There’s a Ruby Debugger?
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
Posted by austin in: Ruby, Technology, comments closed
Yeah. My post title is a little over the top, but since I started using Ruby in early 2002, I can’t count the number of times that I’ve used the Ruby debugger. After all, how does one count the empty set?
This is not to say that I haven’t had to debug; it’s to say that where tests haven’t sufficed in helping me specify behaviour correctly, Kernel#p has helped me find what did go wrong so that I could fix the problem and add a test (where appropriate; PDF::Writer, for example, has no tests).
So I think that Giles Bowkett is right, even though I’d say that debuggers aren’t harmful; they’re pointless in a pointerless language.
I find that I mostly use the debugger in C/C++/C# for stack traces in any case. It’s a bit less painful with a good IDE, but depending on the nature of the problem that I’m debugging (especially one in a tight loop), I will usually add print outputs to a log file and debug based on those logs. Yes, even when there’s pointers involved (because it’s usually a binary search approach where I figure out where a pointer went bad over a large run).
Not Going Back
Wednesday, 24 October 2007
Posted by austin in: Apple, Technology, comments closed
John Gruber has it exactly right:
Windows lost a huge chunk of the nerd market. Nerd switchers, in and of themselves, don’t constitute a significant enough number of people to account for anything other than a tiny blip in Apple’s Mac sales. But nerds are the people who recommend computers to friends and families; it seems inarguable that there are an awful lot of nerds recommending Macs today who weren’t five years ago.
I bought my first Mac (15″ MBP) in August 2006. In some ways, I bought it two months too early; in others, I bought just at the right time (I needed a new home laptop). In that time, I have convinced my parents to ditch their two Windows computers for a Mac—my MBP, when I upgrade early next year; I have told my wife that her next computer when this one dies will be a Mac and I have recommended Macs to three other people. There’s very little that one can do on Windows that one can’t do on the Mac; the only compelling reason for most people is games.
If you’re a big player of FPS games, you want a Windows PC. If you must always have the latest and greatest video card, you want a Windows PC.
Anyone else? You want a Mac. No, Apple doesn’t offer a $400 Mac. If that’s your budgetary limit, you *still* want a Mac, but you can’t afford one. Look at one of the Linux vendors. Because you’re not going to run a decent version of Vista on that $400 PC. And you’ll need to replace it sooner than you would an equivalent Mac. My rule of thumb for non-Mac hardware has been that you’ll get about 12 – 14 months of meaningful use per $500 you spend. I suspect that it’s 18 – 24 months of meaningful use per $500 you spend on a Mac. By meaningful use I mean before you start noticing memory and graphics limitations requiring significant hardware upgrades to keep up to date.
I’m not going back. I don’t know that I’ll stay with the Mac “forever”, but at this point, it’s the best computer investment that I’ve made so far. Aside from that first computer (and it was my dad’s investment then), that started me on the road I’m on.
More on the Wrong Question
Saturday, 20 October 2007
Posted by austin in: Apple, Technology, comments closed
In the comments of my previous question, John asked “what was the wrong question that he asked?” To which I replied:
The wrong question is the comparison between Vanilla Ice and Soulja Boy. Vanilla Ice was low rent back in the day — his second album was a live version of the first album, and his “superstardom” lasted about a year. Soulja Boy’s rap may be better than Vanilla Ice’s rap, but it’d be better to compare Coldplay or Oasis (people with more than one album to their name) to The Beatles or Pink Floyd when asking whether the singles price on iTunes is good, or whether they should be variably priced.
Radiohead may have hit on the right way to handle variable pricing, but that only works when you know you’re sending the majority of your money directly to the band. Most people don’t want to make the soul-suckers at the labels any richer than they need to be.
John replied last night with:
interesting — i read that differently. soulja boy is currently listed as one of the top 10 downloaded songs on itunes, which gave me the impression that his point was about demand. (right now, lots of people want that new hit single, and far fewer people want the old single that now sounds like crap.)
so i thought it wasn’t about which musician was “better” — i don’t especially like either of those songs, personally — but about which musician’s product was currently more “in demand.”
