed my users deserved. After searching for a good tool over the course of 2-3 years, I finally broke down and wrote my own tool that produced the kind of high-quality documentation that my users deserve. (That project is called “Vanity”, and is currently incubating).

Making It Better

With the release of the AWS SDK for PHP 1.2.4, we really tried to raise the bar for our documentation. Here are some of the features that we now provide:

• Rewrote the in-file documentation blocks to use the more common and better supported PHPDoc format instead of the NaturalDocs format we used previously.
• Complete API reference documentation for all methods and classes.
• One or more usage examples for nearly every single method.
• Usage examples are generated from real PHPT tests, ensuring that the sample code actually works.
• A breakdown of all complex parameters so that you can see what all of the possible options are.
• The API reference documentation is available in HTML, raw XML, raw JSON and Serialized PHP formats.
• Offline documentation can be downloaded as .zip, .gz and .bz2 archives.
• Intelligent search along with a class browser.
• View the source code of any method in the SDK.
• The file that a given method is defined in.
• Links out to the GitHub repository.
• Complete inheritance chains and interface conformity.
• Methods that are related to the one you’re looking at.
• Links out to PHP.net, where appropriate.
• Instant feedback, as in the ability to point out an error or some other issue directly on a page itself, instead of needing to hunt for a feedback link somewhere else in the site.
• The ability to link directly to a search query.

It’s this last feature that I’ve come to talk about today — the ability to easily search the docs from tools you already use.

Searching the AWS SDK for PHP documentation from Google Chrome

For this, we need to tell Chrome to use the following pattern when searching the API reference.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSSDKforPHP/latest/?q=%s

1. Open the Google Chrome preferences panel.

   

2. In the Search section, click Manage Search Engines…. This will show the Search Engines panel.

   

3. In the Other search engines section, fill out the fields as shown below. The URL in the last field is the one I posted above.

   

4. Open a new tab. Typing “aws[space]” will trigger the AWS SDK for PHP search. Search for whichever keywords you’d like. At the time of this writing, classes, methods, properties and constants are supported.

   

5. This will open the SDK API reference documentation. Your search terms will be pre-filled in the search field on the left. You can navigate through the documentation from there!

   

Searching the AWS SDK for PHP documentation from Mozilla Firefox

This process is very similar to Google Chrome. For this, we need to tell Firefox to use the following pattern when searching the API reference.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSSDKforPHP/latest/?q=%s

1. Open the Firefox Bookmarks Manager by choosing Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks from the menubar. Once that’s open, click the gear icon and create a new bookmark.

   

2. Firefox will present a New Bookmark dialog.

   

3. Fill out the fields as shown below. The URL in the Location field is the one I posted above. Firefox calls this a Keyword Search.

   

4. Open a new tab. Typing “aws[space]” will trigger the AWS SDK for PHP search. Search for whichever keywords you’d like. At the time of this writing, classes, methods, properties and constants are supported.

   

5. This will open the SDK API reference documentation. Your search terms will be pre-filled in the search field on the left. You can navigate through the documentation from there!

   

Searching the AWS SDK for PHP documentation from Alfred

This approach is my personal favorite, but is specific to Alfred, an app launcher for Mac OS X. For this, we need to tell Alfred to use the following pattern when searching the API reference.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSSDKforPHP/latest/?q={query}

Alternatively, you can use the following URL to accomplish what we’re going to do here:

alfredapp://customsearch/AWS%20SDK%20for%20PHP/aws/utf8/url=http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSSDKforPHP/latest/?q={query}

1. Open the Alfred preferences, and choose Custom Searches from the sidebar. Once there, click the plus symbol at the bottom to add a new custom search.

   

2. Fill out the fields as shown below. The URL in the Search URL field is the one I posted above. Click Add when you’re done.

   

3. Close the preferences, and bring up Alfred! Typing “aws[space]” will trigger the AWS SDK for PHP search. Search for whichever keywords you’d like. At the time of this writing, classes, methods, properties and constants are supported.

   

The End

I hope that this tutorial helps make your use of the AWS SDK for PHP even easier! Are there some other cool uses for the SDK docs that I might not be aware of? Let me know in the comments!

I make all of my own ringtones from music that I already own. There are a few steps involved here, but overall, the process is pretty straightforward.

Getting Started

1. The first thing you’ll need to do is find a song that you want to convert into a ringtone.

   iPhone ringtones can only be 30 seconds long, so if you find something you like that’s 30 seconds or shorter, skip directly to step 9. Otherwise, I’ll walk you through the process of editing down a longer song into a 30-second ringtone.

