My personal blog

There’s a new school opening in Ann Arbor in the fall: Little Lake Free School. As far as I know, this is the only “democratic free school” in Ann Arbor, and I think it’s great that they’re getting this going.

I’ve seen how much my daughter has learned, through her own volition but with guidance and assistance from us. That’s what a “free school” is all about… it provides an environment for children to do that style of learning in an environment with other kids.

I can only imagine how much work they need to do to get their school going, and I know they can use any kind of help they can get. They have a wishlist full of supplies and assistance they can use, plus a kickstarter fundraiser going.

Kenji Lopez-Alt wrote a terrific and detailed look at how to copy McDonald’s french fry goodness. In order to figure out the McD’s secret, he attempted to get some frozen fries from McD’s:

“Listen, the thing is, my wife is pregnant—like really pregnant—and she sent me on a quest for McDonald’s french fries. But she only likes them really fresh, like straight out of the fryer fresh, so I figured I’d just get some frozen, and fry them for her at home. You know how it is. Women—no accounting for’em, right?”

That attempt was met with a dose of McFAIL, so he next resorted to Facebook, where he found an accomplice:

I had pre-printed a list of items for said made up “Scavenger Hunt” (I basically Googled “Scavenger Hunt Lists” and added “Frozen McDonald’s french fries”.)

Kenji’s accomplice succeeded in snagging some frozen fries. He then measured the fries and fried them up in peanut oil and found out that they tasted just as good as they do at the golden arches. But, he hadn’t really figured out the secret, right?

He next resorted to “research”, which I assume means googling. The googling turned up an article that described exactly what McDonald’s does to turn potatoes into frozen fries:

The fries are then flumed out of the A.D.R. room to the “blancher.” The blancher is a large vessel filled with one hundred and seventy degree water. The trip through the blancher takes about fifteen minutes… After the fries leave the blancher, they are dried and then it’s off to the “fryer,” which is filled with one hundred percent vegetable oil. The oil is heated to three hundred and sixty five degrees and the fries take a fifty second dip before being conveyed to the “de-oiler shaker,” where excess oil is “shook off.

It turns out that, in this case, both Google and Facebook came through with their assigned tasks, but Google actually delivered the goods. What struck me about this article, other than the extreme detail about the french fries, is the fact that snagging some frozen fries was entirely irrelevant. Had he and his accomplice not done this at all, the article would have been shortened but had the same conclusion.

Lesson learned: before you hit the street, hit the goog.

Back in January, I posted that I would be blogging more this year. Boy, was I wrong!

The end of 2009 was exceedingly busy for both home and work. I thought that 2010 would get off to a less busy start, but that’s not how it went. Certain things became a bit easier, but work has been very busy for the past month.

The Bespin project “reboot” kicked off in October and has kept us chugging along ever since. I feel a lot of pressure to ship the software when I know there are people out there waiting for updates. I’m happy that we are about to ship the biggest Bespin release since the reboot began, and we’re in a great position for this quarter’s work.

As an experiment, I’m writing this blog post on my new iPad. One of my hopes for the ipad is that, unlike an iPhone, this will make a better blogging and general writing tool than the phone. Not only is it better at consuming content but it is certainly better for producing it. Typing on glass is less than ideal, but the landscape keyboard is definitely better than anything I could do on the iPhone.

Anyhow, that’s enough rambling. My apologies for posting a completely random and useless blog post. More considered writing will come forth another time.

This morning, there was a posting at AnnArbor.com that had the general “we are at war, toughen up” sort of tone that we’ve seen in the years since 9/11. I want to see less of that in the media, because it’s giving the wrong impression about the situation. Rather than going by that feeling that we are less safe, it’s better to turn to statistics and realize that we are, in fact, probably as safe as we want to be. Here is the comment that I posted at AnnArbor.com, reposted here because of the interesting links and what they represent:

I can certainly agree with your call for people to report suspicious activity, though “normal people” have been known to report suspicious activity around completely normal other people, where trained security people would not. Thanks for that video link, because that can help to improve the kinds of things that those of us not trained in security can spot!

I’d like to highlight some alternative views of the overall situation that tend to get ignored in the media around events like this one. For example, air travel in the 2000s is the safest it’s been since the 1960s and is incredibly safe:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/skies-are-as-friendly-as-ever-911-al.html

Put another way, “The chances of being hurt by someone who got past airport security, even without things like the full-body scanners being deployed after this latest panic, are smaller than dying in your dentist’s office from an anaesthesia error.”

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2010/01/big_numbers_and_air_travel.php

Another way to look at the Christmas Day incident is that security actually worked:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/christmas_bombe.html

Reality is unpredictable and it’s impossible (and undesirable!) to get to 100% secure:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01brooks.html?emc=eta1

I think it pays to focus on the things that truly make us more secure, rather than the security theater we are subjected to every time we fly. Bruce Schneier: “Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.”

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/separating_expl.html

I sincerely hope we can see more of *that* kind of discussion in the media.

The second half of 2009 was beyond busy for me, for a variety of reasons. I expect 2010 to be a little better. It occurs to me, however, that sneaking a small bit of writing into each day is not difficult and is healthy. It appears that many people even equate writing with thinking. Writing is a chance to really clarify your thinking on a topic. I’ve started blog posts in the past where I’d begin writing the blog post and eventually stop after I realized that I didn’t agree with the direction the post was taking.

