Disqus - Friends of ariannetessa

Re: Why Facebook is kind of screwed, and why Twitter is (already) the Next Hot Thing, and What Can Facebook do?

Jesse Emery — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:17:05 -0000

Here's another thing, it's really difficult on FB to stumble onto conversations with anyone who isn't a a "friend". On Twitter, that sort of thing happens all the time.

Re: Is A Case Of Quant Trading Industrial Sabotage About To Destroy Goldman Sachs?

Jesse Emery — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:14:54 -0000

That's the first thing on the internet that made me laugh out loud this week... RoR in GS trading apps.

Re: Why Facebook is kind of screwed, and why Twitter is (already) the Next Hot Thing, and What Can Facebook do?

Jesse Emery — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:46:22 -0000

You might want to checkout Jason Kincaid's followup to FB's privacy conference call:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2...

Re: Framework + Language Attention Deficit Disorder

Jesse Emery — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:48:11 -0000

I do. But you knew that. I'm starting on Scala as soon as have a few hours to focus on it.

Re: Framework + Language Attention Deficit Disorder

Jesse Emery — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:29:26 -0000

btw... FLADD, the first ever nickonymism

Re: Broken Wordpress Admin

Jesse Emery — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:30:18 -0000

It seems to me that if you have themes or plugins that do anything with WP comments then behavior start getting strange in the admin. I have a theme where the options page doesn't show at all and a plugin that isn't configurable. I've only poked around the code for a short while so far.

Re: Qi4j

Jesse Emery — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:59:47 -0000

test

Re: Idea Giveaway: How to Kill the Kindle in 4 Easy Steps, No New eReader Required

Jesse Emery — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:43:36 -0000

Thank you. Great point about book loans, I totally forgot about that. And yes, there's no reason why this idea couldn't be partnered with goodreads. Although, I really think it's most powerful as being partnered with anyone.

Re: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission: SF Dystopian Disasters Set to Come True

Jesse Emery — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:06:00 -0000

Barney Frank went on Maddow and seems optimistic that legislation can be passed curbing corporate campaign spending in other ways. I hope he's right.

Re: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission: SF Dystopian Disasters Set to Come True

Jesse Emery — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:08:49 -0000

Oh, nice catch on the irony front.

Re: How Little You Really Know

Jesse Emery — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:01:59 -0000

Did you have a chance to see any of Nielsen's "avoid voodoo usability" talks in the late 90s/early 2000s? He tried to make a really similar point by first complimenting the audience for being smart and knowledgeable and then pointing out that every time they try to be clever they are asking their users to be MORE knowledgeable about computers than they are. I'm probably butchering the paraphrasing but it was over a decade ago that I saw the talk. I can't find any videos or transcripts :(

Re: Python 2.5 distutils, snow leopard and xcode making gcc happy

Jesse Emery — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:47:15 -0000

Glad it was helpful!

Re: The Ass-Backwardness of Our Technology, Copyright Laws and Privacy

Jesse Emery — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 14:07:28 -0000

I'm not wholly convinced that they are legally bound to do so. The examples of companies not pursuing copyright or not enforcing a patent don't get nearly as much press, but they certainly occur (The Oracle/Google Android case is all about a patent that Sun never pursued). Also, some companies are doing a fantastic job of giving copyrighted product away as a mode of building other revenue streams. Facebook, IBM, Red Hat, Rackspace, id Software are all examples of companies that contribute to free of charge, open source software.

The issue is that the entertainment industry - and let's be honest, this goes way beyond RIAA and music, "Foxing" is a word that came out of silly copyright enforcement - has had a broken business model for a very, very long time. The transport of the "information" in a book, a song or a film was bound up in physical transport until the Internet came along. These companies were never, no matter how much they yell and scream otherwise, in the copyright or intellectual property business. They were always in the content delivery business, it's just that no one called it that and they use law to monopolize the delivery of particular content.

Well, then the we started digitizing content and then the Internet came along and guess what? Books and CDs and DVDs SUCK as content delivery systems. They're inefficient, require shipping and materials, etc.

If Napster, iTunes and the Kindle have shown anything, it's that there is quite a lot of money to be made in better, easier-to-use, instant-gratification-full content delivery. Now, the licensing and revenue apportionment involved is a huge mess at the moment because we have not only laws, but these huge, old systems and ways of doing things that just don't make any sense anymore.

If you really want to get to the heart of the matter with some of this panicked litigation business model stuff, the real issue is that we now know it's actually possible to ID copyrighted material without any kind of DRM or tagging. That means you can figure out how to pay (or at least enforce credit) the copyright holder regardless of the delivery system.

Anyway, that's kind of a big digression from the point of this post, which was really to bring to light much better individuals are understanding and making use of "their content" in the era of the internet, despite having far fewer resource and tools to protect themselves.