   

2. Once you’ve selected the song you want to use, right-click (or control-click if you have a one-button mouse), and choose the option that will allow you to see the file itself. On Mac OS X, this is Show in Finder. On Windows, this is Show in Explorer.

   

3. Once the window opens containing the song, make a copy of it somewhere — preferably your desktop.

   

4. Open the file using the latest version of QuickTime 7, which is QuickTime 7.6.6 for Mac OS X or QuickTime 7.6.9 for Windows.

   

   Note: If you’re running Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”, it’s possible that you have the newer QuickTime X installed, but not the older QuickTime 7. Unfortunately, because QuickTime X was completely re-written from scratch, its player does not yet editing and exporting in other formats. If you’re not sure whether or not you have QuickTime 7 installed, you can use Spotlight to search for quicktime 7.

   

5. Using the small arrows at the bottom of the timeline, decide which 30 seconds of the song you want to use for your ringtone.

   

6. From the menubar, choose Edit > Trim to Selection.

   

   This will shorten the length of the entire song to just the 30 second clip you created.

   

7. From the menubar, choose File > Export.

   

   When the dialog box comes up, choose where you want to save the file to (I would recommend your Desktop), and change the Export selection at the bottom to Sound to Wave. Choose Save.

   

8. Once you’ve saved the 30-second clip as a .wav file, drag it into iTunes.

   

9. From the menubar, choose Advanced > Create AAC Version.

   

10. You should now have the original .wav version, and a new .m4a version. (If you’re interested in learning about why AAC files have an .m4a file extension, read the Audio Codecs section of Dive Into HTML5.)

    Right-click (or control-click if you have a one-button mouse) on the new file, and choose the option that will allow you to see the file itself. On Mac OS X, this is Show in Finder. On Windows, this is Show in Explorer.

    

11. Select the .m4a file, and change its file extension to .m4r instead.

    

    Mac OS X will ask you if you’re sure you want to change the file extension to .m4r. Choose Use .m4r.

    

12. Back in iTunes, you can delete the .wav and .m4a files from your library. You won’t need them anymore.

    

13. Drag the new .m4r ringtone we created into iTunes. Unless you removed it in your Preference, you should see an option for Ringtones in the sidebar.

    

14. If you haven’t done it already, connect your iPhone to iTunes. Select your iPhone in the sidebar, then choose Ringtones from the bar along the top. From there, you can either sync all ringtones, or selected ringtones. If you prefer to do the latter, make sure that the checkbox next to your new ringtone is checked.

    

15. Sync your iPhone. Once it completes, pick up your iPhone and launch the Settings app. Next, go to the Sounds option. From there, you can change your various sound settings.

    

Fourteen years ago, we met when I gave her a wedgie in the middle of our high school Chemistry class. Ten years ago, we were married on the first hot day of summer in a gorgeous outdoor ceremony. Nine years ago, we became parents with the birth of our daughter. Five years ago, our son came into the world. Three years ago, we nearly split up, but with marital counseling we were able to work out our differences and start getting along again. One year ago, we moved from beautiful, sunny California to the rain-drenched trenches of Seattle. This morning, after all of the laughter, tears, stress, and joy of a relationship that has spanned half of our lives, Sarah and I have parted ways.

What happened?

For those who know us personally, what can I even say? In the early years of our marriage, I had a lot of emotional baggage leftover from one particular ex-girlfriend. Part of me resented Sarah because I felt like we got married before we, or rather, I, was ready to. She saw me pushing away, and responded by clinging on, which only made me push away even more. We started fighting all the time.

Sarah became depressed. I became moody and irritable. I asked her to move out, then relented. We went to marriage counseling and somehow managed to work things out. I learned how to set aside my baggage and simply love Sarah for who she was. Sarah learned how to communicate with me in a way I could understand and provide the personal space that an introvert like me needs to have. Our relationship did a 180. But the seeds were already sewn.

Our interests diverged until we no longer had anything in common. Sure we liked movies, but completely different kinds of movies. We liked different kinds of music. When we would go out, we could never agree on what we wanted to eat or what we wanted to do. We stopped spending time together. We fell out of love.

Sure, we got along just fine, we never really fought anymore, and we certainly made great friends and roommates, but it takes more than that to keep a marriage together. Honestly, I believe that the reason why we stayed together for as long as we did was that we both really wanted it to work out. We wanted to stay together. We wanted to be happy. But we weren’t.

Stay together for the kids

I don’t believe in the notion of staying together for the kids. I believe it’s an excuse that lazy people come up with to avoid moving out of their comfort zone. “Sure I’m unhappy, but it would be too much work to split up. Let’s just stay together for the kids.” Baloney.

