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5:10PM Pacific: Portland, OR. Safe and warm. 90 degrees, no humidity. Ahhhhh.  Chris Lydon's interview with me is ready for your listening pleasure. His comments are here. Joshua Allen: "We in the software industry are waaay too guilty of this self-indulgence where we think that the world cares about our politics, platforms, and gratuitous layers of abstraction." Right on. On the other hand, the rest of us are really at the mercy of the BigCo's. While I agree totally that we programmers are here to serve the users (I preach that every day, telling the users to expect more of techies, esp to expect the complete truth) one little change from one of the platform vendors can and often does put lots of LittleCo's into the dumper. Try to understand, we're not wrong, maybe your intentions are good, then you can do much better at staying out of the way. In the meantime it's getting worse not better. Also, one more thing, I don't do vertical apps; and your boss needs my horizontal ones as a source of new ideas. When was the last time Microsoft shipped something really new that originated inside Microsoft (not just the code, the idea and the design). Obviously it happens, I'm making a point. There's a synergy between large and small, even a co-dependence. The small guys have always known that. The big guys, for a variety of reasons, haven't. In the case of smaller newer Big's, like Marc Andreessen's Netscape, not understanding the power of independent developers can be fatal (for the company, Marc is still alive). It's exactly at this point, an inflection point, that Google is at right now, imho. Yesterday I asked for a feature in Manila, and today it's being tested with the most technical Manila users (also known as developers). If all goes well, Jake will release it later today. I wanted to get a feature in asap, this is a good one because it removes the incentive for referer-spam, the nasty links that show up on our referer pages because people want a free ride on our waves of page rank. It's a feature we think the Google folk should appreciate. As Jake would say: Hey There. Anyway, with the recent changes at UserLand, one of the good things is I have a direct connect once again to Jake and Lawrence. Don't worry guys I have a few more ideas for quick hits that will make the users happy. Real crowd pleasers. Three years ago today: "I just got an email from a friend who suffered a massive heart attack, and survived." Update: He's still kickin. I've been emailing with him the last few days. Once an hour, please  Mark Pilgrim has written an application that reads my site (apparently) every five minutes by a robot. Mark, please limit your reads to once an hour. We have a huge bandwidth bill, it's one of UserLand's biggest expenses, and the more we pay for bandwidth the less we have available to pay for programming and support. Thanks for working with us on this. How to help People ask how they can help UserLand. Here's one way. When someone asks an intelligent question on one of the user mail lists, be sure they get an intelligent answer. Lawrence is totally overloaded and it's a well-known fact that he can't get in every loop, although he surely tries. Especially while we try to put it back together, we need extra support and understanding for the users. It would be great if the support improved at this time. Think about what a powerful message that would send. The friendly skies I'm flying to Portland, OR today via Seattle, WA. Limited updates. See you from the West Coast. |
 
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