"February Stars"

Grok Headline matches for "February Stars"

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: February 15, 2004 - February
21, 2004 Archives

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: February 15, 2004 - February
21, 2004 Archives 02/17/2004 12:57 PM
This is the arsonist in your house telling you that stranger outside with the hose can't be trusted .. Democratswould threaten fiscal health .. ever .. Heh

talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_02_15.html#002565
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"Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: February 01, 2004 - February
07, 2004 Archives"

"Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: February 01, 2004 - February
07, 2004 Archives" 02/10/2004 02:52 AM

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: February 08, 2004 - February
14, 2004 Archives

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: February 08, 2004 - February
14, 2004 Archives 02/10/2004 01:35 PM
sounding evasive, incoherent and out of touch .. Josh Marshall .. said

talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_02_08.html#002539
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Stars of Wonder

Stars of Wonder 12/25/2003 12:48 AM
Your sky is a virtual planetarium program from Fourmilab. "You can produce maps in the forms described below for any time and date, viewpoint, and observing location. "

Web Stars: Best of the Web

Web Stars: Best of the Web 01/17/2004 10:48 PM
Web Stars: Best of the Web by Josh Taylor
http ://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,113745,00.asp

Where should you go for news, research, shopping, and more? We compare Goliaths of the Web to lesser-known upstarts--and discover some surprising results. The Web has been around long enough that even the most adventuresome surfer might end up in a rut, always using the same sites to get work done. So we put up the periscope to scan for the best newcomers and compared them to the Net's stalwarts. In each category, one site emerged as the Best Bet--but that shouldn't dissuade you from exploring the other contenders, all of which offer innovative and useful features you won't find anywhere else.

STARS

STARS 06/08/2004 06:57 PM
New Developer: Tong Zhang

Web of stars due at Spider-Man 2

Web of stars due at Spider-Man 2 06/22/2004 12:37 PM
The stars of Spider-Man 2 are expected to attend the US premiere of the sequel in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

Shooting stars.....

Shooting stars..... 10/29/2003 12:11 AM
SHOOTING STAR Words and Music by Bob Dylan Seen a shooting star tonight And I thought of you. You were...

four stars, two cars...

four stars, two cars... 03/13/2003 10:22 AM

Scott finally posted about his new song, and I've been waiting to say something about it. It absolutely blows me away that someone with a desktop PC and a few guitars can create this kind of music all by themselves, in their home.

Stars Utilities

Stars Utilities 07/24/2004 11:03 AM
Map2XY released

Math Stars 5.5

Math Stars 5.5 03/14/2005 05:37 PM
Math Stars 5.5 includes 5 math games for practicing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts plus factors and multiples. This version also includes a practice module which tracks each student's mastery of math facts. Students who answer all questions correctly within the allotted time earn a gold star. After earning 10 gold stars, a student's name is placed in the Hall of Fame. Various time limits and adjustable difficulty settings make the program adaptable for all ages. The program includes sounds and colorful graphics. Help is available within the program. Shareware $12. Site License $85. Registration documents included.

Two stars for peace

Two stars for peace 02/01/2005 09:09 PM
This proposal to make Israel and Palestine the 51st and 52nd states seems to be serious. While the site explains that it only takes a majority vote of the US Congress to add a state — there's a Constitutional flaw for you! — it oddly says nothing about asking the Israelis and Palestinians. [Thanks, Mark D., for the link.]...

Travel to the stars for $1,000

Travel to the stars for $1,000 07/12/2004 10:28 AM
It's a one-way trip, though

Rock Stars: Don't Rip Us Off, Man

Rock Stars: Don't Rip Us Off, Man 01/10/2004 07:17 AM
Big names from the music and film world drop by the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to remind folks that stealing their music is bad and that they shouldn't do it.

3 Rising Stars

3 Rising Stars 08/04/2004 11:36 AM
Tom Gardner draws back the curtain on his Hidden Gems approach to small-cap investing.

