No, not a subtantive comparison, just a funny video:

OK, so it’s not that accurate (I could make a list of Java advantages that would be quite long), but it’s damn funny. Not having to deal with compiler quirks and Makefiles would be at the top of my list (and, by the way, this is coming from an experienced Linux/OS X/Unix guy…). Java just makes that stuff very easy.

Quick note: I was checking out NYC17’s comment on my “Why I Left ESPN.com” post below and saw something I hadn’t seen before: The square Google Ad placement before the comments was a video ad that let me watch highlights from last night’s Spurs game. I didn’t embed it, and it wasn’t a traditional ad (I didn’t get redirected to NBA.com or another site). I just got to navigate a menu and play back the highlight right there.

That’s a pretty cool setup. Ad as content…

Does anyone know anything more about this? The only thing I can find online (after a quick Google) are passing references in various Adsense Video coverage (which is different).

I wish I had taken a screenshot. I’ll grab one if I see it again.

There really isn’t a reputable news source out of the major news networks. While not all of them are as bad as former ABC News political chief Mark Halperin, all of them have some pretty awful contributors.

CNN.com is my primary news source online and their albatross is Lou Dobbs. Today, he wrote a rather amazing editorial defending himself against an OpEd in the NY Times that criticized his show. It’s amazing because he actually doesn’t defend himself.

I don’t want to get into the specifics of the two articles. If you’re interested, read the Times OpEd first, then Dobbs’s article to have them in the proper chronological order. Instead, I’ll just highlight some parts of Dobbs’s response:

Today’s New York Times column is primarily a personal attack on me, focuses on an ad-lib on the set of this broadcast uttered more than two years ago by Christine Romans on a number of cases of leprosy in this country. …

But today’s scurrilous personal attack from The New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, carrying the water of the Southern Poverty Law Center, also has the facts wrong.

So, you read this and, think, “Gosh, I wonder what the Times got wrong?” After all, a “scurrilous personal attack” will be primarily wrong on the charges, right? Let’s see what Dobbs says the charges are:

He wrote that I said, quote, that “One third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants.” That isn’t what I said. I didn’t say anything close to it.

Here’s where it gets weird. So, Dobbs denies saying it, but Leonhardt (unlike Dobbs, I’ll note) actually links to the transcripts on CNN.com. If you go there, you’ll find:

DOBBS: … One-third of the inmates in our federal prisons come from another country. The cost, staggering. Bill Tucker reports.

Sure, he doesn’t say “illegally” in there, but what’s the implication? Apparently nothing relevant, as Dobbs continues in his “defense”:

We reported that one-third of the federal prison population three and a half years ago were non-citizens. The columnist said the number was 6 percent. The exact number of the year in question was 29.3 percent for fiscal year 2001. And by the way, we’re putting up links on our Web site, loudobbs.com, so you can check the numbers for yourself.

I introduced that report three and a half years ago by saying the number of illegal immigrants in our prisons was increasing and the financial burden rising. Well, we had to go back and check, and because our correspondent no longer has his notes to support that statement, that the number of illegal immigrants within a prison population of non-citizens, I have to retract it here tonight, and I apologize to you for the necessity of doing so. But like I said, I do make mistakes.

Nowhere in the original transcript, by the way, will you see any qualification of the numbers as coming from 2001 (the Dobbs report originally aired in 2003). That might not seem that important except for one thing. Something significant happened in 2001 (around September) that caused a change in how the government handles non-citizens who commit crimes… deportation is swift, even if the person is a lawful, greencard holding resident.

On the other hand, Dobbs is right about one thing: Leonhardt’s numbers were for all prisons in the U.S. while Dobbs’s 29% is for the federal system. Of course, I still come back to, “so what” since nothing in either sets of numbers speaks to illegal vs. legal immigrants.

What next, Lou? (actually, I skipped one, it’s trivial)

That columnist also said I gave air time to white supremacists, and mentions one by name, Madeleine Cosman, who wrote the article that Christine Romans used as a source for her later leprosy statement.

The fact is, I made a mistake, and I’ve said we would never have used her as a source if we had known of her controversial background two years ago, at the time of the offending ad-lib. But the columnist fails to note that his own paper wrote a glowing obituary of Madeleine Cosman when she died last year.

