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

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];
   
   

   view raw DIBookmarksController.diff This Gist brought to you by GitHub.
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!

Since then, I’ve been polishing the standards from one project to the next to the point where I believe that I have a solid, rational set of guidelines that others can share and re-use.

Any feedback that other PHP developers may have is welcome. I’m hoping to incorporate the better bits of feedback into improvements to the standards.

http://j.mp/php-standards

I love Avatar

I am a huge fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender. When I was out of work for a few weeks in 2005, I happened to land on this Nickelodeon cartoon while channel surfing. The depth of the universe, the chemistry between the characters, and the fact that it had something for both kids and adults simply mesmerized me. I was astounded that the writing for an animated cartoon could be so good.

Over the next few years, I watched Aang, Katara, Sokka, Toph, Zuko, Ihro, Appa and little Momo grow together as a family, and saw Aang grow from being the boy in the iceberg to a fully-realized master of all four elements. The build-up to the finale kept me on the edge of my seat, and the final battle between Avatar Aang and Fire Lord Ozai was simply epic! When the story ended, there was closure for all of the characters. Although I knew I was going to miss the show, I was happy that it ended on a high note.

Expectations

When I heard that M. Night Shyamalan was going to make a live-action Airbender film, I was both excited and worried. Very few re-makes have done their originals justice. Superman Returns, Spider-man, [The Incredible] Hulk, Transformers — I’m looking at you. You guys weren’t very good, and I wasn’t expecting much from you. Notable exceptions are the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jurassic Park and the Harry Potter films. While not perfect, these re-makes did an admirable job at standing up on behalf of the source material. Even the Bourne trilogy, which notoriously deviated from the books, was at least a great set of movies.

Despite M. Night being pretty hit-or-miss over the last decade, I still considered myself a fan. Luke Y. Thompson, E! Online, described M. Night as:

“Director M. Night Shyamalan is, of course, best known for slow-burn, low-key suspense films that end with dramatic twists.”

If you’re familiar with Airbender, you’ll know that its story doesn’t fit the typical M. Night criteria. The Sixth Sense, Signs and The Village were all good flicks; Unbreakable and The Happening were so-so; Lady in the Water was unbearably boring. So which way was this re-make of one of my favorite TV shows going to go?

Luke Thompson goes on to say:

“And that probably makes him exactly the wrong person for a would-be epic like this adaptation of the popular animated serial Avatar: The Last Airbender.”

Of course, I hadn’t read this review before I saw the movie. I did, however, see a quick quote from the Roger Ebert review:

“The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.”

Sometimes Ebert is right; sometimes he’s wrong. I figured I’d take my chances. I was horribly, horribly wrong.

Story and pacing

Listed on IMDb as the sole screenwriter for the film, M. Night had the job of packing nearly 8 hours worth of source material into a 2 hour movie. But rather than pulling out the most interesting parts of the first season and trying to create a worthy film portrayal that was true to the characters and storyline, it seems that he opted for simply taking the entire season on DVD and pressing the fast-forward button on the remote.

The backstory is pretty much non-existent for much of the film. Some storytellers will introduce parts of the backstory through flash-backs; some will have the backstory come out as part of the natural progression of the characters so that the audience can figure out how we got here. The backstory was barely glossed over as exposition, and not even good exposition.

In the pilot episode, “The Boy in the Iceberg,” there is an extended intro where Katara narrates the backstory of how the 4 elemental nations lived in peace and harmony until the day the Fire Nation attacked. It tells of how the Avatar — master of all four elements — vanished 100 years ago, and in that time, most people came to believe that he was dead.

An episode or two later, we learn that the Avatar is re-incarnated into the next elemental nation in sequence — this time it was Aang, an Airbender. Before him was Avatar Roku, a Firebender. The film barely touches on these fundamentally key plot points, which leaves any semi-intelligent movie-goer somewhat confused by what’s going on.

The poor pacing of the movie made the whole story feel very jerky. The movie clocked in at an hour and forty minutes, culminating in a battle of good vs. evil at the Northern Water Tribe. The last 40 minutes were spent on what was essentially 4 out of 20 episodes worth of material. Interesting and important plot points throughout were skipped, but as long as we got some awesome CG effects, that would make up for it, right? Wrong.

Unfortunately, M. Night had done such a poor job of developing the characters and the backstory that I didn’t really care who won as long as I knew I would be out of my misery soon. 20 minutes from the end, I nearly fell asleep. Once the credits began to roll, I nearly tramped an old woman while trying to get out of the theater.

Characters

I don’t believe that M. Night has seen a single episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Okay, maybe one or two — but certainly not the entire series. If he had, he’d know that the most important element of the show was the characters and the relationships that they formed over 3 seasons. Neither the writing nor the actors provided an accurate portrayal of the characters we’ve come to know.

Aang is a 12-year-old boy that is generally playful and fun. He cares very deeply for his friends, and would do anything for them. But Aang is also very reflective about his place in the world. Being the Avatar, he’s very respectful of his lineage, and spends a lot of time in self-discovery.

Sokka is the comedy relief. He always knows the wrong thing to say at the wrong time, and is great at drawing the wrong conclusion from his experiences. Being the eldest, however, he carries a certain weight in wanting to protect his friends.

Katara is motherly and nurturing, and has a certain insight and sensitivity that helps Aang along the way. When Sokka is telling bad jokes, and Aang is reflecting on what it means to be the Avatar, Katara is making sure that the bonds of their friendship stay strong.

Zuko, the prince of the Fire Nation, is a tormented soul. Never able to earn the love and respect of his father, Fire Lord Ozai, Zuko was banished from the Fire Nation by his father. The only way for Zuko to regain his honor is to capture the Avatar and bring him back home to the Fire Nation.