Shooting stars

Shooting stars 06/16/2004 08:32 AM
My close encounter with William Hung and Buckethead at a hot, hippie-packed extravaganza. Plus: Reconsidering a band -- because you told me to.

Stars marred

Stars marred 09/15/2004 07:37 AM
USA Today Sep 15 2004 12:14PM GMT

Closer to the stars

Closer to the stars 04/04/2005 06:46 AM
USA Today Apr 4 2005 10:49AM GMT

Stars reunited

Stars reunited 06/17/2004 02:46 PM
USA Today Jun 17 2004 7:24PM GMT

Crucible of Stars

Crucible of Stars 09/23/2004 10:01 PM
Setting Up

Stars of tomorrow ... and beyond

Stars of tomorrow ... and beyond 08/18/2004 08:31 AM
Free music from the next Suzanne Vega and from a European cult figure that every Beck fan should know about. Plus: What's wrong with borrowing a soul vocal trick or two from Kanye West, anyway?

W3C Talks in February

W3C Talks in February 02/11/2004 01:16 AM
2004-02-10: Browse upcoming W3C appearances and events, also available as an RSS channel. (News archive)

February 17, 2005

February 17, 2005 03/14/2005 05:44 PM

Usability Time! When Microsoft AntiSpyware is running it displays this dialog:

... which looks, to me, like it's telling me that it detected spyware on my system.

Oh, wait! No, that's not it, it's just a lazy programmer who wrote this code:

10 PRINT "DETECTED SPYWARE ON YOUR SYSTEM:"
20 FOR I = 1 TO 1000000000
30 IF SPYWARE(I) THEN PRINT FILENAME(I)
40 NEXT I

I think I get it. It's the heading for a list which has not arrived yet because you're still busy scanning my harddrive searching for spyware which I don't have. The usual programmer mentality ("it's just a list with 0 elements, what's so hard to understand about that?"). Hey guys, next time don't use a message that's only one pixel away from telling me the exact wrong fact about whether or not there's spyware on my system.

So far, it looks like this is a nifty program, and consumers should be happy that Microsoft has announced it will be free, but it really, really would have been nice for us here in the software industry if Microsoft had set a price on this thing just to provide some air cover for the other companies working on spyware removal. This is not a software category where a monopoly monoculture will be a good thing.

Not only that, but I wonder if Microsoft can run an antispyware product without huge conflicts of interest. For example, will they block all the spyware that Real installs on your system? While Real is suing them? Especially when blocking spyware from Real will just give Real more ammunition to use against Microsoft in court? And the next time Microsoft needs a DRM favor from your friendly neighborhood media conglomerate, will the media conglomerate demand exemption from Antispyware removal for their adware in exchange for supporting Windows Media 37.0, with the new brain-zapping feature that prevents you from humming any song unless you bought the performance rights? (A sheet of tinfoil wrapped tightly around your skull is effective against this zapper, I understand.)

I understand that Microsoft wants to help customers who feel like a spyware-free operating system should be your right when you pay for WinXP, but it's a shame that by giving it away free they're likely to wipe out a useful industry and replace it with something that's difficult to trust due to conflicts of interest.

"February 8, 2004 05:18 PM"

"February 8, 2004 05:18 PM" 02/13/2004 02:37 PM

February 16, 2005

February 16, 2005 03/14/2005 05:44 PM
Jamie Zawinski on Groupware: “So I said, narrow the focus. Your ‘use case’ should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?”

February 23, 2005

February 23, 2005 03/14/2005 05:44 PM

Phew! and w00t! Last night at about 7:35 FogBugz 4.0 finally went live, on the exact day we planned to ship it quite a few months ago.

 

I have put a lot of other things on hold while we got this major upgrade out the door, so I'll be spending some time in catch-up mode for the next few weeks. And now I'm going to take a nap.