The record execs want you to think that it’s about demand, but it’s not. Demand pricing makes sense when there’s scarcity and you have a lock on the market. Newer music is anything but scarce. You can hardly go anywhere without hearing it as a ringtone, an advertising jingle, or just on the radio. I listen to a “classic rock” format station, yet they’re playing new music from Neil Young and Kim Mitchell, and they consider U2 (up until All That You Can’t Leave Behind, at least) classic rock. So music has the opposite problem of scarcity; there’s a glut.
The radio brings up another important point—as much as record execs would love to pretend otherwise, they’re not competing like you do in other markets. They’re competing against free. There’s plenty of songs out there that I like, but that I don’t like enough to even consider buying even at 99¢—not when I can hear them periodically on the radio. And if I wanted them, but they were more expensive than my lowest willing price, I can usually find them somewhere online. (I don’t; but I have used AllofMP3 before. I already pay the CRIA something every time I buy blank media, so I have the right to get songs that others share that way.)
There is one other theory the record execs could be using here, which is the concept that one values something one has to pay for. Therefore, one values something more that one has to pay more for. If this had been possible when Vanilla Ice was in his (short-lived) heyday, people may have been willing to pay $3.00 for “Ice Ice Baby”, but how many people would have regretted it later and deemed themselves fools? (The song has not aged well.) So the value of a song isn’t really derived from how hot it is, but its longevity. And even then, you’re still competing against a model that treats songs as essentially valueless (radio or satellite radio).
So, demand pricing doesn’t work well if there’s no scarcity (or artificial scarcity). We also know that subscription pricing for portable devices doesn’t work. (More accurately, it doesn’t work for portable devices where you control the content. Satellite radios are portable, but you don’t control the content.) Subscription pricing works when it gives you a menu of things to choose from (cable television, satellite radios) but the value is provided by the menu, not the individual pieces that make up the menu. (The subscription price is too low per person for the individual songs or television shows to be worth much at all. In aggregate, they can make money, but individually they’re fractional pennies value.)
What does work? That’s where we get back to the Radiohead experiment. They asked people how much they value their music. Some folks bought it for the absolute minimum; others paid much more. Most paid about the same price that they’d pay on iTunes. But you have to have an environment where that will work, and I don’t think that the Radiohead experiment is generally applicable for the entire catalogue of some bands’ music. (That is to say that I think that it’s a decent short-term strategy when the music is new, but I don’t think it’s sustainable for more than a few months.)
I don’t agree completely with Apple’s iTMS policy (you can have some songs album-only, but you can’t have an album-only album), as I’d love to see album-oriented rock make a return. (But I’d also love to see sound-bite politics go away.) I think, however, that the simplified pricing models make a lot more sense than pretending that something is more valuable because more people want it, when there’s no scarcity involved.
Souljaboy may be hot. Will he be next year? Or will he be dropped like Vanilla Ice?
When you ask the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer
Thursday, 18 October 2007
Posted by austin in: Apple, Technology, comments closed
In Slate’s What’s the future of iTunes? by Ivan Askwith, the wrong question is asked. Not surprisingly, the wrong answer is reached. Specifically:
…Whomever you believe, the fact remains that content providers have been pushing Apple to loosen up its pricing restrictions, and Apple has refused.
Regardless of demand, each song on iTunes costs 99 cents, each television program $1.99, and each feature-length movie $9.99. Most consumers are likely to agree that iTunes’ pricing seems illogical; there’s no obvious reason that Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ninja Rap 2′ should cost the same as the newest tracks from Soulja Boy. For content owners, this is more than illogical: It’s bad for business.
The question isn’t about Vanilla Ice. The question is about Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and the Beatles. There’s no reason whatsoever that newer, “hotter”, music should be more expensive than legendary music by these bands. Is the latest Justin Timberlake even remotely as good as “Behind Blue Eyes” or “Paint It Black” or even “Yellow Submarine”?
The usual standard presented by the recording industry morons is variable pricing based on the freshness and popularity of the music, where the more popular and fresh the music is, the more expensive it is. This works in a scarcity model, but music isn’t scarce. Music’s value increases the more that it’s heard and the more people internalize it. But if you’re going to price Soulja Boy’s latest tracks more than Harrison’s masterpiece “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, you’re implying that Soulja Boy’s music has more value than the older, and better, music.
