Month: July 2003

Media consumption

Family vacations are a perfect time for media consumption. Here’s what I was into:

Complete Digital Photography, by Ben Long. Borrowed and skimmed a copy, planning to buy. It’s fabulous. Lots of detailed explanation of how digital cameras and photo editing software works. If you’re baffled by terms like “color management” and “alpha channels”, this book will make you happy.

Strip Tease, by Carl Hiaasen. Fun, light vacation reading. Hiaasen is my default vacation author. They made the book into a movie a few years ago.

A1A, by Jimmy Buffett. Bob and Mike and I had this playing in the car on the drive up to Mineral King. Been a long time since I listened to Buffett. It was like coming home. “Life is just a tire swing…” is still twanging in my head.

Rogers Cadenhead is my hero

I posted this comment to the “Leave RSS alone” thread on Mark Pilgrim’s weblog:

A word of caution to those of you who think this is funny. As programmers we delight in things that are clever. But most of us are disinclined to use that cleverness in hurtful ways.

You may think that there’s plenty of hurtfulness to go around, and you may be right. But consider this. Suppose we posit that all good leaders are bound to offend somebody. How would you rather take it: out in the open with a little name-calling, or craftily and meanly?

Observe carefully what is happening here. This is your future.

It’s so disheartening when people are intentionally mean. It blows me away to think that anyone could possibly believe that this reflects well on them. Contrast Mark’s problem-solving approach with Rogers Cadenhead’s. Now imagine that you had to choose to work with one or the other, say, in a consulting relationship, as a business partner, or on an open source project. I’d pick Rogers in a heartbeat.

Subscriptions Harmonizer

It looks like Dave is thinking about a world where desktop aggregators can sync their subscriptions lists with a central server

The proposed api looks good. A minor question is whether the subscribe() and unsubscribe() methods should use strings instead of arrays. Strings agree more with the language that subscribing and unsubscribing are done one feed at a time. But the backend may be simpler to code if we always deal with arrays. No big deal, I think it will work fine either way.

This will be a huge usability leap, and will make me happy, for one. Excellent!