At first I thought the arguments justifying Apple’s ban of non objective-c development by claiming that resulting apps would be lower quality were absolutely moronic (and hence the people making the arguments either blinded by religion or morons). After all, it’s not like there isn’t a review process already in place. But the more I think about it the more I see where they’re coming from.

I think we should apply the same model to the Web . Imagine if we all had to use the same development environment and tools, and that there was a single entity who could decide, arbitrarily, if the thing we just spent months building should see the light of day or not. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

If the internet has proved anything, it is that a closed, tightly controlled environment based on uniformity of tools and development environment, and a benevolent master overseeing everything is the right way to go.

I used to read the local newspaper. It was a fairly poor quality view of world events.

As news sources moved to the web I started to read a wider variety of sources – BBC, Le Monde, Haaretz, NY Times, Google News, various Iranian publications, and so forth. I had a better view.

As RSS took over I started to spend more time in Google Reader, with a larger number of sources. The sources, however, were hand-picked by me and the topics they covered were much more niche.

Sure, I had the feed from the NY Times, BBC, etc, but they just couldn’t compete with the blogs. I would only read them occasionally, and finally I gave up and removed them from my feed.

Nowadays I hang out on Twitter, to the detriment of Google Reader.

My sources of news are even more niche, even more hand-picked, and the news itself is headline-only.

It strikes me that I’ve lost something valuable here. I went from being exposed to a world view, much of which I didn’t agree with, to a series of very short, niche, hand-picked news sources.

I have unwittingly self-applied blinders.

An odd and disturbing trend. Nothing is stopping me from regaining the world view, other than my own choices. Yet I remain mostly blind.

I still have a big soft spot in my heart for Yahoo, but Yahoo mail, WTF?

Of the entire screen only the area I’ve highlighted in orange is dedicated to the contents of the message. And this is with the app maximized to full screen.

The interface is unusable as a mail reader: I can’t read the email message.

How on earth did the product people agree to this? Where’s the customer advocate?

Gmail is once again unavailable this morning. Normally I’d let it go – fail happens – but it’s part of a disturbing trend that looks a lot like neglect. The service has been getting slower and slower over the last few months, with search taking ridiculous amounts of time.

Why is it disturbing?

It’s important to understand that Google doesn’t directly make money on email. Think of it as a loss-leader of sorts.

Yes, I know there’s advertising on there. I also know a bit about advertising systems.

Gmail brings in a relatively a much smaller amount of revenue than Adwords and Adsense, and the margins are much lower. You have to pay for all that Gmail infrastructure, and click-thru rates on email ads (or ads placed next to most other compelling content) are very low.

Google is smart enough to know where their money comes from, and they go to great pains to ensure their search remains superior. They invest a lot in search.

But what do you do with properties that make money, but at small amounts and with much lower margins?

For example, Yahoo Finance, Small Business, My Yahoo, and many of the other businesses are nice, profitable business, but not large enough or high-margin enough to get a lot of love or resources.

You neglect them. You put resources on projects that move the top or the bottom line.

My concern with Gmail is the trend that looks like neglect. It’s a relatively large property for Google, but it’s been experiencing problems. I know fail happens, but I also know that if Google put their mind to it they could make it much more available than it has been.

As Google branches out into more new and different products, it needs to be very mindful of neglect. Rot at the edges of your systems deteriorate the overall perception of your offerings. And search market share is very dependent on perception: witness the studies that removed branding from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft search results and found nearly identical user satisfaction scores. 

So Google’s outlook has to be: if we’re going to do something we’re going to do it extremely well. The apple philosophy.

And if we’re not doing something extremely well, we need to fix it or shut it down. 

It’s a tough balance – how do you foster innovation and allow people to quickly create and launch projects, while maintaining a commitment to long term maintenance of quality?

It’s crucial to identify your core offerings, mark the rest as alpha, beta, “labs”, or any other label that signals the service might go away, and be absolutely fanatical about the quality of the core offerings on a continuous basis.

Here’s hoping Gmail gets its act together so I don’t once again have to switch providers.

Uploading pictures from Picasa to Flickr (or Facebook, or pretty much anything other than Picasa Web Album) is still too difficult. There’s a nice project called picasa2flickr but it has some issues – it takes focus and blocks while uploading the images, which can take quite a while. I used to drag and drop from Picasa into flickr uploadr but that doesn’t seem to workanymore with Picasa 3. Thanks Googs.

The solution, seems to me, should be something like this: Select a number of pictures, right click on them, and have an “Upload to Flickr”, “Upload to FaceBook”, etc, button. Clicking the button should simply send the list of files to a background uploader and return immediately. The background uploader can take its merry time uploading the pictures.

