I speak of salsa as we Americans understand it. A product that comes in dozens of varieties, probably more. It is frequently tomato based, but need not be. It works well mild, hot, or any degree in between. It is usually made almost exclusively from real, old-fashioned, non-bioengineered, non-preserved fruits and vegetables. When properly served, it is wonderfully healthy and safe — the worst it might do to you is give you a bit of excess sodium. It works great atop a wide variety of foodstuffs, or as a dipping sauce, or even eaten alone. The nature of the traditionally included ingredients are such that preservatives are rarely needed, even in canned, store-bought varieties. You can get great salsa at the super-expensive local organic market, and you can get great salsa for cheap at Target. There are so many varieties of salsa that everyone can find one they enjoy, and yet all of these very different sauces are recognized as salsa. I salute you, various peoples, regions, and cultures that created the sauces and dips that we now collectively know as salsa. You have made the world a better place!

Random House Dictionary suggests I get over one of my pet peeves:

Since the early 20th century, literally has been widely used as an intensifier meaning “in effect, virtually,” a sense that contradicts the earlier meaning “actually, without exaggeration”: The senator was literally buried alive in the Iowa primaries. The parties were literally trading horses in an effort to reach a compromise. The use is often criticized; nevertheless, it appears in all but the most carefully edited writing. Although this use of literally irritates some, it probably neither distorts nor enhances the intended meaning of the sentences in which it occurs. The same might often be said of the use of literally in its earlier sense “actually”: The garrison was literally wiped out: no one survived.

I’m literally throwing up right now.

I recently had a chance to speak with an engineer at the company that runs WordPress.com, the blogging platform that hosts almost 10 million blogs and serves over a billion pageviews a month. I used to use the precursor to the WordPress software for my personal blog, and continued to use WordPress as the blogging platform evolved and improved over the years. I’ve also managed a small WordPress multi-user install, serving about 300 blogs and 300,000 monthly pageviews at Harvard Law School.

What is remarkable about WordPress.com is that, despite being absolutely gargantuan, the technological underpinnings are very similar to the open-sourced WordPress code that is available for anyone to use. Unlike Twitter, with its well-known performance woes, or Facebook, with its huge interconnected network of users, WordPress, with it’s blog-centric approach, scales nearly linearly. With the exception of a few global features, like single sign-on, blogs are relatively self-contained. The WordPress crew wisely chose to move complex operations like search out of the core (utilizing Lucene), so that as usage grows, scaling is as easy as throwing more computing power and storage at the problem.

At the database level, they run stock MySQL, and not even the latest version, because their code doesn’t require anything more complex than simple SELECTs, INSERTS, and JOINs. Rather than attempting to optimize every layer with hyper-efficient C code, they instead cache content aggressively using the powerful Varnish reverse proxy.

As the WordPress platform has gotten more complex and plugins more sophisticated, I’ve had less need to actually delve into the code to customize my blog to my liking. Taking a look at WordPress 3.0, I see that things have evolved significantly from earlier versions. The developers have wisely focusing on beefing up the plugin API over the last several revisions. Because of this, WordPress.com coders are free to spend time developing cool new features and improving functionailty using the same modular plugin and theming architecture as standard WordPress. This in turn means that development is non-stop, and developers actually push out updates to the main WordPress.com code on a daily basis.

The WordPress.com approach is not appropriate for all, or even most, large-scale web applications. But it is instructive. Rather than spending huge amounts of time re-writing and hyper-optimizing, the WordPress crew focused on incrementally improving their core product, implementing common-sense technologies to simplify their traffic management, and building a solid foundation for continuous platform improvement. As a result, WordPress.com has grown to a top-10 web property in terms of traffic while keeping a staff of only 50 globally distributed employees.

All that, and the core product, the WordPress platform, continues to be free software overseen by a non-profit foundation and open to anyone. Pretty neat and, if you ask me, not a bad way to run a business.

