Blue Sky On Mars

Chris DiBona had an idea for reloading Python modules properly. It looks like the PyUnit folks have come up with an even more robust solution. The ability to reload is pretty useful in an environment as dynamic as Python.

Lore Sjöberg throws a volley into the argument about micropayments, though his article is not strictly about micropayments. It’s more about the notion that if people want to make money from their content, they should just plain start charging for it. While Lore talks about using PayPal to charge a buck today for content, he doesn’t really talk about the fact that many people may be more inclined to pay a smaller amount for a discrete piece of content.

Not everyone produces as much content as an issue of The Economist in a given month, so charging the same amount for an online publication doesn’t necessarily make sense. People might not want to pay $12 for an annual subscription to Scott McCloud’s work, or even pay $1 for a month. They might want to pay a quarter for a specific Scott McCloud comic, however.

I think the same thing goes for music. Online music services were unsuccessful until iTunes Music Service (ITMS) came along. Partly because the earlier services sucked, and partly because ITMS lets people buy (with permanent ownership) songs for a more reasonable price… rather than subscribing to play-on-demand sorts of services.

This article does a good job of driving the point home that charging people for your work will fix many problems of the web, even if it does shrink your “audience”. I think it glosses over the issues that still remain with charging people, and I’m happy that folks like Scott McCloud are trying out new ways of ChargingPeople.

This is a first. Seagate is shipping hard drives with the Lindows operating system preinstalled. Just drop the hard drive in your machine, and the OS will configure itself. This is really clever marketing on the part of Lindows, who are trying to make their money by selling update services.

It will be a miracle if the recording industry survives the PR fiasco they’re creating for themselves. The latest is that the RIAA filed a lawsuit against a woman who was clearly not a file trader:

But [defendant Sarah] Ward, 66, is a “computer neophyte” who never installed file-sharing software, let alone downloaded hard-core rap about baggy jeans and gold teeth, according to letters sent to the recording industry’s agents by her lawyer, Jeffrey Beeler.

Other defendants have blamed their children for using file-sharing software, but Ward has no children living with her, Beeler said.

Moreover, Ward uses a Macintosh computer at home. Kazaa runs only on Windows-based personal computers.

Crysania had her 2 month doctor’s visit today. She’s officially up to 9 pounds, 4.5 ounces. She had her first set of shots today, and did great with the shots. I’ve heard that babies tend to get cranky for a day after the shots. Hopefully, she’ll have a good day.

The Ann Arbor News has an article about Erica Knopper, who died on Monday. She had been in a coma for 10 days after being struck by a car. Surekha worked with her husband, Mark, and I had met her once or twice. The Knoppers are very nice people, and this is a real tragedy.
Update: Mark has sent the link for information on Erica Knopper’s Origami Peace Foundation, and Erica’s origami pictures.

TheServerSide has a thread regarding the use of checked and unchecked exceptions, in response to an Artima interview with James Gosling. This is a good read. CompSci always boils down to the tradeoffs you make, and it’s good to conciously decide how you’re going to handle something.

Maggie Biggs writes in InfoWorld: Code editors renew approach to IDEs that many people are finding that they are more productive with standalone editors (vim, Emacs) than IDEs. Of course, Emacs with all of the Java tools incorporated could readily be considered an IDE.

My opinion is that using a “standard” text editor in conjunction with ant is less productive than an IDE (again, including tricked out Emacs in the IDE camp). Particularly in a statically-typed, verbose language like Java, having code completion and useful inter-class navigation features is a huge win. Having an integrated JUnit view (red bar/green bar) makes test driven development very zippy.

From the article:

Some IDEs are taking this to heart; more open IDEs, such as Eclipse, are beginning to implement a flexible development approach by offering one or more editors and pluggable modules within the IDE.

“Beginning to”? Eclipse is built from the ground up as a flexible tools platform, and I would venture to say that it’s every bit as flexible as Emacs. Only it’s written in Java, so extending Eclipse is probably a bit more accessible to many of its users. Starting with 3.0, there will be an increase in the number of standalone apps built on top of Eclipse, and that will show just how flexible it is.

One positive note about the article: it ends with a recommendation to give developers some control over the development tools they use. I definitely agree with this. There is value, particularly in XP shops, in using the same tools… but just as important as standardization is the need to experiment and try new things out.

Chris Nokleberg reports on new classes in CGLIB that do reflection twice as fast as Java 1.4, using a similar API. This could be a big win for scripting languages which use reflection extensively.

StreamRipper32 saves MP3 audio streams directly to MP3 files.