Why does Apple stick with fixed pricing? Market analysts generally say that this is because iTunes sales are a means to an end, where the end is selling iPods. As such, Apple’s interest is ensuring that desirable content for the iPod costs as little as possible.
John Gruber addressed this quite nicely in September. I’m not trying to say that Apple is perfect (far from it!), but I would assume the obvious: multiple price points confuse people unnecessarily. Those market analysts, of course, are wrong. Ivan Askwith gets this one right:
The more likely explanation, however, lies with the company’s obsession with simplicity. ITunes has been a huge success because it’s easy to use, and (at least for now) has the most digital content of any online store. Apple’s refusal to budge on pricing indicates it’s prepared to defend simplicity at the expense of selection.
That target of simplicity is important: the harder it is for people to play the media they want on the devices they want, the less they’ll buy the one they need less. (And, so far, the iPod is the device people overwhelmingly want. People will forgo on-line purchases if the rest of the device is easy enough to use. I’ve bought a total of four things from iTMS, and two of those were audiobooks.)
Simplicity matters. Amazon works, despite the pricing differences, precisely because it makes the shopping and shipping simple. Amazon’s music store works well because it integrates with iTunes, too.
Are Social Networks Fads?
Friday, 12 October 2007
Posted by austin in: Technology, comments closed
Steve Ballmer warns that social networking may be a fad. Eric Schmidt, on the other hand, looks at it from a page view perspective. Both are wrong about the details. Facebook and MySpace and the like will continue to be important destinations, much like Google, Yahoo, Netscape, and even the MSN homepage have been destinations. They provide value to people.
What’s a fad, though, is how these networks work. I think that the people who are dealing with “open” social networking have the right approach. Facebook will have to adapt to input from outside (opening up the inputs), as it recently did with allowing applications the ability to set a user’s status, as with Twitter. Facebook has already said that it’s going to open certain things to the outside on an opt-in basis; if it can nail the user interface (and that’s a big if, given how many people stick with the standard privacy settings), then we’ll have an even bigger when as the network effect not only deals with people, but with sites.
Social networks as networks are fads; the value they provide, though, is real. The challenges that remain are better classification of friends and a reduction in the amount of effort it takes to allow users to segregate information between groups of friends. That last is important. I’m on Facebook. If I were looking for a new job (I’m not), I might talk about it on Facebook. There’s a problem, though: my boss and some of my coworkers are on Facebook and are friends with me. The moment I started talking about it publicly, they’d know something was up and it might make for bad relations at work (at a minimum).
Now, I’m pretty open, but if I wanted to do something like that, I would want an easy way of drawing a circle around them and saying: they can’t see these updates.
Before it’s too late.
Would you go to a Fake Steve party?
Saturday, 6 October 2007
Posted by austin in: Apple, Toronto, comments closed
I’m more than just a little behind on reading my feeds, and I noted that Daniel LyonsFake Steve is going to be in Toronto from October 17 through 19 and is considering having some “Fake Steve Jobs” parties.
Could be interesting. I’ll see.
Are you nuts or stupid? Nevermind, I know the answer to that.
Posted by austin in: Apple, comments closed
So, Mac OS Rumours “reports” that the Mac Mini will be killed in October and replaced with a “Mac Nano”. TUAW picks up on it and gives it enough legs to reach Digg’s frontpage.
Personally, I don’t care if Mac OS Rumours is right or not; I don’t listen to them. The idea of this move makes no sense anyway given that the Mini was just given an update in August. What interests me are the comment threads on TUAW and Digg.
Take, for example, the first comment on TUAW, asking where the mid-range headless with upgradeable components is. Or this one from Digg. What about this one calling for a Mini with an upgradeable video card?
I gotta wonder whether these people are nuts or stupid. Actually, I don’t really have to wonder at all. Like it or not, Apple is about control. You’re never going to get a consumer-level Mac with much of an upgradeable anything. They’re not trying to compete with Dell, so they don’t need a minitower model for consumers. The Apple model distribution is simple—and that’s on purpose. The pricing is roughly accurate: you spend more, you get more. Contrast that with Dell, where spending more doesn’t always get you more—it gets you different. (It always took me a couple of hours to figure out the best base-model machine to configure from at Dell for the best bang for the buck. It doesn’t take long at all with Apple.)
