Global Nerdy

Watch for all sorts of follow-up, discussion (and possibly a shouting match or two) over at O’Reilly Radar, where Tim O’Reilly starts a series of articles titled Programming Language Wars. In Part One, he presents a graph comparing book sales on computer languages between January 2006 and January 2007, based on data from the Bookscan Top 3000 Report (click to see it at full size):

Tim writes:

As you can see, books on every language but Actionscript (Javascript for Flash), JavaScript, Ruby, and SQL were down, some more than others. Ruby books did outsell Python books. But Javascript — driven by everything Ajax — was the biggest winner.

Link

Perhaps most of the tips listed in the article 12 Quick Tips To Search Google Like An Expert might be old news to you, but there may be one or two tricks in the list that you might have missed. In my case, I was unaware of the “numeric range” search, such as this one: president 1940..1950.

One tip they don’t list in the article is the unit conversion feature. For instance, give these a spin:

• 180 pounds in kilograms
• 500 miles in light-years
• 1 parsec in cubits
• 1 femtosecond in fortnights

Feel free to try less ridiculous conversions. Or more ridiculous ones, if that’s your thing.

Link

Designer/developer Joshua Porter lists his five design principles in the latest post on his blog, Bokardo:

1. Technology serves humans.
2. Design is not art.
3. The experience belongs to the user.
4. Great design in invisible.
5. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Pretty sound advice. Even if we could only get techies to follow principle 1 and artists/designers/ponytails to follow principle 2, that would solve a lot of problems.

Link

If you’re like most of our readers and live in the U.S. and Canada, it’s time to enjoy your last week of standard time. Come this Sunday, daylight saving time begins — a full three weeks earlier than usual.

The change to daylight saving time is deceptively simple in appearance. In 2005, the Energy Policy Act was signed into law. This act, whose purpose was “to help every American who drives to work, every family that pays a power bill, and every small business owner hoping to expand”, included among its measures a change to daylight saving time. Starting this year, daylight saving time would be extended by four weeks, starting three weeks earlier on the second Sunday in March and ending a week later on the first Sunday in November. The rationale for this change: if daylight saving time saves energy, then extending it will save even more.

If you’re looking for someone to blame, Ben “Buzzkill” Franklin is a good candidate. In 1784, riffing off his earlier “early to bed, early to rise” nonsense, he wrote a letter to The Journal of Paris titled Daylight Saving. Written in the excessively florid language used only by 18th century statesmen and aliens on Star Trek, Franklin suggested that by waking up earlier, Parisians would enjoy more daylight during their waking hours and as a result use fewer candles and economisez beaucoup francs.

In a move as telling of the stereotype as their coinage of the word schadenfreude, the Germans were the first to put the daylight saving concept into practice in 1916. Eager not to lose the stereotype war, Newfoundland implemented this silly idea a year later. The Americans implemented daylight saving time in 1918 along with the establishment of time zones, but it proved to be so unpopular that it was repealed a year later. Daylight saving time became something that was practiced at the discretion of several localities — a few states and cities — rather than at the national level. This was followed by a whole lot of governmental meddling starting with FDR and currently ending with GWB; you can read the rest of the sordid history over at the WebExhibits Daylight Saving Time site.

The concept of daylight saving originated in a world that predated not only the concept of time zones, but also a globalized economy, ubiquitous computing and a world that runs on timetables, so perhaps “Buzzkill” Franklin can be forgiven for his crime against humanity in light of such extenuating circumstances. However, the current U.S. administration, who live in the current world and who should recall all the work that went into averting the potential problems of Y2K, should know better.

In the New York Times article Time Change a ‘Mini-Y2K’ in Tech Terms, the problem with the change is put simply: Most internal clocks in computing devices are programmed for the old daylight-time calendar, which Congress set in 1986. The end result is that all sorts of tech companies and vendors are scrambling to patch systems programmed to the old spec and that extent of the effect of the change on uncorrected systems is unknown.

The article lists a number of systems that could be affected:

• Email applications
• Calendar applications
• Hotel wake-up call services (many hotel chains’ wake-up calls are centralized under one or two data centers)
• Smart electric meters, especially in systems where the charge for electricity varies on the time of day
• and, of course, the number of appointments and meetings that will be missed as a result of the change to the time change.

The upside is that for most of us, the change to daylight saving time will be an annoyance. As Rich Kaplan, Microsoft’s VP of Customer Service puts it, “It’s not as if you’re going to lose any data — your documents, e-mail, digital music or pictures.” (I quote Mr. Kaplan with the caveat that it is perfectly appropriate and even prudent to worry when a person high up on MS’s org chart tell you that there’s nothing to worry about.)