These are the characters of the Airbender universe. With the exception of Dev Patel who had a barely-adequate performance as Prince Zuko, the rest of the characters might as well have been made out of cotton balls and popsicle sticks. No chemistry, no character development, no emotion, and totally wrong character traits.

In particular, I felt that casting Jackson Rathbone as Sokka was a huge mistake. Not only was he incredibly stiff and humorless throughout the film, but his inability to show any sort of emotion toward either his sister or the northern water princess provides nothing more than a devastatingly awkward and abysmal performance.

Quotes

Think I may be over-reacting? Here’s what others had to say:

“After waiting extremely eagerly for this movie, I sat in the theater and was extremely eager for it to END. Ear-oh? Oong? Soak-ah?! Could they have butchered the names anymore than they did? Worse, the entire movie felt like a string of clips put together for an hour and a half and not like a movie at all.” — Tamisura

“So where did this movie go wrong? The better question would be: where didn’t it go wrong? The writing was horrendous. High school freshmen could probably manage to come up with a better screenplay. I’m not sure who gave Shyamalan permission to write this film, but whoever it was needs to formally apologize to the fans and to the people who wasted their money hoping to see something worthwhile.”— LunaRaven

“Void-ness of emotional moments are what really plague this film. I would blame this on the script but the performances are what make it not work. Every actor in this film (minus Shaun Toub) delivers dialogue as if they were reading it for the very first time. Not one thing anyone says carries any weight, none of it resonates emotionally. To say the actors suffer from wooden acting would be insult an to wood.” — lukeg37

And lastly, my favorite:

“Just saw this, I don’t know what to call it. It was the only movie I’ve seen where everyone in the theater booed at the end and threw things at the screen. I feel like it was written by someone who can’t read, write or care about their or anyone else’s work. How do you take something that seemed like such a good idea and make it so terrible. I hope that the man or men responsible for this never get work again. This is what I would hope qualifies as a career killer, because I wish I had slept instead of going to this movie. I want my money, time, and expectations back. As in I expected at least good fun with the ‘bending’ or fight/dance scenes. I feel like I just got served… Do not watch or let ANYONE YOU KNOW GO TO THIS MOVIE, AND SOMEONE SHOULD PETITION TO CANCEL THE OTHER TWO.” — Partofthevoid

I’ll wrap things up with a quote from Ty Burr, staff writer for the Boston Globe:

“It would be heartening to report that Shyamalan has wrangled a good movie out of this litany of disaster, but no such luck. “The Last Airbender’’ is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic that makes the 2007 film “The Golden Compass’’… look like a four-star classic.”

M. Night Shyamalan was once one of my favorite writer-directors, but I’ve had enough. In the end I’ve decided to vote with my wallet.

I’ll never pay to see another M. Night movie again.

He was telling me about how he’d selected a nice pair of pants and a button-up shirt from his dresser, done his own hair, and even brushed his teeth!

A tired parent

As a parent, you’re frequently bombarded with a ton of information from your children, so you have to very quickly discern what’s valuable and what is not. Typically when I come home from work, I’m tired from a long day and exhausted from my bike ride home (which finishes with an intense climb up a hill to our house). Everybody in the house starts talking to me at once, and I’m generally only half-listening simply because I’m tired and need to decompress from the day.

Back to the story

As Matthew told me about how he’d gotten ready, I must confess that I hadn’t really even looked at him yet. So when he told me how he’d picked his clothes and done his hair, I finally took a look at him.

“What’d you put in your hair?” I asked.

“Gel,” he responded.

“Shaving cream,” my wife corrected.

“Ergh,” I groaned. “Guess who’s getting a bath tonight?”

Just then, Matthew turned his head and I caught a glimpse of something in the light:

Did you see it? No? How about now?

That’s right, friends, Matthew — while doing his own hair — decided to take the trimmers from our bathroom and shave some lines into his head. Wonderful!

Seeing this, I decided to do the only thing that a respectable father like me could do: shave his head.

I’ve always wanted to do this

After a bit of protest from his mother, I took him upstairs and told him to strip down to his skivvies while I looked for some scissors and a better trimmer head. He was pretty unhappy that I was going to shave his head, but since that’s what must happen when a little boy cuts his own hair, there wasn’t much to argue about.

If you want to see the entire process, check out this photo set on Flickr. The short version? He ended up like this:

Lessons learned

Ultimately, he decided that he didn’t want to go through that again, so I’m hoping he’ll avoid this sort of hair care in the future. Until then, he’s my lucky, bald-headed little monkey.

Video retrospective

Download Video: MPEG-4 • WebM • Theora

It’s been a wild 5 years so far, and he’ll probably even live another 5 years before I kill him for one thing or another. Have a happy birthday, son, and I hope you enjoy your new bike!

I sighed, paused my game of Call of Duty, and went to find the dog. Generally, dog vomit involves wiping it up with a dish towel and spraying it with carpet cleaner. However, as I walked into the living room, I found more dog vomit than I’d ever seen before! On the couch, under the couch, in various corners of the carpet — it was pretty much everywhere.

“What happened?” I shouted to whoever was within earshot.

“I don’t know,” The Wife™ replied.

“He ate some vitamins,” The Girl™ answered.

“Vitamins? How many did he eat?”

I surveyed the room for bits of those children’s gummy vitamins, which I think are normally shaped as small bears.

“I dunno” was the child’s response.

The Wife™ had already begun pulling pulling the covers from the couch cushions. I found the dog — who was clearly having a bad day, and thought it was about to get worse as I approached — in the corner of the room. I put him in the bathroom and closed the door. “At least the bathroom will be easier to clean up,” The Wife™ said.

