moebius recursive

When it comes to music downloads, the iTunes music store just doesn’t add up when compared to Amazon’s offering. In fact, I regret the small number of purchases I made from iTunes prior to Amazon launching their service in May of 2007. The two big issues with iTunes are DRM and cost.

DRM: Aside from my iPod, I have one other device that is able to play Apple’s DRM crippled files and that is an Airport Express. And by and large, it sucks. I have it connected to a Bose CD player in the kitchen which is about 15-20 feet from the Airport base station with a dry-wall wall between the two. Airport Express will play between 1 and 5 songs before it just stops playing music — no error on the iMac side, no indication that there is a problem on the AE side. It usually gets confused at the end of a song. The rest of the music needs of the house are served by Roku Soundbridge network music players. The Roku devices more or less just work with one problem — they can’t play any of the DRM crippled music from the iTunes store. Amazon’s downloads don’t have this issue and are of the same or higher quality as the iTunes files.

Cost: If a CD that I am looking to buy is available on Amazon download; I’m going to download it. That way I don’t have to deal with shipping and storage of the physical CD. The downloads can be significantly less expensive than the CD, especially for imports. And in every case, the download is $1-4USD cheaper from Amazon than from Apple. And did I mention, no DRM on the Amazon files. The Amazon downloader puts the files right into iTunes and even includes the CD cover art at the click of a button so there is no challenge or inconvenience in using Amazon’s downloads versus Apple’s.

So tell me again why I should buy music from Apple? Surely not just because it’s Apple and it’s ‘cool’.

Technorati Tags:
amazon, apple, itunes, music

No, I personally am not going away, but my me.com (aka mobileme aka .mac aka itools) email account is. I started with the free iTools service that came out shortly before the first release of OS X. In fact, iTools was released 9 years ago tomorrow (January 5th). I stayed with it when it became the .mac paid service in 2002 because of the discounts on offer and the free software that was given to subscribers (this perk has now gone away). I had second thoughts when the fee increases were announced over the years. But when I got the most recent ‘we (Apple) will automatically update your subscription’ email, I thought to myself ‘what value am I really getting from this’?

The answer ‘is not a lot’. Syncing bookmarks was cool, but I can do that now with Opera or Evernote. As the me.com service becomes more and more iPhone-centric it becomes less attractive to me because I don’t own an iPhone nor will I own one anytime in the foreseeable future. I can sync my contacts on my Nokia N95 using Nokia Ovi online service. In fact on Ovi, I can sync my calendar, upload photos and video, store and retrieve files, enable push-mail from any POP account to my phone, access map updates and more. I have my own hosting account on dreamhost so I don’t need Apple’s crippled iWeb tied hosting.

The fact that I have stronger alternatives to Apple’s offering as well as the poor performance and outages that accompanied the mobileme ‘upgrade’, the choice was a fairly easy one. It has cost me a little effort in switching sites that were using my .mac email accounts over to another and downloading the files that I was sharing that I will need to get around to re-hosting on mobrec.com . In the end I feel better about not handing over $100+ dollars to Apple every year for what has turned out to be diminishing returns.

Technorati Tags:
apple, blogging, dubious, email, iphone, mac, n95, nokia, webtools

Happy 2009, all.

You may want to start by familiarizing yourself with the words and phrases that are banished for 2009.

Technorati Tags:
blogging, fun

An excellent collection of photos ‘taken at just the right angle’. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags:
creativity, fun, photography

The Register rather mercilessly skewers Malcolm Gladwell in a recent posting. I’ll grant them that some of his grand proclamations turn out to be a bit hollow (discussed previously) but is that enough to conclude that he has nothing to say?

I recently purchased Gladwell’s new book Outliers. Hopefully I’ll have time to read it and draw my own conclusions as most of the comments in the Register’s posting refer to statements he has made in public presentations/discussions.

Technorati Tags:
books, dubious, ideas, outliers, science

As I was reading Martin Fowler’s post on ServiceCustodian I was struck by something that, in his words, didn’t smell right. After re-reading the article several times, I finally put my finger on it. He appears to assume that a service is no different than Java .class file or a .jar . Nothing could be further from the truth.

A true service should reflect a reusable business function, not merely some technical/programatic detail. As such, it should have a business owner who defines and controls what changes are appropriate to that function at a business level. Having coders making changes willy-nilly could prove disastrous to the business (but quite satisfying to the coders). It is unlikely that the business service owner will be able to understand the nature of a change from a patch (or even what a ‘patch’ was for that matter). There is no substitute for appropriate documentation and change control procedures to avoid errant changes.