Since the Bank of America fiasco I find myself constantly logging into my account to make sure my money is still there. My new bank account won’t be open for a few days and the transfer of investments to E-Trade takes two weeks. Why is everything related to banking still so slow? And to top it off, today when I tried to use my Citi card to book an airline ticket it was rejected, even after going through some asinine verification process that for all I know may have been a phishing attempt. One thing I will say for BofA, they have never made me jump through stupid hoops like that.
Continue reading “Bank of America updates”

On Friday I received a message from a nice-sounding man who identified himself as being with Bank of America’s fraud department and requested I give him a call back. I didn’t get around to it on Friday, not realizing the urgency of his innocuous request. On Saturday I discovered that both of my Bank of America credit cards were blocked and my account had a hold on it for $888,888.88.
Continue reading “Bank of America is scary and powerful”

I am happy to report that in spite for previous failures I have finally made my way through a complete David Foster Wallace piece, namely Shipping Out (pdf) also known as the title essay in his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. This treatise on luxury cruises is spot-on and engrossing, and difficult to describe. I read something that said that Wallace’s gift is for honesty and conversation without irony. He just sort of talks to you, the reader, mixing high prose and pedestrian language interchangeably, with footnotes and asides, meandering discussions, and the occasional bit of straightforward insight. In Infinite Jest it drove me batty, but in Shipping Out it worked for me. And it was odd, reading this essay, a narration of DFW’s week at sea, feeling like I was getting inside his head, and then remembering how he is dead. So odd.

Ars Technica, the popular technology site, recently wrote an article with the ominous title Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love. It has reignited (somewhat) the debate about the use of ad blocking software in web browsers. I have been blocking online ads for years now using specialized software. But I suspect almost all of us block ads to some degree by utilizing our browsers’ built in pop-up blockers.

I’m not ready to go back to annoying pop up windows, but I decided to embark on what I’m dubbing the “Ars Challenge,” and disabled my ad blocking software this morning.

The results…well. Around 2pm I went to the New York Times web site, and by 2:02pm I had re-installed a plugin called ClickToFlash in order to silence their huge distracting Adobe Flash advertising. But disabling things that move and make noise seems to me in line with the spirit of the challenge. I will tolerate ads that are respectful of me, that don’t unduly invade my space and attention or hijack my browsing experience.

So I soldered on another 2 hours, until I stumbled across this LA Times article.

Can you see it? I’ve highlighted it with a red box. Everything around it is ads and white space. Less than 20% of the screen is devoted to the actual article, and the font and spacing is such that in the entire first page on a relatively large computer screen I am able to view only about 40 words of actual article text without scrolling. Unbelievable.

And so, at 4:25pm, less than 5 hours after the challenge began, I’m giving up. Back to the ad blocker, and back to sanity.

Megan McArdle makes the point that our health care debate is skewed because we are debating a full coverage program rather than also discussing the need for catastrophic coverage. The latter is in some ways much easier to justify and to insure, but our framing covers the entire health care market, with all the concerns about care rationing, government intervention, standards, etc., pushing aside what should be a far simpler to implement government mandate.

One of the comments on her blog explains it well using an analogy of groceries and flood insurance. We all need food to live, but we are “trusted” to choose it and pay for it ourselves. For those with limited income, government subsidies in the form of food stamps and other programs help them and encourage but do not require good decision making. In healthcare, first-dollar care means our employer- or government-provided insurance is intimately involved in all of our health decisions, including normal checkups and things like breast cancer screenings. We are not making our own informed choices about which health care to pay for out of pocket (self-insurance) or which free market insurance company to choose. Since it is someone else’s money, there is no incentive for that sort of decision making, the market for services is not competitive, and thus prices rise.

In much the same way, we need shelter and choose on our own how and where to obtain it, be it by buying, renting, subletting, or taking advantage of a government assistant program if we are poor. But for people who live in flood zones, the government mandates flood insurance. This catastrophic insurance is required and usually subsidized or provided free by the government. In the event of a catastrophe, this insurance (in theory) kicks in. In much the same way, the government should mandate catastrophic health insurance coverage for all Americans. A policy that covers things like heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, etc. Since the shared risk pool is massive, the cost of insurance can be fairly low. While most people will never need it, it is a public safety net for everyone.

