Blue Sky On Mars

• What Our Top Spy Doesn’t Get: Security and Privacy Aren’t Opposites
  Schneier reframes the debate from security vs. privacy to control vs. liberty. This is another good article to point people to if they’re making the argument that we need to sacrifice our liberties for our security.
  (tags: politics privacy schneier security liberty control)
• Fluxx card game review
  Fluxx looks like an interesting game. LISPers would love it. It has only a couple of rules, but the cards add more rules.
  (tags: games)
• volity.net | Fluxx
  The Fluxx game can be played online.
  (tags: games)

• 07:12 @BryanForbes congrats! #
• 11:13 @sillyevar Rands would call you laptop larry #
• 11:32 Nokia buys Trolltech for $153 million… that and MySQL make a pretty good couple of weeks for open source business. #

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• Relax Like A Pro: 5 Steps to Hacking Your Sleep | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
  I don’t know about “ice baths”, but there are other interesting tips in Tim Ferriss’ post and the comments that follow about manipulating your sleep.
  (tags: lifehacks health sleep)
• iVideosongs: We’ll teach you how to play a complete song
  Looks like a nice site. Pay $10 and learn how to play a Rush song… from Alex Lifeson. I’ll be nice to see this expand, but it’s a cool start.
  (tags: music learning video tutorial)

• Trellis - The PEAK Developers’ Center
  I don’t think I had noticed how far this library of Philip Eby has come. Trellis lets you wire up the relationships between things (kind of like a spreadsheet knows the relationships between cells) and then have everything stay in sync automatically.
  (tags: python programming)
• Top 15 Amazing Coincidences - The List Universe
  Not sure if they’re all true (at least some are), but they’re all interesting!
  (tags: cool weird)
• Dundas Jafine | Heat Keeper Kit
  Redirect the warm, humid air from an electric dryer back into your house during the winter… seems like a good idea!
  (tags: energy)

• 14:13 hey, lookie there… premature optimization is still the root of all evil! #

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• The Dilbert Blog: The Hit Song You Wrote
  A few days back, Scott Adams talked about how many songs have complete nonsense for lyrics. He asked his loyal readers to toss forth some drivel for a song. Remarkably, the band Rivo Drei actually went and recorded it. You must check it out.
  (tags: funny music)
• YouTube - Richard Hammond presents Bloody Omaha (The Graphics)
  Amazing work recreating a battle with very few resources.
  (tags: tutorial video howto graphics design)

• Last.fm – the Blog · Free the Music
  Last.fm can now play any song and even full albums from all of the major labels.
  (tags: cool music free)
• Macworld | Creative Notes | Creative resources on the Web
  A useful collection of sites that help online creative work.
  (tags: design web)
• Rogue Amoeba - Under The Microscope
  last.fm’s new ability to stream any music you like opens up the possibility that people will record the audio stream for free rather than buying the music. Rogue Amoeba makes one such program that can do that. With all of the reasonably-priced, DRM-free m
  (tags: music lastfm)

I believe that we’re going to see some significant post-Rails server side web tools developments this year. TurboGears and Django were both never “Rails clones” because of their history and where they came from. But, all three promote a fairly similar idea of webapps are put together on the server.

Last month, AppJet provided a look at something different. It combined transparent persistence and, importantly, a seamless ability to run code on both the client and server.

A bigger deal, though, is Aptana Jaxer which has just been introduced. Jaxer runs the Mozilla engine on the server and provides a mechanism for writing the server side of webapps in the same way that you write the client side (only without the browser compatibility headaches, of course!) You can manipulate the DOM using traditional JavaScript and have the server push out the changed document to the client. Jaxer will also automatically generate client->server proxy functions or copy code from the server to the client if you have code that needs to run in both places.

I think that Jaxer and AppJet are just the beginning. I’ll definitely be writing more about how the server is changing.