As we cleaned up all puddles of dog vomit on the carpet, The Girl™ grabbed the quart-size vitamin bottle from the pantry. “Look how many are left!” I walked over and took the bottle from her. There were 6 gummies left. There was a 1/3 of a bottle this morning.

“Did someone leave the gummies out?!” I asked her.

“I think brother did,” she said — giving her best guess.

I walked over to the staircase and shouted up to the second floor. “Son! Get down here!”

“What?” was the reply.

“Get down here, now!”

“Why?!”

“Get down here! One!” I shouted.

“Why, daddy?”

“Two!”

“I’m coming, I’m coming!”

The pitter-patter of footsteps was hurried — rushed — as he knew what a three-count meant for his backside.

“What is it, daddy?”

“Did you leave the vitamins out?” I asked, pointedly.

“It was an accident.”

“What was an accident?”

“I left them on the floor.”

“You what?” I asked as I narrowed my gaze. “You accidentally left an entire bottle of gummy vitamins on the floor?!”

He nodded. “Sorry,” he said, as his gaze fell.

I put my hand on his head and walked him into the living room so that he would better see the consequences of his carelessness. He failed to understand the point of the exercise. “What happened?” he asked.

I proceeded to explain to him that when he left out the gummies, the dog ate nearly all that were left, got a stomach ache, threw up all over the living room, and now mommy and daddy were trying to get it all cleaned up.

He looked at me, still failing to understand what was wrong and why I looked so upset. “The dog might have to go to the hospital because you weren’t paying attention.” Apparently, this was the thing that made sense to him. A worried look shot across his face.

“We’ll call the vet to see what they say,” mommy said. “Hopefully he’ll be okay.” He seemed less worried.

I sent The Boy™ back up to his room, then went to go check in on the dog. Apparently, he’d had such a horrible experience over the last 10 minutes that he’d managed to pee and poop in the bathroom as well. Normally, he gets busted for going potty in the house, so as soon as I opened the door to the bathroom, his head went down and his tail went between his legs. Fortunately, there wasn’t any more vomit, so I figured it was safe to assume that he was done.

I sat down next to him, put him in my lap, started petting him, and asked if he was okay. He wasn’t sure why I was petting him when he’d just gone potty in the house, and seemed to be confused by the recent events in general. I just sat there petting him, telling him calmly that everything was going to be okay.

Back in 1980, Bill Cosby explained that all children are brain-damaged. The “Why did you do this? I don’t know.” exchange is evidence enough of this fact. I’ll never understand why The Boy™ thought it was okay to leave an opened bottle of gummy vitamins lying on the floor with the dog walking around. I’ll never understand how the dog could’ve managed to eat nearly all of the remaining gummy vitamins, then start throwing up all over the room before the girls even noticed.

In the end, it turns out that Jack will be okay. And despite my son’s inherent brain damage and the the new grey hair I sprouted tonight, I think that he’ll be okay too.

Mostly.

He’s the outgoing type who’s always looking for attention. I fully expect that he’s grow up to enjoy sports and be the life of the party. While he reminds me quite a bit of Calvin, he’s still very innocent and naïve. He calls it as he sees it, and it’s interesting to see how his perceptions of life grow and change over time.

4 is an age where they’re past the Terrible Twos (which actually runs from 1½ to 3½), but they’ve not quite reached the sweetness and maturity of a 5-6 year old (for parents who have experienced that). 4 is an age that is not so much defiant as simply lacking experience. They’re still learning about what is right, what is wrong, and what they can get away with.

Being the world’s biggest fan of Calvin & Hobbes, I frequently relate to Calvin’s dad. A facepalm and an “Oh, that dumb kid…” have admittedly come from my mouth more than once. If we’re all being honest, I think that’s a natural reaction to have when your kid tries to flush an entire roll of toilet paper at once.

(Of course, I still debate as to whether that’s better or worse than discovering a giant turd sitting in the toilet with no toilet paper at all.)

These sorts of things aren’t humorous in the moment, but they become funny over time. Spilled milk again? First you’re irritated, then you let out a resigned sigh, then over time you realize how entertaining and insightful these little nuggets of life’s minutiae are.

Other instances would be perfect for an episode of Kids say the darndest things. I gave my son a bath this morning. Every bath follows more-or-less the same pattern:

1. Turn on the bath water, squeeze in some bubble bath, and tell him to get naked.
2. I point out the invisible line that the water should be up to before he turns it off.
3. He plays in the bathtub for a while, soaking everything, while I play one or two multi-player rounds of Call of Duty.
4. I go in and wash his hair “the easy way,” which was a method I devised of washing his hair without having him panic at the thought of getting shampoo in his eyes.
5. He pulls the plug, climbs out of the tub, I wrap him in a towel, and send him to his room to get dressed.
6. I’ll pick out some clothes for him to wear, help him dry off, then help him get his clothes on.

Now when you’re raising kids you’ve pretty much seen them naked about a million times. It’s also very likely that they’ve seen you naked a million times. And the kids have probably seen their similarly-aged siblings naked a million times. But as they grow up, they naturally begin to want some privacy when they’re changing or getting in and out of the bath.

That transition hasn’t fully happened yet in our house.

So I’m sitting there drying off The Boy™, and his sister came in to provide her opinion on his choice of clothes to wear. I held out his underwear and told him to stick his legs in. As I was helping him get them on, he says:

Brother: “Sister’s looking at my pee-pee parts!”

Sister: “No I’m not!”

Brother: “Yes you are!”

Sister: “Nuh-uh!”

Brother: “Uh-huh!”

Sister: “Nuh-uh!”

