Keeping Computer Books Up-to-Date

Charles Wright in the Sydney Morning Herald:

With the number of blogs increasing at a phenomenal rate, more people than ever will find themselves dealing with the market-leading Movable Type. The Movable Type 3 Bible, from Wiley, gives you a thorough grounding in the complexities of a blogging platform that, on the surface, looks relatively easy to master but repays the effort required to learn about its more powerful features. Increasingly, these books are rendered somewhat out of date with the release of new versions, which this book promises to solve with an update site. Frankly, there's not much there, but there is a link to the author's site.

A truism of computer book writing is that a new software release will be announced the day after your book goes to press on the same subject. I need to write more on Workbench about Movable Type's PHP publishing features in advance of the book's next edition, but otherwise it keeps current with version 3.

I've always thought that computer books should be paired with active web sites, which is why there are more than 5,000 pages on this server supporting my books. I occasionally get a nice email from someone who picks up an eight-year old copy of Teach Yourself Java 1.1 Programming in 24 Hours and is pleasantly surprised to find the support site online.

As I told Wright in email, with the dot-com bust and the abundance of free technical information on the web, the economics of supporting a book after publication have never been uglier.

I should not have been so quick in college to choose journalism and computer science over a career in interpretive dance.

Java · Movable Type · Publishing · 2005/06/17 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Googlemilk: And Then They All Blamed Me

Alex Pareene, who describes googlemilking as "thinking of a great setup, and letting the internets provide the punchline," offers this contribution to the game: "and then they all blamed me."

The phrase reveals scapegoated sex club workers, abuse survivors, drug addicts, and a Canadian who blogs about flatulence:

i guess all this talk of gas has had its effect on me. last night i had two dreams and in each one i 'let one go' while i was around other people and they all blamed me and i denied it.

More usefully, it also leads to Athelstane e-Texts, a ginormous collection of lovingly transcribed 19th century children's books.

The site includes 32 adventure books by George Manville Fenn, including Brownsmith's Boy, Marcus, the Young Centurion, and Dick o' the Fens. A discussion on LiveJournal suggests that Fenn's work still fills a niche:

So much manliness ... Nic Revel may also have alligators, I know one book does. Alligators that no doubt thrash about like giant serpents in the dark recesses of their tunnel-like lairs. (I'm so excited by that prospect that I misspelled several words and had to edit!)

Publishing · Googlemilking · Google · 2005/06/17 · Comment · Link

I Heart Alan Colmes

I've been exchanging e-mail lately with Alan Colmes (namedrop!), the cohost of Hannity & Colmes and his own nightly radio show. This isn't payola; I'm doing this as an expression of love. As a huge fan of talk radio I've wanted to adopt a liberal show on the Drudge Retort, inspired by Matt Drudge's relentless self-promotion of his Sunday night show.

Every night as Colmes airs, the Retort will post live links to upcoming guests and a place to talk about them. I don't know how this experiment will go -- my visitors are a hard-edged crowd, as Colmes must have realized when he read one of the first responses:

... Alan looks like someone who skinned some guy and is wearing the face.

As a person whose head was once compared to a bore brush for a 50-millimeter rifle, I feel Alan's pain. (My wife assures me I look very distinguished.)

I began listening to Colmes when I got XM Radio, which airs his show weeknights from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. Eastern on Channel 167.

In spite of being the most-watched liberal TV host with an audience of two million viewers, Colmes takes an unbelievable amount of flak from fellow travelers on the left. People accuse him of being the Washington Generals to Sean Hannity's Harlem Globetrotters, always reaching for the ball just as it gets passed through his legs for a thundering dunk by Mort Kondracke.

A funny thing happens to Colmes when he doesn't have to share air with that oxygen-hog Hannity. He runs an entertaining show that's unabashedly liberal but free of the tweedy, eat-your-vegetables tone that makes too much of Air America sound like homework.

One of the best things about his show is that conservatives are comfortable calling it, which gives him a chance to talk them into indefensible positions. Listening to him coax a dumb caller out onto a limb that doesn't support their weight is comedy gold.

I've attached an example of this from last night, when a cranky caller berated the actor Bruce Campbell for simultaneously being too famous and so obscure she'd never heard of him.

Television · Radio · Publishing · Politics · Podcasts · Movies · 2005/06/16 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Yahoo Buys Ping Collection

Jim Winstead sold Blo.gs to Yahoo.

Yahoo isn't disclosing the amount and Winstead's one of those people who becomes taciturn about the width of his wallet, so we may have to wait for an SEC filing to find out the purchase price. I would be disappointed if Winstead didn't make the $50.9 billion company drive a money truck to his house.

Disclosure: I tried to purchase Blo.gs when Winstead's initial for-sale notice made it sound as if he'd part with it for a check containing three or four zeroes.