Children learn what a healthy relationship is by watching their parents. If the parents don’t have a healthy relationship, the kids will grow up thinking that married couples aren’t supposed to be happy. Is that really what you want to teach your kids? Not me. Sure there will be some near-term pain for everybody involved, but over the longer term, your kids might actually have the chance to learn what a healthy relationship is. That’s what I want my kids to see.

I wish my parents had split up years ago. I know that it’s a strange thing to wish, but I grew up with parents that didn’t (and still don’t) know how to communicate effectively with each other. My parents were separated for most of my growing-up years, but the years they’ve spent together have been so dysfunctional that I wish they’d just broken up and married people they actually got along with.

They just recently re-separated after being together again for about 15 years. My brother is angry about it, while my sister and I are surprised it’s taken this long. We’re used to the dysfunctionality. I wish that we weren’t.

Sarah and I are determined to stay friends throughout all of this. We’re working out how to split things up fairly, and we’re splitting time with the kids 50-50. We plan to live in the same city as each other so that the school situation works out. We’re able to sit down and have rational discussions about our future apart from each other. We’re not mad, depressed, or even resigned from each other. We care about each other, but we recognize that we’re better off apart. It’s that simple.

I would wager that this is the most amicable split in recorded history. We don’t hate each other like most couples do when they split — quite the opposite actually. The best way I can describe our relationship is that we’re bonded for life. We still love and care about each other, even if we’re no longer in-love with each other.

What’s next?

I can’t help but think of the song “Good Life” by Frances Dunnery. I’ve been listening to it, along with the rest of my Depressing Music playlist, for the past several hours.

Softly now / You owe it to the world / And everyone knows that you’re my favorite girl / But there’s some things in life that are not meant to be / I’m not meant for you and you’re not meant for me / Here’s to our problems / And here’s to our fights / Here’s to our achings / And here’s to you having a Good life / From Me

Softer now / You owe it to yourself / And don’t think that you will be left on the shelf / Cause there’s someone for you and there’s someone for me / Like me you’ll meet them eventually / Here’s to your lover / And here’s to my wife / Here’s to your children and here’s to you having a good life / From Me

I honestly don’t know where things are going to go from here. Sarah is a smart, wonderful, talented woman who will continue to play an important role in my life for quite some time. I wish nothing but happiness for her, and look forward to the day when she meets someone who makes her eyes sparkle the same way they used to sparkle for me all those years ago.

One tool that has been an important part of my workflow is a tool called delimport, which automatically indexes my Delicious bookmarks and makes them available via Spotlight and Spotlight-powered tools (e.g. Alfred) on Mac OS X.

While delimport hasn’t been updated since 2007, it has continued to work remarkably well. The upside is that the project has an open-source repository available, but I still ran into a few issues. Here’s how I added Pinboard support to delimport.

Getting Started

The first thing to note is that I’m running Mac OS X 10.6.5 and Xcode 3.2.5. This is notable because it’s what caused several of my problems while trying to solve this puzzle. We’ll get to that in a minute.

1. I needed to pull down the delimport source code. This required additional steps.
   1. Install MacPorts if you haven’t already.
   2. Update MacPorts and its files to the latest version.

      sudo port -d selfupdate

   3. Install Darcs.

      sudo port install darcs

   4. Pull down the source code.

      darcs get http://ianhenderson.org/repos/delimport

2. I’ll save you the time and tell you that delimport will not compile in Xcode 3.2. You’ll need to revert to an older version of Xcode, 3.1.4.
   1. Go to connect.apple.com and login.
   2. In the sidebar, choose Developer Tools.
   3. Scroll down and find the section labelled Xcode 3.1.4 Developer Tools.
   4. Choose the Xcode 3.1.4 Developer DVD (Disk Image) which clocks in at 993 MB.
   5. While waiting for that, you’ll need to uninstall your current version of Xcode.

      sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools –mode=all

3. Once the Xcode 3.1.4 disk image is downloaded, install it.
   1. Make sure you include the Mac OS X 10.4 SDK as well.
   2. After the install has completed, restart your computer. No seriously.

Editing and Compiling

Note: A couple of people have asked why I don’t just redistribute a modified version of the app. The reason is licensing. As far as I can tell, the source code is 100% copyrighted with no license for redistributing modifications to the source or the app. As such, I’m providing instructions for modifying the app but you’ll need to compile it yourself.