The Large Print Giveth and the Small Print Taketh Away: What we shipped today was FogBugz 4.0 for Windows. The Unix & Mac versions are now in beta and will be shipping Real Soon Now.

February 05, 2005

February 05, 2005 02/05/2005 09:52 PM

It's time for a server upgrade. For two years a single server has hosted the bulk of our sites, including Joel on Software, although a second smaller server has made an appearance. Over the next few weeks there will be a massive upgrade, giving us six top of the line, state of the art servers at the Peer 1 colo downtown.

In the past I would have upgraded the system, installed it all, and written an article about it. And then people would have emailed me to suggest better ways to do things, but it would be too late.

So now for the first time ever, I'm going to publish a "live" article here. So far, I haven't done anything. If you have any better suggestions for how to do things, it's not too late for me to learn from your experience. As we go along, I might have a few questions for my readers who have experience with this stuff.

Colo Expansion Part 1

"February 2003"

"February 2003" 01/03/2004 07:07 PM

February 20, 2004

February 20, 2004 03/06/2004 01:51 AM

Ask Joel

I'm running out of my own ideas for article topics. I was going to write about how the search for autotrephination on Google only has one result, which is surprising, considering how there's an entire movie on the subject, although I realized most people probably think autotrephination would mean "automatic-drilling-of-holes-in-the-head" when it's perfectly obvious to me that it should mean "drilling-of-holes-in-one's-own-head" but, hey, what does a word mean that has only been used once in the entire history of Google? And what does it mean to say that a word means something if nobody has ever used it? Anyway, I decided that writing about this would be so headache-inducing you all would try to drill a hole in my head so I didn't write anything about it.

Luckily, I have my readers for topic ideas. A lot of times people email me saying, "I'd love to hear what you think about X." Sometimes, that's enough to motivate me to write a long essay. But more often, my opinion is far too shallow and insipid to justify such an effort, so I dash off a paragraph or two to the email correspondent, or, more often, file away the email in a folder full of things I would love to respond to if we lived on Pluto and the day was 153.4 hours long and humans didn't require that much sleep.

I decided to try out one of Philip Greenspun's ideas -- the Ask Philip Forum. So, without further ado, I have recycled the dreary old "New Yorkers" forum, which was something of a ghost town anyway, into the shiny new Ask Joel Questions forum. There are still some old New York-related topics there. Ignore them. Put the drill away. Thank you.

Linkers

The appropriate person at Microsoft ble w off my request for a linker. The strongest argument he makes is that Microsoft wants to be able to patch security bugs in the CLR after I've shipped my program. This is a valid concern; when a major security hole was found in zlib everybody had to figure out which programs they had that used it and recompile them all. I wasted a day of my life on that particular bug. But it's easily solved by a simple technology of shims or jump tables. Put on your thinking hat and you'll figure out how to make a linker that produces a single executable plus a jump-table that Microsoft can patch when they find a security hole. PS. Apple had this technology in the original Macintosh, 1984.

His other argument about working set size is a decision that should be left to developers. Let me pick the tradeoff I want to make between ease of installation and working set size.

Look, I used to be a program manager at Microsoft, and there's a really strong tendency in that culture to treat customer requests as fun intellectual challenges to be fended off like exercises in debating class. But I've been talking to customers since the days of the Visual Basic 1.0 runtime in 1991 -- thirteen years ago! who have been begging for this problem to be addressed. Jason, why don't you go talk to somebody on the FoxPro team. In the late 80s FoxPro clobbered dBase in the market mainly on the strength of the fact that it compiled standalone executables. FoxPro had a linker. xBase developers pleaded with Ashton-Tate, makers of dBase, to develop or acquire a linker, but Ed Esber, reviled CEO of Ashton-Tate, refused to give them one. Learn from your own history. (Thanks to Rick Chapman for reminding me of history repeating itself.)