Self-interest prevented me from telling Jim, but I thought Blo.gs had blindingly obvious and considerable value in weblogging. For several nights I fell asleep to dreams of swimming in a vast sea of coins a la Uncle Scrooge. As I told my wife, our house has plenty of room out front for a money truck.

I soured on the negotiation when another party secured a right of first refusal, figuring the chance for a bargain was gone.

Weblog notification services such as Blo.gs tie the entire blogosphere together, and commercial sites like Technorati, Feedster, and Blogpulse are utterly dependent on them.

Yahoo clearly recognizes this, as company engineer Jeremy Zawodny describes on his weblog.

With this sale, I'm pondering the most attractive remaining acquisition targets in weblogging. Weblogs.Com is clearly the biggest, followed in less certain order by UserLand Software, del.icio.us, Haloscan, and the commercial side of WordPress.

2005/06/15 · Comment · Link

Open Source, Insert Foot

As a Java devotee, I grimace whenever language inventor James Gosling expounds to the press on the subject of open source.

In a story noting the 10th birthday of Java, Gosling said, "We did do it as close to open source as you could and still be a corporation."

Last month, Gosling responded to an Apache proposal to create an open source version of Java with puzzlement:

It's often difficult to get a good picture from the open source community of what they actually object to in what we're doing. In what way could we be more open? ...

Since day zero, 10 years ago, all of our sources have been open and available. We've got several thousand man-years of engineering in [Java], and we hear very strongly that if this thing turned into an open source project -- where just any old person could check in stuff -- they'd all freak. They'd all go screaming into the hills.

I have trouble believing that Gosling could be this mistaken about open source.

Open source projects do not allow random people to check in code. There's a submission process where proposed modifications are evaluated by people who have the ability to commit or reject a change. All revisions are tracked with code versioning software and can be backed out if necessary.

Gosling knows this -- he runs two open source projects, BlogEd and JNN, that require his permission to check in code.

The open source process works as well or better than proprietary approaches. I observed the early development of Geronimo, the Apache Software Foundation's J2EE application server, and its project committers are meticulous, professional, and extremely dedicated to software development.

Apache's so accomplished that its process has become celebrated as the Apache way. When I need a Java class library, I check Apache Jakarta before Sun. The code's often better, more reflective of real-world needs, and actively developed -- unlike parts of the Java 2 class library that Sun appears to have quietly abandoned.

Java is not remotely open. Under the Sun Community Source License, you can't publish a modified version, Sun decides whether your contributions are compatible, and contributors don't have to share their code.

If releasing open source code is detrimental to a corporation, that's news to IBM, Red Hat, JBoss, SleepyCat Software, and hundreds of other companies, many serving the enterprise customers that Gosling believes are fleeing in terror.

Gosling, who appears to have qualified some of his criticisms on his blog, ought to find some unloved part of the Java 2 class library like JavaSound and shepherd its adoption as an Apache project. He'd realize that open source can be an asset to Sun, which needs all the help it can get.

Java · Programming · 2005/06/14 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Robot Behaving Badly

Before I can run Urchin to track web traffic, the Apache script split-logfile creates log files for each virtual domain on my server.

A bad request from a webcrawling robot breaks split-logfile:

The error's in the first field: OmniExplorer_Bot should be requesting the page from the host www.drudge.com, not www.drudge.com//retort.shtml.

As it turns out, this bot has bigger problems: It never requests robots.txt, violating the Robots Exclusion Protocol, and will consume hundreds of megabytes crawling a site in one session.

Publishing · Linux · 2005/06/14 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

In a World Where People Watch Movies

The Guardian has a great piece on how all movie trailers look alike, sound alike, begin with the words "in a world" and have the same guy doing the voiceover:

... by far the oddest practices in the world of trailers concern the music that accompanies them. Film scores tend to be completed so late in the production process that most trailer editors can't use the correct music even if they want to; normally, however, they don't. Deploying the music from a successful older film to advertise a new one must be about as close to subliminal advertising as it's legally possible to get.

"Fire In Brooklyn Theatre," a foreboding instrumental song from the 1991 film Come See the Paradise, has been used in trailers for Clear and Present Danger, A Few Good Men, and nearly two dozen other films.

A snippet of the song can be heard on the soundtrack page on Amazon.Com.

The director of the film, Alan Parker, can't escape the song:

There is a Randy Edelman cue in my film ... that has been used for the trailers of at least a dozen other movies at last count. I even have to listen to it every weekend because it's also been pinched for the theme music of the Premiership Plus matches on Sky.

Joshua Allen wrote a funny fake roundtable discussion of how the trailer was made for the Tom Cruise film Minority Report:

Erskine: Don't be coy, give us whatcha got. Combee: 'In a world where crimes are st -- ' Doven: No. Combee: But -- Doven: No 'in a world.' Erskine: What do you mean no 'in a world?' 'In a world' is our bread and butter. Test audiences love 'in a world.' The people like knowing a movie's going to be 'in a world.'

Music · Movies · 2005/06/13 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

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