I was just complaining about Amazon’s gold box stupidity, and then the go and revamp how it’s done. I browsed it and I finally got relevant items that were based on things I had bought before. Well done amazon. only 3 years after I expected it.

A judge has issued a strongly critical 139 page report banning the teaching of intelligent design in Pennsylvania. To me and the scientists of the country this comes as more relief than anything else. What I want to know(but I’m too lazy to figure out) is why did Judge Jones need to write 139 pages that couldn’t be summed up in three words: Intelligent Design: pwned.

A thought occurred to me after reading this article on attempts to rework the economics of distributing of movies. Why don’t we have a content pricing model which is scaled to distribution? ie. An independent filmmaker gives away the first 100,000 copies of their content, but then after that the next 500,000 users have to pay $.25. Then after the first 1 million people pay $1 and after that, they pay $3 each. This would allow independent films to get people to spread word of mouth buzz while still allowing both them and the studios the chance to create blockbusters. By the time a movie reaches blockbuster status the full price would ensure that publishers could recoup their large marketing investments. In addition, some content creators could be rewarded for great content even if they didn’t have a distribution partner.

Everyone knows about the struggle of small time musicians and filmmakers and the evils of the big corporate publishers. No one knows how to fix it, but the scaled pricing scheme seems like a simple solution. Maybe it’s a technology problem or a DRM problem.

Mel Gibson had to use his own studio and do independent distribution to get The Passion of the Christ into wide release, and his gamble paid off several hundred million dollars. But few people have the money and clout to do that. The Blair Witch Project came from obscurity to become one of the most profitable films ever. It’s too bad we don’t hear of more success stories like these.

Yesterday I had to fill up my Prius(which is hereafter known as The LiberalMobile) for the first time. The combination of 4 factors has lowered my monthly gas cost to about 1/5 of what it used to be.
1: Better mileage: 40 mpg in LiberalMobile, about 22 in S2000
2: Plummeting gas prices: Gas prices dropped about $.30/gallon in the past month
3: Not having to use premium: another $.25/gallon savings
4: Shorter commute: new job is less than 5mi from work, old was 17mi

Here’s a rough comparison
Oct S2000: 20 MPG, $2.70 gallon(premium), 200 mi/week ~= $25/week
Nov LiberalMobile: 40 mpg, $2.15 gallon(regular), 90 mi/week ~= $5/week.

To make up the cost of car(S2000 worth about 15k, LiberalMobile cost about $29k) using only the better mileage I’ll need to make up $14k, and my average savings is about 20 mpg. Assuming a cost of $2.15/gallon that’s 6500 gallons of gas, which translates into 286k miles. This is truly a fine investment. Driving 5000 miles/year I’m going to be totally stoked once I get to 286k miles in the year 2062 because after that I’ll be saving $.10 every single mile.

Over on The Server Side I spotted this thread on Java losing ground to LAMP and .NET. Being a Java bigot I dismissed it out of hand, but then I got to thinking…

It’s clear that for pure web development, PHP is much better than Java. No matter how much I’d like to believe it, JSP still sucks. My personal complaint about PHP has always been not with the language itself(although there are some oddities), but about the way people use it to build applications. Being a scripting language, it tends to breed a lot of two tiered applications with the PHP presentation layer talking directly to a DB. This is poor because once you embed database logic into the presentation layer, it becomes very difficult to extricate it and build a nice scalable multi-tiered solution. I have always advocated against building large complex systems with PHP for this reason. Java does a much better job of architecting for multi-tiered solutions. They have solutions like the full J2EE specification to show that they have at least thought a lot about separating presentation, business and database layers. Not that I love J2EE, but at least it shows they have thought about building n-tiered applications, which is more than I can say for PHP.

I think what has made me rethink this is the rise of Web Services, SOAP and XML-RPC. Java is a great solution when you have a pure Java environment and you want to build the most scalable solution. The reality is that no large system is built as a pure Java solution. Every company I’ve ever been at wants to grow their business by opening at least a little bit of their sytems up so strategic partners, affiliates, and customers can exchange the information they need.