ISV's that I talk to agree that this is the #1 weakness of VB1-6 and .Net. I'm forced to conclude that Microsoft has grown so large they are living in a reality-distortion field. I suppose it's not unusual for someone working on a campus with 45 buildings all full of Microsoft employees to lose track of what the outside world is thinking and doing.

OK, anyway, there are third party alternatives. Jitit makes a thing called Thinstall. I haven't tried it. If someone out there wants to write an in-depth technical review of this thing, please contact me and I'll try to get you a review copy.

Elsewhere

Blogs I've been reading lately: Rory, Scoble, Raymond, Phil.

I loved the style, wittiness, humor and erudition of Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby but I can't say I learned much about Ruby. Maybe in the next chapter?

No PowerMacs in February?

No PowerMacs in February? 02/16/2004 09:30 AM
ThinkSecret updates with a number of small blurbs... the most interesting of which involves some information of PowerMac G5 updates. According to t...

February 27, 2004

February 27, 2004 03/06/2004 01:51 AM

I hope you're not all missing the excellent stuff going down on the Ask Joel forum.

On Apress: “ And although they would not put a doggie on the cover of my book as I requested, because a certain other book publisher threatens to sue his competitors when they put anything animal like within 90 feet of their covers, their graphic designer worked overtime to create underground cover art called User Interface Design for Doggies complete with three golden retrievers, which they framed and sent to me. ”

On Microsoft Program Managers: “ So the programmers think they're deciding everything and the program managers think they're deciding everything. How can they both be deciding everything? They can't. Who is really deciding, then? Let me give you a hint. Of the program managers and developers you know, on the whole, who has better people skills? eh? speak up boy, I can't hear you. Duh! Of course it's the program managers. You knew that. Developers couldn't people-skill their way out of a summer intern party at BillG's lakeside mansion. Developers have such weak people skills they can't even imagine what people skills could be used for, other than the purely theoretical concept of getting a theoretical date ("I ... like ... big BUTTS and I can not LIE..."), so it's no wonder they're not even aware of the secret that I can finally reveal today. ”

On Lisp: “And I have the ultimate respect for Paul Graham -- I think there's a good probability that in a year or two we will credit him with being the man who solved spam. But I think that if you try to ignore the fact that millions of programmers around the world have learned lisp and don't prefer to use it, you're in the land of morbid cognitive dissonance. ”

On Big-M Methodologies: “ Everything about RUP, for example, is obsessed with figuriing out what the business objects and business rules are so you can do a payroll system. We do things like add spell checkers to an editor window. ”

On Usable Programming APIs: “Indexes are one based. That's how humans count. Zero-based is better, I agree, but one-based is what humans expect, and the program model must conform to the user model for ease of use.”

On Starting Fog Creek: “ The law firm that was recommended to us was big and famous and wanted a $30,000 retainer just to talk to us. There was a time during dotcom mania where you weren't someone unless your law firm was VLG or MoFo. I was literally told that you had to use VLG or maybe, distant second, MoFo, or I could never convince VCs to invest. "They won't take you seriously if you don't have a serious lawfirm." I snorted up my milk. ”

On teaching your boyfriend C++: “ Forget it! Give up! ...  Teach me about women's shoes and I will feign interest and then promptly forget everything you told me.”

On software pricing: “With software sold in corporations, as soon as your price gets up in the $3000 level, the amount of approval it needs is so absurd that you are not going to sell products without a salesperson making a few visits. Hiring the salesperson, sending them out to make presentations, hotels, airfare -- now it costs $50,000 to get the sale done just in sales closing costs. That's why you see a lot of software products at $100,000 and a lot under $3000, but anywhere in-between and it's impossible to make sales. ”

BenQ P50 in February for $800

BenQ P50 in February for $800 01/06/2005 02:56 PM

BenQ finally showed off the P50 smartphone, with built-in Wi-Fi and GSM/GPRS radios, as well as a 1.3-megapixel camera. The bummer is they are quoting a price of $800—almost twice as much as its main competitor, the Treo 650 (after rebates).

