News Goat

Yahoo Looking to Buy Tumblr

2013-05-17T15:03:00Z

Peter Kafka and Kara Swisher, at All Things D:

But it’s not the first time Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been interested in the New York-based hipster blogging service. As an executive at Google, she had closely watched its fast growth, along with that of Foursquare. Since she took over at Yahoo, several sources said that she has met with its top execs, including founder and CEO David Karp.

What I find surprising about this is that Tumblr would seriously consider a sell out. And I guess that’s only because I assumed Karp wanted the same thing Twitter wants: to build a billion dollar media company.

If it’s true and if the deal happens, I hope Mayer fires the Tumblr management and hands the whole thing over to the Flickr folks. Flickr at least knows how to a) foster a community and b) charge for a product.

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We Don’t Have to Imagine

2013-05-01T16:04:00Z

I wanted to make one other point about that article in Wired that inspired John Gruber’s web vs. native post. Let’s take another look at Marc Andreessen’s “thought exercise”:

Let’s say we all grew up in tech world where we only used tablets and smartphones. Then one day, someone comes up to you with a 27-inch display hooked up to a notebook. You could have everything you have on your tablets and smartphones, and then some. Except you don’t have to download anything or update it. Everything is the latest and greatest, and just one click away. If you are a software developer, there are no gatekeepers telling you if your latest creation is approved, or when you can add the latest flourish.

“We would be like, wow, that’s great,” Andreessen says from his office at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Thing is, we have that now. It’s called a Chromebook, and nobody’s using them.

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Thing Is, They’re All Web Apps

2013-05-01T15:03:29Z

Love this post by Gruber on web vs. native apps:

Facebook, bless them, has it right. What’s great about the web is ubiquitous network availability, not running within a browser tab. Websites are just services, and what you see in a browser tab is merely one possible interface to that service. The best possible interface to that service is often, if not usually, going to be a native app, not a web app.

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Pelican 3.2

2013-04-30T04:04:00Z

I hadn’t planned to write about Pelican again so soon, but 3.2 came out this past week, with a nice set of changes. I’ve installed it, and while I’m mostly happy with it, I’ve found a problem for my site.

I hesitate to call this a bug, because I imagine it’s working as the developers intend. It just breaks something non-standard that I am doing. For the dates on articles, I use the following as my default date format:

DEFAULT_DATE_FORMAT = '%A, %B %e, %Y'

When I first installed 3.2, that was interpreted like so:

I Googled around to figure out what was going on, and came across this post by Dr. Drang. As he explains, ‘%e’—which I use to get the day without a leading zero—is a format code that is not supported on all platforms. But Python’s strftime just calls the system strftime, so why would it stop working?

So I dug into the Pelican code. It appears¹ they’ve written a wrapper for strftime that skips over non-standard format codes. I have to assume this is for compatibility with Python 3.

At this point I had a choice: Accept dates with leading zeroes, or write some kind of workaround for Pelican’s strftime workaround.

I think you know what I did.

It was actually pretty easy. I just wrote a plugin that replaces the value of Article.locale_date with a call to the built-in strftime. And since I know ‘%e’ is supported on all the platforms I use, it’s portable enough for me. You can find it (and all my Pelican-related code) on GitHub.

I’m pretty new to Python, so keep that in mind. ↩

What Would Devs Change?

2013-04-26T15:03:00Z

Well, hell. I’ve been working on a post about WWDC and how developers want to change it. Then I get back from lunch to find Jeff LaMarche has written that post, AND he wrote it better than I would have, AND he has better suggestions for improving WWDC than I have.

Ah, but the joke’s on you Jeff. I had a lovely lunch.

Anyway, I’m not even going to quote anything from it, just go read the whole thing. He details exactly why expanding WWDC is much harder than most people realize.

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WWDC Sold Out

2013-04-25T18:06:00Z

Two minutes. Wow.

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AmazonTV

2013-04-25T15:03:00Z

Brad Stone at Bloomberg with the scoop on Amazon’s set-top box:

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), the world’s largest online retailer, plans to release a television set-top box that would stream video over the Internet into customers’ homes, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The device, due later this year, will connect to televisions, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak publicly about it. It will also provide access to Amazon’s expanding video services, which include the Amazon Video on Demand store.