(And so on and so forth.)

Finally he looks at me and says, “Daddy, I don’t want any girls to see my pee-pee parts — only boys.”

I smirked and said “For now, son. For now.”

Most of the 3D movies I’ve seen in years-past have been very gimmicky. The 3D is overbearing, and the directors seem to think it’s funny to break “The 4th wall.” Avatar is an entirely new approach to bringing 3D into films. Not only did they have to invent new technology to do the 3D film work, but the way that 3D was used in this film did a lot to enrich the experience. No gimmicks, no games.

The only way to see this film is in IMAX 3D. The use of 3D made the entire world of Pandora so much deeper and richer than anything I’ve seen before. It almost made you feel as though you were right there with the soldiers, the Na’vi, flying on the backs of the dragons, and trying not to get crushed by the construction equipment. It’s been quite a while since I’ve felt that immersed in a movie.

That being said, the story itself was fairly mediocre and predictable. If you compare the story of Avatar to the stories of Terminator (I & II), Aliens, The Abyss, Strange Days and Titanic, it just doesn’t compare. All of the other movies he’s written have either had deeper, richer story lines (Terminator, Titanic), have had better action (Aliens, The Abyss), or have been darker (Strange Days).

At one point, the film’s political message got so heavy-handed that my B.S. meter jumped the tracks and it actually pulled me back out of the movie. James, I didn’t come to see this movie so that you could preach to me, m’kay? But really, this is the same political message that was at the end of the special edition of The Abyss.

On the other hand, the story line is still better that most Hollywood blockbusters or summer action flicks — I had just expected something better from James Cameron. Bottom Line: A-minus.

Snow Stacks

(Can’t see the video? Watch it directly.)

Image Fly

(Can’t see the video? Watch it directly.)

Prerequisites

• Install MacPorts

Also, make sure that your MacPorts install is completely up-to-date with:

sudo port -d selfupdate

Installation

Now, I’ve never used MacPorts to install PHP or Apache before, so I’m starting with a clean slate. If you’ve already installed PHP or Apache with MacPorts, your steps may be different. As always, your mileage may vary. For me, I develop several open-source projects, so I need things that others may not. Adjust these steps as necessary.

1. Using “Web Sharing” in your Sharing Preferences should be turned off. Currently this points to the (old) Apple Apache installation, although we’ll change that later.
2. From Terminal, install PHP 5.3 + Apache, and some other stuff. This will likely take quite a while. I’m installing SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL because of my work on CacheCore, so you may or may not need those. mysqlnd is the new PHP Native Driver for MySQL and is supposed to be better, so we’ll use that. We also need to enable non-default settings for cURL.

   sudo port install curl +ssl+ipv6+ares+idn+gss+openldap+sftp_scp \
   php5 +apache2+fastcgi+pear

   You can see all available options by running port variants php5

3. The new Apache configuration file is stored at /opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf while the old one was at /etc/apache2/conf/httpd.conf. Take a moment to copy over any settings you’ll want to maintain into the new Apache installation.
4. You’ll also want to include your extra settings. Toward the bottom of your httpd.conf file, add the following line:

   # All settings
   Include conf/extra/*.conf

5. If you don’t have an SSL certificate, rename your SSL configuration:

   cd /opt/local/apache2;
   sudo mv conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf-disabled

6. You’ll also want to enable PHP in Apache:

   sudo mv conf/extras-conf/mod_php.conf conf/extra/mod_php.conf

7. The new PHP configuration file is stored at /opt/local/etc/php5/php.ini while the old one was at /etc/php.ini. Take a moment to copy over any settings you’ll want to maintain into the new PHP installation.
8. You’ll need to tell Apache to enable PHP support. Open your new httpd.conf file, find where the extensions are loaded (with LoadModule), and add this to the end of the line:

   LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so

9. Restart Apache. If you were using apachectl before, it still points to the old Apache, so we’ll want to point specifically to the new one.

   sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl restart

At this point, PHP 5.3 with Apache 2.2 and the new mysqlnd extension are all installed.

Extra stuff

1. I generally prefer to have lots more stuff installed locally so that I can worry more about developing and less about installing. Because of this, I also install a few other things.

   sudo port install memcached \
       php5-apc \
       php5-curl \
       php5-gd \
       php5-http \
       php5-iconv \
       php5-imagick \
       php5-mbstring \
       php5-memcache \
       php5-mysql \
       php5-openssl \
       php5-postgresql \
       php5-sockets \
       php5-sqlite \
       php5-tidy \
       php5-xdebug

2. Restart Apache with:

   sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl restart

Replacing older versions

Now, we want to continue using our command-line PHP scripts and the “Web Sharing” checkbox in the Sharing Preference Pane, so let’s make sure that those are all pointing to the new locations instead. We’ll be backing up and redirecting php, apachectl, and httpd.

1. Open up your Sharing Preference Pane, and disable Web Sharing
2. Run the following command on the Terminal:

   sudo mv /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php.bak && sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/php /usr/bin/php; \
   sudo mv /usr/sbin/apachectl /usr/sbin/apachectl.bak && sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl /usr/sbin/apachectl; \
   sudo mv /usr/sbin/httpd /usr/sbin/httpd.bak && sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/bin/httpd /usr/sbin/httpd; \

3. Re-enable Web Sharing in the preference pane.

Shortcuts

Lastly, I like to set up some shortcuts so that I can access all of my important localhost stuff from one place. I’ll create a new directory called www-config and then I’ll place symlinks into it for quick access to Apache and PHP configuration files.

sudo mkdir /www-config && \
cd /www-config && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl /www-config/apachectl && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/conf/ /www-config/httpd-conf && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/logs/ /www-config/logs && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/var/db/php5/ /www-config/php-ini && \
sudo ln -s /opt/local/etc/php5/php.ini /www-config/php.ini

Update: Microsoft’s images are broken, and don’t work on anything except VirtualPC now. Mac and Linux users are out of luck for the time being. More information on the subject can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/petel/archive/2009/09/09/running-the-ie-vpc-s-on-other-vpc-hosts.aspx.