1. Once your system is back up, locate the delimport.xcodeproj file and open it in Xcode 3.1.4.

2. Change the Base SDK pulldown to Deployment.

   

3. In the sidebar, choose the delimport project, right-click (or control-click), and choose Get Info.

   

4. From the resulting dialog box, change the value of the Architectures setting to 32/64-bit Universal.

   

5. Click the checkbox for Build Active Architecture Only.

6. For the Valid Architectures setting, there are more architectures than we need. Remove all architectures except for i386 and x86_64.

   

7. While delimport is still selected in the sidebar, choose Project > Edit Active Target “delimport” from the menubar. Choose the Properties tab from the resulting dialog box. Change the version number to 0.3.1u which says that you’re using an unofficial modification (just in case the developer releases an official 0.3.1 version).

   

8. Open the Classes folder in the sidebar and find the DIBookmarksController.m file. Make the following changes to the file.

   --- DIBookmarksController-old.m	2011-01-01 15:04:30.000000000 -0800
   +++ DIBookmarksController.m	2011-01-01 15:19:23.000000000 -0800
   @@ -86,21 +86,21 @@
    							  @"loginwindow", kCFPreferencesCurrentUser, kCFPreferencesAnyHost); 
    		CFPreferencesSynchronize((CFStringRef) @"loginwindow", kCFPreferencesCurrentUser, kCFPreferencesAnyHost); 
    	}
    	[loginItems release]; 
    }
    
    - (KeychainItem *)getKeychainUserAndPass
    {
    	KeychainSearch * search = [[KeychainSearch alloc] init];
    	
   -	[search setServer:@"del.icio.us"];
   +	[search setServer:@"pinboard.in"];
    
    	NSArray *results = [search internetSearchResults];
    	[search release];
    	if ([results count] <= 0) {
    		return nil;
    	}
    	KeychainItem *item = [results objectAtIndex:0];
    	[username release];
    	username = [[item account] retain];
    	[password release];
   @@ -137,25 +137,25 @@
    - (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(NSNotification *)notification
    {
    	[self addToLoginItems];
    	[self getKeychainUserAndPass];
    	[self updateList:nil];
    }
    
    
    - (NSXMLDocument *)deliciousAPIResponseToRequest:(NSString *)request
    {
   -	NSString *apiPath = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"https://%@:%@@api.del.icio.us/v1/", username, password, nil];
   +	NSString *apiPath = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"https://%@:%@@api.pinboard.in/v1/", username, password, nil];
    	NSError *error;
    	NSURL *requestURL = [NSURL URLWithString:[apiPath stringByAppendingString:request]];
    	NSMutableURLRequest *URLRequest = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:requestURL];
   -	[URLRequest setValue: @"delimport/0.3" forHTTPHeaderField: @"User-Agent"];
   +	[URLRequest setValue: @"delimport/0.3.1-unofficial" forHTTPHeaderField: @"User-Agent"];
    	// NSLog(@"%f", [URLRequest timeoutInterval]);
    	
    	NSHTTPURLResponse *response;
    	NSData * xmlData = [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:URLRequest returningResponse:&response error:&error];
    	NSLog(@"API request: '%@', response: %i, d/l size: %i", request, [response statusCode], [xmlData length], nil);
    	if ([response statusCode] == 401) {
    		[self logIn];
    		return nil;
    	}
    	if ([response statusCode] == 503) {
   @@ -190,21 +190,21 @@
    {
    	[username release];
    	[password release];
    	[loginController getUsername:&username password:&password];
    	
    	[username retain];
    	[password retain];
    
    	Keychain *keychain = [Keychain defaultKeychain];
    
   -	[keychain addInternetPassword:password onServer:@"del.icio.us" forAccount:username port:80 path:@"" inSecurityDomain:@"" protocol:kSecProtocolTypeHTTP auth:kSecAuthenticationTypeHTTPDigest replaceExisting:YES];
   +	[keychain addInternetPassword:password onServer:@"pinboard.in" forAccount:username port:443 path:@"" inSecurityDomain:@"" protocol:kSecProtocolTypeHTTP auth:kSecAuthenticationTypeHTTPDigest replaceExisting:YES];
    
    }
    
    - (NSDate *)dateFromXMLDateString:(NSString *)string
    {
    	NSMutableString *dateString = [[string mutableCopy] autorelease];
    	[dateString replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"T" withString:@" " options:NSLiteralSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [dateString length])];
    	[dateString replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"Z" withString:@" " options:NSLiteralSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [dateString length])];
    	[dateString appendString:@"+0000"];
    	return [NSDate dateWithString:dateString];
   

9. In the menubar, choose Build > Build. If all is well, the source should compile with no errors.

Cleaning Up

First, let’s clean up after the old version of delimport.