This seems to be an increasingly frequent miss for coders: focusing on the code and what is convenient for the coder rather than on what makes sense for the business that they are supposed to be supporting.

Technorati Tags:
agile, architecture, badideas, design, development, dubious, ideas, software

Auto makers: instead of going, hat in hand (fresh from your private jet) to the government and asking tax payers for a bailout, why not go to your biggest benefactor: the oil companies? You have tacitly been in their service for the last thirty years if not more, cranking out bigger and less fuel efficient cars that serve to line their pockets with more and more cash.

Why does a minivan need to have an engine in it that is bigger than what was in a ‘muscle car’ back in the 60s? Do you really need a 2.5 ton pickup truck to drive down to the wings place and pick up a case of beer on the way home? ‘No’ to both.

So there you go: ChrysForGM can consolidate and be the demand side for the oil companies who will continue to pay them for their wasteful services. After all, the oil companies are flush with cash and government is still giving them corporate welfare checks. Please don’t let it be American taxpayers. Again.

Technorati Tags:
dubious, humor, ideas

It is becoming routine to see baiting headlines like Gartner’s latest on SOA Is A Failure. Suitably, this puff piece was delivered by the king of the malaprop.

To save you the time, here is the formula for a Gartner blog posting of this type: “_insert technology to be disparaged here_ is/will be a failure if it doesn’t solve a business problem and is technology for technology’s sake. It will fail even faster if you do not manage it properly and don’t have accountability.” Done. There you have it. No insight, no facts, just the same set of pro forma platitudes that have existed in the IT industry for years.

It is equally important to notice what doesn’t get written: ‘We (Gartner) told you to drop everything and run after this technology previously without making sure it solved a business problem, etc’.

Technorati Tags:
architecture, dubious, soa

I was reflecting on the state of the BPM marketplace while returning from Software AG’s Innovation World. It seems that, by and large, there are few consultants out there who can advise you on the actual implementation of BPM (the hard part) but plenty of them that can fulminate on the easier theoretical portions. For example, here is a relative plot of the marketplace as I see it:

The justification phase is easy, as it primarily consists of the same pro forma advise for any IT-related project: have an executive sponsor, get business buy in, don’t try to justify a big bang approach, blah, blah blah. Check.

The analysis phase is where the Lean/Six Sigma types will descend upon you with endless discussion of SIPOC and other jargon. Don’t get me wrong, this is a valuable analysis to have, it just does not solve the entire problem.

Then comes the actual implementation and the sounds of crickets in the field. For implementation, that favorite consulting cliche comes out all too often: ‘it all depends’. Well, yes, it does all depend, but if anyone has successfully implemented BPM even a handful of times, they should be able to begin to synthesize a set of best practices and guidelines in general and offer specifics in a given tool stack. This area is sorely wanting — in most cases, even the vendors can’t tell you how to effectively use their own tool stacks in any detail.

Assuming that you have navigated the rocky shores of implementation, there are any number of Business Activity Monitoring and Business Intelligence vendors who will sell you their wares to help you visualize your process data as executive friendly dashboards and portals. They typically have nothing to say about effective data collection and meaningful representation of data.

Technorati Tags:
architecture, BPM, consulting, enterprisearchitecture, soa, technology

At least the ‘logic’ sounds familiar, if not the tactic of not allowing a response.

Technorati Tags:
batman, dubious, politics, video

Not really sure of the value of this, but it is a bit fun to type in names and see the result.

Technorati Tags:
fun, visualization, webtools

In an amazingly progressive move from embarrassingly staid Cincinnati, the city has introduced dedicated parking spots around the central business district dedicated to two wheeled vehicles. Though in typical Cincinnati fashion, they introduce the parking spots at the onset of winter when there will be fewer riders to actually take advantage of them. What I hope doesn’t happen is that they assess the usage of the spots over winter and conclude that no one is using them.

Technorati Tags:
cincinnati, parking, scootering

I bet this guy has wanted to do this ever since he was a little kid.

Technorati Tags:
fun, video

From Counterintuitive physics may help everyone drive home quicker

If you’re trying to drive to a destination as quickly as possible, you might think that knowing the traffic conditions would help you choose the quickest route for yourself. Traffic reports and new GPS technologies that provide traffic data are based on this assumption – but scientists have found that knowing this information may do more harm than good.