As before, let’s compare and contrast with Netflix:

“Reed said to me one day, ‘I want to be able to call Steve Jobs and talk to him about putting Netflix on Apple TV,’” recalls one high-level source. “‘But if I’m making my own hardware, Steve’s not going to take my call.’”

To the surprise of most employees at the company, Hastings decided to kill The Netflix Player, and spin the team out as a separate company. His decision, made almost exactly five years ago this month, was one of the riskiest moves in Netflix’s history. But it also proved to be one of Hastings’ most prescient. By shelving its hardware and remaining an agnostic platform, Netflix was able to transform itself into a digital powerhouse and become the dominant player in subscription streaming video.

I don’t make these comparison to suggest either approach is “correct” or “winning”. I just think the difference is interesting.

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Drafts 3

2013-04-24T16:04:00Z

It took me a while to “get” Drafts, but once I did I was hooked. Some day I’ll write up how I use it for publishing here. It has become a key part of my iOS workflow.

Version 3, released today, is a great update. If you haven’t tried it check out the review on MacStories to see how powerful it is.

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Why Revenues Matter More Than Stock Prices

2013-04-23T20:08:00Z

Nick Wingfield at The New York Times on why investors are not happy with Steve Ballmer or Tim Cook:

Of course, the real reason both Microsoft and, more recently, Apple, have become sources of investor disgruntlement have little to do with how profits and revenue have fared in the past. In Microsoft’s case, the list of Wall Street’s grievances includes the billions of dollars the company has lost seeking to compete with Google in search, multiple missed opportunities in the mobile market and worries that Microsoft’s longtime profit engines will run out of gas.

In Apple’s case, the concerns are different. In January, Apple warned Wall Street that it expected its profit to decline about 20 percent during its fiscal second quarter, results for which the company will report on Tuesday. Slowing sales, a shift to products like the iPad Mini with lower profit margins, and a lull, whether real or perceived, in breakthrough new products are all weighing heavily on Apple’s shares.

It’s a fair comparison, though I’d argue that Tim Cook’s “problems” are just misguided expectations, while Ballmer’s were actual failures on his part. But whatever you think of either CEO, it’s hard to argue with growing profits.

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Breaking News Isn’t Broken

2013-04-23T19:07:00Z

Related to the previous, Jamie Kelly has a look at the difficulties of covering breaking news:

Breaking news is by turns terrifying, exhilarating, stressful and extraordinary boring. There are large stretches of time when you don’t know anything new. That’s OK, unless you’re running a 24-hour news feed. Then you have to find something to fill the time. And too often it’s either baseless speculation or just plain bad information.

And the alternative is not sticking with the story and having people flip over to your channel and wonder why you’re not covering it.

Read Jamie’s whole post, because he has some terrific insights into why social media makes breaking news particularly difficult, and how journalists (and consumers) can do better.

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Breaking: Cable News Is Terrible

2013-04-23T19:07:00Z

David Carr for the New York Times, on how badly CNN did last week:

Mr. King, a good reporter in possession of a bad set of facts, was joined by The Associated Press, Fox News, The Boston Globe and others, but the stumble could not have come at a worse time for CNN. When viewers arrived in droves — the audience tripled to 1.05 million, from 365,000 the week before, according to Nielsen ratings supplied by Horizon Media — CNN failed in its core mission.

I haven’t had access to cable news for a while, and I’ve never been as happy about that as I was last week. The 24-hour news channels just keep getting worse.

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Creating a Linked List Atom Feed in Pelican

2013-04-22T16:04:00Z

When I decided to reboot this site, one of my goals was to have a “linked list” feed, where the main link of each linked list post points to the URL that the post is about, instead of pointing to the post on my site. Several sites I read do this (Daring Fireball being the most popular example), to the point where I’m genuinely confused when I click a link in my newsreader and end up at the same post I just read.

I also wanted to use Pelican, for reasons I may write about another time. Pelican has no built in concept of linked lists. From Gabe at Macdrifter, I learned how to make linked list posts on my pages. Having gotten that far, I figured there had to be some way to do the same in the feed.