Nowadays when I build a system I think of what parts I would want to open up to other developers, and I ask myself how would they want access to it? I cannot assume they are going to want to program in Java. I’m a huge Java advocate and even I don’t want to do everything in Java. So I want to expose an interface using the the best supported cross platform technology which is probably Web Services. If I’m exposing a Web Services interface to other developers it needs to be solid and tested. A great way to ensure that the Web Services layer works well is to use that API for my own presentation layer. This means that the presentation and application layers are decoupled and therefore I can use the best tools for the job on both sides. And the best tool for the presentation layer is PHP and the best choice for the application layer is up to the developer. Personally I’d do some application layer stuff in Java, some in Python or Perl depending on the complexity.

This post is already too long with too many what ifs and whys but hopefully you get it.

With so much focus today on the soaring home prices and how they are the foundation of the American economy, I found this article on Slate about mortgage default rates interesting. There are many contradictory indicators on the health of the US economy. Strong growth in consumer markets and home equity valuations have to be balanced against massive consumer and war waging deficits, soaring health care costs and the ever increasing wealth gap. If the mortgage companies are indeed being much more forgiving of bad debts then one of the few indicators of the strength of the economy may be in doubt, which is worrisome for everyone.

Baby is 5 weeks away. We still don’t have a name. We’re excited. I know our lives are going to change, but it’s still hard to grasp how much exactly. We set up the stroller today. It’s one of those convertible ones where it’s got a car seat part and a stroller part so you can transfer baby from stroller to car seat without ever taking him out of his seat. Got the baby room, got the family car, got the stroller, got the cloth diaper service. Now all we need is the baby.

I talked to my parents today and my mom has embroiled herself into a very small disagreement between two parties back in Seattle. As it was explained to me, my mom is defending A local pastor at a Taiwanese church is very pro independent Taiwan is in some disagreement with some members of the congregration who would like him expelled because they want a religous leader. I guess my mom and the pastor didn’t get the memo that has been circulating for about 2000 years that religion and politics don’t mix.

I got my first order from Shutterfly today. The quality was very good, I was impressed. I did screw up a couple of things. I ordered a snapbook which uses a spiral binder to hold a set of pictures together and has a nice cover, but I made some of the pictures with borders and some of them without. ie The spiral holes go through the left side of the picture on some, but on most the picture is centered and doesn’t touch the holes. I also blew up a couple of pictures a bit too much and they look very grainy and just plain bad. The camera that took those pictures may have been lower resolution too. I only printed out 40 4×6s in the snapbook. This is kind of a test run for some nicer things which I’ll do in the future. I am going to try doing a bigger format print, maybe 11×14 or 16×20.
Take a look at these pictures and tell me which you like(you can comment here or there but you need an account there). It’s hard to choose which, because there are a couple different styles of pictures. I am not sure it’s worth enlarging just a picture of me and Tracy, but the picture of me, Tracy and her sister in Yosemite might look good bigger.

The lot next door has been vacant ever since we moved in about 7 years ago. It’s not ideal for building another house on because it’s not very wide, and there are some trees that would have to be replaced to build on it. But the total size is probably comparable to ours, so it is big enough. Today we went and saw the plans of the family who is going to build on it. The couple is a nice Indian couple with kids and the wife is an architect so she did the plans herself of course.

The house they want to build is huge. The city of Belmont limits houses to 3500 square feet. I guess they didn’t want to seem excessive, because they only went with 3497.5 square feet. I think they are leaving the extra 2.5 sqft for some expansion plans.

The plans themselves are nice. They actually did a nice job of not trying to intrude on our space as best as can be expected. No matter what, putting a house that’s about 2000 sqft bigger than our house in the lot next door is going to create some space issues. Street parking will go away and that will also be unfortunate. But on the other hand, I don’t feel like it is my place to complain. It’s their lot, they can do what they want. If I felt the house was going to hurt my property value significantly I’d be more apt to do something about it. As it is, I believe it might raise my property value slightly.