Why is this all goofy looking? Probably because your browser doesn't support stylesheets or you have an old stylesheet. Try hitting reload or upgrade your browser today.
fatmixx iconFatMixx Logo
?!
Advertising
Latest Featured Video

Looks like a performance at NYU (where she was a student for a few years). She really can sing (though she has a few misses playing the piano). There’s talent there, covered these days in a blond wig/hairdo and heavy makeup. Do your best to ignore the goofy MC, if you can. :)

8:52 AM | 3 comments
Donate
ad for kiva.org which facilitates microloans to small businesses around the world
Support CC - 2007
join EFF!
Advertisement

archives - about - home
This site runs WordPress

I’m probably the 10,000th person to say this, but as I was driving in today, I realized that the mobile web is at an inflection point where developers are going to stop building for the lowest common denominator and start pushing for the best. Feels similar to the way the web was just a few years ago when developers started getting fed up with IE6 and started emphasizing graceful degradation from Firefox/Safari instead of simply designing for IE6 + some.

The effects of this are subtle but profound. Already, we’re seeing pressure on companies like RIM to update their browsers to “catch up” w/ where the iPhoneOS, Palm OS, and Android OS are taking the web. This is setting a new baseline for developers and will shift internal development priorities. Already, for example, we’re seeing more & more AJAX & JavaScript features on mobile web sites. We’re seeing a lot more CSS3 transitions & effects in products like ESPN’s mobile NFL GameCast. We’re also seeing more HTML5 features coming out as well.

There’s going to be a big leap in the quality of mobile web applications and experiences over the next few years. Just think about what you expect from your desktop browsers today vs. what you expected in 2004. So much good stuff coming. :)

9:12 AM | 2 comments

Via @keithlam & @scottconnor, found this great essay by Paul Graham, Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. The essay describes my challenges with being a manager vs. a maker almost to a T. I was particularly struck by these paragraphs:

For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

This is further complicated by the challenges of trying to be great at your job. I’ve found I can only be either a good manager or a good coder. Every single time I’ve tried to do both (outside of a very small team of similar aptitude/motivation), I perform below my own standards at one of them. Either I cut corners in my code or I ignore my team too long. In the worst case, I do a bit of both. So, at my day job, I make the choice of being a manager.

This is also basically why I work into the night when I am coding. Working after emails die down and Heidi goes to bed offers that unbroken expanse of time to be creative and just get stuff done. This is again in conflict with the manager’s schedule so jobs that require a morning start time (early being, say, 9AM) make it hard to stay up late.

There’s something to be said for the discipline of getting up early and getting to bed early, but building neat things isn’t necessarily a question of that kind of discipline. In fact, Graham gets to this point right at the end:

When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I’d sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.” I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.

While at Fanzter, I did the dinner to 3AM stint pretty much every day. It was my most productive time. It also led to tension as we had morning people in the company and the schedules never quite lined up. I made it work, by coming in earlier (10/10:30 or so until dinner-ish). His pattern of dividing the day is also pretty much how I ended up doing it, and if I had thought about it more, I would’ve even formalized it. As it was, I always felt as if I was doing something wrong. That’s why it was so satisfying to read this. It’s like someone sat down and decided to explain how I work.

I’m going to make Heidi read this, and I’m going to paste this to my wall if I ever do a startup again.

PS. Graham’s Hackers and Painters is still one of my favorite books. It’s a collection of his essays and many are about the same subject as the one above: what makes coders and artists similar and what makes them tick. Some of it is over-the-top almost hubris/presumption, but in general he has some excellent observations. Great read if you liked what you read above. Many of the essays are available on his web site. Hackers and Painters (the essay) is one of my favorites.

For those wondering where the heck I was and what the heck I was doing traveling for so long, you saw the results during the Apple iPhone 3.0 event yesterday. Being the secretive lot they are, Apple has asked us not to disclose any of the particulars of our time with them, the process, etc. So, no blogging about it for me beyond what they’ve disclosed: we spent about two weeks (less, in our case) building an app for the demo event. We actually built an app that we had postponed on our app roadmap because the 2.x releases didn’t have push notification available yet. So, the moment we found out about push, Alerts was the natural choice over our other, in development applications.

