Holidailies 2008

You may have heard that over-the-air television broadcast is converting to digital transmission on February 17, 2009. Even though that's still over two months away, if you don't act right away, like this very weekend, you may find out you are too late.

Here's what's happening: analog over-the-air television broadcasts will cease on February 17, 2009. Digital broadcasts are happening right now, and will be the only form of broadcast TV available after that time. If you depend on over-the-air broadcasts (which means you receive TV from a rooftop or rabbit ears antenna), then you need to be digital capable on that date. New televisions are required by law to have a digital tuner. Old televisions can continue to be used with an add-on digital converter box. They cost about $60 and are widely available. Each household can request up to two $40 discount coupons that can be applied to the purchase of qualified converter boxes.

An article is currently circulating the blogosphere about an irate Austin middle school teacher. The teacher, first name Karen, is incensed at a student for showing classmates how to get Linux software for free. She's even more angry at the person who provided Linux to the student. She wrote, in a letter of complaint:

At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows.

This is all laughably uninformed, except I'm not laughing.

I'm concerned that most people are responding by amping up an even greater level of outrage, and that doesn't seem to be a helpful way to move this forward.

Yesterday, I started a discussion of things I don't like about Twitter. I pointed out that lack of message prioritization in the client was a problem. I also noted that since Twitter has an API, that should be easy to fix, and I wouldn't be surprised if somebody already has.

The problem I want to talk about today is tougher to fix, and the fix basically entails throwing it away and starting over.

The term "microblogging" has been invented to describe what Twitter does. I strenuously object to that name. That which makes blogging so excellent and so important is exactly what's lacking in Twitter.

Blogging is a decentralized, user-hosted service. Anybody can host a blog—or designate a service to host it for them. Anybody can access and read blogs using a standard protocol suite. It's an open, distributed environment.

My initial impression of Twitter was unfavorable. It struck me then as a bad implementation of multicast IM. Maybe I should learn to trust my initial judgments.

(The term "multicast" means a single message is transmitted to multiple receivers. Most Internet applications, such as conventional IM, are unicast applications: they transmit to a single receiver.)

I remember when Twitter became a big, smash hit at the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive festival. I resisted joining for a long time. Early this year, I finally gave in.

I'm burned out on social networks. You invest all this time and effort into building your network, and six months later it's like living in the cavern of an abandoned ant colony. What a waste of time.

Fortune cookies the software developer received:

The inflection point of knowledge comes when you switch from the user manual to the API reference.

Just because everybody loves unit testing doesn't mean it gets done.

If you say "no" a lot, then there is a problem either with your attitude or your users.

Certification is not a substitute for wisdom.

Any web-based application in which business logic approaches zero may be implemented as a blog.

The corollary to the above is that every "build a web app in 15 minutes" demo will be to construct a blog.