Re: LAUNCH - Blog - LAUNCH002: What I learned from Zuckerberg's Mistakes

Jesse Emery — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 15:52:09 -0000

There's another edge to this sword, which is that the FB App ecosphere has been insanely unstable. I don't just mean in terms of "is the API up?" I mean features get discontinued and introduced with little or no warning, example code is almost by nature so out of date that it doesn't work (the documentation is worse) and the platform has become the most dreaded social integration for almost every developer I know.

I think giving developers the power and responsibility to make decisions and push new code out is great and even essential. However, FB is an extreme. I think this practice has to be balanced with some covenants (or a similar concept), like "Thou shalt not change the login API URL" or "Thou shalt not ever, upon pain of having to read it aloud on YouTube, use XML", "Thou shalt not store plain passwords" etc. Or, to be more particular to FB, something I think would help them: "Thou shalt not rollout a feature without privacy settings".

That doesn't mean you have to institute crazy processes to control everything, its just more about having smart sanity checks.

Re: LAUNCH - Blog - LAUNCH002: What I learned from Zuckerberg's Mistakes

Jesse Emery — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:30:24 -0000

Ha, illustrating the dangers of this approach - Facebook is just a blank page at the moment.

(Note: I still believe in empowering devs, it's just amusing)

Re: LAUNCH - Blog - LAUNCH002: What I learned from Zuckerberg's Mistakes

Jesse Emery — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:00:48 -0000

I just had another brainfart. If Facebook goes public and run's their IR website in this manner then they are going to rack up a lot of fines.

Re: Beck’s double standards aren’t just imagery or historical

Jesse Emery — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:14:17 -0000

That part bugged me too, but wasn't the point of my post and honestly, I don't want to spend my time analyzing Glenn Beck's every word (and http://www.stopbeck.com does a great job anyway).

Having said that, I actually interpreted it differently than you. I interpreted the other side - "that all the Indians wanted violent uprising", "that all the Christians wanted violence" (against the Romans?) and that "blacks wanted violence to overturn segregation."

Re: Mime-type is really important to set for HTML5 video in Rackspace Cloudfiles

Jesse Emery — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 14:13:04 -0000

Glad to help!

Re: Hammurabi was the first programmer

Jesse Emery — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:51:51 -0000

Incidentally, my tiny code snippet is pretty easy to read. Hammurabi's code, not so much...

http://eawc.evansville.edu/...

Re: 7 Things Ive Learned at South by Southwest This Year

Jesse Emery — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 01:23:22 -0000

11. Everyone in the tech world hates Facebook, even Facebook employees.

Re: An Open Letter to SXSW: 10 Ways to Ensure The Conference Stays Great

Jesse Emery — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:32:49 -0000

I agree with this post a lot. I had a lot of connectivity problems (I even tweeted, basically begging one of the big players to sponsor a bigger pipe for next year). The connectivity is basically okay-ish for stuff like tweeting and checking in, but if you have to do anything real, like SSH/VPN/etc it's a disaster. It was just too slow to get "work" done. I ended up relying more on my 3G(!!!) card.

Also, per the site and the app, I just do not understand why this isn't an open source project. You've got how many thousands of web developers at SXSW? You could rebuild the entire site in a 3-day hackathon.

Re: How to keep your software awesome

Jesse Emery — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:46:55 -0000

Yes, you are entirely correct. I toyed around with the 3.x/9.x/Me reboot a bit and just sort of ended up going with more recent history because a) I figured people would remember it better and b) it got kind of complicated to explain "two reboots."

Re: How to keep your software awesome

Jesse Emery — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:26:13 -0000

1) Yeah, the "your name" page vs. the "Dashboard" (aka logged in Home) throws me a lot as well. As does the repo sorting algorithm. I may have overrated github because it works so well for me. But now that I think about it trying to get non-technical team members into it to get them using the Issues and Pages, has been a, um... challenge?

2) Totally agree. I remember my first foray into the various permissions modules for Drupal. Just typing that sentence and jogging that memory made my eye twitch.

Re: Scripting News: API designers should be writers

Jesse Emery — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 11:49:11 -0000

This is a great post.
I really like: "Another rule that API designers violate -- the easy stuff should be easy and the hard stuff should be possible."

A great example of this is OAuth. How many OAuth libraries make you do the following?

1. Initialize your client with key and secret.
2. Get a Request Token.
3. Use the Request Token to get a URL to ask the user for authorization.
4. Get the Access Token based on the user (presumably) granting authorization.
5. Exchange the Access Token for the Authorization Token.

For developers unfamiliar with the spec, this process always falls flat on its face, especially on the command line where the step of jumping out to the browser seems unrelated. The process only needs to be:

1. Initialize (client lib in the background gets a Request Token and URL)
2. Send the user off to the URL
3. Get the Authorization Token

Boom: One two three, much easier to follow. Much less to comprehend and worry about, much more stuff that you have to do 99% of the time pushed into the background to let you focus on the actual stuff you're trying to do with the client/API.

Re: Scripting News: API designers should be writers

Jesse Emery — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:39:42 -0000

Just to be clear, I don't think OAuth is inherently bad. I just think that way too many of the client libraries got written in a kind robotic way that expected every web developer to have read the spec.