21st Century Digital Boy

Apparently YouTube sucks.

This is news to no one.

Tremendous fun for the users, but of no value to people who want to make money; the author calls it a “community charity”.

But the best part is this:

There is absolutely no market value at all to user generated video. Zero. None. Nada. Actually there is a market value, but its negative.

Sometimes I get a little sad that I’m not out in Silicon Valley doing the hip startup thing, and that our little company here will probably at best provide a decent living for the principals (as opposed to headlines and filthy lucre).

But then I remember that the primary operating mode in startups is suck and only in the Bush Administration and Silicon Valley is a lengthy list of failures a positive thing.

And suddenly our boring little profitable company isn’t so bad. (If only running a successful business was a virtue in startups!)

We’re getting our iPhones tomorrow, once we work out how to have the company pay for them all (and assuming there are still 4 available in NoVA, and we can figure out a way to get 4 of them). So it’s Xmas in July, really. Like a kid I’m counting the minutes.

Tog posted a bit about the iPhone:

It really is wonderful that, in an industry rife with companies striving for mediocrity, one company is still doing things right.

But he’s committing one of the classic blunders; no, not starting a land war in Asia. He is confusing mediocrity with worse-is-better, although in practice they’re the same thing. The Zune pretty much is a non-starter vs iPod, but that gives it better survival characteristics, as it’s built on the computer virus that is Windows. As I shopped around for a new phone for my wife, I marvelled at the insipid, awful design, only to remember, “no one gives a shit”, because phones are built on the virus of fickle, non-technical consumers.

Also, I think I really need to start working on dealing with my depression. I really can’t continue to focus effectively on the physical if the mental isn’t 100%, too. I’m pretty sure my continual ennui at work is not some vague metaphysical dissatisfaction, but a pronounced downspike. Rough seas ahead; but if I can remake my body, I guess I can do the same to my brain. Right?

From http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000849.html

I believe every software developer should have basic competence in a common graphics editor.

(Emphasis his.) He’s right; I’m so doomed.

There’s a few reasons; for example, I have poor color vision. No, I’m not colorblind. The best example I can give is, “I have CGA vision in a VGA world”.  I don’t see differences in shades, particularly in poor light or without a strongly contrasting background.

(I do, however, have extremely good distance vision - I can see farther, and more accurately, and anyone I have ever met; and I am very good at detecting motion, which is sadly useless while drawing pictures.)

This explains (1) why I never wore anything colorful until I met my wife (also, black is slimming), and (2) why I’m so good with a rifle, but it hinders my artsy-fartsy skill.

For me, though, it all comes down to, programming is forgiving and graphic design is not. If I go to learn, say, Python, no one is going to laugh that my “hello world” looks dumb (all things being equal). By my stick figures never transcend to real art.

46 Million credit card numbers stolen:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The retailer that owns the T.J. Maxx and Marshall’s clothing chains said nearly 46 million customer card numbers were stolen from its computers over an 18-month period and said the total number of stolen cards may never be known.

A couple years ago, a number of our merchants - who have not in their decade of business made even 4.6 million total sales - were required to implement lots and lots of new business practices to adhere to the Payment Card Industry Security Standards, else they lose their merchant accounts.

Obviously this whole industry-wide push has yielded incredible results. I said it at the time, and I’ll say it again:

• PCI compliance is a shakedown
• Only small merchants were “targeted”, no large retailer will ever suffer the wrath of Visa/Mastercard/Amex
•  Nothing in PCI will do much to stop security problems, anyway

The entire system is a giant CYA and has nothing at all to do with genuine security. But great PR is better than real work.

Scoble made a quick comment about AppleTV, that Apple in general tries to underpromise and overdeliver.

It occurred to me that one of the chief sources of frustration I have in helping our customers is, I am rarely (if ever) even given the opportunity to underpromise/overdeliver. We have a common cycle: rather than shoot for simple, defined milestones along a critical path, they want the world out of the gate.

“We’re competing against thousands of other sites!” they say as rationale for why. “20 different competitors so something similar, so we must as well!”

My latest project is a perfect example. We have so many requirements, that when we cut-and-pasted his requirements document into the estimate, we got reamed out that we “left out a bunch of things”. Um, dude … that was your text.

I never get a chance to overdeliver, throw in extras, show off.  It’s all I can do to get it done, only a little late, and only a little over budget. It’s a perpetual death march. (See also)

ca. 1997: “Browsers will reduce Windows to an unimportant collection of slightly buggy device drivers” Marc Andreessen (attributed, source)

ca. 1998: Mozilla Foundation “spun off” from Netscape

ca. 1999: Netscape sold to AOL (source)

ca. 2007: “Hey, let’s make it, so, like, Windows is just, like, a bootloader. Or maybe even, like, boot the Linux kernel or something.” (source)

Why can’t programmers … program? has certainly been a hot topic (the followup mentions everyone tried to solve FizzBuzz in 20 bytes or less, etc).

I suck at Fizzbuzz problems, because my first response (in my brain) is always, “Why the fuck would I ever want to do that?”. I eventually get around to some “if mod foo == 0″ solution but then get all irate again: “I’ve used modulo exactly once in my life, and for a toy program to figure out when I was on call without doing a database query.”

I suppose, then, there are 2 camps. One, “You suck if you can’t come up with 20 different fizzbuzz solutions, because it proves you don’t have the programming abstraction chops to deal with real-world problems”.

The other, “You used freaky date math to not do a database query? OK I suppose you’re not an idiot.” It might technically count as one of those “innovative solutions” that FizzBuzz problems are supposed to illustrate.

I’m very bad at tests. I always have been. I’ve been quizzed in tech interviews before; the jobs I wanted were less “ok stand at the chalkboard in front of the class whiteboard and perform, monkey-boy write some code”, and more “let’s have a conversation about programming”. I get excited about questions that have real-world applications, I get frustrated at endless abstraction for the sake of it.

The FizzBuzzers are probably almost certainly right, though, in that the great majority of people that can’t solve it somehow probably can’t program for shit. I just wish they weren’t.