My friend Mahesh’s parents have apparently had a very bad experience with United Airlines. Mahesh is a very low-key, down-to-earth guy, and it would take a lot to upset him, so this must’ve been egregious. Check out his Evil United Airlines blog for the details.

Scoble thinks Microsoft giving away Vista laptops is a great idea, and I agree. A huge barrier to evaluating anything is the pain of setting it up. Send out a laptop already setup and there’s no excuse not to look at it. Win over a few of the influencers and already it’s worth the cost.

Now I’m reading that Microsoft is asking for the laptops back. That makes absolutely no sense. If you have to give back the hardware then you’re not going to go thru the trouble of actually setting it up and using it in real-life. You can play around with the pre-installed tools and poke around the demos, but you won’t install and configure the 10 apps that are your core tools, because it’s just not worth it. After all the trouble of installing and setting up, you have to give it back. Plus you have to worry about any sensitive information you put on there. In short, pain.

I know about this first hand – we had an opportunity to evaluate a nice server, about $30k of nicely configured hardware. I had a couple of guys on the team excited to get their hands on it. Then I found out we’d have to give it back after 3 months.

Think about the cost tradeoff of setting up and evaluating the hardware. I would be putting in resource and investment in checking out the platform, with zero gain at the end. It immediately becomes a worthless proposition.

On the other hand, if the hardware stays, I can justify my investment of resources against the cost of the server. It’s a fair tradeoff.

The MS laptop scenario is a mini version of the same thing. If you’re an influencer your time is valuable, and if you have to give the laptop back then you’re just wasting your time.

Check out this review of Gizmoz on Techcrunch, and also take a look at Eyal’s myspace page.

Generally speaking I’m not a fan of avatars, but this one really is compelling. If you don’t buy compelling you’ll at least agree it is fun.

How long before Fred Wilson is sporting one of these on his blog?

Seems construction of 3d models of faces from 2d pictures is close to becoming mainstream. Polar Rose is doing a similar thing but apparently for face recognition.

I’m generally against pills of any kind, including vitamins. This can partially be explained by the fact that I come from several generations of physicians.

I also feel the marketing of vitamins in the US amounts to a multi-level marketing scam with little benefit. I’m a big believer in eating healthy (or at least not overly unhealthy), and eating lots of fruit. This can partially be explained by my Iranian heritage – fruit is the normal “dessert” after meals and is served at every social occasion.

So that basically left me as an anti-vitamin-pill guy. Friends, acquaintances, and even random annoying strangers would tell me about the miraculous benefits of vitamins, but it had no effect.

After watching this presentation, however, I’m a believer. I love the way this guy speaks. It’s a science talk so it won’t be for everyone, but it did the trick for me. I’m going to redouble my efforts to make sure my family has good fruit intake, and I might even… gasp… buy that pack of multi-vitamins from costco.

Tim O’Reilly is fond of saying that data is the new Intel inside, but I think S3 is much more deserving of that label.

Talking to a couple of startups and looking at my own side projects, I increasingly find attraction in Amazon’s service offerings, S3 and EC2.

Why would you trust a startup with infrastructure? Innovation, sure, but infrastructure and operations? For that you want a proven, stable, large company. You want Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Ebay, one of those folks. Amazon has the relative advantage that people are not overly spooked about its privacy policies, and its CEO has stated it’s committed to supporting this model.

Data is too important to trust to a startup. Amazon S3 gives it the seal of approval, the guarantee of availability and longevity. From where I stand, S3 is the new Intel Inside.

According to the Becker-Posner blog:

There are now almost 800 billionaires in the United States and countless millionaires, and one out of every 500 U.S. households have an annual income of at least $1 million.

800 billionaires is more than I expected, but 1 out of every 500 households making $1million per year? That’s far higher than I’d have guessed.

Here’s another interesting nugget:

the top 1 percent of earners pay more than one-third of all federal income taxes today

I had an old version of Firebug installed and had played with it briefly, but spurred by Ajaxian I decided to give the new version a try.

Firebug is unbelievable. This is a surprisingly excellent tool for any kind of Web UI development, whether html, css, or ajax. It’ll let you inspect and edit just about any aspect of your code. Or anybody else’s for that matter – go to a site and you’ll have a beautiful view of their CSS, Javascript, loading times, etc.
Check out the screen cast and go download it.

Now somebody needs to make something similar for IE so I can debug the cross-browser differences and incompatibilities…

There were a couple of posts from Ruby folks around the Web picking up on the lost formatting for python code in my monkey-patching post, pointing out that the lost whitespace renders the program invalid, and drawing the conclusion that whitespace is evil.

Fair enough. Whitespace gone, program no longer works, bad. Agreed. Dion Almaer points out that “At least if curly-code is misformatted (which is frequent too) you can paste it into your IDE of choice and autoformat.” Also true.

The whole mandatory whitespace thing was such a turn-off for me initially that it actually prevented me from trying Python for a whole year. If they’re this fascist about whitespace, just imagine what the rest of the language must look like!

Now that I’ve used it for a little while, I must say I’m converted. Whitespace is the way to go. Here are two reasons why:

Legibility:

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
– Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman.

I’m wading through a horribly badly formatted Perl program right now, and it is tremendously painful. Sure, I can auto-format, but I’ll effectively lose diff – the new version will differ from the old in every line, preventing me from cvs/svn diffing.

The better way is to force proper coding style from day one. In my old company we had a strict style guide that we forced everybody to follow, with good results. We used a variety of techniques for ensuring it was followed, starting with social pressure and ending in torture.

