Random Precision

According to CNET, HP is diving headfirst into the Netbook market. The interesting part of the article, though, is not so much about HP, as about netbooks in general, and how they are being marketed in Europe and Asia:

It’s a dramatic increase, and the difference is all coming out of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), where Asus and Acer have been incredibly aggressive about their Netbooks, the Eee PC and Aspire One, respectively. Of the 10.9 million units that are estimated to ship worldwide by the end of 2008, 8.1 million will go to EMEA, says IDC.

Acer and Asus have done well in the region, as evidenced by Acer’s quick rise to the top of the portable PC market there. But they’ve been aided by local telecom companies, who are subsidizing Netbooks in exchange for a signed wireless service contract. It’s a model that in the past few months has thrived in Europe.

Dell signed up Vodafone for this kind of deal on its Netbook, the Inspiron Mini 9 in September, but HP’s mostly been on the sidelines in this regard, and representatives for the company haven’t indicated if a similar deal with wireless providers are in the works.

Wireless service contract to subsidize a Linux-based device optimized for mobile Internet access. Other than the physical size of the device, how is this different from Android (and, Linux notwithstanding, the iPhone)?

At some point in the near future, somebody is going to put Android on a netbook-class device, and the shape of the future of client computing will become clearly visible. And the day that happens is the day that Microsoft’s desktop monopoly will be truly broken.

Model-View-Controller (MVC) is a design style that dates back (as so much does) to the pioneering work of the Xerox PARC facility. The idea is that applications should be separated into:

• Model: the data that the application manipulates, and the fundamental operations it performs on that data
• View: How the application looks to the user.
• Controller: How user, view, and model interact.

(Yes, yes, I’m sure anyone who cares to can pick apart my definitions. Don’t care.)

The idea is, views change all the time (today it’s radio buttons, tomorrow it’s drop-downs), controllers change moderately (add a confirmation step, tighten up the authentication), and models hardly change at all (an accounting program isn’t going to change into an MMORPG). So isolate the fast-changing bits from the slow-changing ones. And also allow different specialties — database hackers, usability analysts, graphical designers — to put apply themselves to their own field exclusively.

How do you do that in web applications? The received wisdom of the day is:

• Model: database + ORM (e.g., Hibernate, ActiveRecord)
• View: templating language
• Controller: application framework (Struts, Spring, Rails, etc.)

In other words, do it all on the server, all in one language (which, of course, fits all purposes, because it is the One True Language). Maintain separation of concerns with iron discipline and wishful thinking.

My own view:

• Model: database + RESTful web service, delivering information in JSON
• View: Static (X)HTML/CSS
• Controller: Javascript/AJAX

The controller code can be implemented in any server-side language: Java, C#, Ruby, Python, Erlang, whatever; it just needs to be able to talk to the database and send JSON over the wire. The view can be created in an HTML/CSS environment like Dreamweaver, with no worries about whether it’s compatible with the developer toolset. And the controller logic… Well, I’ve been playing with jQuery lately, and it may shock some folks to learn that coding client-side Javascript with a good compatibility layer library is actually fun.

Dividing tasks by physical location and implementation language creates a strict separation of concerns. Server-side code does not generate HTML. Controller code does not do SQL queries. View markup contains no executable code at all: there is no template language. There is zero possibility of the parts bleeding together.

Why wouldn’t this work? Am I missing something?

Paul Ford publishes an excellent essay on intellectual property laws, and the chilling effect they have on innovation, in Learning to Fear the Semantic Web.

As a bonus, it includes this lovely turn of phrase:

I believe, as in don’t-get-him-started, that…

I will now have to use this in everyday conversation on a regular basis. Consider yourself warned.

Tropical Storm: Computer Model Hurricane Forecasts : Weather Underground

Worrisome: some of the computer models are now showing Gustav hooking to the south. One, the NGFDL model, shows Houston in the bull’s eye.

Even if it does, I probably have nothing to worry about, given I live almost forty miles inland. Still, it looks like I need to do some shopping on the way home tonight.

McCain picks Alaska Gov. Palin as running mate - CNN.com

Palin, 44, who’s in her first term as governor, is a pioneering figure in Alaska, the first woman and the youngest person to hold the state’s top political job.

I guess it had to happen someday: a Candidate for the Presidential ticket (if not actually for President) who is younger than me.

Okay, I’m a week late hearing the news, but it seems the EcmaScript (aka JavaScript, JScript, etc.) committee has cut its losses, and settled on a less ambitious next version of the standard, ECMAScript Harmony. Packages, namespaces, and early binding are gone. Which kind of leaves Adobe with a problem, as they had started implementing a lot of the ES4 features in ActionScript for Flash/Flex.

Namespaces are, in other languages, an important means of controlling complexity by partitioning the code into well-defined pieces. Maybe it’s not so essential in Jav(ahem) EcmaScript, especially in web browsers, which account for 99% of the current use cases. I think dropping them reduces the chance that EcmaScript will break out into other domains, and I think that’s unfortunate. But I’ll admit, the technical trade-offs involved are beyond my current understanding.

