Backup Brain

January 27, 2006

Apple doesn't, Microsoft might

As you know if you've read this blog earlier this week, I was at Microsoft's Search Champs shindig. If you want to know more about what went on, there are plenty of other bloggers doing brain dumps. Me, I just want to write about one thing.

I've been talking about widgets for a long time now; both the ones from Konfabulator (now Yahoo!) and the ones from Apple (and yes, I know that Microsoft calls them Gadgets, but I'm calling them all lower-case "w" widgets here to group them together). And what I love love love about them is the idea of lightweight applications that can be created by people who aren't programmers, aren't developers, don't even think of themselves scripters — people who, if asked, might call themselves Web designers. Or just designers. Or sometimes Web developers, but when pressed, will volunteer that they aren't "real programmers."

They know HTML. They know CSS. They know JavaScript. And as people from these corporations keep pointing out, that's all you really need to know to create widgets.

Where people from corporations who implement widgets keep screwing up is that they think that they have to then sell creating those widgets to their usual developer crowd — the ones deep into Cocoa or C# or whatever. And the result is a big honking silence. Well, yeah; if you know how to create "real" applications, why on earth would you want to cripple your capabilities? What isn't happening is trying to sell creating widgets to their natural audience: those Web designers I referred to above.

This post ain't the first time I've ranted about this. For instance, I did this rant straight in the face of Apple's Dashboard Widget crew back at WWDC. I did it again to MS this week when they talked about Gadgets.

One thing, though, was very, very different between those two rants: the Microsoft folks listened. Or at least they did a darn good impression of it. I spent a bunch of time talking to Steve and Sanaz, and I think they really understood what I was talking about and what I was trying to get at. For instance, Sanaz told me that she's going to be doing two sessions on Gadgets at Mix06 (Microsoft's upcoming conference which they describe as "a 72-hour conversation between web developers, designers and business leaders"). I asked her if either was "Gadgets for Designers," and she said no. "Well, why not?," I asked. And it looked like she got it.

The actual proof will be in what Microsoft does next, of course. They might not care. They might care, but internal politics make it irrelevant. Or they could be a huge corporation that can't turn its message around that quickly. But I'll be paying attention to see, and that's how I'll know whether the trip to see them was worth my time.

Two bonus comments for those who've made it down this far:

1. Here's Apple's current Top 50 Dashboard downloads. How many of them consume Web services? How many are just fun static doohickeys?

2. I ran the Dashboard Developer BOF at Macworld Expo earlier this month.

Number of Apple employees who attended: 1.
Number of Microsoft programmers from the Redmond campus who work on Windows who attended: 3.

Posted by Dori Smith at 06:32 PM
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Tags Don't Work, Part 2

Here's another set of examples of why tags don't work, this time specifically focusing on a group of people who think that tags do work and not using Technorati:

Four different tags, four different groups of pictures. Sometimes I can add tags to other people's pictures. Sometimes I can't. Most pictures are found in multiple tag groups. So far as I can tell, no tag group contains all the pictures. Some tag groups include pictures from other events.

What a pain in the ass, especially when I'm only trying to find one particular picture (said pic is worth checking out, btw).

Posted by Dori Smith at 01:09 PM
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January 26, 2006

Why HSA's suck - for most people

By all accounts, in the upcoming State of the Union speech Bush will be proposing an increase in Health Savings Accounts as his "solution" for the health care crisis, under the rubric of "consumer-driven health care." As you might expect, it's just another Republican scam to shift more costs and risks to consumers and reward GOP donors, in this case the health insurers and large employers. Insurers get to charge premiums and cover less costs; employers get to push more health care costs onto their employees.

If you're not familiar with HSA's, there is a terrific post explaining them at TPMCafe, Me and my HSA, by a surgeon who has had an HSA for some time. It's a great deal for her, because she's young, single, ridiculously healthy and has a high income. But she details the pros and cons for her and for most people, and concludes:

This is my reward for earning in the top 1% or so of George Bush's America - I make a profit on something that bankrupts people who aren't as fortunate. Note to self: avoid getting sick. Avoid getting old too.

Now I don't know what, or even if, George Bush thinks, but it seems to me that this is unfair, and borderline immoral. Like the proposed social security reforms, the Republicans are pretending to offer me more control and opportunity, but what they're really offering is the opportunity to eat all the risk myself. I can probably do that, but my situation is very rare. And I am so atypical of the standard American health care consumer that portraying HSAs as a national solution is ridiculous to the point of absurdity.