1. Shutdown any running copies of delimport by launching Activity Monitor, searching for delimport, clicking the Quit Process button in the toolbar, and choosing either Quit or Force Quit from the resulting dialog.

   

2. Open up your Accounts preference pane, click on the Login Items tab, and delete any entries that contain delimport.

   

3. Open your Terminal and run the following commands.

   rm -Rf ~/Library/Caches/org.ianhenderson.delimport &&
   rm -Rf ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/delimport/ &&
   rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/org.ianhenderson.delimport.plist
   

Installation

Once we’ve removed the old cruft, let’s install our new app.

1. From your delimport source code directory, open build/Deployment to find delimport.app.

   

2. Drag the app into your /Applications or /Applications/Utilities directory.

3. Launch the app.
4. Since we deleted all of the previous settings, your computer will think that this is the first time that we’ve launched the app. It will ask you if you want to launch it on login. Choose Add.
   
5. If you already have your credentials for Pinboard stored in your Keychain, it will ask if you want to give delimport access to your Pinboard credentials. Choose Always Allow.
6. If you don’t have your credentials saved, delimport will ask for your Pinboard credentials. Go ahead and enter them.
7. Within a few moments, you’ll be able to use Spotlight to access your Pinboard bookmarks.

Post-mortem

Once everything is installed and working, you’ll probably want to remove Xcode 3.1.4 and reinstall the latest version. Simply follow the aforementioned uninstallation instructions to remove the old Xcode, then install the latest Xcode.

If you don’t have the installer on-hand, you can always download the latest version from the logged-in version of developer.apple.com/mac.

That said, I’ve also learned that sometimes you need to simply draw a line in the sand to kick-start your motivation to actually accomplish tasks from that crazy-long to-do list you have. And that’s where I am. I spend too much time thinking about the things I want to do, and not enough time actually doing them. So here we go.

• Come up with a set of New Years’ resolutions. Done.
• Engage with people more often. I spend a lot of time hanging out in my head, and not enough time building relationships with people.
• Improve relationships with people I already know. It’s really easy to put relationships on auto-pilot or the back burner. I want to be more intentional about growing relationships with people.
• Publish my first book. Working on it, but I want to actually complete it and get it out to people.
• Do my first speaking engagement. I’ve wanted to go on the speaking circuit for several years now, but was never intentional about trying to make it happen.
• Take instrument lessons. Either drums or guitar. Or both. Maybe piano too.
• Launch my first desktop app. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while as well. It’s time to do it.
• Hit my weight goal of 180 lbs. I was almost there a couple of years ago, but the medication I’m taking made me gain some weight back. I want to be intentional about slimming down. P90X has already been added to my wishlist.

What are your resolutions for the new year?

The basic problem is that people don’t trust you and you aren’t very good at community building; in fact you are pretty bad at community marketing.

I really really want you to succeed  and community marketing is not that hard.  The first step is to read this really cool book called ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’.  The basic premise of the book is that communities are really conversations and to succeed you need to be part of and interact with the community.  I know this can be a challenge with all your lawyers and marketing executives trying to ‘control’ the message but you have to do it to gain the trust of the community.

Building a community that trusts you is the second most important feature your software can have (a shipping product is #1). More companies than simply Oracle would be better off learning this lesson sooner rather than later.

I spent more than 5 years working on SimplePie, and although it gained hundreds of thousands of users all over the world, it never gave anything back to me. It was a labor of love, and I did it both for the recognition as well as my desire to take something complex and make it simple.

In July 2007, while working on my startup — WarpShare — I rebooted my old Tarzan project, which was a wrapper around what is now Amazon’s Product Advertising API. Tarzan grew and grew until it became a fairly popular toolkit for working with Amazon Web Services. I’ve been amazed to find out who some of my customers are!

Tarzan caught the attention of two companies — Amazon and RackSpace. It was during this time when I had RackSpace folks pinging me that I decided that I wanted to branch out beyond just Amazon’s services, and renamed the project to CloudFusion. Ultimately, however, it wasn’t meant to be. In February 2010, I accepted an offer to join Amazon Web Services to work on the then-secret AWS SDK for PHP.

As of today, the AWS SDK for PHP has superseded CloudFusion for all of the infrastructure services. It’s been an exciting time here at Amazon, and I’m looking forward to all of the awesome stuff we have in the pipeline!

I hope that you’ll see all of the energy I put into the SDK, and that you’ll come to love it as much as I do!