If you’ve not yet read the related post, “Run Internet Explorer 6 (or IE7, or IE8) images in VMWare Fusion on Mac OS X,” you should. This is a follow up on how to take those virtual machines (which we’ve already done a lot of work on), and convert them for use VirtualBox.

Prerequisites

• You need to have access to a Mac OS X machine.
• A broadband connection would be quite helpful.
• A USB flash drive (or some other way to copy files to the VM before you have network access enabled).

VMWare Fusion uses the .vmdk disk format for its virtual drives. VirtualBox uses the .vdi format. Although VirtualBox can use the existing .vmdk images, you get better performance if you convert them to .vdi.

Downloading and Preparing stuff

1. Download and install VirtualBox. It should live in the /Applications directory.
2. Download and install Q (a Mac version of Qemu). It should live in the /Applications directory.
3. Download and decompress an IE6, IE7, or IE8 VMWare Fusion image that I’ve posted previously. If you need ALL of them, you can save yourself the bandwidth by downloading the IE6 image, making a copy of the file, and upgrading that copy to IE7 or IE8.

Extracting the disk image

1. When you decompress the VMWare Fusion image, you should end up with a folder containing 3 files: Two text files, and a .vmware file.
2. Right-click (or command-click) the .vmware file and choose “Show package contents.” This will open up a new window.
3. Find the .vmdk file and drag it some place that’s easy to find. In this tutorial, we’ll use the desktop.

Converting the VMWare image to a VirtualBox image (Optional)

This step is optional. VirtualBox can read the VMWare Fusion disk image format if you’re short on time. However, you get better performance if you convert to the native VirtualBox format.

1. Fire up Terminal.app. It lives inside your /Applications/Utilities directory.
2. Move to your desktop directory:

   cd ~/Desktop

3. We’ll convert the .vmdk file into a raw hard drive file, then convert that raw file into the native .vdi format:

   /Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert -O raw IE6-XP.vmdk IE6-XP.raw && /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxManage convertdd IE6-XP.raw IE6-XP.vdi && rm IE6-XP.raw

4. Wait. Depending on your computer, this will probably take 20-45 minutes.
5. Once it’s done, you can delete the IE6-XP.vmdk file.

Configuring the VM

1. Move the new .vdi file to wherever you’ll want your virtual machines to live.
2. Launch VirtualBox. You’ll be presented with the “Welcome to VirtualBox” dialog.
3. Click “New.” A “Create new virtual machine” dialog box will pop up. Click “Next.”
4. Name your virtual machine. I named mine “IE6-XP.”
5. Operating system is “Microsoft Windows.” Version is “Windows XP.” Click “Next.”
6. Determine the amount of RAM you want to allow the virtual machine to use. I have 4 GB of RAM, so I allow 512 MB. Adjust as necessary, but I wouldn’t go below 192 MB. Click “Next.”
7. Here, you select the disk image to use. Choose “Use existing hard disk.” There is a pull-down menu that says “<no media>”. Click the icon to the right of it.
8. The “Virtual Media Manager” dialog should pop up. Click “Add.”
9. Find where you saved the .vdi file to, and select it. Once that’s done, click the “Select” button. This will close the Virtual Media Manager” dialog.
10. Back on the “Create new virtual machine” dialog, the pull-down menu that used to say “<no media>” should now say something along the lines of “IE6-XP.vdi (Normal, 16.00 GB).” Click “Next,” then “Finish.”
11. From there, click “Settings” along the top of the application.
12. Click the “Audio” tab, and deselect “Enable audio.” We don’t have the drivers for this, so we’ll save ourselves the nag-ware.
13. Click the “Network” tab, and choose “Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop” from the Adapter Type pull-down.
14. Leave everything else as default, and click OK.
15. Click “Start” along the top of the application to start the virtual machine.

Installing the drivers and Guest Additions

1. When the virtual machine starts, the viewport will be very small. Windows also may be asking you to find drivers. Make it go away for now.
2. In the “Devices” menu, choose “Install Guest Additions.” This will load a virtual CD-ROM.
3. The setup should begin automatically. If it doesn’t, go to the Start Menu, choose “My Computer,” then double-click on “VirtualBox Guest Additions.”
4. Go through the process and install the software, then restart your VM.
5. While that restarts, switch back to Mac OS X and download the driver for the Intel PRO/1000 MT ethernet card. Download the version for Windows XP (32-bit). Copy it to your USB flash drive.
6. When the virtual machine comes back up, you’ll need to connect your USB flash drive to your virtual machine. To do this, you’ll need to drag the flash drive icon to the trash from Mac OS X (but leave it physically connected). In VirtualBox, go to the menubar and choose Devices > USB Devices > USB Flash Drive.
7. Navigate to the installer on your flash drive, and install the Intel drivers.
8. Lastly, go to Start Menu > Run, then in the dialog type the following so that you can keep the additional drivers on your VM:

   D:\VBoxWindowsAdditions-x86.exe /extract /D=C:\Drivers

Done!

You should be all set! If you want to get all super-hacky, you can check out “Create IE VBox” for geekier details.

