I’ve been underwater trying to get a release out the door ever since I got back from Germany two weeks ago, and so haven’t had much time to do anything interesting. But last night I read a fantastic transcript of a talk by Steve Yegge of Google called Dynamic Languages Strike Back. If you care about compilers and/or dynamic languages you should read it and check out some of the linked articles, including one from Adobe. Mind-blowing stuff.
History Meme
17Apr08 – 07:12
Tim Bray and Mark Pilgrim have done it, so I thought I’d throw my command line history into the mix. Interestingly, I’ve been doing a lot of ruby on rails work over the last few weeks and it has skewed my command line use away from java based stuff like ant and maven:
~ % history | awk ‘{a[$3]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s \n”,a[i],i}}’ | sort -rn | head
259 ls
135 cd
82 p4
61 svn
61 ruby
59 cap
34 rm
31 mate
30 rake
22 script/console
(and, in case anyone was wondering why I use the third column instead of the second, it is because my default shell is still tcsh.)
SHARE Futures
19Mar08 – 20:19
There’s an interesting post over on Ryan Stewart’s blog about SHARE, my favorite web service (sometimes) and my personal migraine (sometimes). Ryan wants to know why SHARE doesn’t get more love from bloggers, something I can’t really speak to. We do get quite a bit of usage, though. Anyhow, there was lots of great feedback in there which we’ve been discussing on our internal mailing list, but there was one comment from Marc Hughes I wanted to address more publicly:
I’m planning Adobe Share support for AgileAgenda (my scheduling app), but the thing that’s been keeping me from doing it is the beta status.
When it goes official, what will be the fee structure? Free? Free for a limited account, pay for more? Pay-only? How committed it Adobe to the technology? If nobody uses it will it be gone in a year?
Also, being able to embed the content in a web page is great, if you’re sharing one of the few supported formats. But what about custom file formats? I want to supply a custom swf that’s used as the embedded viewer.
First, its really cool that you’d like to support SHARE in AgileAgenda. This kind of integration is exactly the reason why we spent so much time building web services APIs.
Second, on the future: although I can’t make any guarantees that mean anything, the future of SHARE is pretty bright. There is some other software coming from Adobe that make use of the same web service APIs that you can get from SHARE today, so we are pretty darn confident that those APIs will still be around for some number of years to come (since we had to sign support commitments in blood).
Third, on custom file format viewers: this is something we’d definitely like to do, although there are some serious security issues around embedding third party SWF objects inside of our Flex UI which we’re still trying to figure out. So no dates for this functionality just yet. Anyone have any tips? Send them my way.
Fourth, and finally, SHARE itself is getting a little stale, in internet time anyhow: its been almost five months since our last major update. That’s way too long, and we’re going to try to make sure we have something cool to show every couple of months from now on. The good news is that some of the key features we talked about at MAX last October are literally just around the corner, driven in large part by the feedback we’ve received on SHARE to date. And I’m even more excited about the new UI functionality coming in the release after that, which I get to play with a little more every day.
Anyhow, I hope this helps people who are working with SHARE feel better about its future. Hopefully we’ll have more to talk about next week.
The Death of Television?
18Mar08 – 10:23
For many years, we’ve been hearing about how Tivo and Premium Cable TV were killing broadcast TV (though honestly the “invention” of reality TV didn’t help either). But lately I’ve been noticing a sea change among early adopters which may mean that the end is near for both broadcast TV and the cable/satellite systems. That change is a switch to using services like Netflix and hardware like the AppleTV to switch to a completely different model of watching TV.
I actually have very little time to watch TV these days. We watch Lost, Heroes, Weeds, and the Daily Show pretty regularly. We occasionally watch The Office and The Colbert Report. I’d like to watch more movies at home but by the time we’ve had the kids watch their shows and put them to bed, we’re too tired too stay up another 90-120 minutes. Pathetic, I know. Yet we still pay a lot of money every month for DirectTV, which we invariably watch in recorded form on our Tivo. I recently downgraded us so that we no longer get anything but the ‘plus’ package of cable channels, but no movie channels, which saved us something like $40 per month. I considered going even further and getting rid of DirecTV altogether, but decided in the end that we’d keep it for a while longer so our kids could have access to Noggin and PBS Kids. But that means we’re paying something like $50 a month for the privilege of getting those channels.
But a lot of people are going further. One friend told me last week that he did jsut get rid of his DirecTV entirely, and now just buys his kids the occasional new kid shows on DVD. Some friends without kids rely on Netflix for everything now. I’ve seen a number of blog posts like this one where people have done similar things.
Bottom line is that $50 per month buys a lot of movie rentals and pay per view. Now that you can get those downloads on demand, why pay money to cable/satellite companies with crappy service? I predict this behavior will spread from high tech early adopters pretty quickly, and will have huge repercussions for the TV industry, particularly the satellite/cable companies and the premium cable channels.
Things may turn out ok for the broadcast companies. People still need local news and such. Wouldn’t it be funny if ABC/NBC/CBS turned out to outlive Showtime, HBO, and Cinemax thanks to their affiliate networks?
