Followup to yesterday

Following up on yesterday's post:

• As promised, Tim posted Part 3: How Publishers Fared. I have some quibbles about his methodology here as well (e.g., I don't think that New Riders, Macromedia Press, or Adobe Press should be broken out from Peachpit when he's not breaking "Missing Manuals" out from O'Reilly), but again, it's worth reading.

• No, my comment on his post never did get accepted. Funny, that, eh? I submitted it, their system told me that if I'd never had a comment accepted there it could take some time (ref previous comments of mine here and here that have posted in the past), but it never showed. Yes, comments made since then have showed up. It could be that including a URL makes it take longer, it could be that Tim wants to check the numbers in order to answer my questions, it could be, well, due to just about anything. But it is interesting, to me at least.

Tim O'R on the tech book biz

Every quarter, Tim O'Reilly does his take on the computer book business. It's always worth reading, and if you're in the tech biz like us, it's required reading.

For Q2 2006, so far he's written one on the overall market trend in computer books versus last year and one on category winners and losers. Part 3, on "How publishers fared," is promised shortly.

I took a look at the numbers (as always), and I don't have the time at the moment to dig into them the way I want to, but some of it doesn't quite click for me. Here's what I wrote to Tim in the comments:

I'm working through trying to understand these charts, and I'm getting a tad confused about how these work together. For instance, regarding JavaScript (a topic where you & I both have a strong interest in the market):

• The programming language chart shows JavaScript up 177% last quarter over the previous year.
• The Web design and development chart shows JavaScript down 5% last quarter over the previous year.
• The overall treemap view shows the -5% drop in JavaScript, but not the 177% jump — or is that hiding somewhere?
• The Q1 2006 treemap showed JavaScript (then under Web design and development) as being up 116% (or maybe 121%, depending on which chart you look at). Does the change from +116 to -5 in one quarter have significance?
• Last quarter, JavaScript was not on the Q1 2006 Systems and programming chart so far as I can see (and I can't find a Q1 '06 programming languages-only chart).

My working hypothesis: JavaScript was moved (or some of the books in the JavaScript category were moved) from "Web design and development) to "computer languages" — making them (possibly) a larger fish in a smaller pond. This doesn't explain why JavaScript isn't in the full treemap, but it does seem to cover all the other issues. What's the scoop?

Dinner tonight?

Yesterday (Monday) I budgeted about four hours to drive from Healdsburg to Santa Cruz (I'm here for Orientation '06). Usually it only takes about three hours to drive it, but as we didn't hit the road until about 3:15, I was expecting the worst — both San Francisco and Silicon Valley traffic? Yikes!

Door to door: about 2.5 hours. Surprised the crap out of me. No, I wasn't going faster than the traffic flow (except for the one spot where I was using the carpool lane, but that doesn't count); there just wasn't any traffic. Plenty of cars, but none of the bumper to bumper stuff that drives me crazy.

Why does this matter? Or more precisely, why should you care? Because I budgeted five hours to get home tonight. We're done at UCSC at 5 pm, and I expect us to get home about 10 pm having had dinner along the way somewhere between here and SF. But now I'm feeling cocky, and instead of just saying, "We'll drive until we hit traffic and then we'll eat," I'm thinking about making (gasp!) actual plans.

So, wanna have dinner with me and the kid young man (he turned 18 just last weekend)? If you're somewhere around the Valley or the City (or basically anywhere on the first leg of my way home; roughly 17 to 85 to 280 to 101), drop me a line in the comments.

Dunno if I'll have much in the way of connectivity today… hmmm&hellip Maybe Tom will have to book this for me… Anyhow, ping me however and let's do this, okay?

Local Warming

I assume people reading this blog all believe that there really is such a thing as global warming; this, on the other hand, is evidence of local warming:

That shot is of Meteorologist (aka Meteo), a handy OS X menu (or dock) app. For those of you who think in Celsius, that's about 44 degrees. Yikes!