Fast-forward to today. My 7-year-old is just starting to learn to play video games. For the past few months, she’s enjoyed (or been frustrated by) games like Mario Kart Wii and other games where motion (such as jerking the controller up in the air) gives her the response she wants. Playing the Wii has been a bit unnerving for me, as I spent years of my childhood trying to unlearn the very sorts of actions that the Wii encourages. This has always come naturally to her.

A few days ago, I decided that it was time for her to learn how to play with my Nintendo DS. As the was playing “The New Super Mario Bros.,” I noticed that the motion that she’d become accustomed to (jerking the controller around) wasn’t working, and it was making her frustrated. When playing Mario Kart DS, she kept trying to turn her driver by turning the DS in the air… which, of course, doesn’t work. All in all, playing the DS was a frustrating experience for her after having played the Wii for so long.

After seeing her frustration playing those action-oriented games, I decided to let her try another game that I thought might hold her attention longer: Final Fantasy. Specifically, it was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for Gameboy Advance. (FFA for PlayStation is still one of my favorite FF games.) I handed her the DS and let her play, warning her that there was a lot of reading involved, but that it might be more interesting for her. She started playing and I didn’t hear anything out of her for over 4 hours. Simply amazing. Her cousin came over yesterday, and they’ve been playing a LOT of Nintendo DS together.

So I suppose it was interesting to see the difference between her generation and mine. Or rather, the similarities. The biggest difference is that this time around, Nintendo allows people to jerk the controller around. I also think it’s interesting that my daughter couldn’t pay attention to the Mario games, but was able to hyper-focus when it came to playing an RPG. That sounds like my daughter.

You need to construct a new element, then add properties, then construct a child element, then add properties, then append the child to the parent, and the parent to whatever DOM object you want that’s already in the page.

A few years ago I discovered Builder.node(), a component of Scriptaculous. The problem is that Scriptaculous relies on Prototype, and both are HUGE JavaScript libraries. Later I moved to Moo.fx/MooTools, then I didn’t do much JavaScript for a while, then I started doing a lot with YUI, while sprinkling a little jQuery around here and there. None of these other frameworks had an equivalent to Builder.node(), and again, that sucks.

So last night, I wrote a small JavaScript class to handle this very thing. Introducing DOMBuilder. DOMBuilder is small, fast, and doesn’t depend on any other JavaScript frameworks meaning that it’s easy to use in any project where you need to construct nested DOM elements. The fully commented debug version clocks in around 3k. The minified version is 739 bytes. With gzip compression, it squeezes down to a mere 393 bytes.

It’s not quite as terse or elegant as I’d like (yet), but it’s a good result for about 2 hours of hacking.

Examples

Here’s the HTML we want to generate:

<div class="location_select_control">
	<a href="" class="location_select_label">
		<label>This is my label</label>
	</a>
</div>

Here is how we’d do it with the standard DOM:

control_div = document.createElement('div');
control_div.className = "location_select_control";
control_link = document.createElement('a');
control_link.href = "";
control_link.className = "location_select_label";
control_label = document.createElement('label');
control_label.innerHTML = "This is my label";
control_link.appendChild(control_label);
control_div.appendChild(control_link);
document.body.appendChild(control_div);

Lastly, here’s how we’d do it with DOMBuilder:

document.body.appendChild($dom('div', { class:'location_select_control' }).child(
	$dom('a', { href:'', class:'location_select_label' }).child(
		$dom('label').innerHTML('This is my label')
	)
).asDOM());

Download

This code is BSD licensed, so feel free to use it in personal or commercial projects. You can download it from GitHub.