I’m happy with what we were able to accomplish over the sprint considering we built the whole thing, from the BottomLine to alerts feed, essentially from scratch. Dalmo, a new member of my team, did some great work, and I had a refreshing spell of doing nothing but coding and hands-on building the product.

One more thing: A lot of folks have been coming up and saying congrats and the like. While I appreciate it, this is only the beginning for us. Building a great demo app is one thing, but I really enjoy building great, innovative, released products. Being part of the teams that built FantasyCast, all the live-updating infrastructure at ESPN.com, and Coolspotters is what I work for. So, hold the congrats for when we launch our apps. We’ve got some good stuff coming. If you loved the alerts prototype, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

If you want to see me (and, really, who does… er, I mean, doesn’t), skip to 39 minutes in. We’re on right after Oracle. I’m the driver for the demo, walking on stage behind Oke.

Often gets overlooked in app creation…

12:54 AM | share your thoughts

This is very similar to the proprietary stuff ESPN uses to do all the realtime updates on ESPN.com. Curious to see how good it is.

iPhone developers, take note.

Some good information for the iPhone devs out there. Some of the details about the way the GPU works, I didn’t know.

This is an interesting post. I think all of us that built our careers on the back of PCs and traditional browsers will need to read this. Entrepreneurs should have to answer, “How can my idea be a mobile app? Why isn’t it?”

11:08 AM | share your thoughts

Good idea to keep your code a little more efficient, with a little bit of extra code. This approach works for non-YUI code, as well.

12:15 AM | share your thoughts

Interesting stuff. India really has some unique challenges compared to other non-Asian places (I’d guess places like China also share some of these challenges). Google is benefiting from their Indian staff, I think, and it should help them own that market.

Interesting ideas here in this paper, and they go to some pains to differentiate their implementation from BigTable and Dynamo.

(via Evan’s Twitter Feed)

Very clever way of passing the time while the upgrade processes take place.

11:06 AM | share your thoughts

Good post on about the reason security researchers insist on full disclosure of vulnerabilities.

Oh Mama. I’ve been waiting for this for MONTHS. MONTHS! Can’t wait to dive in on this.

4:09 AM | 2 comments

I love XMPP. I wish I had more time to play with it.

This is good news for the software industry and a reminder to proprietary software companies to check the software they distribute to make sure they respect and honor the licenses of these open source projects as much as they audit their commercial license use.

Good summary of what happened a few weeks ago when S3 disappeared for a day.

Just catching up to this post from a few weeks ago. I used to work for an ESB vendor, sitting next to some of the lead architects and developers for chunks of their app. The story sounds ideal, but the abstractions are never ideal in practice. Read into the comments for more conversation.

12:32 AM | share your thoughts

Aaron passed this on to me. It’s pretty interesting to see that a guy like this going iPhone full bore.

While a lot of the Twitter architecture speculators are smart, this guy knows a few things about pub/sub tech, being one of the brains behind the now defunct (but apparently relaunching without Wyman) PubSub.com. I think he’s missing a feature or two that Twitter supports, but he does know the tracking feature. That’s basically what made PubSub so cool. And, let me tell you, if you can write something that keeps up with the rate of public blog posts, you’re clever. I tried writing some code to just catalog the stream and found the flow of data coming in daunting, to say the least.

I’ve been paying attention to the evolution of HTML5 / WHATWG for a while, but I spent some time really thinking about the impact this will have when it finally makes it into the real world (and enough real browsers implement it). The whole idea of having a real API spec for things like postMessage and local storage, things which are appearing in Safari 3 and Firefox 3 (soon IE8).

I can’t help but think that we’re finally reaching the vision imagined about 10 years ago now when the Netscape/Microsoft battle began in earnest. The dream was that you’d be able to run things like a spreadsheet or word processor in your browser, complete with local storage, perhaps a database, and fast, local widgets.

I don’t know if we would’ve gotten here any faster if Microsoft didn’t fight it as hard as they did. On one hand, it’s significant that IE6 basically stayed stagnant for 6-7 years. At least 6 years with barely any meaningful rendering engine changes. That’s staggering, when you think about it, and it’s why developing for IE6 is so frustrating. Even today, many sites, including Coolspotters, have degraded functionality or features that are dropped or on hold because IE6 is still in the Stone Age while still having a large installed base. If it weren’t for Firefox, I don’t think Microsoft would’ve really committed to the standards movement as much as they have lately.