I’d very much like to know how this is going to affect the Tamarin project, though.

I saw The Dark Knight last night (in IMAX, on the front row, by Crom). I don’t have to repeat how purely awesome the movie is, so many others have done so already.

But it took me until tonight to notice an ironic bit of casting. The Mayor of Gotham is played by Nestor Carbonell … who played a certain flying-rodent-inspired character himself, once upon a time. I bet somebody in casting had a chuckle at that one.

I just got an alert from Google that my website was on a danger list, that it included a link to some malware. (It’s gone now.) Sure enough, the Yahoo post below contained an IFRAME with a reference to Ghod-knows-what. After excising that, I found some link spam buried in two other posts, pointing to a gambling site. Also gone now.

I recently upgraded to WordPress 2.5, which I understand closed a major security hole. I hope that this closed that hole, and I’ll see no more of this evil nonsense.

Fucking parasites. Pardon my Anglo-Saxon, but this crap just makes me furious. Now my page is marked as “Evil! Unclean!” in Google’s index, until they get around to reviewing it again. And it wasn’t just someone having fun punking my site; this is how hackers build their botnets, using openings like this to subvert anyone unlucky enough to read a hacked web page.

(I repeat, the offending code has been removed, and if the programmers at Automattic know what they’re doing, it won’t be back. If you’re still worried, try switching to a more secure browser… like anything other than Internet Explorer. Like this or this or this.)

Despite my earlier, skeptical thoughts on the subject, I have been following Twitter (although not contributing a lot, I’ll admit) and starting to appreciate it.

Granted, it’s yet another time sink, and I haven’t found an actual productive use for it yet. But I still marvel at how spam-free it remains so far. Since you only follow people you want to follow, you don’t hear from complete strangers. Yes, a stranger can make a message appear in your feed by including @yourname, but that’s a one-to-one channel, not the one-to-gazillions type of channel that spammers feed on. It works as a way to say ‘hi’, but not as a way to mass-market.

We do need some kind of middle ground between the new proprietary walled gardens like Facebook, and the all-you-can-spam communications channels like email and Usenet. IM isn’t quite it, it’s too much hassle to set up anything other than ad hoc one-to-one conversations. IRC seems to have some kind of karmic “Geeks Only” sign on it, it hasn’t caught on in a big way.

Twitter has about the right social model: opt-in, but make it easy to make connections; but we need to supplement the microcontent format, and an economic model that can keep the servers running as the scale gets truly massive. And finally, it should not be tied to the fortunes and whims of any one company, no matter how enlightened they may seem.

What do you get when you cross Microsoft and Yahoo?

Microsoft.

Over at TechCrunch, Duncan Riley makes the case that people leery of the coming Microsoft/Yahoo merger are being unreasonable, and need to start thinking of Google, not Microsoft, as the Evil Empire.

The Microsoft is evil meme is alive and well this week as many digest Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover offer for Yahoo. There’s Flickr users protesting, talk of Yahoo teaming up with Google to block Microsoft’s bid, and general Microsoft is bad sentiment everywhere, even from Google itself. While Microsoft acquiring Yahoo may not provide the ultimate in happy endings to many, it’s really not as bad as some would have you believe.

My own objection is not so much because Microsoft is evil (and we’ll set aside for the moment whether Microsoft is evil). Rather, it’s over the fact that Microsoft is a desktop software company. Up to now, Yahoo has been a pure Internet company, like Google. They have not had any reason to care what platform its users run; they simply don’t have a horse in that race.

But a combined ‘MicroHoo’ has a vested interest in what software is running at the other end of the pipe. Even if the people running the ‘Yahoo Division’ say all the right things, there will always be a temptation for the Microsoft brass to use the Yahoo properties as instruments with which to promote Microsoft desktop software. That should be a concern for anyone who uses non-Microsoft alternatives to Microsoft products — not just Mac and Linux users, but users of Firefox and Opera, iTunes and Winamp.

Will you have to use IE to access del.icio.us or Yahoo Finanace? Will you have to use Windows Media Player to access Yahoo’s streaming media? Will you have to use Visual Studio to develop Yahoo plug-ins? Even if the answer to all of these questions is ‘No’ now, can anyone promise it will stay that way in the future? Even if Microsoft goes into debt with this deal, and has to justify its purchase to the stockholders, can we be sure that management won’t see this as a way to monetize their new properties?

And I don’t buy the parallel being drawn by some between Google’s domination of the net and Microsoft’s domination of the desktop. Microsoft gained its position by leveraging its relationship with IBM, and muscling PC vendors into exclusive deals, precluding them from offering pre-installed alternatives to Windows. Google, by contrast, is a textbook example of a natural monopoly, exactly the kind of company we should want to see more of: they built a better mousetrap, and the world beat a path to their door.

In practical terms, the only real stumbling block to this deal may be EU intervention, and even there, Microsoft can make a compelling case that the merger will increase rather than decrease competition, so I don’t see that as likely. So the deal is likely to go ahead. I just don’t see it as cause to celebrate.