1. All through Elementary, Jr. High, and High School, my teachers would always tell my parents: “Ryan is a bright kid, but he just doesn’t apply himself.” In 6th grade, I was the only kid in G.A.T.E. with an F as a class grade.
2. My first real girlfriend was a girl named Claire, who was really cool. The first time she met my mom was on the way to Taco Bell, and Claire called her “Mom.” My mom still asks me about her from time to time, although Claire and I haven’t spoken since high school.
3. When I was a kid, my mom didn’t want me listening to “Devil’s music,” so I was only able to choose between opera, easy listening, or country. I chose country. I listened to country exclusively until mid-way through my Freshman year of high school when I went to Eric’s house after school. His brother Kevin and cousin Sebastian were listening to a little blue-covered CD with 4 guys standing there with the name “Weezer” along the top. That was the day I became a fan of Alternative.
4. In 1995, my best friends (Eric & Jeff) and I decided to start calling ourselves the U.F.K.S. (which stands for something that starts with “ugly” and ends with “suckers”). It was an inside joke about an inside joke that was satirized by the class clown. Over time it just became UFKS, and doesn’t really stand for anything anymore.
5. My sophomore year in high school, I wrote a story about my then-girlfriend and I breaking up for my English class. I wrote it in a writing binge that started at 9:00pm and went until I finished editing the story around 4:30am. I listened to “The Change” by Garth Brooks on repeat the entire night. I turned the paper in and got an A+. I turned the same paper in in 11th grade and got an A+. Same thing in 12th grade, and again in my first year of college.
6. I met my wife, Sarah, in 11th grade Chemistry class. I gave her a wedgie, she gave me her pager number. True story.
7. I asked the same girl (my long-distance, on-again-off-again romantic interest) to both my Junior and Senior proms. Both times she said yes. Both times she backed out after I’d bought the tickets.
8. When my best friends (Eric & Jeff) graduated from high school, I ran down to the field after the ceremony and wrapped them both in duct tape just for kicks. When I graduated from high school a week later, Eric and Jeff wrapped me and my girlfriend Sarah in duct tape.
9. One of the best things about college was that you didn’t *actually* have to go to class. I used this privilege liberally, and ended up failing all of my classes. Unfortunately, I also did the same thing the following semester, and again the semester after that. I ended up deciding to join the seminary instead. I dropped out of that too.
10. I spent a few months in 2000-2001 in the San Francisco rave scene making candy bracelets and dancing to trance and house music in underground clubs getting hit on by both girls and guys. I met some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met during that phase of my life.
11. Once I was at a party, and had unknowingly taken a hallucinogen. It’s one thing to be young and stupid and decide to get high with your friends. It’s another matter all-together when you find yourself having a conversation with a 6-foot lizard-person with a rainbow for hair, or when you’re talking to someone and suddenly their face morphs into a completely different person, or when you shout “go carpet, go!” and actually mean it.
12. When I was 21, I asked my girlfriend Sarah to marry me. She said yes. A few weeks later Sarah said that she thought she was pregnant. I woke up the next morning and found our roommate, Rick, snorting a line of some blend of speed off the coffee table. Sarah and I packed up and moved back to Morgan Hill that very same day. My little girl changed my entire life.
13. I told one of my best friends that I was going to go back to college and graduate valedictorian. He scoffed at me and didn’t believe I’d even finish. In 2003, I graduated with a B.A. in Design and Visualization with a 3.84 GPA.
14. My daughter, Julianna Grace, was born at the end of 2001. I came up with the name 3 years earlier when I was working at Berean Christian Bookstore in Fresno, CA. Sarah loved the name, so our conversation about what to name The Girl literally lasted all of about 2 minutes.
15. I’ve founded two open-source software projects: SimplePie has now had hundreds of thousands of downloads worldwide, and is considered one of the best pieces of software in its class. Tarzan reached a stable release in November 2008, and has already become a very popular piece of software for leveraging Amazon.com’s pay-as-you-go internet infrastructure services.
16. My son, Matthew Taylor, was born in 2005. His name consists of both my own middle name, and the middle name of Eric — one of my two best friends. We also kicked around Daniel (Jeff’s middle name), but preferred the sound of Matthew instead.
17. In 2006, I co-founded a company with the goal of solving the digital media problem. People were downloading music and movies for free on the internet, and the Media Industry was crying foul. Meanwhile the Media Industry was unsuccessfully trying to apply the old “Content is King” mentality to the internet, and were treating their customers like criminals. WarpShare was born out of our efforts, and will be launching in the next few months.
18. I have an INFJ personality type, which less than 1% of all people on Earth have. – http://bit.ly/SSeR & http://bit.ly/Rt5Y
19. I’ve moved roughly 25 times in my life. 19 of those times have been since Kindergarten. 9 have been since I graduated from High School.
20. I am a very pattern-driven person: I always keep a pen, chapstick, and my keys in one pocket, and my wallet in the other. I only take off my shoes in one of two or three places. I have a left-foot sock and a right-foot sock.
21. I hate wasting my life away. If I’m going to spend part of my life doing something, then I want it to be something I can be proud of. There only a few things I hate more than having to work on a project where I’m not able to make enough of a difference to be able to be proud of what I’ve worked on.
22. If relationships aren’t intense, they’re not worthwhile. Although I have friends, my closest friends are people that I’ve been able to be emotionally close to (as I’m sure is the same for everyone). If I can’t have that, then they’re just people who are in my orbit who I cross paths with from time to time. If you’re not in my daily orbit, call me, because I’ll only occasionally remember to call you.
23. Because I’m able to to do my hobby as a job (usually), I find that I struggle with workaholism. When I’m working on something interesting and my brain is firing on all cylinders, I can zone out for several hours at a time before realizing how much time has passed.
24. I Tivo every single episode of Scrubs that comes on throughout the course of the day, and on most nights I fall asleep watching it.
25. For about a year and a half (May 2007 – November 2008), I was the lead male vocalist for a band called “The 5-Afters.” Mary, Sandy and Ingrid were the lead female vocalists, Nick was our acoustic guitarist, Mike was our electric guitarist, Dave P. was our drummer, Tina was our percussionist, “Guitar David” was our bassist, and Dave K. was our sound guy. I had a lot of fun with those guys, and I’ve missed them terribly since I moved away this past fall.
26. (Bonus) I’ve suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder since I was 16. I’ve never taken any medication for it, but simply understanding *why* I get depressed in the winter (and, conversely, why I have so much energy in the summer) enables me to make adjustments in my life when I start feeling depressed or anxious for no good reason. A by-product of this is “reverse photosensitivity” in that I frequently have all of the lights on when I’m home, my home office desk is in front of a window, and I have a difficult time working in the current WarpShare office (which has no windows).

I already tagged several people on Facebook, so I’m only going to tag a few more here: Geoffrey Sneddon, Ryan McCue, Michael Shipley, Matt Clower, Vada Dean, Ron Bronson, and Christen Dybenko (whom I’ve not met in person, but should seeing as how we live relatively nearby each other).

Because of that, we need to go the long way. We’ll download the “officially sanctioned” VirtualPC images containing a time-limited version of Windows XP SP3 and Internet Explorer 6.0, and then we’ll convert these images to the kind that work with VMware Fusion (which works on Mac OS X). This should only need to be done every 3 or 4 months when the images expire.

These instructions are loosely based on the ones found at Running IE6, IE7 and IE8 on your Mac.

Update: Microsoft’s images are broken, and don’t work on anything except VirtualPC now. Mac and Linux users are out of luck for the time being. More information on the subject can be found at http://petelepage.com/blog/2009/09/running-the-ie-vpcs-on-other-vpc-hosts/.

Prerequisites

• You need to have VMware Fusion installed on your Mac.
• You need to have access to a Windows XP machine, as this is where the converting will happen.