On the other hand, a lot of innovations over the last few years took time independent of the browser situation, things like faster hardware, more RAM, faster JavaScript engines, better research into rendering algorithms, and better connectivity. Also, the evolution of Flash over the same time has been remarkable.

No matter how you look at it, things are about to get a whole lot more interesting in the web space. It’s now time to build something cool with this new functionality. It might get even more people to upgrade out of IE6 and that alone is worth it to me.

If you want more HTML5 info, you can check out some of these posts:

Interesting development…

11:20 PM | share your thoughts

Found this via Kareem’s twitter feed. Interesting idea. Now, if I didn’t need the Internet to do my work, I might use this every day.

11:57 PM | share your thoughts

Well written overview of the advantages of Git for development. I’m keeping an eye on this for now, but there’s one random thought that comes to mind: Linus Torvalds is a really, really smart guy. First, he has shepherded Linux, and now another of his “itches” has turned into a widely used and enthusiastically supported project. No, Git isn’t as successful as Linux yet. But imagine if it is? How many people do this twice?

When I was at ESPN.com, the top item on my wish list for things ESPN.com should’ve been doing was opening up the Fantasy engine with good APIs. My reasoning was twofold. First, there were lots of features people wanted that simply weren’t popular enough for a site like ESPN, where audience is measured in millions. Second, the team is small and couldn’t (and wouldn’t) build everything in house. It doesn’t make sense.

So, the idea is that a clean API that exposed just enough of the game engine for external tools to integrate in and then independent developers could build (and charge for, if they wanted) all the little niche features that are out there. FAAB free agency and auction drafts were the biggest features I thought were missing (though ESPN did roll out limited auction drafts this year).

Another thing to consider: Facebook was just “eh, Facebook” until the developer API came out. Then, they became a darling, started growing audience a bit more quickly, and now even Friendster has a developer API. There are positive business effects for concentrating on the core platform and turning your game into a service.

You have no idea how much I wanted to do this. Had I stayed at ESPN, I would’ve pushed for that as a new architecture. I had it documented out, plans on how to implement it, and was lining up the ducks to turn the sports group at ESPN.com into a stealth data provider. I was really considering this to be the next startup idea for someday in the future after we turn Fanzter into a media giant.

Now, it seems I won’t have to do it. TechCrunch just wrote up a new company called OPEN Sports Network. While the company web site talks more about the social piece (perhaps they integrate into social networks?), the TechCrunch post suggests that their game platform will have open APIs.

I’m making a prediction now: if this is executed well (and there’s reason to hope because this guy ran SportsLine), this will become the fantasy platform of choice for serious gamers quickly, with casual games following as soon as enough third party features extend the game.

The only thing I don’t understand is launching the platform in August. That gives 0 time to developers to extend the game before the NFL kickoff. I’m sure I’m just missing something, or they’re going out cautiously in year 1.

3:11 PM | 1 comment

Interesting research. (Via Labnotes)

This is a big deal and the future. Surprised more companies haven’t joined Amazon on this bandwagon (big companies, I mean, not smaller ones… lots of grid providers out there).

Excellent news. This is a project I’ve been watching for a long time, as it was the approach I chose when I was experimenting with a FatMixx IM bot. The release of 1.0 is a big step for the project. Congrats to the POE guys on reaching this milestone.

You can find out more about POE at the project’s web site.

12:34 AM | share your thoughts

Yahoo has made a pretty significant change to their fantasy baseball game. I’m not sure if this is new for Yahoo (I didn’t play football there), but the new interface is pretty nice. All drag-and-drop YUI goodness. Here’s a screenshot of me fixing my roster:

DND baseball roster

It’s pretty well executed. The yellow rows are the only slots that Fielder is eligible for, and the symbol on the far right conveys whether I’m dropping the player in the right slot. More importantly, this will cut down on the cryptic error messages in most fantasy games when you forget to move someone to the bench or accidently put two people in the same slot.

Useful Ajax and a nice addition.

11:32 PM | 1 comment

The iPhone SDK is 2.1 GB. Tiny phone, massive SDK.