In the past, I’ve posted random links on my blog (primarily Blue Sky On Mars, the blog I’ve had since 2001). I’m actually quite happy that there’s no need to post tidbits on my blog any more. I have Twitter for that, and my delicious bookmarks automatically get posted on twitter.

For those of you reading this blog and Blue Sky On Mars, you can expect to see more writing from me here in 2010 than in 2009, and I hope you enjoy it.

MacHeist is back with a new deal. In years past, there has been plenty of controversy over just how much of the MacHeist bundle money goes to software developers. The new MacHeist deal, which is actually free, should lay that controversy to rest once and for all. MacHeist has never been about the money made from the software bundles. It’s been a matter of exposure, upgrade sales, and sales of companion products.

Alas, for me, this particular bundle doesn’t really have any software I want. Maybe next bundle…

Every now and then, I wonder what kind of balance I should draw between consuming content online and producing it. Between having new information pushed at me via Google Reader or Twitter, for example, and pulling information that I need via searches. Between spending time looking at a screen and spending time looking at stuff that has mass and takes up space.

During the summer, the balance definitely shifts toward spending time away from screens, and that’s a good thing. Michigan winters are entirely too long, even for me, a Michigan native. I want to take advantage of the summer, so much of my time not spent working is spent doing things away from the screen. This year, I’ve been having a good time riding my bike with my daughter on her new Burley Kazoo Trailercycle.

For the next month, I want to try an experiment that I haven’t tried in a long time and that is to go on a serious information diet. For a month, I’m swearing off Google Reader, Twitter, Hacker News, etc. I’ll still post to Twitter and watch for Twitter mentions and DMs, but I’m not going to follow the random links that appear there.

Doing this will eliminate a source of randomness in my thoughts, and I’m curious to see whether or not I’ll miss it. Will I miss finding out about the latest Snow Leopard seeds, or technical indicators of how crappy the economy is? By stripping down my inputs, I’ll find out.

I’m pretty sure that I’ll miss some of the news I get. The real trick, I think, is that I want better filters. Maybe over the next month I’ll discover how to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. I’m certain that the answer to that is not more Digg.

My wife and I recently upgraded our iPhones, given the apparent value of used iPhones on eBay. The first one was sold via Buy It Now, to someone who turned out to be a scammer from Nigeria. Though I haven’t yet confirmed the vileness of the second purchaser, I strongly suspect a similar situation.

It appears that perhaps “it’s now completely impossible to sell a laptop on eBay” (or cell phone). This could really hurt eBay if this keeps up, but it’s not entirely clear how they can prevent it. They’d almost need to have a system where a user with positive feedback will vouch for any new user. Even that can be gamed, but it’s harder. Both of the scammers going after our phones have 0 feedback.

Take my advice: if you have an electronic doodad to sell and put it on eBay, be very wary of any buyer with 0 feedback and never trust the email messages you receive.

Sympathy for the bad apples « The Poor Man Institute

We’ve got what amounts to a reverse Nuremberg defense, where Bush administration officials are let off the hook because they were only giving orders.

But while Apple caused a revolution, it is unlikely to become dominant in the market. It has sold just over 20m iPhones since the first device appeared in 2007; in that time more than 1.5bn phones have been shipped by everyone else. A similar thing happened with the personal computer market. The concept was championed by Apple when it launched Apple II, the world’s first personal computer, in 1977, and the first Macintosh in 1984, but other players now lead the market.

From Sound familiar? Apple launches a revolution – and then gets overtaken

Apple sure is fun to write about, isn’t it?

From what I can see, Apple likes to make neat products that they would personally enjoy using and that can be sold for a reasonable profit. The Observer article chose to mention how Apple lost a tremendous amount of market share in personal computers within a few years of the Mac’s debut (let’s ignore the fact that that also occurred within a few years of Steve Jobs’ departure). The Observer did not choose to focus on portable music players, a market that Apple stepped into and still holds a dominant position in.

In the case of music players, Apple’s cheapest iPod is $50. I’ve seen MP3 players with comparable features for $20. Apple competes in music players not by driving prices down, but by driving features up. There is a low end that they will not touch. They same is true of Macintosh computers: Apple will compete only in price segments in which they can compete profitably. Though they ensure that their prices are not insane, they also don’t worry too much about competing on price. They compete instead on fit and finish and the software.

What does this tell us about Apple and phones? Unlike music players, the cell phone market is already quite established. As the Observer points out, Apple has had only about 1% market share. Apple doesn’t care. They may have only 1% market share, but they have a product that is generating billions a year for them. As the iPhone line expands and improves over time, Apple’s market share will likely expand as well. But, that’s not the goal: the goal is making profitable products that people want to use.

So, back to the Observer article: they say that Apple started a revolution but will be overtaken. While I am pretty sure that Apple will never have a dominant market share position in cell phones (say more than 30%), I don’t think it’s certain that they will be overtaken in the new segment that they have created: portable computing and communication devices. They have first mover advantage with the App Store and have already built a thriving ecosystem around the iPhone. Those 20 million phones sold, plus some number of iPod Touches, represent a platform for Apple to grow, rather than “just a phone”.

Apple’s ultimate success (or failure) with the iPhone should not be measured relative to cell phone market share, but relative to ultra portable computing devices in general.