My first thought was to write a Pelican plugin. But Pelican’s plugin system doesn’t yet have enough hooks to make this an option. I then considered editing Pelican itself, but then I came back to my senses. I’ve done that with third-party code before. Never edit the core.

It finally occurred to me that I should be able to create a feed as just another template in the theme. I even had an example to start from: The Atom feed template in Movable Type.

If you’re interested in this for your own Pelican site, here’s how to set it up:

Download this gist and save it as “atom.html” in your theme directory. Next, download this plugin and install it so it can be used by your Pelican project.

The plugin is necessary because Datetime objects in Python are not, by default, time zone aware. But timestamps in Atom must be expressed as UTC (or as an offset from UTC).

You may have to do some jiggering to install the plugin. Pelican 3.1.1 has some issues with user-installed plugins. This should be resolved in the upcoming 3.2. In the mean time, I have this in my config file:

PLUGIN_PATH = 'my_plugins'
import sys
sys.path.append('./my_plugins')
PLUGINS = ['tzawaredate']

When you install 3.2, you should be able to remove those middle two lines.

If you want to limit the number of items in your Atom feed you’ll need to enable the jinja2 loop controls in your config file:

JINJA_EXTENSIONS = ['jinja2.ext.loopcontrols']

Finally, add this template to your list of direct templates and give it a save as location:

DIRECT_TEMPLATES = ('index', 'tags', 'categories', 'archives', 'atom')
ATOM_SAVE_AS = 'feeds/atom.xml'

Regenerate your site and see what you’ve got. For me, it’s working great.

Pilot Season at Amazon

2013-04-20T03:03:00Z

Dan Farber, writing for CNET:

Whether the [14] pilots get the green light for a full season of episodes will depend on what the data says. It’s Amazon’s studio, after all, and data is king. “The goal is to get customer feedback, to understand which ones customers are excited about and are promising,” said Amazon Studios head Roy Price. The studio was formed in Nov. 2010, with a focus on crowd-sourced, high-quality TV and movie programming.

Compare and contrast with Netflix’s approach to new programming:

“The goal,” [Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos] says, “is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” His seductive pitch to today’s new breed of TV auteurs: a huge audience, real money, no meddlesome executives (“I’m not going to give David Fincher notes”), no pilots (television’s great sucking hole of money and hope), and a full-season commitment.

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Tech’s Rust Belt

2013-04-20T03:03:00Z

Don Clark and Shira Ovide at the Wall Street Journal give a pretty fair assessment of recent earnings announcements:

The growth disparities are just the latest repercussions of technology shifts—including the rise of mobile devices and slowing growth in personal computers, the replacement of conventional software with online versions and outsourcing corporate internal computing operations to facilities run by other companies.

Tech’s turmoil bears similarities to the way old-line industrial companies in America’s Rust Belt lost sales to rivals in Asia and other regions. But the disrupters this time are mainly domestic and born since the Internet revolution took hold in the mid-1990s, often offering free or low-cost alternatives to widely used products.

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Siri Data Stored for Up to 2 Years

2013-04-19T15:03:00Z

Robert McMillan for Wired:

Once the voice recording is six months old, Apple “disassociates” your user number from the clip, deleting the number from the voice file. But it keeps these disassociated files for up to 18 more months for testing and product improvement purposes.

“Apple may keep anonymized Siri data for up to two years,” [Apple spokeswoman Trudy] Muller says “If a user turns Siri off, both identifiers are deleted immediately along with any associated data.”

Seems reasonable.

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Because Open Always Wins

2013-04-18T15:03:00Z

David Kravets & Roberto Baldwin, reporting for Wired:

The company’s terms of service on the limited-edition wearable computer specifically states, “you may not resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person. If you resell, loan, transfer, or give your device to any other person without Google’s authorization, Google reserves the right to deactivate the device, and neither you nor the unauthorized person using the device will be entitled to any refund, product support, or product warranty.”

Pretty sure the first-sale doctrine protects anybody wanting to sell the device itself. But, I imagine Google is well within their rights to not provide service to a resold device. And as with the restrictions for app developers, this is likely to change when Glass is available to the general public.

