Fort Smith City Administrator Bill Harding stopped twice for driving while intoxicated. The first time, he hit a parked car, twice and then drove around an off-duty police officer attempting to stop him.
This is exactly why Fort Smith’s form of city administration sucks. If this were the mayor, he’d have been lynched by now, but he’s just an employee. Hopefully the system will prove its worth and fire his ass, after all that’s the only advantage our form has over an elected head-executive.
My friend Raymond is getting some attention for his love of OPML over on Dave Winer’s Scripting.com here and here. As is typical of format geeks, there’s a debate over on Raymond’s blog comments about why you’d use OPML over XHTML ordered and unordered lists. When are people going to realize that 99% of people don’t care? I’ve been involved in more format discussions than I care to remember, and in the end the reason RSS and OPML will become popular is because Dave Winer goes to the effort to develop tools rather than writing specifications and hoping someone will write tools for them. The format in the end doesn’t really matter much, it’s just a way to format data. There have been thousands over the years, and as long as everyone can read it, the rest is just syntax and semantics.
Josh and I were having a debate the other day as to whether using a pseudo-protocol like fireant:// was an acceptable solution for one-click subscribe in our aggregator. Most of the other aggregators are fighting over feed:// or some other specific file format (like iTunes pcast files). Why should we worry about all this when all we want is to enable easy one-click subscribe for people who already have our software? Josh’s concern is that the geeks will be upset over our use of a protocol that’s not really a protocol (of course, no need to remind people that feed:// isn’t a valid protocol either) instead of doing it through a file or some other method that’s more robust. Sorry, it works. The facilities are already in the OS and the browser to facilitate it, why not use it? Is it a hack? Yeah, so what? It works!
The same people who would be upset about us using fireant:// as a protocol are the ones who’d be upset that people are using OPML rather than XHTML formatted unordered and ordered lists. Hello? Who fucking cares. The user cares that it works! We spend far too much time debating the merits of one format over another and lot less time than we should making sure that software works for the end user. This is why Dave Winer continues to be a success in getting formats adopted, because unlike the Atom folks who have spent years making a format that’s the most robust and most well-documented, there isn’t a refrence implementation. Why is Microsoft Word the default format for exchanging documents and not OASIS? Because of the software people use. Why is RSS the preferred format for exchanging feed information? Because there was software that worked when the format was introduced that everyone could use as a reference implementation.
There something also to be said for simplicity. OPML and RSS are simple. Perhaps the specs are not complete and don’t cover all the use cases, but I can also code something up to work with them in a matter of hours. I investigated the Atom publishing protocol, and it would take me a couple days to do a pull implementation. By contrast, I have done a full Metaweblog implementation in a couple of hours.
Dave Winer can be an ass, but I give him credit where credit is due. The people who spend so much time complaining about him are excellent at complaining and not so good at getting things done. For that, I look to Dave.
Rest in Peace Edward MacManus, who passed on November 12th, 2005. I read his grandson’s blog, and his story of redemption and resolution with his grandfather has really captured my interest. I came across him originally because of my Technorati feed on a search for “Fort Smith”, where his grandparents live and where he grew up. I’m not usually one to read personal blogs, but he’s an excellent writer. If you’re interested in a guy in his mid 20’s who’s stumbling through life the best way he knows how, and has no shame in telling you the ways in which he’s fucked up, I highly recommend his blog.
I’m sorry for your loss Declan, and I wish you the best over the holidays.
Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone is having an excellent Turkey Day. It just now sits at Dallas 7, Denver 7. Go Cowboys! Thanksgiving isn’t truly complete without a Lions loss and a Cowboys win.
Seems the pronoucements (including my own) of Solaris’ death were a bit premature, according to David Berlind. I agree. In terms of performance and stability, Solaris is definitely the 800 pound gorilla over Linux, and now with it being essentially free on x86 (it has been for a while, although making it open source definitely makes this much more clear) I see no reason not to deploy it over Linux. I’ll definitely be exploring this as an option for some of my new deployements, especially with ZFS out in the wild now.
I love reading Paul Graham. He’s a must read for anyone in the technology business, especially anyone who is either involved with or considering a startup. His latest essay, “How to Fund a Startup” is an excellent read and very timely for me. Howevever I do take exception to his third note, which states:
[3] If “near you” doesn’t mean the Bay Area, Boston, or Seattle, consider moving. It’s not a coincidence you haven’t heard of many startups from Philadelphia.
If the Internet has done anything, it’s changed the dynamics of the workplace such that it doesn’t really matter where you’re located anymore. I’m still highly in favor of having a physical office and a place where people can collaborate, but as long as you can find your core team where you’re located, you can fill in the rest from wherever in the world you so choose. I lived in Arkansas for 23 years. I’ve lived in Seattle for 2. I’ve met a lot of technology people out here, and lot of them are very smart, but I also know a lot of incredibly smart technology people back home in Arkansas as well. I’d take anyone’s bet that I could start a software company and develop software on par with any California company from my home state (perhaps with some work filled in from overseas or out of state, but that’s what this whole Internet thing is about). If we’re still thinking that all successful startup technology companies need to be located in one of those three places, things really haven’t changed. I’m very disappointed in Paul, because I would have thought of all the people I respected and read on a regular basis he would have thought differently. I guess old prejudices never die.
I’ve been searching for this for a year and a half. My laptop runs like shit. I’ve always meant to come back around and find out exactly what’s wrong with it. It’s not incredibly high CPU usage, it’s not swapping, it’s not disk I/O. But, I went and grabbed Process Explorer from SysInternals today and I see that when I’m docked, and I have a USB mouse plugged in, my Hardware Interrupts go through the roof and the DPCs (deferred procedure calls) take up 30-40% of my CPU. This is obviously not right. I’ve updated everything I can think of from Dell’s website and still I’m having the same problem. I’m now installing Service Pack 2 to see if that helps, but I’m going to be fucking ecstatic when I can finally dump this piece of shit Dell laptop for one I buy and setup myself. I will have no problem saying goodbye and good riddance to Cingular’s corporate IT and their insistance on buying poor hardware and loading it up with crappy software that kills the performance on my PC.
Update: For anyone who happens to come across this later via a search engine, Windows XP SP2 fixed the problems I was having with a USB mouse plugged into the Dock USB controller causing 30-40% processor usage via the “Deferred Procedure Calls” or DPCs.
I had to read the whole article to really believe to what extent Sony would go to protect one damn CD, but this software they install, with no prompting, no EULA acceptance, nothing, uses the same technology rootkits use to hide their existance on your system. Amazing. Read the whole thing, from Sysinternals.