From personal experience, I can attest that HSA's suck, even if you have a relatively high income, but are not absolutely healthy. In October 2004, we were forced into a high-deductible insurance policy, which is coupled with an HSA. We are financially able to save money to the HSA, but because we have ongoing health care costs, we've needed to draw down the saved funds. The health insurance has paid for exactly nothing in the time that we've had it, though of course we've been paying the premiums. All of our heath costs have come out of our pockets, sometimes (but not always) laundered through the HSA. There are only two "good" things about the insurance. One, we would have 80% coverage in the event of a hospital stay, after paying $4,000 out of pocket (that high deductible). Second, though we pay for virtually all of our health care costs, we pay at the rate that the insurer has negotiated with the providers, so at least we don't pay the full retail price. It's hard to call paying $90 instead of $150 for a routine doctor's visit a terrific deal, compared to the days when we had real health insurance.

Oh, and to get the most out of the policy, you have to be diligent about following all of the famously confusing paperwork and making sure that the insurer has credited all visits towards the deductible. If you want prescription costs to count towards the deductible, you have to keep all the pharmacy receipts, make copies, then submit each receipt as a separate claim. Mind you, you won't get any money back for doing that bookkeeping; it just counts towards the deductible, so if you do get catastrophically sick, it will cost you a bit less out of pocket.

In short, I've already seen the Bush future. It has cost me more money, and I've gotten less health care for that money. It incentivizes me to put off going to the doctor because of the cost, thereby increasing the chance that I'll put off getting early treatment for illness. It's more complicated and bureaucratic. It sucks.

For more smart thoughts on health care and HSA's, I heartily recommend Ezra Klein's recent posts over at Tapped.

Posted by Tom Negrino at 11:00 AM
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Scoble told me to blog this

At Search Champs this week, Robert Scoble has made a point of mentioning (at what seems like every possible opportunity) that I was the first to use the word "weblog" to him. I mentioned to him that I'd recently come across the email in which I'd done that, and he said "You've got to put it up on your blog!!!!". So, here it is, for the world's edification.

Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 01:37:38 -0700
Subject: Re: Last Call for CNET 'Call for Speakers' — CNET Builder.com Live! conference
From: Dori Smith
To: Robert Scoble

On 6/13/00 12:47 AM, Robert Scoble wrote:

> We have received a ton of great proposals for the CNET Builder.com Live! and
> the E-Developer's Conference to be held in the Hilton New Orleans Riverside
> hotel on December 6-10, 2000 but we still need more session proposals and
> speakers for both conferences!
>
> If you've already sent in your proposals, sorry for this reminder. (Feel free
> to send in more, though!)

Actually, I hadn't, 'cause I thought that I'd blown the Builder.com deadline when I went off on the geek cruise.

Yes, I want to speak, if you'll have me! Here's some rough ideas, off the top of my head:

• Looking at the Builder.com Speaker call, I notice that you don't have anyone for the DHTML/Scripting Workshop. Please, please, please, may I? I had a blast doing the workshop last year, and I'd love to add on to it all the great stuff I've learned in the meantime.

• Do you have any interest in Weblogs? I've been running one at Backup Brain since last year, and I think that this is one of those trends that's just getting bigger. Here's some press on the phenom:

So far as Weblogs go, I could see doing one of two sessions:

Tools: How to get started, how to pick a tool, whether to use a tool or write your own
Weblogs panel: From what I understand, this was a big hit at SXSW. There's a large number of smart/sharp people who run weblogs, and they have some great things to say. I wouldn't have any trouble getting some of the best (I know a lot of them). Why do a weblog? Making a living as a weblogger? Corporate weblogs. Weblogs as a way to attract people to your site, and keep them coming back.

• The state of web standards. As you may know, I'm on the Steering Committee of the Web Standards Project, along with a number of other great folks. I discussed with Tim Bray and B.K. DeLong (who both spoke at Builder last year) the idea of WSP doing a Web Standards panel, and we all thought that it's an important topic and getting to be even more so. I did one of these once with Glenn Davis and Jeff Veen at Thunder Lizard, and the crowd ate it up.

Speaking of which, I know that Tom Negrino pitched a seminar to you on Web tools & Standards. He's also a member of the WSP Steering Committee, and if he attends he'd be a good addition to the panel. What you may not know is that he's my significant other, and if you invite us both you only have to cover one hotel room. Hint, hint...