As an aside, the Tcl Style Guide and the Tcl C Style Guide remain the best written style guides I’ve seen to date, and the core Tcl code some of the best written code out there. Highly legible.

Python moves enforcement from a manual activity to one that’s automated in the interpreter/compiler, ensuring everybody follows the same style, making Python code universally easier to read.

If this sounds like nonsense to you, let me ask you this: do you write or allow your people to write badly formatted code?

If you don’t, then Python will not hurt or bother you. In fact, it’ll make your life easier by automatically enforcing what you manually enforce today.

If you do, stop it immediately! If your code is worth anything somebody will have to read it some day.

Brevity and Beauty:

It’s wonderful that Ruby on Rails folks are bringing the concept of beauty and elegance back in style. Beauty in code actually is important.

I contend that curly brackets, begin/end blocks, and their ilk are ugly and unnecessary. If you accept that proper style is necessary you’ll soon see that you don’t need being/end. If you don’t accept that proper style is necessary, then you don’t care about beauty. Worst, you’re making your programs unreadable.

In any case, we can all agree that a program that omits begin/end is shorter than one that doesn’t. Brevity.

…

So what about the lost spacing in that earlier post? Well, that’s a real problem. The lost spacing doesn’t just make the program unreadable – it makes it invalid, unable to be executed.

What’s the solution? I’m still looking for one. Is there a wordpress plugin that’ll allow me to maintain spacing, or better yet, highlight code? I tried every single one I could find, but none of them worked as advertised.

This is a comment on Malcolm Gladwell’s Lunatic Fringe post. Typepad is convinced I’m a spam bot and won’t let me post it there, so I’m posting it here…

…

Ayres put togother of group of young men and women–half white and half black–and sent them to 242 car dealerships all around Chicago. All were attractive, well dressed, and well-educated. All had the same cover story: that they were professionals from a wealthy part of Chicago. All pointed to the lowest-priced car on the floor and said–”I’m interested in buying this car.” Ayres’s question was–all other things being equal, how does skin color and gender affect the initial price quoted by a car salesman? His results: white men, on average, got quoted a price $725 above invoice, white women got quoted a price $935 above invoice, black women $1195 above invoice, and black men $1687 above invoice.

Regarding the initial car price quote – at first I thought it might be related to the practice of bargaining – ie. that a black man might bargain more than a white man and end up at a similar price.

So I called up a friend who has spent a lot of time at car dealships and asked him. He said without hesitation that it’s due to the financing risk – black males are less likely to successfully make the payments, so the dealer builds a cushion into the price upfront.

Sounds plausible. I’d be curious if the rate of over-quoting corresponds to the financing risk of the different groups – are black females less of a financing risk than black males?

Let’s assume for a moment this is the actual explanation – would you consider this racism? It passes the content and conviction criteria, but probably not the intent.

Regarding Sailer – I haven’t read any of his comments, but I’m enjoying your series of posts very much. It’s not often that race is discussed openly, and you seem to be a smart guy in a unique vantage point. It feels like his comments are bringing something to the discussion, even if only to draw you out to refute them. I’d say keep him in, unless it takes away from your willingness to think/post more about this topic.

Just last week I was calling for someone to hack up the Wiimote for PC use, and lo-and-behold, it’s here!

Hack-a-day gives an overview, Wii Hacks has lots of different hacks, and Bob Somers has even build a Wiimote Drum Machine.

Apparently you grab the GlovePIE program, get yourself a bluetooth sensor, and you’re off and running.

If only I had some time to play with this…

As I was moderating the 37 pieces of comment spam I received this morning (must’ve been a hiccup in Akismet) I was struck by how much the activity resembles reading RSS feeds. Quick scan of the contents, followed by an action. Not to mention the abundance of junk in both cases

It also struck me that the Google Reader interface would be perfect for this. By now I’m so used to the J, J, K dance of Google Reader that I find myself instinctively reaching for it everywhere.

Google Reader has great usability. It doesn’t require mouse movement, centers the content in the same location so you don’t have to move your focus, and gets everything accomplished with a few keystrokes. Try it to see what I mean. Nice job Google Reader team.

This is an interface worth stealing. I’d like to see it used in a lot more places. Anytime you have lots of items to review or take action on and the actions are fairly limited and repetitive, this is a good interface.

I have a side project I might attempt to steal this on, but I want all of you to do the same. Spread the usability goodness. AJAX toolkit writers, include this as a pre-baked widget so we can get it going everywhere.

I tried Yahoo Answers when it first came out (I’m a Yahoo employee so I got a sneak preview). Interesting concept, I thought, let’s see how it turns out.

I checked it out every once in a while and wasn’t impressed – the questions are generally junk and the answers aren’t much better.

Tonight I was trying to figure out what kind of game console I should buy for the boys (since the Wii is sold out everywhere). I don’t know much about game consoles so I sent email to friends and family for advice.

Then it occurred to me to try out the question on Yahoo Answers. The results were surprising. Within 30 minutes I had received 9 answers, 7 of which are actually helpful.

Since that worked so well I decided to ask another question that came to mind about chemistry and physics experiments that can be done with household items. That one is also generating interesting answers.

And now that I’ve received value from the community, I feel like I should give back and answer somebody else’s question.

Interesting system. Particularly impressive is how fast you get feedback – the first 6 answers came within 10 minutes of posting the question. The speed makes a real difference in the user experience.

One obvious improvement would be to put a link to questions you’ve asked somewhere more accessible – it’s a pain to find your questions right now.