Sam On Software

There are a lot of people claiming that Apple is more than a one man show. Jobs as chairman of the board, Jobs as CEO, feh what’s the difference. There’s Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive, they’ve been running the show for a while anyway. Everything will keep ticking over as per usual. Nothing to see here.

I disagree, I’m calling it over for Apple. The next five years will see it’s share price and cool-factor stagnate if not fall.

Usually when a truckload of importance is unloaded onto one person it’s a stitch up. Usually circumstance, history and a team of people played a larger role than they are credited with.

Usually but not always.

In makes sense to allocate your attention based on your ability to influence. I care more about what goes on in my country than in others because I have more power here than abroad.

I am in a communal resource sharing co-operative with my co-nationals. We pool our wealth to build schools and roads and overpriced government websites. Naturally I care about the success and survival of the things I am invested in more than the things I have no investment in.

Countries allow the competition of ideas at the scale of nations. Deng Xiaoping began Chinese economic reform in the 70s because he had learned about Singapore and Japan and other Asian nations having great economic success.

As a world we learn more quickly with competing models. It makes sense to try and ensure that the model of which you are a part functions best so as to serve as the best example to others.

It may be that you see many values in the society of your nation that are superior to the values in other nations. Perhaps you feel the rule of law, property rights, equality for women, freedom of speech and freedom from corruption are fantastic innovations in the mechanics of society and they deserve protection. Part of this protection surfaces as nationalism.

Almost all of the arguments for and against caring about your nation apply equally to the idea of caring for your family.

There is no absolutism, if your family is a bunch of drug dealing sociopaths it’s sensible to think differently about the notion of family than if they are an honest, decent supportive group.

How much you feel nationalistic pride for your own country is up to you, but the idea that nationalism has no positive aspects shows a lack of imagination.

By the way, it is clear there are many negative aspects to nationalism, and I haven’t argued that on the whole nationalism is good.

David Brooks quoting a brain researcher on meditation (not an exact quote):

“It’s like driving through the city with a flashlight. You can see a small area really brightly. When you turn off the flashlight everything gets dark but you begin to see a might wider range of the city dimly”.

It would be awsome unreal if there was a site that did A,B + C !

Hell, I would use it everyday and If I would there must be millions of other people who would as well!

This is going to be HUGE.
Domain name please be available!
Please be available!

What’s this ? A site just like the one I was going to build!
It actually looks pretty good.

Oh well, there goes that idea.
Maybe I should sign up and use this site!
hmmmm

Naaah, Can’t be bothered.

It’s really delightful¹ when someone solves a problem that you didn’t know existed.

I think Google² is a good example of this, at least it was for me. Altavista seemed pretty damn good. If someone had told me they were creating a new search engine I would probably have told them they were going to have their work cut out competing with the existing players.

But when I started using Google it became apparent that I had indeed been missing out, there was a problem to be solved.

I don’t think HTML editing is a solved problem. There are of course thousands of editors out there but personally I haven’t seen one that cuts the mustard³.

Given your editor of choice :

• Does the code, with CSS and Javascript embedded effortlessly indent and is the syntax correctly highlighted ?
• Are you always able to find unmatched tags quickly and without frustration ?
• Is the character encoding always consistent and maintained, with no strange little characters popping up ? (Yes I’m looking at you Ultraedit)
• If someone threw a complicated page at you would you be able to open it up and quickly understand the structure of the page, how many levels of tables and divs there were for example ?

The HTML editing paradigm⁴ is basically “shift to the right to indicate childhood” or “indent to indicate containership” (You know what I mean).

I think it’s time for this paradigm to shift⁵, we need a new way of visualizing containership, a way that makes it easier for us to edit HTML. What is this new way ? I’m glad you asked.

It is…. Ok I’ve got nothing, I have no idea. I don’t know what the solution is but am I alone in thinking it’s still a problem ?

¹ ‘delightful’ ? who says delightful ? I feel like I should be holding a cup of tea, for realz.
² Are you allowed to blog anything tech related without mentioning Google or Apple ? I think not.
³ Why anyone would want to ‘cut’ mustard, as opposed to spreading it I’m not sure, maybe that’s another unsolved problem, working out what the hell we are all talking about.
⁴ Yeah I said it ‘paradigm’, deal with it. At least it didn’t shift.
⁵ doh

They allow people not technical enough to deal with HTML to express themselves on the web.

That’s it, end of story.

Patrick Mckenzie is a small software business operator who has provided a lot of inspiration and insight to other software entrepreneurs.

He’s recently released http://www.appointmentreminder.org a tool to help service providers automatically remind clients about their appointments .

Here’s hoping he has lots of success.

I am busy with CustomerCradle but I do have a little time I can dedicate to new development this month and so I am joining the Hacker News make an app in november challenge.

The challenge was inspired by an annual “write a novel in November” movement.
I am going to be creating Quiz Blog Chief a plugin for the WordPress blogging platform that makes it easy to compose and schedule quiz posts.

I am not sure whether I will use the add-in to generate some links back to the Quiz Night Chief site or if I will also charge for the plugin.

There certainly is some evidence that you can make money selling wordpress plugins, but I will be happy if bloggers find QBC (everything has to have an abbreviation) useful.

• The 32-bit version of the Odbcad32.exe file is located in the %systemdrive%WindowsSysWoW64 folder.
• The 64-bit version of the Odbcad32.exe file is located in the %systemdrive%WindowsSystem32 folder

Amazing, Galeazzo Ciano, Italy’s foreign minister from 1937 to 1943 kept a daily diary during his tenure that gives an amazing insight into the political world of the time.

Each daily entry is a paragraph or two. Here are a couple of excerpts to give you a feel for  the diaries.

September 15, 1937

Franco asks for four submarines to be placed at his disposal. Two will go immediately and the other two shortly.

The letter has been judged as very clever, but the environment is bitter and hostile. Bova telephoned from Geneva to say that Eden and Delbos are ready to accept our requests but they would like us to make the first move. Impossible. We must wait. They will come to us…

September 30, 1937

Return to Rome: triumphant. They could have done without the arches and laurels. These symbols are reserved for victors at war, not for those who return from a train journey…

October 27, 1937

This morning I received Henry Gris, a Lithuanian journalist who had insulted me some months ago in Esquire. He was very embarrassed and turned red, above all his ears and around his chin. I spoke to him courteously and at length; this worked to make him even more timid…

November 2, 1937

Eden’s speech was very hostile. But this was to be expected. The man cannot accept the Ethiopian failure and tries to fight back. I drafted Informazione Diplomatica n. 5. It is a good reply. An even better reply still will be the one on Saturday, when we sign the anticommunist Tripartite Pact, so to speak, which is in reality clearly anti-British.

Talks with Balbo. As always he is sour and untrustworthy. he counts upon the Party and tries to save his accomplice: Lessona.

I am finding them quite fascinating, there is an added sense of eeriness to reading the diaries knowing that Ciano was executed in 1943 on Mussolini’s orders.

Amazon Link – The Ciano Diaries

Wikipedia Entry