Blue Sky On Mars

In two days, I’ll mark four years as a blogger Seems like a good time to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a few months now: switch to WordPress. There are a few little things that have been irritating me about MT. Those were quite possibly fixed by MT 3.1, but I wanted to head over to where a lot of the action was.

I’ve decided to go ahead and put things in place so that the WP blog is now in control. Next up: getting redirects in place for all of the old content, making sure the feeds are working right.

Sometime soon, I’d like to move away from the default WordPress template. I don’t have time to deal with that right now, however.

Podcasting has received a lot of attention. I don’t think I’ve written a single word about it to date, despite being a longtime reader of Dave Winer and a creator of a news aggregator. The reason I haven’t written anything to date is that it’s not something I’m really jumping up and down about. There are many other things going on in internet audio that are more compelling: the move to subscription services, heinous DRM — and when consumers will finally revolt against it, the ongoing availability of AllOfMP3.com.

And now, I don’t have to write my thoughts about podcasting, because Seth Godin has summed it up perfectly. Podcasting doesn’t work as well as blogs for reaching a broad audience or sustainable. Check out Seth’s further thoughts as well.

In order for podcasting to work, it needs to provide an experience similar to what I get with blogs: it needs to be searchable, and it needs to be indexed. There are some blogs that I subscribe to, but there are many, many blogs that I read via searches and such. Usually, I’m interested in one topic, not an entire 1 hour show worth. I need to be able to do a textual search that links me directly to a ~1 minute space around the topic I’m interested in. Give me that, and podcasting may work.

Even with that, however, it’s not a certainty. The segment that talks about the topic I’m interested in may be 10 minutes long. With a blog article, I can scan for the specific item of interest. This is a lot harder to do with an audio file. Like I said, there’s a serious UI challenge to overcome before podcasting really works as well as a blog.

I had, until very recently, been aiming for releasing the first alpha release of Zesty News Lite on May 31st. I do believe in “release early, release often” as a way to make great progress on a project, even a closed-source one. However, I also believe in not wasting the time of the people testing my product. That means balancing the desire to get features out there with a bit of stability.

The point of the alpha release of Zesty News is to get the foundation out there, showing off the basic concepts, and then build features based on my plan and feedback I get. The foundation should be solid, so that I can react fairly quickly without spending too much time retooling.

A couple of days ago, I decided that I needed to do some retooling to handle concurrency better. Though I could have done this work between the alpha and beta releases, I decided that it’s a better idea to get this done before I release at all. There are other benefits to this change, as well: my code will be easier to test and more code will be covered by automated tests as a result, the distributed package has shrunk by about 10%, and programming for the web interfaces will be easier going forward.

When I’m done with the change, I’ll write more technical details about it.

Odds are that this change will take about a week, which is not too bad. After that week is over, I’ll spend the following week or so working on what I had originally planned to do this week and ongoing testing of the big change I’m making now.

Three months (almost to the day) after she stood independently for the first time, Crysania started walking without support yesterday! She seemed thrilled about it, and so were we!

For anyone else out there with an “early talker, late walker”, don’t give up hope! As long as your child makes forward progress small bits at a time, it’ll all work out. It’s actually a blessing to have a child that can communicate well verbally and isn’t running around getting into everything.

There’s the old question “if a tree falls and no one hears it, did it make a noise?” Just as goofy: “if you improve the performance of an unreleased application, did it actually get faster?”

I’m definitely in the “premature optimization is the root of all evil” camp, but the time has come for some performance work on Zesty News. I currently have well over 1,000 unread items, and it takes a few seconds to bring up the main view. Fixing this does make the code more complex, which is why I’m glad I didn’t do it prematurely But, now is the time. So, I’ll see the performance difference. Zesty’s alpha testers won’t even be aware that it used to take a few seconds. (And that’s the way it should be.)

Dare Obasanjo and Dave Winer are both talking about the problem with Outlook-style (3-pane) aggregators. I believe that Dave is generally right about the River of News: clicking on each feed and then clicking on each item is a drag. Thankfully, most aggregators seem to have moved past this. Even the built-in aggregator in Safari lets you view all of your feeds together.