Update: I just noticed that Jaxer is licensed under the GPL. That complicates things a bit, because it seems more like a library than a compiler. In other words, you can’t freely give someone a copy of your app with Jaxer and not be forced to use the GPL. I’m not certain that you could even give them a copy of your app.

• Roxer - The easiest way to make a web page
  Interesting Dojo-based UI that lets you move “boxes” of content around on the page. Very simple to use… I wish I could run this on my own server…
  (tags: web webdesign)
• Eloquent JavaScript
  Nice online book about JavaScript with an excellent UI for running examples.
  (tags: book ajax webdev free programming javascript)

MacHeist has caught some flak in the past for selling indie Mac developer wares at a price that’s too low (by some reckonings, see below). On the other hand, those developers are choosing to become part of the promotion and MacHeist raises money for charity. This go around, they’ve raised more than $320,000.

I bought the heist primarily for PixelMator and 1password, though I’ve also found that I enjoy CoverSutra. There are a lot of other apps in the $49 bundle that make it a good deal for many (Snapz Pro X!)

Update: I can’t believe I missed noticing this. The bundle now includes Vector Designer as well. That means that you get a vector drawing program (imagine Adobe Illustrator Lite) and a bitmap editor (Adobe Photoshop Lite). Plus everything else in the bundle. It really is a great deal for the buyer.

I’m mentioning the heist again here on my blog because they’ve opened up more apps and they’ve added a referral program that delivers even more cool software. So, if you’re thinking of buying the heist, time is running out… and please use my link.

Update (1/23/08): Thanks to everyone who bought the Heist through my link. I did indeed get a copy of NoteBook. I hope you enjoy the software bundle! It’s working out nicely for me so far.

Would I be a part of the Heist?

With all of that said, I think it is an interesting question: would I want software I create to be a part of something like MacHeist?

During the first Heist, Gus Mueller broke down the numbers and decided it wasn’t a good deal. I don’t think it’s so clear cut.

First of all, I think it’s better to focus business decisions on absolute measures rather than relative measures. Consider stock market investing. Many mutual funds will compare themselves to the S&P 500 (if they’re lucky enough to be beating it). Let’s say that they beat the S&P 500 by 1% over the past 3 months. That’s pretty darn good performance. Except for the fact that you just lost 10% (for the past 3 months, the S&P 500 is down 11.69%).

Yes, I know that you can’t time the market and all of that. My point is that by relative measures that mutual fund was a winner. Absolutely, though, it was a dog. You could’ve just left your money in a mattress.

So, for a second let’s remove the relative earnings of the MacHeist guys from the equation.

Users cost money in terms of support, but have the potential to bring in word-of-mouth (or word-of-blog) advertising. A micro ISV could get absolutely swamped by a sudden influx of thousands of new users, unless their product was absolutely rock solid, super easy to use and/or had a good, active set of forums to which people could turn for support.

The reason to go for a MacHeist would be the advertising you get from the heist itself, word-of-mouth from people who buy the heist, and upgrade revenue later on. All of that comes at a cost of lower (tiny, even) initial sale revenue and a likely deluge of support work.

If I was just getting a cool, but little known product off the ground (PixelMator?), it may very well be worthwhile. If I had a major upgrade coming in a few months (Notebook?), then I might be a participant. Acquiring users for the sake of having users is a bad goal. But, getting a product off the ground or building up a reasonable expectation of upgrade revenue is a good goal.

As for the MacHeist share of the pie: I’d focus first on whether my needs in the deal are getting met. Once that’s true, then I’d try to push for what I think is a fair balance between my share and that of MacHeist. But, that is definitely a secondary concern. If MacHeist is providing the best avenue for meeting my business needs, it’s worth the cost. Companies pay $1 million+ for a 30 second spot during the Super Bowl, because they feel that it fits their business needs. The same goes for a marketing opportunity like MacHeist.

That was the long answer. The short answer to whether I would participate in such a promotion is likely “no”, because the cost is too great. Only under the fairly limited set of circumstances above (new unknown product or coming upgrades) would I consider it.