B enQ unveils WLAN smart phone with camera [Infoworld]

February 28, 2004

February 28, 2004 03/06/2004 01:51 AM

This thread in Ask Joel about offshoring/outsourcing is much better than anything I could have written on the subject myself. Ken sets up the strawman; eloquent readers from around the globe tear it down.

February 05, 2003

February 05, 2003 03/11/2003 09:44 AM
Dave asks: "When I get Slashdotted we get about 5000 reads. I've noticed that number is about what some Manila and Radio sites have gotten when they were Slashdotted. Now, according to Joel Spolsky he gets about 400,000 reads from a Slashdot link, about 80 times the flow. Now here's the question. Why?"

Actually, I said 500,000, not 400,000, and I was referring to hits, not "reads." I'm not sure what a read is, but a hit is a single file served by the web server. Even the simplest page on this site consists of four files: the header GIF, the Made with CityDesk GIF, the CityDesk logo, and the article itself. Articles with pictures have a lot more. The number of page views we get, which only counts HTML files, is about 120,000 on "slashdot days." Since the average day has about 30,000 page views, only 90,000 are "extra." Still a lot more than Manila sites, but not 80 times the flow.

Another difference is that I almost always get slashdotted on a day when I release a new article. This is coincidentally the same day I send email to 16,000 subscribers telling them about the new article. And on average a few dozen webloggers will link to me on the same day, bringing in their traffic as well.

Some percentage of those people say, "Aha! This precisely proves my point!" and forward the URL to their boss or underling to hit them over the head with it. "See? Nya!" So there's always a multiplier effect.

Finally, Joel on Software has enough old content that many new visitors stay a while and click around. That accounts for a lot of the extra traffic on Slashdot days.

February 25, 2003

February 25, 2003 03/11/2003 09:44 AM

The discussion forum for this site generates a lot of questions and commentary. As I said when I launched it, it's a bit of an experiment. Although it may seem simple, there are a lot of subtle design decisions and magic-behind-the-scenes in hopes of improving the quality of discussion that takes place there. So far, it has mostly worked.

Later this week I'll write an essay explaining everything, but because it's full of Heisenberg effects, the essay won't appear on this web site, it will only go out via email to email subscribers. You can subscribe here or at the bottom of any page on my site:

Email:

 

Don't worry, you can unsubscribe at any time; every email I send includes a single-click unsubscribe link. I will never sell your email address. Subscribe by Friday to be sure to get the essay. Once again -- the essay will not appear on the web and will be copyright so I'll ask you not to forward the email around. It's an exclusive benefit for email subscribers.

February 14, 2003

February 14, 2003 03/11/2003 09:44 AM

Due to the poor sound quality of the previous CityDesk online demo, I decided to invest in a real studio quality microphone instead of using one of those cheap computer headset/mike combinations.

It took me a while to figure out what I needed. The mike itself is a Shure SM58, probably one of the most popular professional microphones in use today and generally available for about $100.

I bought the Mic from Sam Ash on 48th street, hoping that they would be able to get me the right combination of cables and adapters I needed to plug this thing into a standard sound card. The stoner DJ sales dude sounded very confident but he didn't tell me that I needed a preamp, and he gave me the wrong kind of cables.

If you're trying to do this yourself, here's exactly what I have:

1. the Shure SM58 microphone
2. A basic desk stand. The clip part that connects the mike to the stand comes with the mike.
3. a 3' mic cable (it only needs to reach the preamp). I bought a CBI LowZ Microphone Cable from Zzounds.
4. A preamp. This boosts the level of the microphone to something that is called "Line Level" which is what a computer sound card needs. I got an M-Audio AudioBuddy from Zzounds.
5. To connect the preamp to the sound card, you need a cable with a 1/4" stereo phone jack on one end and a 1/8" stereo "mini" phone jack on the other end. I assembled this out of two cables which I bought at my neighborhood Radio Shack. For some reason the professional music stores like Sam Ash and Zzounds think it is beneath their dignity to stock any parts with 1/8" jacks, but that is what your sound card needs.