Installing Qemu (FIRST-TIME ONLY)

1. Download a small application to our Windows machine called Qemu. At the time of this writing, you want to download the regular version 0.9.1. Once it’s done, unzip it someplace that’s easy to get to via the command line (e.g. c:qemu).
2. Go into the Qemu folder, then into the bin folder and copy all of the files in the bin folder back to the original Qemu folder (you can simply copy-paste).

Downloading and Preparing stuff

1. On Microsoft’s website, they have a page entitled Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image where you can download various time-limited images that allow you to test combinations of Windows XP SP3 or Vista, along with Internet Explorer 6.0, 7.0, and the 8.0 betas. In this example, we’re going to install the IE6/XP image but you can do whatever you need to do.
2. We’ll need to unpack this download in Windows, so if you haven’t already, make sure you’re doing this part in Windows.
3. Double-click it (in Windows) to begin unpacking it. It will warn you that it has an expiration date. On that date, we’ll have to download a fresh VPC image from Microsoft and do this all over again.

Converting the image

1. You’ll want to copy the XP SP3 with IE6.vhd file into the Qemu folder. This will allow us to use simpler, more consistent commands to convert the image.
2. In your Windows VM go to Start Menu > Run, type the cmd command, and click OK.
3. Using your deftly intimate knowledge of MS-DOS, use commands like cd to navigate to where you unpacked Qemu.
4. If you don’t know MS-DOS commands from a hole in the wall, you can download Open Command Window Here from Microsoft, install it, find the Qemu folder in the normal Windows Explorer, right-click, and choose “Open Command Window Here”. One method is shorter and harder, while the other is easier and slower. Take your pick.
5. Type the following command in your MS-DOS window:

   qemu-img.exe convert -f vpc "XP SP3 with IE6.vhd" -O vmdk IE6-XP.vmdk

   Note that “XP SP3 with IE6.vhd” is the path to the IE6 VPC file you downloaded, while “IE6-XP.vmdk” is the new file that VMWare Fusion will use.

6. Wait. This will probably take 5-10 minutes.

Configuring the VM

1. Move the new .vmdk file to your Mac.
2. Open VMWare Fusion (or shutdown the Windows VM you may already have running) and click File > New.
3. Go through the wizard and when you get to the “Virtual Hard Disk” page, expand “Advanced disk options”, check “Use an existing virtual disk” and use the dropdown to find the new .vmdk image you just copied back to your Mac.
4. Finish the wizard and start it! If prompted to upgrade the virtual hard drive, click “Yes.”

Installing the drivers and VMWare Tools

1. With VMWare Fusion running, download and decompress vmware_xpsp3_drivers.tar.gz. Copy all of the resulting files to c:windowssystem32drivers. Make sure you install these BEFORE the VMware tools!
2. Download vmware_mouse.reg and double-click it to load its settings into the Windows registry. VMware doesn’t correctly overwrite these setting upon install of the VMware tools, and the mouse can start doing wonky things. These registry settings fix it.
3. In VMware, click Virtual Machine > Install VMWare Tools.
4. Follow the instructions. If Windows asks for additional drivers, point it to c:windowssystem32drivers.
5. Make sure that you shutdown the VM and configure your memory (etc.) settings appropriately.

You can download the 2.0 release from http://bit.ly/tarzan2, and please Digg us at http://bit.ly/digg-tarzan.

For starters, I’m an avid Mac user. I’ve spent many years on Mac and Windows systems, and I overwhelmingly prefer Mac. One of the biggest problems that I had as a Mac + BlackBerry user is that the syncing tools suck. PocketMac is a disaster, and the Mark/Space app (whatever it’s called) only works about one day per year. I ended up having to install the Google sync app on my BlackBerry and move my iCal calendars into Google Calendar, then re-import them with Google’s CalDAV support. A messy solution at best, and it still doesn’t solve the issue with my contacts.

iPhone 3G, however, syncs with my Mac flawlessly (as expected). Because I have a MobileMe account, my contacts and calendars sync within minutes (faster if I force a push). On top of that, I have all of my email accounts routed through Gmail, so the mail client’s IMAP support makes configuring and managing my email simple.

Beyond that, there are all of the custom apps that are available now that the iPhone OS 2.0 software went live. The apps I find myself using most (besides Contacts, Calendar, Phone, Safari, and iPod) are Brightkite, NetNewsWire, Things touch, Twitterrific, Apple Remote, Klick, TV Forecast, 1Password, Facebook, YPmobile, and nearly a dozen time-wasting games. I’ve even created a ringtone from the Dr. Horrible theme song.

All-in-all, I’m happy with the phone. The on-screen keyboard responds and auto-corrects as quickly as I can type, which makes typing MUCH faster than it was on my BlackBerry. The only irritation I have is that I can’t tether it to my MacBook Pro as a 3G modem without jail-breaking it. This is more due to AT&T’s policies than anything else. The only other thing is that I haven’t found the right setting yet in Handbrake or VisualHub to convert my DVDs into a format that works with both my Playstation 3 AND my iPhone at the same time. Let me know if you find the right combination of settings.

I give it five stars, over and over again.

• Added the ability to change the content-type of an existing object in S3.
• Fixed some minor bugs in SimpleDB and S3.
• Re-wrote all of the documentation in the entire project (which enables us to generate awesome documentation which can be found on the Tarzan documentation page).
• Launched an entirely new website!
• Added support for caching frequently requested data to enhance performance. Caching types currently include file-based, APC, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Informal tests tend to show a speed-up of between 600x-1000x, depending on the request and the type of cache being used.

If you’d rather not use the bleeding-edge subversion trunk builds, you can grab the latest pre-release build from the Tarzan download page. Check it out!