Blue Sky On Mars

Via Erik Thauvin’s great link blog, there’s an excellent intro to JavaHelp 2.0 on DeveloperWorks by Nancy Chen Junhua.

Software Development

After reading the press releases and initial press coverage of the Sony Librie ebook, along comes dottocomu: First look at the Sony EBR-1000 Librie eBook reader, Kakyou’s review of the unit. The short of it: great screen, crappy usability, even crappier DRM. Looks like a “wait for second generation, and its associated software hacks” sort of product.

Technology

An ever popular BSOM posting was about Super Volcanoes, and the possibility of Yellowstone erupting and eradicating life as we know it. New research apparently concludes that massive eruptions are rare, and Yellowstone does not appear to be gearing up for one. So, you can officially quit worrying about super volcanoes and go back to worrying about sudden climate change.

Random

Not much of a shocker… On the first anniversary of the iTunes Music Store, Apple posts major iTunes upgrade. A bunch of nice features in there. With our giant hard drives these days, the Apple Lossless Encoder seems like a good feature (though isn’t there a standard format for lossless encodings?) They’re now allowing you to authorize five computers for listening to your purchased music, which is pretty reasonable and might be a response to the recent activity around PlayFair and DeDRMS.

Playlists can be published on the iTunes Music Store, which seems really smart. Supposedly, many Napster users discovered new music by looking at what other people had on their machines. This serves a similar purpose.

Strangely, the article says that you can now view movie trailers in iTMS. It’s a music store! Give me music video previews or something, rather than movie trailers.

Sounds like a decent upgrade on the whole, though.

Music

I’ve been keeping an eye on the iTunes Music Store’s “Just Added” section to see if there’s anything new I’d like to buy. This week, they added somewhere between 900 and 1000 new albums, which is quite a bit more than normal. My guess is that they made a big push to hit some magic number for Apple’s iTunes conference call tomorrow. I haven’t been keeping track, but I’m sure that they want to be able to say that they have more than 500,000 songs.

Music

John O’Conner says Groovy? Are you serious?

But couldn’t it have a different name? Groovy? I wonder how many people have just overlooked it so far because of its silly name? Is it irresponsible to overlook it for that reason? Yes, most definitely. But will some of you? Come on, be honest. Doesn’t the name put you off just a little? Can serious professionals use something that sounds so silly?

This is the type of attitude I’d love to have in a competitor. Nothing like avoiding some technology because of the name. I always thought .NET was a horrendous name for an offering that Microsoft couldn’t even explain to people, and that certainly hasn’t stopped people from adopting .NET. One commenter made the point that naming a language after coffee isn’t not exceedingly serious sounding either.
I happen to think that Groovy is a good name. It’s memorable and is the top hit on Google for a not-entirely-uncommon word.

Software Development

DVD Jon has created a tool that provides fair use capabilities for owners of iTunes songs under Windows. As long as you have a legitimate key to play the song file, this tool will strip out the DRM. It leaves your username and email address in the file, which is not a problem for you as long as you’re trying to play fair.

Music

CNET launches free music downloads:

“We are the first large-scale provider to offer free music downloads in a discover-focused environment, saving music fans valuable time in finding tunes that match their tastes,” said Scot Arpajian, senior vice president of CNET Download.com.

Here is yet another avenue for unsigned artists to get some exposure. MP3.com wasn’t able to stay in business with this model, but hopefully CNET can keep this going.

Music

Though I haven’t yet watched this week’s American Idol, I got an unfortunate preview from this article: ‘American Idol’ Voting Strikes Sour Note. Once again, we see the ugly side of plurality voting (I wrote about this last year. When you have more than two candidates, just choosing your single favorite candidate does not do the job. I will say that it’s quite crazy that the three best singers, in my opinion, ended up in the bottom three… that’s unexpected even with plurality voting.

Politics

A fascinating article talking about Bob Woodward’s new book about the Bush presidency and his cabinet. The following comes in the context of Bush trying to provoke his cabinet members, without letting on that that’s what he’s doing:

President Bush: “I do not need to explain why I say things. — That’s the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

This is how he interacts with his most trusted advisors. Personally, I don’t think this is very good management style, but that’s just me. More interestingly, it seems like this is the attitude that he has toward the American public in general. I get this impression from all of the secrecy and the “trust me, I have things under control, just don’t ask me questions” sort of attitude.

Everyone works for someone. The CEO of a corporation has to answer to the board and the shareholders. The President of the United States has to answer to the laws of this country and to the voters that gave him his job.

Just as people have been clamoring for more transparency in corporations, there are a fair number of people who are calling for more transparency in government. I hope we get it this November.

Politics