Gemstar exiting the ebook business

Here’s one from the “Saw it coming since the day they got in the business” department: Gemstar has an announcement on their front page saying they they are exiting the business. They say

for at least the next three years, users will be able to continue to
use their eBook devices and content under the same arrangements as they
do today.
We will also continue to provide the newly released Personal Content
feature available through the web bookstore
(http://www.gemstar-ebook.com and then click Personal Content) at least
through July 16, 2006.

Yowza. When Gemstart bought the Rocket eBook line from NuvoMedia, I was still working in the publishing division at Intertrust and thus was kind of in this space and paying attention. At the time, NM had something like 50,000 customers, all of whom were fanatic lovers of the platform. It was easy to see why, because it was a good product. We had one in the office for competitive reconnaissance, and everyone that used it liked it. People would put design docs and test plans on it, and review it on the bus or train to and from home. Everyone liked the Rocket

Enter Gemstar. When they bought the line, one of the first things they did was shut down the community aspects, like the newsserver and fora that existed. Then they closed the box so that you couldn’t put your own docs on the devices, or if you did you had to go through them. In every way, they acted like bulls in china shops that completely misunderstood the value of what they had purchased. If anything, my only surprise is that this action was so long in coming. I knew from the first week after they purchased Nuvo that Gemstar wouldn’t make it in this business. I only fear that this will be interpreted as one of those “look, you can’t make a business out of ebooks” stories. Instead, it should be interpreted as one of those “understand what you are buying and pull your head out of your ass or else you will end up subtracting value and ultimately killing this successful business you acquired.”

Fun with Blapp

I don’t know if I missed it in the docs or what, but by accident I ran across this “Post to Blapp” thing in my services menu in all my OS X apps. I was listening to something in iTunes when I saw it. Out of curiousity I tried it, and Blapp opened up with the info for my currently playing song. Interesting, so I opened up one of my RSS aggregated articles from nntp//rss and tried it. The options was grayed out, so I selected some text and voila! There it was. When I hit it, (which I can also do via command-shift-B) blapp opened up with the text of the article already in the edit window. I believe this is all I need to make the decision to go with the NNTP//RSS and Blapp combo over using NetNewsWire.

Spanish Lessons

I made the decision to get a little more serious about learning Spanish. I had checked out a 4 CD language lesson set, which is good for some stuff. However, to challenge my listening comprehension with my very limited vocabularly, I have taken to watching short spurts of Mexican soap operas. Those are good, because you always have a lot of context. You can tell at a glance who is good, who is bad, and what is going on. This evening by accident I realized that if I turn on the closed captioning, I can read along! That makes it much easier to deal with, and facilitates looking up the words I don’t know (which is most of them.) I’m not under any illusions that I’m going to catch more than a fraction of anything. I’m going for immersion and then fighting my way to the surface. It’s much more fun this way than the rote tourist phrases on the tapes.

POPFile 0.19.0 is out

So I wrote about spam the other day. POPFile is one of the core tools in my personal spam fighting toolbelt. I use it in a chain of spam fighting tools, where SpamAssassin has a rule that scores mail higher if POPFile has scored it spam. Really and truly, though, I could use just POPFile by itself and it would be plenty sufficient. After training it for a few days, it has > 98% accuracy, and this includes not just a spam/nonspam distinction but filtering into 12 buckets, only one of which is spam.

Version 0.19.0 is now out and available for download. I highly recomend it.

The Flag as Graven Image

Andrew Reding writes a commentary that the flag-burning ammendment which has passed the house violates the First Ammendment, and the First and Second Commandments. An excerpt:

The First Amendment was adopted to prevent the government from limiting dissent in any way. It is inherently anti-idolatrous. As Gen. Colin Powell wrote to Sen. Patrick Leahy in 1999,

“The First Amendment exists to insure that freedom of speech and expression applies not just to that with which we agree or disagree, but also that with which we find outrageous. I would not amend that great shield of democracy to hammer a few miscreants. The flag will still be flying proudly long after they have slunk away.”

Should the amendment be passed by the Senate and then ratified, it would for the first time incorporate religious language into the Constitution. The great irony is that it would do so to venerate a secular object — the symbol of an often exemplary but still fallible nation-state — violating the most fundamental tenets of the three primary religious faiths of the American people.

