Month: November 2007

MIT sues Frank Gehry

MIT sues Frank Gehry: stata-center.jpgI don’t know much about this developing story, but it’s interesting on its face… M.I.T. Sues Architect Frank Gehry – New York Times (and here’s a longer piece in the NYT):

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing renowned architect Frank Gehry, alleging serious design flaws in the Stata Center, a building celebrated for its unconventional walls and radical angles.

The school asserts that the center, completed in spring 2004, has persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold growing on its brick exterior. It says accumulations of snow and ice have fallen dangerously from window boxes and other areas of its roofs, blocking emergency exits and causing damage.

Maybe unfair, but one interpretation: award-winning “radical” designs aren’t great if they can’t keep snow off the emergency exit.

[There are all sorts of stories about famous architects and there rejoinders to complaints about leaky roofs… Frank Lloyd Wright they claim told one client who was complaining about a roof leak dripping on his chair to move his chair. Another comment was that you wouldn’t know it was a roof if it didn’t leak. It’s simple really, it’s just a question of priority. If you want something that amazes by its design and look it’s going to require trying new materials and techniques. If you’re trying to build stuff you haven’t built before, there is going to be a learning curve, and unexpected results. It’s the same thing that makes so many software projects “grow”, or “late”, or “overbudget”. Stick with stuff that’s been done many times before and it won’t leak or drop melting ice in front of doorways. But it won’t inspire or delight except in its utility. Fine if that’s what you want, but you don’t hire Gehry for that.]
Source: Good Experience Blog

It’s not a phone, it’s an alliance

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

An Introduction to JRuby

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

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

Joho the Blog: What’s unspoken between us

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…”]

The Mythical Gphone

The Mythical Gphone:

Did we get a Google phone? No.

What we got instead was a press release, a conference call, some self-indulgent videos, and a memo from Andy Rubin, the putative designer of the mythical phone (and hero of an adoring profile in The New York Times over the weekend), confirming what the naysayers have been saying all along: Google is not and will not be in the business of building phones.

What it’s offering — and trying to sell to the people who actually build the phones — is an operating system and some tools for writing cellphone applications. It’s a worthy enterprise and I wish them well. What it is not — as they are the first to say — is a Gphone.

[Roight. Vapor s’all. Shameless vapor.]
Source: FORTUNE: Apple 2.0