My advice: download the appropriate patches for your computer and other devices, confirm and re-confirm any appointments that take place during the first three weeks of daylight saving and don’t take the word of any electronic clock in the month of March without corroborating evidence.

Links

• Time Change a ‘Mini-Y2K’ in Tech Terms (New York Times)
• WebExhibits’ site on daylight saving time
• Wikipedia entry on daylight saving time
• Ben “Buzzkill” Franklin’s letter, Daylight Saving, to the Journal of Paris

Our wedding gets mentioned in an article in today’s Wall Street Journal Online titled The Minutes of Our Lives, which looks at the growing phenomenon of liveblogging — that is, blogging about an event while at that event. It’s no longer unusual to see people liveblogging at tech conferences or events on live television, but some people are liveblogging things like their Thanksgiving dinner or the birth of their child. Twitter.com, where you can post ultra-short entries typically no longer than a sentence, even had a post made from a mobile phone at a funeral.

Jennifer Saranow, WSJ staff reporter and author of the article, has been in touch with me and my wife Wendy for the past couple of weeks. She contacted us after finding this article on our wedding blog by Wendy:

If you would like to blog our wedding, you may do so! But after the fact. We really want all the fun things to be a surprise. And we really, really don’t want you to bring your laptops to the wedding (JKB). We want you to pay undivided attention (Ethan, hee) to the ceremony and then have face-to-face exciting interactions – like dancing! (Erica, I know you don’t need to be asked twice) – during the reception. But after you leave, we’d be more than happy to have you blog about it. There are a lot of bloggers and readers whom we weren’t able to invite, and the more of a taste we as a group can offer them…well, it’d make me happy. We hope to post some photos soon after ourselves.

Here’s the snippet from the Wall Street Journal article that mentions us:

Hosts who want to ensure that guests focus on the festivities are responding with countermeasures. Expecting about half a dozen bloggers at their wedding, Joey de Villa, 39, and Wendy Koslow, 32, posted “A Note To Other Bloggers” on their wedding Web site about two weeks before their September 2005 nuptials in Cambridge, Mass. The note asked guests not to bring their laptops to the event and to only blog about the wedding after the fact. “I wanted them to pay attention and enjoy themselves and participate,” says Ms. Koslow, who came up with the idea for the embargo. “I wanted them to be in the moment.”

Although the guests complied, the first attendee blog post was up by 11:16 that night, shortly after the reception ended. The culprit: Rev. A. K. M. Adam, a 49-year-old Episcopal priest from Evanston, Ill., who preached at the ceremony. From his hotel room, he wrote, “the ketubah is signed, the glass smashed, the champagne toasted, the disco medley played, and the guests exhausted. These guests, anyway.” Rev. Adam says, “It was the thing that happened that day, so I wrote about it.”

My thanks to Jennifer Saranow for including me and Wendy in the story.

(And yes, George was at the wedding — he was my best man!)

I just recently got around to listening to Tim Cook, Apple’s COO, speak at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium (a “symposium?” Faaaancy). A lot of people made note of his comment that Apple’s sold 90 million iPods like it was news. In fact, Apple first posted that number when discussing their most recent quarterly results (Q1 F2007) in January 2007. Since we’re going into the final month of Q2 of the current fiscal year, and estimates have Apple selling between 10 and 12 million more iPods, I think we’ll see Apple’s cumulative iPod sales cross 100 million by the end of this month.

That’s 1, followed by eight zeros.

So what does 100,000,000 iPods mean? Well, over the course of the iPod’s life, Apple has sold:

18,181,818 iPods per year
1,666,667 iPods per month
353,357 iPods per week
50,352 iPods per day
2,098 iPods per hour
35 iPods per minute
1 iPod roughly every 2 seconds

On average, of course.

When Apple Inc. wanted to bring its series of “Mac vs. PC” ads to international markets, it faced a difficult issue: What’s funny in one culture can seem ill-mannered in another.

Here’s the shorter version of the WSJ article on how Apple’s adapted their “I’m a Mac…” ads for other countries:

People in Britain and Japan are different than they are here in America. In America, the Mac Guy is called “smug,” while in Britain, he’s called a “tosser.”

On the other hand, people in Britain and Japan are the same as they are here in America; there’s always some loudmouth who thinks I care about the fact that he doesn’t like the Mac Guy in the commercials.

While you were reading the Journal article, Apple sold another 160 iPods.

Source: Mac and PC’s Overseas Adventures – WSJ.com