A recent study has investigated just how much time is lost due to individuals opting for strategies that maximize their own personal utility rather than the social optimum, which often aren’t the same. Physicists Hyejin Youn and Hawoong Jeong from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, Korea, and computer scientist Michael Gastner from the Santa Fe Institute and the University of New Mexico in the US, call this lost time “the price of anarchy” (POA) that society must pay for the lack of individual coordination.

This would appear to be another demonstration that acting for a greater good rather than for individual gain actually benefits the individual as well. Check out Robert Axelrod’s excellent book The Evolution of Cooperation for more on this topic.

Another study shows that people come up with more creative solutions to problems by using simple paper and pencil than they do by using a computer. Fundamentally, the difference seems to be between a constrained environment (the computer) and an unconstrained one (pencil and paper).

This mirrors my own experience in computer programming and other areas. When I first started programming over twenty years ago, I felt I came up with a much better solution by sketching out the overall flow of the app and the different sub-routines and modules on paper first. Now it seems the first instinct of most developers is to reach for google and copy and paste some code rather than think through the problem themselves and come up with an approach.

Technorati Tags:
cognition, creativity, ideas, technology

I tried out the latest Yahoo Go mobile app on my Nokia N95 8GB. Go quickly demonstrated that Yahoo have no idea about the mobile market and their offering stinks. By focusing on bandwidth wasting adverts they undermine the entire mobile experience.

In my case I loaded up Go to try out the new voice search feature. Marginal success in that it mis-interpreted most everything that I spoke into it. Just for fun, I clicked over to check for my email. Up pops and error that it can’t connect to email. But apparently what it *could* do was connect to a server and start streaming some useless video for some Ford product that I had absolutely no interest in. If I wasn’t on an unlimited plan, I’d be really pissed. Oh, an there is no way to stop the ad until it downloads completely — sheer genius.

This is just further confirmation of what I have talked about before: Yahoo is clueless, it’s offerings suck and they should just agree to Microsloth’s offer to buy them and put them to sleep.

Technorati Tags:
crap, dubious, mobile, n95, suckage, yahoo, yahoogo

Trying to keep these forays into politics to a minimum but this is one that really struck me last night watching McCain and Obama debate:

Someone needs to sit John McCain down and explain to him that no matter what he does, he can’t ‘win’ the Vietnam War by fighting in Iraq/Iran. It just isn’t going to happen.

Technorati Tags:
dubious, mccain, opinion, politics

My recent sniglet creations:

Solutionating: Combination of solution and hallucinating. What vendors and software designers do when they convince themselves that their product (solution) does something that it absolutely does not.

Annausysis: Combination of analysis and nausea. That feeling you get during your analysis that tells you just how screwed up something is. Frequently accompanies solutionating.

Technorati Tags:
fun, humor, ideas, language, sniglet

Finally had a chance to try out the Genius function in iTunes. In a word: unimpressed.

Here is Apple’s breathless description of Genius Sidebar:

While you reacquaint yourself with the music you already own, let Genius introduce you to new music you’ll love. As you select songs in your library, the Genius sidebar displays songs from the iTunes Store that go great with it. The Genius sidebar won’t recommend songs already in your library, and you can preview and buy recommended songs directly from the sidebar.

In my experience, not quite. Granted my rather eclectic set of music in iTunes gives a wide berth to what passes for American pop music, it is not like it is all way-out exotic stuff. Genius seems to think so. For I would say better than half of the music tracks that I clicked on, Genius came back with ‘I got nothin’, but here is the tired old crap that everyone else is listening to…‘ displaying the top selling tracks and albums in the iTunes store. Great, not interested in being homogenized like the rest of the herd.

It also frequently falls into the trap that Amazon recommendations does, that of assuming that you are a moron. For example, if you buy a CD by, say, David Bowie, Amazon proceeds to recommend every single CD that David Bowie has ever made, whether the style of it is even close to the original CD. It’s as if Amazon (and Apple) are saying: ‘You found that first CD, but your probably not smart enough to find all the other stuff by the same artist by using our search function, so here they are for you, nitwit‘. Not helpful at all.

The Genius Playlist function does a slightly better job than the sidebar, but I still get plenty of “Genius is unavailable for the song “.

I suppose it can only get better as more and more info gets fed into Apple’s hungry servers over time. We shall see…

Technorati Tags:
apple, genius, itunes, music

Over two years ago, I posted about the idea of marrying an accelerometer and the iPod to be able to shuffle iPod tunes and otherwise control it. I guess Apple thought it was such a good idea that they stole it and implemented it in the new iPods announced today.

So where is my money, Apple?

Technorati Tags:
apple, ideas, ingenuity, innovation, ipod