The sound quality is really quite a bit better. Here are two MP3s, before (with the computer mike) and after (with the professional mike).

February 28, 2003

February 28, 2003 03/11/2003 09:44 AM

The social scientist Ray Oldenburg talks about how humans need a third place, besides work and home, to meet with friends, have a beer, discuss the events of the day, and enjoy some human interaction. Coffee shops, bars, hair salons, beer gardens, pool halls, clubs, and other hangouts are as vital as factories, schools and apartments ["The Great Good Place", 1989]. But capitalist society has been eroding those third places, and society is left impoverished. In "Bowling Alone," Robert Putnam brings forth, in riveting and well-documented detail, reams of evidence that American society has all but lost its third places. Over the last 25 years, Americans "belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often." [2000] For too many people, life consists of going to work, then going home and watching TV. Work-TV-Sleep-Work-TV-Sleep. It seems to me that the phenomenon is far more acute among software developers, especially in places like Silicon Valley and the suburbs of Seattle. People graduate from college, move across country to a new place where they don't know anyone, and end up working 12 hour days basically out of loneliness.

So it's no surprise that so many programmers, desperate for a little human contact, flock to online communities - chat rooms, discussion forums, open source projects, and Ultima Online. In creating community software, we are, to some extent, trying to create a third place. And like any other architecture project, the design decisions we make are crucial. Make a bar too loud, and people won't be able to have conversations. That makes for a very different kind of place than a coffee shop. Make a coffee shop without very many chairs, as Starbucks does, and people will carry their coffee back to their lonely rooms, instead of staying around and socializing like they do in the fantasy TV coffeehouse of "Friends," a program we watch because an ersatz third place is less painful than none at all.

In software, as in architecture, design decisions are just as important to the type of community that develops or fails to develop. When you make something easy, people do it more often. When you make something hard, people do it less often. In this way you can gently encourage people to behave in certain ways which determine the character and quality of the community. Will it feel friendly? Is there thick conversation, a European salon full of intellectuals with interesting ideas? Or is the place deserted, with a few dirty advertising leaflets lying around on the floor that nobody has bothered to pick up?

— Excerpted from my latest article, “Building Communities with Software,” which will only be sent to email subscribers. Please subscribe now to receive the article, which will be sent out on Monday morning.

February 03, 2003

February 03, 2003 03/11/2003 09:44 AM

New Column

I just got the March copy of the Programmer's Paradise catalog, which contains the first installment of my new column, a review of VMware, on page 11. “By the twentieth time I'd installed Windows 2000, I could do it in my sleep, even though I don't know a word of Chinese.” The only way to read the column is to get the catalog, which you can do for free here.

I've already written the next two columns for the catalog: a review of ERwin and an article about user interface design. Also in the pipeline: reviews of LeadTools, Camtasia Studio, and DevPartner Studio. Unlike most software reviewers who write for the magazines, who spend just enough time with a the product to get 750 words worth, I plan to review things that we actually use on a daily basis here at Fog Creek and talk about how we use them.

Commoditize Your Complements

Remember when I wrote that “smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements?” We decided to take some of our own advice, here, so as of today, FogBUGZ can be run on top of MySQL, which is free, in addition to Microsoft SQL Server, which is expensive.

We also support two more source code control systems: CVSNT and Visual SourceSafe.

February 04, 2003

February 04, 2003 03/11/2003 09:44 AM
I've moved Joel on Software to a new server, at a colocation facility operated by Peer 1 Network. In the process of finding a new home and getting it up and running I've learned quite a bit about how web hosting works, so I thought I'd describe a bit of it here and in the process provide a glimpse Behind The Scenes.


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"February Stars"

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