I’m not entirely convinced by this libertarian-minded argument, since I tend to see healthcare as an entire ecosystem with good choices in preventative care paying large dividends down the line, and with chronic conditions sopping up most of our health care dollars. But in terms of getting something passed through Congress to improve our system and cut costs, the idea of tackling catastrophic insurance first does have some appeal.

For the last time people, it’s not about specs! Processor speed, RAM, and graphic chips are not how you judge an Apple product. This is faster and that is smaller and this one does multitasking and has USB ports and a network jack. It doesn’t matter.

I won’t prognosticate about how the iPad will sell, or how successful it will be. I will simply say that the iPad is innovative in the same way that the iPhone and iPod Touch were innovative. It’s just a bigger iPhone, you argue? Of course it is! That is an argument for it, not against. Remember Minority Report? Remember every other cool movie or tech demo that showed amazingly slick touch screen interfaces? How many of them had standard menu bars, or windows with close and minimize buttons, or Start menus? None of them did. So why is it that when people talk about tablets, they talk about shrinking Windows or Mac OS to a smaller screen?

The iPhone succeeded in large part because Apple conceptualized a whole new user experience. The iPad, if it succeeds, will do so in large part because, like the iPhone, it is familiar. It uses gestures we use in life, its iconography is rarely confusing, and it just works in a smooth, clean, fluid way that totally abstracts away the whole notion that we are using a powerful little computer with files and folders and processes and RAM and software updates. The reason that every tablet so far has failed, and the iPad may just succeed, is because instead of taking a 1980s-era desktop metaphor and shrinking it down, Apple took an entirely new direction, the iPhone direction, and blew it up.

On Windows, every app has its own user interface conventions and different sized and shaped buttons and windows. Every version of Office re-arranges things and adds new colors and shapes and shortcuts. The modern Mac aesthetic, in contrast, generally strives towards minimalism. Most of the best apps use standard platform UI conventions with minor enhancements that are intuitive and clean. Powerful and expensive apps look simple and almost boring at first glance: the full potential is hidden and gradually becomes apparent as the app just works the way the user expects, the same way as other Mac apps. Still, almost all desktop computers, Macs included, overflow with confusing error messages, dialog boxes, file save windows, and various other extraneous nonsense. My codecs are out of date? You need to modify what registry? Windows demands to shut down right now to install critical updates? Why do I have to deal with all this stuff?

Apple has created a whole new set of interface conventions and user experience standards for the iPhone and, now, iPad. These opinionated guidelines and development frameworks make it very easy to do things the “Apple way” and much more difficult to do things in non-standard ways. Apple has cut off low-level access to the system, restricting applications (err, “apps”) so that if they break, they leave everything else as they found it. Apple has created standard system-wide gestures, buttons, and interaction paradigms that just work — everywhere. The iPad puts the content front-and-center, and hides all the needless chrome. I doubt you will be able to find any successful apps on the iPad that behave like a Windows or Mac desktop app. They will work like iPad apps.

Now, I was disappointed by the iPad announcement in one major way. I expected groundbreaking content deals for interactive media. Neat new technologies for reading magazines or multimedia newspapers. But now I’m convinced that Apple did not take that path because it just makes more sense for subscription content providers, like newspaper and magazine publishers, to create their own apps and try their own experiments. Apple has given them the platform, given them the guidelines, given them a UI that gets out of the way, and said, “innovate!” The ones that succeed will be the companies, like the New York Times, that embrace the challenge.

Judge the iPad, not by what you see, but by what you can imagine. If there are over 100,000 apps on the iPhone’s App Store, it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that there will be thousands more made just for the iPad. The real wonder and power of the device will come from what those apps let you do.