OK, so you made a mistake, and the only thing you can add is, “But you did it, too!” Classy.

Next up:

And the columnist writes that I suggested that new immigration reform bill would be the first step to a North American union. Nope. What I did say is that the proposed legislation, favored by President Bush and Senator Kennedy and others who are misguided, contains language in Section 413 that, if approved by Congress, would endorse and legitimize the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, which is the foundation of this administration’s efforts to create a North American union, and which would further threaten, in my opinion, our national sovereignty.

So, though it’s not “the first step” to a North American union, it would further the “administration’s efforts to create a North American union.” So, what, it’s step 2 or 3? What the hell is he clarifying here?

Look, I had fun writing this in part because Dobbs makes it easy. He paints himself as some man of the people speaking truth to power. I would be willing to accept that if he actually did more than pander to the “middle class.” So much of his show is based on reinforcing that “everyone is coming to get you!” Even that might be OK if he could actually make sound arguments.

I don’t necessarily have to agree with the guy to respect him, but he doesn’t even try to make sense. Like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and the other blowhards on radio and TV, Dobbs makes his arguments simply by assertion. He simply hopes that most of his viewers will just assume that he wouldn’t be so cavalier with the facts. Unfortunately, his viewers would be wrong.

I just found out that a paper I wrote in college is cited as a resource on Wikipedia. I’m frightened. The entry for Genius of Universal Emancipation contains a link to a section of a paper I wrote for a history and technology class in college. The paper was online because that was part of the delivery and it’s partially why I ended up getting a gig with the Maryland State Archives. Small world. The whole paper is online, and I’m afraid of how bad the writing actually is.

And, no, I didn’t add the link myself.

Update: In a quick scan of the article I already found 2 grammatical errors… I probably should fix them…

Part of what I’m doing is actually learning Rails more than I knew it before. I’ve been working on random test apps, but now I’m trying to build something for real and I decided to start from scratch. Blew everything away, happily compiling/installing on my Mac and then I run into issues.

Basically, I got this error (I was trying to run rake db:migrate) on OS X:

dyld: NSLinkModule() error
dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.15.dylib
Referenced from: /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle
Reason: image not found
Trace/BPT trap

The issue is that in the most recent builds of MySQL from mysql.com (I was using 5.0.41), the libraries are no longer in lib/mysql/ but just in lib. I couldn’t remember how to modify linkage in a compiled bundle, but after a bit of googling, I found a post detailing the answer. Just run:

sudo install_name_tool -change /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.15.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.15.dylib

/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle

That will take care of the issue. You can use the same tool for any library that’s pointing to the wrong place for a link. Not sure why or how this happened, but at some point I’ll probably look into it and submit a patch.

A lot of questions have come my way about what I’m up to now, and why I left. I’ve heard sentiments ranging from “Are you crazy?!” to “Congratulations, I admire your guts/courage (or my favorite, sack).” All of them make sense to me.

Ultimately, it does take a little nerve to walk away from a great company, and it takes a great deal of nerve to walk away from the kind of money that I was making, could’ve been making in the near future, and probably would be making down the road. I had established myself and a reputation at ESPN and while I’m not saying being an executive was in my future, I probably could’ve set up a very comfortable situation for myself working on cool technology with the safety and resources of ESPN.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? I want to do more than just live a comfortable life in a comfortable job in a comfortable town. At some point, I imagined myself doing more, and and some point between then and now, I put “more” on hold. It sounds silly to say it now, but I wanted to be a millionaire by 30, and I dreamt of making billions and living off of a tiny percentage while operating the rest as a foundation. Imagine Bill Gates with a simpler lifestyle. That’s where I wanted to be.

So, consider this step putting “more” back on the front burner, and taking a chance to hit those goals. I’m only 31, after all, and if there’s one part of my cultural heritage I’ve mastered, it’s Indian Standard Time. Of course I’m a little late, right?