Keeping Spaces

Rather than watch Trading Spaces last night, we lived it. Well, we were in our own house but we were painting ceilings. I truly hate doing this sort of thing, but we are done now and all the ceilings in the front part of the house look great. The house is much less dingy and more cheery. While the furniture is out of place, i’m running the Roomba in the family room. We swept it before putting down the dropcloths, but I’m sure the Roomba’s bin will be full anyway. I really dig this little robot. I’m exhausted, but somewhat done now.

Cures worse than the disease

Over on SFF.net in one of the tech help groups they are discussing the sff.net spam filters. The discussion reminded me all over again why I’m glad I stopped using any of their filters and chose to do it all myself, via SpamAssassin, Razor, Popfile, CRM114, et al. I love SFF.net, and they are great guys who run a great system. However, their spam stance is unacceptable to me. I would rather delete 1000 spams than miss a mission critical e-mail. When I hear some of the choices they make, it makes me shudder.

Because I use it for training Bayesian filter, I have a corpus of all my spam since last November, as well as snapshots of non-spam taken regularly over that time (but not comprehensive.) They mentioned in this discussion they block all mail from Topica. I checked my spam corpus and in over 6000 spams I had 22 from topica. Meanwhile, in my corpus of 2200 righteous e-mail that I have, there are 46 from Topica. For me, a Topica e-mail is at least 6 times more likely to be legitimate. This is but one of many heuristics they use that just are too nonspecific for my taste. True, spam is a huge problem for them, but their particular solution is in my view worse than the problem. That’s why I’ve been handling it on my own and been much happier for it.

Doing the Unthinkable

Yes it’s true, I am getting rid of even more books. When we moved from Portland back to Atlanta, I got rid of hundreds of pounds of them, mostly freebies from the radio show days. I culled more a few months ago for the yard sale, another hundred or so pounds, 6 good sizes boxes of them. Now I’m getting rid of even more. I’m just in one of those moods, depressed and unsatisfied with the mess I make of things, that I want to simplify. Also, the realization that of the thousands of books I have in the house, the last ten books I read included none of them. They were all either electronic books I read on my Handspring or things I checked out from the library. Is there really any reason to warehouse all these things? I’m cutting ever deeper. On the last pass, the standard was “If I had one year to read one book every day, would this be one of the ones that gets read?” If yes, I kept it. If maybe, I kept it. If no, it was gone. Now, if the answer is not yes, it is gone. In fact, if it is in the latter part of the year, it might be gone anyway. The standard now is “How hard would this be to read later if I don’t keep it?” A comon book that any library might have, I don’t need to have. I’m keeping my copy of Buckminster Fuller’s Synergetics and other oddball things. If it is of sentimental value that is one thing, but ordinary books are on the chopping block. I’m a packrat and I never feel like this, so while I do I must purge!

Now I understand

I see in my refer logs that a number of people come here by searching for “evil genius game”. Now I know why, as there is a computer game by that name in development (close enough to release for demos to be reviewed at Game Spy. It actually looks fun. Of course, for what five years now, I’ve had the game Before I Kill You Mr. Bond from CheapAss Games (apparently no longer sold due to threats from the Bond rights holders – glad I have a copy.)

I love OS X

I was fooling around with the launchbar on my Mac OS X box, and I wanted some of the things gone and I wanted Mozilla and a few other things in the launch bar. I brought up the preferences and couldn’t see a way to specify what I wanted, the way one does for the Start menu on Windows. On a wild hair, I just dragged the Mozilla icon over the bar and let go. Blip, a little animated graphic zips in there and now it is there forever. Hmm, says I, I wonder if I can do the same to get rid of them? I grabbed the IE icon, pulled it away and out into the main part of the desktop, where it moved, and then vanished in a literal puff of smoke. I thought that was so spiffy that I deleted a bunch of stuff just to watch it. I’m developing faith in this OS that there is always an easy way to do things. Most of the time when I find there isn’t, I’m just overthinking. Years of Windows and having to constantly fight it to get ones work done ingrains bad habits. OS X enables better ones. Long live OS X!