And yet, even though the aggregators offer other views that are more River of News-like, that’s not the default view. Imagine for a moment a newspaper that had a front page like this:

The Daily Press Gazette Morning News

• Stories by DPGMN reports — page A2
• Associated Press stories — page A3
• UPI stories — page A4
• Stock information from Bloomberg — page B1
• Comics from King Features — page C1
• Comics from Joe Random Syndicator — page C2

So, you flip to page A2. And you see this:

• Area man charged in robbery — page A9
• Girl sells “best cookies in town” — page A10

This is essentially the presentation you’re getting in an Outlook-style aggregator. Granted, it’s quicker to click something on the screen than flip a page, but you get my point. Readers are more interested in the story itself than they are in the source of the story. Sure, the source of the story makes a difference in credibility and likelihood that the story is something interesting to you, but driving the user experience based on the source just seems wrong.

When I went to his conference last year, Edward Tufte talked about quality newspapers have been doing their thing for 100 years and more. Though the internet certainly changes things, that doesn’t mean that the lessons of the print papers are invalid.

After that, you won’t be surprised to hear that Zesty News is a River of News-syle aggregator. My early mockups were very newspaper-like: multiple columns, bigger headlines for bigger stories, etc. After some experience using the software that way, though, I realized that software has a big advantage over a print newspaper: unlimited space. Print newspapers use the format they do partly for readability and compactness. When moving to feeds on the screen, however, multiple columns are a lot harder to scan through than a single column.

I can prove it, too. Go to Google News and first scan down the column on the left, looking at the headlines as you go. Then, go back up and try to scan both columns. With a single column, your eyes can move just a little bit to read the text. With two columns, your eyes have to dart left and right to scan. It may be a better workout for your eyes, but it’s not an easy way to get through a couple hundred items in a day.

I’ve got more to say about getting through those couple hundred items, but I’ll save that for another day.

Today, the boss let me sneak out and see Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I saw a 1:30PM show and it was busy, but certainly not crazy. There were a couple people with lightsabers and robes, but that was about as nuts as it gets on a Thursday afternoon in Michigan.

Short form review: I thought the movie was excellent. Yes, Lucas is not a good writer and, yes, the acting can be a bit stiff at times. But, the story of how Anakin becomes Vader was much more credible than I expected. The movie was plotted, paced and shot very well. All-in-all, Episode III did deliver on all of that exposition from the first two movies and makes Star Wars a fairly seamless 6 parter.

Spoiler that you don’t care about alert.

Jar Jar Binks does not die in this movie. Though he’s basically one of the good guys (despite the fact that he basically created the Empire in Episode II when he moved to grant special powers to Palpatine), he’s not a Jedi and so he survives. Alas, you can’t have everything.

I finally got everything set up yesterday and installed Tiger. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to move my 10.3 installation to an external drive, so that I can continue to use that to make Panther builds of Zesty News. CCC is very easy and did the job with just a couple of clicks. The only trouble I had with it was that a bunch of my folders were owned by root in the clone. Once I chowned them, all was well.

The Tiger install was painless. RSS in Safari is nicely done, I don’t hate the new Mail interface as much as many people (I’ve even decided to switch from Thunderbird to Mail to try out the Spotlight integration), and Dashboard is nice. Overall, a good upgrade and I’m looking forward to seeing what new apps people come up with to take advantage of Core Data and other under the hood features.

I’m impressed by Apple ripping apart the old, long-entrenched initd and crond and putting launchd in their place. That was very good thinking, and Tiger definitely boots faster as a result. Not that I boot much, but it’s still nice when I do need to boot.

Waiting a couple of weeks to install also gave me the benefit of not being totally out on the bleeding edge. 10.4.1 was already waiting in Software Update when it fired up.

By the way, thanks to the couple of people out there who bought Tiger via one of my Amazon links.

I love cats as much as the next guy, but a new cat picture posted on a blog is not a good reason to interrupt my current train of thought. Right now, I’m writing this little article. If a box popped up saying “3 new blog postings” or “SomeSite: Here’s my cat”, that would derail this sentence as I’m writing it and take a few seconds to shift back and forth between the trains of thought.

Most feed reading programs have taken many cues from email programs, and that includes some kind of popup that shows you that new items have arrived. Is it really that important to see the items right now? Unnecessary distractions can weigh down your productivity.

I prefer to conciously decide “I’m going to take a look and see what’s going on in the world”, and then actively open up my news program. I don’t have popup notification on my mail program, because even email can wait a little while.