• I'd also like to do a session on DHTML GUI's. While this worked well as last year's session, like the workshop, there's a lot more that can be done here now that I'd like to talk about. I'm doing a similar session at Macworld Expo next month, but I think that even more exciting things can be done by the time December comes around.

• At Perl Whirl 2000, I did a session on "Women in the Technology Business" that was very well received. It was scheduled to be just a lunch time workshop, but everyone was surprised both by how many people attended and how valuable it was. It wasn't just a bitch fest--everyone left with a number of useful ideas to take home. It wasn't just for men only, and one of the guys attending (a contributing editor for Wired) said he was going to write about it in an upcoming article. With my 23 years in the tech biz, I think that I was an appropriate choice for the leader, and I'd love to do something similar again. This is another issue that's big and getting bigger.

• Mailing Lists for fun and profit. More and more, I see that people are using mailing lists where they previously had used online bulletin boards. When to use each. When to use (and when to not use) public lists like EGroups. How to build community with mailing lists. Tools to use: hardware and software. BTW, did I mention that I run several web developer mailing lists with hundreds of members?

• Under "Interact," you've got a number of unclaimed ideas that I could easily run with. "How to do Cookies." "Advanced Scripting." "Doing a dynamic site "on the cheap" (with DHTML & JavaScript)." "Pushing around the browser with the DOM." I could have a fun time with any of these.

Well, this should give you some ideas of what's on my mind lately. Which of these would you like to hear more about? Or if any of these don't scratch an itch, is there something that I can do instead?

Looking forward to seeing you in N'awlins -

Dori

Sometimes I think that mentioning weblogs to Scoble is the one achievement that's going to be written on my tombstone. And sometimes, I think that the reason I'll be in that tomb will be because someone wants me there because I mentioned weblogs to Scoble.

Posted by Dori Smith at 10:58 AM
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January 25, 2006

Godlike power – cheap!

You've had a tough day at the office or at school. You're tired, frustrated, and dammit, you just want to smash something. Why not crash together two galaxies? Yes, you can slam together two vast arrays of stars, planets, and nebulae, and change the collision conditions at will. You'll need to rely on your imagination to supply the anguished screams of the countless races you'll be destroying, but you know that you're up to the task.

(Via Paul Music.)

Posted by Tom Negrino at 06:39 PM
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Start.com versus Live.com

This was one of my main questions coming up here, and here's the answer: What's the difference between start.com and live.com... they look similar and have similar features, what's the point?

Posted by Dori Smith at 05:03 PM
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Tags Don't Work

There's been a lot of discussion here about tags, and I'm being the heretic by simply saying that tags don't work. Here's a quick demo to show what I mean:

Nine different searches, nine different sets of results; but all of them are, at their heart, looking for the exact same thing. That's not working, by any meaning I know for the word.

And no, it's not just a Mac-related thing, that's just the one that I try to find most often and so notice exactly how broken it is.

Posted by Dori Smith at 03:53 PM
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January 24, 2006

Not a thin dime, Bob

Bob Casey is the Democrat running for the Senate in Pennsylvania against the odious Rick Santorum. So he's obviously doing the Lord's work. And I know that Casey's for forced childbirth (as an aside, I agree with this article and this one that it's time to eliminate the wimpy "anti-choice" label and call it for what it is: "forced childbirth"), but I don't believe that every Democrat must toe the line on every issue. But then I read this: Casey announces endorsement of Alito and I gotta say: Bob, you're dead to me.

It's not just that Alito will clearly vote to force women to bear children against their will, though that alone is enough to disqualify him from the Court. It's that the guy's a freaking fascist in judicial robes. There's not a strip search, a forced spousal notification, or an act of judicial activism that is beyond him. He's all for making the President a king. He is profoundly anti-liberty, pro-corporate, and authoritarian. That's the reason for anyone who cares about liberty - Democrat or Republican - to oppose Alito's nomination.

Casey recently solicited funds from me for his campaign. I decided to hold off a bit before I did, and I'm very glad of that decision today. Bob, you'll have to do it without my help; I'm not giving you anything, except for my disgust and contempt. You are a disgrace.

Posted by Tom Negrino at 08:33 PM
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Blog? What blog?

I'm here in Seattle for Search Champs 4, which means that blogging will be light for the next few days. Yes, even lighter than it has been, unless Tom picks up the slack.

Given that he's already taken the first new shower (without me) and the first dip in the new hot tub (also without me), he owes me at least one. So bug him here to post something, okay?

Posted by Dori Smith at 06:33 PM
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