Hackers and Painters

The ever reliable Paul Graham has an essay (originally a speech) comparing Hackers to Painters. Interesting reading, as Graham always has. My favorite bit:

Only a small percentage of hackers can actually design software, and it’s hard for the people running a company to pick these out. So instead of entrusting the future of the software to one brilliant hacker, most companies set things up so that it is designed by committee, and the hackers merely implement the design.

If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don’t win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.

This is just a side point of his larger and very interesting talk, but it is one near and dear to my heart. I’m conflicted, because I believe it is entirely possible for a development group to have their shit together, to be organized and clicking, and to deliver without letting the bureacracy and process stifle the results. I know, I’ve done it. In the case of me and my team, it helped that we were isolated physically from the company headquarters, and on a product path off the main line of the company. That enabled us the breathing room to do something fantastic, and later on resulted in all of us getting laid off when the main company had no idea what to do with the stuff we built them. You live by the sword, you die by the sword I guess. Anyway, read the whole talk. It is great and it helps pump me up for both the rigorous and the woo-woo creative part of what I do.

Can’t say I’m sad to see it go

Microsoft has announced there will be no more Internet Explorer versions for Macintosh. I do everything I can to avoid using it anyway, so it doesn’t much affect me. However, I would like someone to explain this quote to me:

Sommer said that, with the emergence of Apple’s Safari browser, Microsoft felt that customers were better served by using Apple’s browser, noting that Microsoft does not have the access to the Macintosh operating system that it would need to compete.

Why exactly does MS need access to the OS in order to compete? Mozilla doesn’t, and I think Firebird is better than Safari.

Howard Dean Weblog

The Dean 2004 presidential campaign has a weblog. It makes for interesting reading, being able to see into the workings of a campaign like this. My small yet exhausting efforts for the Max Cleland senatorial campaign left me with great respect for the people who can pull these things off.

Death Marches

I found myself googling for Fred Brooks earlier today (after fellow blosxom blogger Charlie Stross called him “Ted Brooks” and I was making sure I wasn’t crazy in correcting him). That googling led me to Ed Yourdon’s site, a developer, consultant and speaker on software issues of whom I had previously never heard. On one page he was discussing Brooks’ Mythical Man-Month, which is the one I found. By browsing around the site, I got interested in Ed Yourdon’s stuff. One very interesting looking book is his Death March which he is updating and has portions online. It is all about those kinds of projects which are familiar to some of us, the kind where the esimation process was done poorly or not at all and now the deadline must be met even though it is unrealistic. When the only way to achieve the goal is for everyone to work 100 hours a week, you are in a death march. For extra SFnal dorkiness, he opens his introduction with a quote from Jubal Harshaw, in Heinlein’s To Sail Beyond the Sunset. He appears to be a true blue SF fan. I’ll be reading his working chapters over the next few days.

Too Much Free Time

On Electrolite, PNH quotes Arthur Hlavaty on the subject of well-roundedness and “too much free time” as being used to describe those who accomplish things. (I wanted to link directly to AH’s quote, but I can’t find it on his weblog – maybe this was an e-mail or something?) I agree with what both gentlemen say. I got the same kind of crap about reading lots of books that is getting discussed in the comments section of EL, and I currently get the “too much time” business about things like my georging of nearly 5000 bills. In point of fact, I don’t have too much “free time”. What I do have is what they called when I was doing behavioral interviewing for Intel “Commitment to Task.” That means I’m willing to do things a little at a time over long periods without getting washed away by the fact that its a large job that may never get finished. When Java’s Swing was new, I printed out the entirety of the javadocs for it at work, all 1500 pages. I did it one class at a time, staying off radar, over the course of 6 weeks. That’s how I georged all those bills. I doubt I have ever spent more than 15 minutes in one day on it ever. Typically, I do a few bills a day, for less than 3 minutes total time. When I look back at the WREK automation system, I get amazed at how much stuff there is there and wonder how I had the time until I think about how I did it in 30 and 60 and 90 minute chunks over the course of 18 months. The “you’ve got too much free time” meme is the kind of thing said by the unimaginative and impatient who can’t comprehend any other way of existence. Along with “get a life”, it has become a phrase of so little meaning that it gets piped to /dev/null in my ears as I hear it.