For this reason, Zesty News doesn’t have a new item notification feature yet. It just hasn’t been a priority for me. if people start asking, I’ll certainly add a notification feature.

I’d be curious to hear from others who do use the popup notification feature from other newsreaders.

It’s getting to be time to rebalance the finances. Much of my thinking of the current state of the economy and the stock market echoes what you see in John Mauldin’s excellent Bull’s Eye Investing. (Do be sure to check out John’s free newsletter, as he dispenses useful and timely thoughts every week). The short of it:

• Stocks are richly priced and are not going to provide decent returns for the next few years. Don’t believe me? Take a look at how good the returns for the major indexes have been over the past 5 years. (Hint: it’s close to zero.) For the full story on this, read Mauldin’s book. He goes into almost excruciating detail.

• There are still stocks out there that are good values. The Motley Fool does a decent job finding them.

• The trade deficit, though it declined in the most recent month, is huge. Couple this with a government that’s borrowing money like a teenager with their first credit card, and you’ve got a recipe for a falling dollar. Already, the dollar has taken a huge tumble against other currencies. I wish I had acted on this sooner, but it wouldn’t seem that the dollar is done falling yet. As Mauldin has mentioned in recent newsletters, Asian governments are buying up dollars to hold up their business in exports to the US. If they stop, the dollar will plunge. If you don’t believe me that the trade deficit and the budget deficit are a problem, listen to Mauldin or Warren Buffett and Charles Munger. Those guys know what they’re talking about.

• Interest rates are on the rise.

This is some scary stuff. So, I’m going to look into some good sources for safe returns. I’ll also mention one that’s a bit less safe, but interesting nonetheless.

I’m not a lawyer, financial planner, CPA, gardener, bartender or anyone else qualified to give professional financial advice. You’ll have to figure out for yourself what you want to do with your money, but I’ve got some good links here to share.

First stop, Bankrate.com, where you can get a quick snapshot of interest rates. They’re listing five banks offering 3.9-4.0% APY on a 1 year CD. That’s a big boost over the rates of a year ago. 6 month CDs can be found with 3.5-3.68% APY.

Want something more liquid than that? How about an Emigrant Direct “American Dream” Savings Account? 3.25% APY, and it’s “linked” to your existing checking account. This is an FDIC-insured bank account from a real bank with $10 billion in assets.

With inflation on the rise, Series I Bonds are a good deal. In fact, these have had some of the best returns for completely safe investments. Currently, they are paying 4.8% (1.2% fixed + the inflation rate). You have to hold the bond for a year, and you pay 3 months interest as a penalty if you cash it in before five years is up. When CDs were paying 1.5%, these guys were paying 2.2%.

These rates of return may not sound all that great. But, if the stock market has another five years like the previous five, you’ll be better off putting your money into one of these guaranteed investments. Of course, I don’t advocate putting all of one’s money in “safe” investments, but that’s what I happened to be looking at right now and figured I’d pass along what I find.

Now we come to the promised “less safe” option. Actually, if you believe that the dollar is going to fall, this is more safe. You see, earning 3.25% in a money market is great. But, if the dollar is falling against other currencies, we’ll likely see inflation increasing and our buying power drop. This is what makes EverBank interesting.

EverBank offers FDIC insured accounts like other banks, so you don’t need to worry about that aspect. On the surface, their site lists a 2.76% APY money market. At 0.5% less than Emigrant, that’s not interesting. Take a look on the right hand side of the page, and you’ll notice “World Currency” rates. That’s what makes EverBank interesting.

These folks let you open up savings accounts and CDs in other currencies. Let’s say you think the dollar is going to fall against the euro. You could open an account with a European bank, and then deal with all of the extra paperwork that holders of foreign accounts have to deal with. Or, you could just open an account with EverBank, a US bank that makes it easy to deal in foreign currencies.

When you look at EverBank’s rates, keep in mind that shifts in foreign exchange rates alter what the net rate is to you. If the dollar drops 15% against the euro, and you’ve got your account in euros, you’ve just made 15%! That’s why it’s a bit riskier a proposition: you’re gambling on foreign exchange rates. When you invest in one of the other places I described above, at least you know your principal is safe and that you’re getting a guaranteed rate.

For stock tips, you should probably go to the Fool. You could also pay attention to the investment spam messages that show up, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Then again, it doesn’t matter what I’d recommend, because I’m not a professional