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No 3rd Party Ads on Google Glass

2013-04-17T02:02:00Z

Jon Brodkin, writing for Ars Technica:

“You may not serve or include any advertisements in your API Client,” the Mirror API terms of service state. “You may not use user data from your API Client for advertising purposes. You may not sell or transmit any user data received from your API Client(s) to a third-party ad network or service, data broker, or other advertising or marketing provider. For the avoidance of doubt, user data from the API Client(s) may not be used for Third-Party Ad Serving.”

But guess who can serve ads. Go on, guess.

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Mailbox App Now Open to Everyone

2013-04-16T20:08:00Z

I tried Mailbox shortly after they were bought by Dropbox. Lovely app with a nice UI. Unfortunately, it solves a problem I don’t have. If I’m not going to deal with an email right away, I send it to Omnifocus. Mailbox doesn’t offer much if you’re not using the “save for later” feature.

There were also a couple of things I just didn’t like. The push notifications have less information than those that come to the built in Mail app. Mailbox gives you the sender and the subject, Mail also gives you the first line of the email. And with Mail, the email is there as soon as you open the app. Mailbox has to download the mail after you’ve launched it, so there’s a small delay.

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Microsoft Is Working On A Watch

2013-04-16T18:06:00Z

Lorraine Luk and Shira Ovide at The Wall Street Journal:

This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has shown an interest in wearable gadgets. Microsoft a decade ago unveiled a “Smart Watch” powered by the company’s software. For a subscription fee, Smart Watch wearers could have news headlines, sports scores and instant messages beamed over FM radio to their wrists. But sales stopped in 2008.

Microsoft has gotten into a nasty pattern of launching products nobody wants, then after the market matures responding with something nobody wants. They did it with tablets and smartphones, so it’s hard to be optimistic about their chances with a smart watch.

Thing is, they have the talent and the resources to do wearable computing right. If they focused on it as a completely new thing with no (visible) link to the past, I think they could quickly take the lead, regardless of whether Apple is working on something similar.

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Ownership

2013-04-15T14:02:00Z

I’m trying on an idea to see if it fits. Here’s the tweetable version:

If I own my own thing, I don’t need to own your thing.

You could interpret that in a lot of ways, I think. What I’m talking about is control, and how we strive for control in most every situation we’re in. In our work, our relationships, our financial transactions. We always want some level of control. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, necessarily. But we do have to recognize there are limits. There are limits to the control you can, or should, have over another person. There are limits to the control you have in a purchase, which depends on a lot of different variables.

In our work I think we have a tendency to try to establish ownership over certain aspects so we can feel like we have control. We talk about “my projects” and “my systems”. We adorn our cubicles and offices with personal knick-knacks. We feel like we own the aspects of our job that we maintain. And when that control is taken from us, we get mad. We feel like we’ve lost something that belonged to us.

Except, we haven’t, because it didn’t. What we’re doing is confusing responsibility for ownership. The difference is, when you’re responsible for something it’s up to you to get it done. When you own something, you control how it’s done. If you work for somebody else you don’t really own anything you work on. You might be responsible for it, you might even have some say in how it’s done, but ultimately your employer owns the code, the machines, everything. You only have as much control as they let you have.

But that goes both ways. Your boss only has control of what you do for the company. What you do for yourself, on your own time, that’s all you. And in my experience, if you have something outside of work that you own, you’re less stressed about the amount of control you have on the job.

This is why I develop apps in my free time 1. I like having things in the store that I own. If they’re crap, they’re crap because of decisions I made, not because someone else made a decision I had to implement. And when I own something, really own it, I have far more incentive to make it better.

And this is not to say you shouldn’t care about the work you do for your employer. Part of being responsible is caring about doing a good job. But for me at least, I have to distance myself from my job a little bit, and recognize what’s mine versus what’s their’s. When I do that I’m happier and more productive, because I’m not worrying about trying to own things that don’t belong to me. I’m less concerned about what privileges I have and more concerned about just doing good work. And having things that really are mine make it easier for me to let go of things that aren’t mine. In other words…

If I own my own thing, I don’t need to own your thing.

Anyway, welcome back to News Goat.

Also, my lack of free time explains why I haven’t developed any more apps. ↩