All of these are true, and all of these are appropriate for April Fool's day:
- Punzun Ltd., my software firm, proudly announced record earnings yesterday, earning a net profit of $0 on $0 of gross revenue and ($0) expenses (all figures in millions). It's the best quarter we've ever had, 11% better than our last record in 4th quarter 2004.
- Mark Morford, on GM's "recovery:" "Behold this weird new Camaro. It is, in sum, exactly the wrong car at exactly the wrong time with exactly the wrong attitude attached to exactly the wrong hopeless hope for a return to a rather crude automotive golden era that never really existed in the first place."
- The Justice Department is halting its prosecution against former U.S. Senator Stevens (R-AK), figuring he's suffered enough. This, you remember, comes after the conviction. Yes, it's April Fool's day, but no, this isn't a prank.
- Congress is set to repeal the ban on travel to Cuba. The loudest opposition came from U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL), who said the measure would prop up the Castro regime, though one expects not for any longer than the Castro brothers' walkers would, given they're both in their 80s.
Finally, the creaking, old Weather Now demo project is getting an injection of mojo. I'll have more when I release it for real, but meanwhile you can check out the Beta version. (It's actually a ground-up re-write, even though it looks the same. Really. It's cool.)
Despite recently complaining about public transit in Chicago, I have to say I like ctabustracker.com, the Chicago Transit Authority's online bus tracker. It's a public-private venture with Google, and I think everyone benefits.
In fact, I'm writing this blog entry because I have 11 minutes before my bus comes, and it only takes me 4 minutes to shut down my laptop and get to the bus stop. This, I think, is the epitome of efficient labor markets.
All right, maybe not the epitome, but certainly a good example of them.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote this evening about his own thoughts about physical books vs. Kindle:
I've always been an inveterate collector of books. Not in the sense of collectibles, but in the sense that once I buy a book, I never let it go. As I made my way through adulthood it was while dragging a tail of several hundred books along with me.
... Don't get me wrong. Book books still have some clear advantages. Kindle is a disaster with pictures and maps. But I didn't realize the book might move so rapidly into the realm of endangered modes of distributing the written word. I was thinking maybe decades more. The book is so tactile and personal and much less ephemeral than the sort of stuff we read online.
I thought about this also. I love books. I have two shelves yet to read, in fact, and it would be a lot easier to take them on trips with me if they weighed 290 grams instead of, say, 100 times that. Still not completely sold, though. Maybe next month.
Last night, while studying for an economics exam, I took a moment to execute the following SQL against a client's production database:
UPDATE table_name
SET column_a = 'Equipment', column_b = 'Equipment'
WHERE column_a = 'Boojums'
GO
UPDATE table_name
SET column_a = 'Borfins', column_b = 'Equipment'
WHERE column_a = 'Nerfherders'
GO
The client called this morning to ask why the application suddenly had two different types of equipment, one which looked suspiciously like a collection of borfins.
You can see what I did, of course. I copied the first statement and forgot to change the copy's second argument. And I quite deservedly looked stupid.
What makes this even funnier: I executed the statement against a staging server first, carefully (I thought) checked the results, and then executed it against the production server. This is why having someone else do quality assurance is a good thing for most programmers.
Sunny and 13°C in Chicago today. Result: Parker got almost two hours of walks. Other result: Pithy, pointless blog entry. Everyone wins!
The vernal equinox happened about two hours ago. Typical of this time of year, though, it's below freezing this morning in Chicago. Nature nerd Naomi has more from the wilds of northern Lake County.
Of interest to possibly no one, for the last two years I've worked on the innards of my flagship demo project, Weather Now. I'm now putting together a new user interface for it. The new version 3.5 UI, which you can see at http://beta35.wx-now.com/, looks a lot like the old one—for now.
So what's new? I've rewritten from scratch the core framework, geography and weather code, and the basic UI framework. The beta (version 3.5) looks nearly identical to the current (version 3.1) application, except that the trained eye will notice new features where the ground-up re-write peeks out.
Sometime before the end of July, I hope to finish the next version (4.0), which will have an entirely different database structure. (Version 3.5 uses the same database as the current version through a façade.)
Exciting? Probably not. But it's how I keep my saw sharp.
I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 3-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page two years ago, so I thought it's time for a quick review.
Here are the main topics on the Daily Parker:
- Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006.
- Politics. I'm a moderate-leftie by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States.
- Software. I own a micro-sized software company in Chicago, Illinois, and I have some experience writing software. I see a lot of code, and since I often get called in to projects in crisis, I see a lot of bad code, some of which may appear here.
- The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than ten years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many weather posts also touch politics, given the political implications of addressing climate change, though happily we no longer have to do so under a president beholden to the oil industry.
- Chicago, the greatest city in North America.
This is public writing, too, so I hope to continue a standard of literacy (i.e., spelling, grammar, and diction) and fluidity of prose that makes you want to keep reading.
So thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy the blog.
I still haven't committed to buying a Kindle, and Mark Morford echoes of the reasons:
[M]any creators loathe the beige slab because of how ruthlessly Amazon owns every aspect of the experience. Authors and publishers have little control. Readers -- that is, you -- have even less. Want to share a book you finished with someone else? Too bad. Want to upload and circulate your own text without using Amazon's system? Screw you. Want to, well, do anything at all that's not 100 percent within the company's power and revenue stream because you don't actually own any of the books you buy? Amazon says: Bite me.
I like having paper books. I have a sinking feeling that having a Kindle would result in me buying books twice, once for my bookshelf and once to read on a plane.
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen takes a look at Kindle 2 usability in his column today:
[T]he device is best for reading long linear material, such as novels and some non-fiction. Kindle's best user interface feature is turning the page; the reading experience you design should require no other interactions.
Writing linear books simply requires a skill that all good authors already possess: the ability to keep readers immersed in the plot.
Kindle also works well for the long, narrative articles common in certain literary magazines and Sunday newspaper supplements. No surprise that The New Yorker is currently the best-selling magazine for the device.
... [But] it's awkward to interact with the device through its 5-way controller. Also, after every selection, you're doomed to wait for a sluggish response. And, once you finally get something, you get very little because of the small screen. Setting aside the header and footer areas, Kindle 2's content area is 525x650 pixels, or 341 kilo-pixels. In contrast, a mid-sized PC screen is 1280x1024, offering 999 KP of content, or the equivalent of three Kindles.
Given these constraints, navigating non-linear content on Kindle feels much like navigating websites on a mobile phone. Kindle content designers should therefore follow mobile usability guidelines for many user interface issues, including the presentation of article pages.
I had a conversation with Joe over at Urban Outsitters this morning when I picked Parker up. It seems he's had run-ins with Yelp as well. He mentioned a ratings service that, he thinks, actually works: Angie's List.
The difference? Angie's List members have a reputational risk of their own when posting. The members may be anonymous to the vendors they're rating, but they're authenticated, and can be held accountable for their content. Also, the List, being member-financed rather than advertiser-financed, has no potential conflicts of interest. Yelp and other advertiser-supported media always have a potential for payola. Always.