Also, I thought hard about ESPN vs. a startup. There are a lot of differences, most should be obvious, but I enjoy the startup atmosphere, and I enjoy a couple of other things. The first is the possibility of failure, which didn’t really exist at ESPN. I believe that cliche that we learn more from failure than we do from success. I’m not talking about poor execution but about being wrong about what customers want. While ESPN might’ve been wrong on that front occaisionally, they are never wrong about what advertisers want. So even an unpopular feature (*cough*Monday Night Surround*cough*) can be a “success” if you look at it from a business standpoint.

The second thing a startup brings is a singular focus on a (singular) product. Hard to have at ESPN, where my team was worried about Rugby, Soccer, and Arena Football in addition to MLB, NFL, NBA, etc. Again, it makes sense in a lot of ways, and this is easier to fix than most things, but it is part and parcel of being there, especially if you want to be a leader in that organization.

Finally, Heidi and I are in the right spot to do this. We don’t have children, yet, we both are working, and we have a house we bought using my Boston salary as the budget (several promotions and raises ago). We were good about saving the last few years as we were able to pull of buying a new roof and chimneys and having our wedding without going into debt at all. A year later and we’ve saved up enough to take this shot.

As for what I’m doing, I want to help build startups. I realized a while ago that while I do have a good head for product development, I’m really, really good at applying technology to solve product problems. I’m also pretty good with open source technologies, well versed in most of the latest technologies of the day, and building on the cheap, all of the other things that startups more than large companies focus on.

The trick is going to be figuring out how to consult with startups (and how to make money at it). I’d love to follow the model that my cousin built during the boom. That would be ideal, but may not be possible on the east coast as it was in 1999. We’ll see what happens. I want to keep doing the startup thing, but I don’t want to be the passionate advocate of every project I’m involved in. Sometimes, it will make sense to stay on for the long haul, if I really get the product and love the idea. Other times (and I’m guessing it’s going to be more often), I’ll just come in for a few months, help launch or help get past particular technical or growth objectives and move on.

I’ll have updates here, including if/when I’m ready to hire more staff. I’m still feeling out the space but I’m working on a project already that I’ve mentioned to some of you. I have a placeholder site for my consulting gig at FrequentMod.com. For those that have been keeping up with the name game, I’m going to simplify Modulation to Mod as it conveys the same thing without the extra syllables.

I’m starting to notice some issues with the redesign, specifically with the single post view. The balance of the page is just off and I feel momentarily lost trying to find the post amid the ads, sidebars, etc., especially for short posts. The content of the post, easily the most important thing on the page, has the least weight on the page. I’ll try to fix it over the next few days, though that might involve some major changes to the layout.

Here’s an opportunity to register any other comments or criticisms about the new look.

If you had me on MSN Messenger (or if you didn’t and want to), I’m no longer using my old address. You can add me as sujal at fatmixx (make that into an email address, including .com at the end).

If I don’t know your hotmail id, you may want to send a message to the same address so I can know who you are.

I tend to find Atrios a bit negative on most things, but his post today on the Iraq war seems about right. There really is no way to “fix” this without a change in the country’s priorities. As the rhetoric is now, the only reason we continue to spend the massive amounts we do on the war is because we’re “supporting the troops.” There really hasn’t been the kind of appetite needed to sustain a large-scale foreign aid package on the same order of magnitude as the war funding, nor are we likely to do something like that without continuing to prefer the U.S. contractors who are doing such a great job at overcharging us right now.

That’s why I end up supporting redeployment plans that pull the troops out faster than slower. Keeping troops in Iraq at these levels simply isn’t helping, the surge itself is folly, and no intermediate plan will happen while this President is in office. The best we can do is redeploy now and then work on convincing the American people that the way to fix this mess is to fund reconstruction in Iraq with an open contracting process that respects local needs as much as it does our own foreign policy interests.

Every time I think of this, by the way, I think of what Rep. Ron Paul said during the debate that go Rudy to pounce on him. We need to face the fact that foreign policy choices lead to consequences, and that terrorists don’t “hate our freedom.” They are responding to decades of short-sighted foreign policy and either perceived or real slights.

Think about some of the stupidity displayed just planning and executing this war. The latest examples just boggle the mind. The litany of errors and the sheer naiveté shown in planning this war will have consequences. To say otherwise is being dishonest.