I’m really tempted to go write this if only to stop being my wife’s “I need to upload photos to FaceBook” tech support guy. Looks like there’s a Picasa Button API (via picasa2flickr) so this should generally be doable. Now to find the time.

You can only pay attention to so many people. Unless I’m unaware of some magical tool or technology, 1000 people is way past the point where you can pay attention.

When I see people who are following 3000 or more people follow me, I have to wonder, do they have any legitimate reason? Or is their sole motivation to get me to follow them?

Why on earth does the home key take you to the top of the file and the end key to the bottom? How often do you actually want to do that versus go to the start and end of the line? Is there a way to remap the keys to go to the start and end of the line?

Is this one of those one-button-mouse things that make no sense but apple is committed to preserving?

And MacFuse has corrupted my windows disk not once, not twice, but three times so far. 

Bah. Humbug.

Have you noticed how more and more the headlines of the top blogs are all the same announcement at the same time? Unfortunately we’re going back to the PR-firm driven news reporting that was prevalent in the era of magazines, instead of that brief but wonderful time when bloggers actually thought for themselves and found stories of their own liking. At least magazines had standards related to grammar and some base level of fact checking, but oh well.

On the bright side the blog world is wide and deep enough to provide lots of interesting news sources, even if they turn out not to be the top blogs.

Let me start by saying: I’m voting Obama.

However, this analysis by Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist who wrote “the book” on macroeconomics, is bringing tears to my eyes:

If there were no taxes, … then $1 earned today would yield my kids $28. That is simply the miracle of compounding.

Under the McCain plan, … a dollar earned today yields my kids $4.81. That is, even under the low-tax McCain plan, my incentive to work is cut by 83 percent compared to the situation without taxes.

Under the Obama plan, … a dollar earned today yields my kids $1.85. That is, Obama’s proposed tax hikes reduce my incentive to work by 62 percent compared to the McCain plan and by 93 percent compared to the no-tax scenario. In a sense, putting the various pieces of the tax system together, I would be facing a marginal tax rate of 93 percent.

The bottom line: If you are one of those people out there trying to induce me to do some work for you, there is a good chance I will turn you down. And the likelihood will go up after President Obama puts his tax plan in place. I expect to spend more time playing with my kids. They will be poorer when they grow up, but perhaps they will have a few more happy memories.

For about a week now the network at home has been slow. Just as I’d get frustrated enough to do something about it it’d get fast again, so I procrastinated.

Meanwhile I was cursing Time Warner, Linksys, Apple, and just about everybody else whose hardware I own. The Linksys wireless router is 5 years old, but come on, it should still work!

This morning my wife complained of web access on the desktop being slow, so I sat down to take a look. Sure enough, very slow. It was odd that the computer itself wasn’t as responsive as it used to be, but then it is a windows box, so curse Microsoft.

As I was dialing Time Warner to schedule someone to come out and take a look I started to look for a bandwidth tester so I could prove how crappy their service was. Oddly the search results didn’t actually go to a bandwidth meter, but rather to an intermediary page with lots of links to bandwidth meters.

And that’s when I realized: I gots me a virus. Fantastic. It’s sitting there eating my bandwidth, probably spamming the world.

Point is, I was ready to blame everyone in the world instead of thinking it’s a virus. If the virus authors hadn’t put in the search redirection they could’ve probably lived on for another month sending their merry spam.

I’m certain a clever virus could infect a very large percentage of the world’s computers without anyone noticing. Probably already has.

Watching the Palin/Biden debate and the subsequent babbling by the TV talking heads has me depressed. Nothing of substance was said during the entire debate. What we witnessed was an audition for a supporting role in a B movie, not a debate between potential 2nd in commands of the most powerful country in the world.

Apparently these folks haven’t noticed, but we’re in the midst of the most serious economic downturn since the great depression. We’re neck deep in two active wars. There are serious problems to solve. Are sound bites, repeated claims of “maverick”, and milf references really the best we have to offer?

What is depressing is not that these folks talk in pre-cooked, substance-free parrotings, but that we really and truly are stupid enough to not only tolerate, but to encourage this.

Please, give me something to vote on beyond how folksy, how old, how female, how dark, and how maverick these people are. I’m not trying to pick the person who looks the most like the president, but the one who will act the most president.

Bah. Humbug.

Watching the women’s uneven bars. The announcers have spent the vast majority of the time whining and moaning Nastia’s the 2nd place finish.

Now I recall earlier gymnastics events where these same announcers said starting first is a huge disadvantage and effectively penalizes the American competitor (pretty sure it was Shawn Johnson’s event). Hmm. The Chinese winner of this event went first. I didn’t hear any whining about how she was at a disadvantage.

