turnings

It’s not a phone, it’s an alliance: The Journal kind of nails the problem with this story. Money quote: Tech consortia for decades have been notorious for failing to live up to their promise. Google Director of Mobile Platforms Andy Rubin acknowledged the troubled history of previous consortia, but said that Android was different because “we’re actually releasing in one week this software.”

Finally, has anyone else noticed the way Google is kind of desperately grasping at straws lately? They spend years trying to do something other than search and nothing works. Then, despite their big brains and IQ tests, they get totally blindsided by Facebook and have to gin up this ridiculous OpenSocial thing. Just like with this phone thing, they round up all the losers in that social networking space to form some dumbass alliance. You know how it looks? It looks weak. Companies don’t form alliances and consortia when they’re winning. Also, whenever you see companies start talking about being “open,” it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.

[Nice bitter piece. Good points though.]
Source: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

Steven Frank on Android:

A 34-company committee couldn’t create a successful ham sandwich, much less a mobile application suite.

[Amen.]
Source: Daring Fireball

FaceBook’s Hotmail problem: Any platform that makes ads a distraction or a cost is always going to fail compared to a site where the ads are a welcome part of the deal. [Calling all networks...]
Source: Seth’s Blog

Intro…:JRuby: An Introduction is a fresh new article by Chris Duckett that presents a practical, code-driven introduction to JRuby, a Java implementation of Ruby. It’s the perfect introduction for people who, perhaps, have an idea of what JRuby is, but who haven’t yet tried out any of the Java connectivity. The first page looks at interacting with basic Java libraries / classes, with the second moving on to building a basic Swing-powered GUI app using Java APIs from Ruby code.
[Hmmm.]
Source: Ruby Inside

OpenSocial Hacked Again: He’s pulled up Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen’s friend list to prove his point, and shared part of it with me. I won’t be publishing it here, but it shows that he got access to the application.

Total time to hack iLike on Ning: 20 minutes.

As with the RockYou/Plaxo hack, no real damage has been done, but it shows that in the rush to get applications out the door quickly, attention to security may have fallen by the side of the road. [Oops]
Source: TechCrunch

RDDB: RESTful Ruby Document-Oriented Database:

RDDB is a Ruby document-oriented database system inspired by CouchDB and developed by Anthony Eden. If you’re familiar with CouchDB, the whole system should make sense from the start, but if not, read on. [I was wondering how long this would take...]
Source: Ruby Inside

Blue Hydrangea

Like the green that cakes in a pot of paint,
these leaves are dry, dull and rough
behind this billow of blooms whose blue
is not their own but reflected from far away
in a mirror dimmed by tears and vague,
as if it wished them to disappear again
the way, in old blue writing paper,
yellow shows, then violet and gray;

a washed-out color as in children's clothes
which, no longer worn, no more can happen to:
how much it makes you feel a small life's brevity.

But suddenly the blue shines quite renewed
within one cluster, and we can see
a touching blue rejoice before the green.

Rainer Maria Rilke
William H. Gass, trans.

Joho the Blog: What’s unspoken between us: Look at how much isn’t said in that line. We wash clothes, and they become more our own as they lose their color. That’s something we know implicitly. We know that clothes need washing.

The next line makes explicit that Rilke is thinking of clothing folded and put away for a child who has grown. Rilke is giving us increasing degrees of explicitness. Poet has to get this right. [Ambient, unspoken knowledge has been an ongoing exploration of mine for many years. More... "Hyperlinks are the opposite of information. They enrich, rather than reduce. Open-ended, decentralized, messy… all the things databases of info are not. Most of all, they are social..."]