Category: it could be called work

we wouldn’t want shuttle mission control to be bored, now would we?

Ultimately, Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ”an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.”

Microsoft officials, of course, beg to differ. Simon Marks, the product manager for PowerPoint, counters that Tufte is a fan of ”information density,” shoving tons of data at an audience. You could do that with PowerPoint, he says, but it’s a matter of choice. ”If people were told they were going to have to sit through an incredibly dense presentation,” he adds, ”they wouldn’t want it.”

So we have 7 astronauts and a multi-million-dollar space vehicle on the line, and we’re worried about professional mission management staff being bored by the details of their job?

When PowerPoint slideware is the answer, you’re asking the wrong question . . .

If you take the time to read his books and the pamphlet referenced in the article, you would learn that Tufte isn’t in favor of overwhelming people with data, but in focusing on detail and excluding extranea, including ornaments and “chartjunk.”

never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence

From the Desk of David Pogue: Customer-Service Representatives Explain Themselves

Customer-Service Representatives Explain Themselves: David Pogue digs out from under the flood of email and shares the inside scoop from real CSRs: turns out the “passive-aggressive” thievery discussed earlier is simple ineptitude at the management level and the folks on the frontline take the heat. How unusual.

Also, he had the temerity to call Microsoft and ask when he could do an iSight-type video conference with Windows XP. Their answer? “On the Windows XP platform, all the pieces aren’t in place yet.”

looking forward to the centennial of powered flight? You missed it — by 50 years

Wired News: Wright Brothers the Wrong Guys?

Ask anyone in Brazil who invented the airplane and they will say Alberto Santos-Dumont, a 5-foot-4-inch bon vivant who was as known for his aerial prowess as he was for his dandyish dress and high society life in Belle Epoque Paris.

But even the Brazilians can’t trump John Stringfellow’s claim of powered flight in 1848 — 55 years before the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.

I had seen the signs in Chard as the birthplace of flight, but hadn’t looked into it: 55 years is a pretty good margin.

See for yourself. Even the US Air Force’s museum credits Stringfellow . . . .

iTunes2html 2.1: cool tool

This just in (from Morbus Iff):

I never did tell anyone that iTunes2HTML 2.0 was released, so I’ll rectify
(RecTTIIifffYYFy!) the situation with a iTunes2HTML 2.1, which generates
this final output (which is my current output – nearing 10,000 tracks,
whoo!). Updates in this revision include:

* we now attempt to detect which albums have VBR tracks
* we automatically skip over Griffin Technology peripherals
* if an album name is not found, we use “Unknown Album” instead
* if an artist name is not found, we use “Unknown Artist” instead
* confirmed it works on Win32 (though you’ll need ActiveState Perl)
* fixed bug with next’ing too quick for people with crappy id3 tags.
* fixed bug with assuming a “Disc Count” would exist. more crappy tags
* a new --addedwithin option allows you to choose how many days ago an
added album should be considered “new” and thus colored in the HTML

Fun, fun.

[1] http://disobey.com/d/code/itunes2html.txt
[2] http://disobey.com/d/lists/albums

those who don’t understand the Big Mac Index are doomed to repeat it

Licence fees and GDP per capita

There is a strong case for free software (also known as open source or libre software) being deployed widely in developing countries. As argued in this note, the open source development community provides an environment of intensive interactive skills development at little explicit cost, which is particularly useful for local development of skills, especially in economically disadvantaged regions. Further, this note argues that the controversy over total costs of ownership (TCO) of free vs. proprietary software is not applicable to developing countries and other regions with low labour costs, where the TCO advantage lies with open source, and the share of licence fees in TCO is much higher than in high labour cost countries. The note concludes with a table comparing license fees for proprietary software against GDP per capita for 176 countries.

Of course, this has been done before: the Open Source model is a little different, and I think a more interesting model would be to compare hardware costs. Hamburgers are a physical commodity, after all, and like computer hardware, can be assembled locally around the world.

Economist.com | Markets & Data | Big Mac Index

The Economist’s Big Mac index seeks to make exchange-rate theory more digestible. It is arguably the world’s most accurate financial indicator to be based on a fast-food item.

using apt as an option

Well, fink continually fails to install xfree86-*, as it turns out.
mkdir -p /sw/src/root-xfree86-rootless-4.2.0-12/DEBIAN
install -d -m 755 /sw/src/root-xfree86-rootless-4.2.0-12/sw/..
mv /sw/src/root-xfree86-base-4.2.0-12/sw/../Applications /sw/src/root-xfree86-rootless-4.2.0-12/sw/../
mv: rename /sw/src/root-xfree86-base-4.2.0-12/sw/../Applications to /sw/src/root-xfree86-rootless-4.2.0-12/sw/..//Applications: No such file or directory
### execution of mv failed, exit code 1
Failed: installing xfree86-rootless-4.2.0-12 failed

Whatever . . . .
Continue reading “using apt as an option”

what’s the link between java mavens and Mac OS?

James Gosling: on the Java road…

Also in 1990 an arcade-style 2D game called OIDS was released on the Apple Macintosh. I developed a real addiction to it and spent many hours going back and forth between writing the java (then oak) compiler/VM and playing oids. There’s something deeply fascinating about gameplaying that unlocks mental logjams. I’m sure that there are many PhD thesis topics here. Needless to say, I was thrilled to find that a new release of oids came out for OS X just recently.

First Bill Joy and now James Gosling . . . . .

Obviously, Solaris is not desktop-friendly enough, if these guys don’t use it. But for them both to using OS X is interesting.

What appeals to them? They could install cygwin and get a commandline on Win32 platforms, or run VMWare to get what they need/want. But instead they use the OS made by the company long decried as making toasters.

I wondered when Java first came out if it was partly an attempt to add a UI to UNIX/Solaris, not as opaque as Classic Mac OS, but in addition to the terminal and X.

I guess this old fortune quote is obsolete now:

Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac
(and nobody cares about it).
— Bill Joy 6/21/85