We’re also hearing about the incompetency of the judges. Apparently the Australian judge favors the Chinese. Makes sense that Australia would pick China over US. Eh. I’m sure it does somehow. Nevermind that his score was actually thrown out (top and bottom scores are thrown out).

The tie-break procedure is also apparently anti-U.S. I’ve heard Al-Qaeda was behind instituting it.

Watching the track events earlier I was shocked to see there were 8 athletes running in each heat. The announcers announced 2, and the camera was very clear that there were only 2 athletes running. Turns out there are other countries competing besides America. Which really pisses me off – don’t they know it’s ALL ABOUT AMERICA?

I’m sick of NBC. These guys are making America look like a bunch whining, sore losers, which is anything but the truth. The athletes are doing a fantastic job and the venue is beautiful. If only these NBC idiots would embrace the spirit of the Olympics and realize it’s not all America versus the rest of the world. It’s a celebration of the athletic spirit of the world.

There we go. And they finish with how America’s dominance of baseball and softball is so complete the Olympic committee had to drop them from the Olympics.

Think back to high school, to the rich kid who was a good athlete and had everything else going for him, but was still an asshole? There you go. Apparently that’s who we are. Despite everything we have we still can’t find it in ourselves to be gracious.

Damned Australia.

Finally got my wife a new laptop. She spends all day frustrated at work because her new computer isn’t compatible with her work software. It’s Vista apparently; the software is not compatible with Vista.

“Everybody at the office agrees, it’s kind of a wierd operating system”. “Nobody likes it”. “It’s not compatible”. “I talked to the two tech guys and they both said it was Vista”.

Excellent.

The software is actually browser based. The geniuses who wrote the software forgot to set the content-type header for the pdf file they generate and they don’t call it a .pdf, so IE doesn’t know what to do with it and throws up a non-helpful prompt.

Translation for the less technical folks: this has nothing to do with Vista.

If you add up all the other stupidity Vista gets blamed for by both software developers and incompetent tech support people, you get a picture of why it has a bad name. It’s the new thing and it’s easy enough to blame, so why not.

That damned Vista.

Here I am sitting at the train station waiting for a train that’s 1 1/2 hours late, and I can’t call home to tell my wife about it, because the iPhone ran out of battery. It was fully charged when I left the house this morning. I didn’t make any calls, did use it to browse the web, and also used it as an iPod. And now it’s failing to do what 5 of the 6 letters in its name claim – to be a phone.

The guy standing next to me has his new 3G iPhone turned off because he’s almost out of battery. He’s saving it in case he decides to forgo the train and have his roommate pick him up.

Some phone. Bah, humbug.

This morning while trying to close a firefox tab I accidentally hit a button on Gmail that made it magically faster and better. I’ll share it with you: look at the top right hand side of your gmail screen. Look for the link that says “Older version”:

Click on this. Boom, magic. You’ll find suddenly Gmail is significantly faster, more responsive, and less prone to reducing FireFox to a groaning heap of ooze.

This is awesome. I’m not sure why Google is not publicizing more, and I can’t wait till they roll it out more widely. Perhaps it’s in beta.

Update: Gotta love it. Genius, I am. Turns out the laptop was on “Power Saver” mode.

About 2 weeks ago my Vista laptop started slowing down. I don’t know what caused it, but it started sometime after I updated to service pack 1, although I have no idea if that has anything to do with it. In any case, it’s stayed slow and it’s getting very annoying.

I’ve also been losing disk space. As I’ve gotten closer to filling up the disk I’ve made a concerted effort to delete items, but each time I do the space inexplicably disappears again.

My CPU usage is hovering at around 30% even when I’m doing nothing. I’m running FireFox 2.0.15 with -safe-mode, but doesn’t seem to be helping very much.

I fear I may do something drastic here if I don’t find a fix. If you have any ideas let me know.

Looks like Time Warner has dicontinued usenet service:

A good reason to leave Time Warner. I currently have the majority of my services through them (cable, phone, web), I’ll be looking for alternatives.

I revived a bunch of mp3 onto my windows box. I want to get them onto my iPhone. Should be drop-dead simple.

I’ve spent 10 minutes with iTunes, pressed the “Sync” button a ridiculous number of times, and I’m no closer to getting the songs onto the iPhone.

I found an article that suggested creating a special playlist and sync’ing that with the iPhone. Fine. However, when I try to sync that it tells me my iPhone is already sync’d with another computer (the infamous mac) and that sync’ing would erase the existing songs on there.

Why on earth is this difficult? Did apple really assume you’d only ever want to transfer songs from a single computer?

I’m really puzzled and disgusted. I should be able to drag and drop my songs onto the iPhone and magic should happen. Bah.

And that’s all I’m gonna say about that.