Insanity is colloquially considered to be trying to do the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results. You can keep wishing that Apple will cater to you and not to what will actually make them money, but it won’t do you any good. So, keep wishing. You’ll keep me laughing at you.
Rainier Brockerhoff on the State of the iPhone
Tuesday, 2 October 2007
Posted by austin in: Apple, comments closed
Rainier Brockerhoff’s State of the iPhone is an excellent read. Even though, as a Canadian, I can’t get an iPhone here (damn you, Ted Rogers, knuckle under already you greedy bastard), I really want an iPhone SDK. I might even pay for one, but I think that’d be the wrong step for Apple to take (listing and certifying in the iTunes store, perhaps).
(Via Daring Fireball.)
Edgar Bronfman, Jr. is an idiot…
Posted by austin in: Personal, comments closed
“Never before in the history of content has the hardware been more valuable than the software…You think about the VCR or the video cassette—the video cassette always had more value than the VCR that you shoved it into. Apple has been able to turn that model on its head.”
Edgar Bronfman, Jr. (Chairman, Warner Music Group), in Like Amazon’s DRM-Free Music Downloads? Thank Apple
Edgar Bronfman is an idiot who simply doesn’t get it. Apple hasn’t made the hardware more valuable, it’s made the collection more valuable. It used to be that you weren’t able to carry the majority of your media collection with you; now, that collection represents a valuable investment. Not the hardware.
Moron.
Why I (now) wholeheartedly support MMP
Monday, 1 October 2007
Posted by austin in: Politics, Toronto, comments closed
I’ve been doing some serious thinking about the referendum question facing Ontarians this fall. Spacing Votes has been quite useful in distilling some of the issues and features of MMP (Mixed Member Proportional) as opposed to FPTP (first-past-the-post, the current system), as evidenced by an earlier post I made. They continue to do so with MMP Disproportionality, Part I (Local Seats); I’m looking forward to part two.
I have, however, been thinking about the “list” seats versus geographically-based seats (”ridings”) and come to the conclusion that the problem isn’t list seats, but ridings. My office-place is an interesting example in this problem, in that the office is in nominally in Oakville (it’s at Winston Churchill and Dundas, right at the very border between Oakville and Mississauga), but very few people live in Oakville. A lot of people live west of the office, in Hamilton, St. Catharines, or Burlington; a lot of people live in Mississauga proper. Some, like myself, live in Toronto. I spend nearly ⅓ of my life away from where I live, and of the ⅔ that I’m at home, roughly ⅓ of it is spent sleeping.
So while I care about my neighbourhood’s representation in parliament (both federally and provincially), I also care about the places where I work and (at a minimum) the transit corridor I travel to and from work every day. My concerns are less about where I live than how I get to and from work, which means that regional transit policies matter to me. I can’t effectively and efficiently use a transit system to get to work. (The local Go station is ~10 minutes from my house, the train doesn’t run that often and even less often coming home, and the nearest station is still ~15 minutes from work by bus; my total commute by car is under 35 minutes).
I care about how municipalities (who should be caring more about the local rights and responsibilities) are being run over roughshod by the OMB and developers and the province itself. Mike Harris did more damage to Toronto’s infrastructure through forced amalgamation and downloading than anyone else. He also reduced our democratic representation by cutting the number of city councillors from 57 to 44—the City of Toronto web site says this was adopted by City Council, but I recall reporting at the time was that the adoption was at electoral gunpoint, just like the almagamation itself.
In other words, 90% of my concerns aren’t limited to my relatively small geographic region of the Parkdale-High Park riding, and the concerns I do have about Parkdale-High Park should be addressed through City Council and my local councillor rather than my provincial representation.
Ultimately, I don’t know that I care whether my representation is regional, and even think that regional representation may be the oddity in today’s world. As such, I can only end up supporting MMP. It may not be perfect, and I may regret supporting it in the future, but I don’t believe that being held hostage to the past in this case is a good thing.
Update: Reading a bit more, I have found another point that puts me in favour of MMP. The claim is that regional ridings represent the will of the people. This is only partially true, in that there are plenty of examples of parties parachuting in “star” candidates. I think Ken Dryden was this way for the federal Liberal party; while the people of his riding ended up voting for him, he did not have to win his party’s nomination for the seat.
