John Dunne

Why You Should Be on Twitter

2008-06-14T18:40:00.001-07:00

Social networking web sites have this odd affect on you, in that they make you want to sell them to your friends. It is the classic "network effect," of course. The site becomes more valuable to me as more of my friends use it.

Having made my self-interest clear, please allow me to explain why you should be on Twitter.

Twitter is fun. It is this little river of gossip and news and personal status updates flowing past you. Most of it is trivia, but I often hear about genuinely important things from Twitter first.

Twitter allows you to broadcast short, durable, asynchronous messages to all of your friends, while allowing you to follow the messages that are sent by your friends. You can send and receives messages from their web site, instant messenger, SMS text message, or via a desktop application that knows how to talk to them via an API.

If all of this sounds interesting to you, check me out here.

How to make the perfect cup of coffee

2008-04-13T10:29:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, my wife bought me an espresso maker, and I switched over to drinking espresso. Lately, I had felt the yearning to make a nice cup of coffee, which led me to remember the steps for making the perfect cup of coffee.

Equipment

French press
Coffee grinder
Kettle or pot
Coffee
Filtered water

Step 1: Grind the coffee

You will need two tablespoons of ground coffee for every eight ounces of coffee you intend to brew. For best results, you should grind the coffee on the day you intend to use it. You may store the ground coffee in an air tight canister, but try to avoid this whenever possible. For a french press, you'll want coarsely ground coffee.

Measure out the ground coffee into your french press.

Step 2: Boil the water

Boil the water in a pot or kettle. Use about twice as much water as you'll need for the coffee. The moment the water reaches the boiling point, take it off the heat.

Step 3: Brew the coffee.

First, pour an ounce of water into your french press and let it sit for a half minute. If you smell the coffee during this time, it will have a bitter aroma. Pre-brewing like this eliminates some of the bitterness of your coffee. Be sure to leave the top off the french press.

While this is happening, fill your cup or mug with the boiling water to heat it. This will warm it so that when you pour your coffee in, it won't be chilled by a cold mug.

After your coffee is done pre-brewing, add the rest of the water, put the top on the french press, and let it brew for a few minutes, until it reaches the strength that you prefer.

Step 4: Enjoy

Slowly press the plunger on your french press. Dump the water out of your nicely warmed mug. Pour the coffee. Enjoy!

My Tumble Log

2008-01-01T11:14:00.000-08:00

A while back, I started a tumble log, called MicroBlog, which I thought I ought to mention here. I have been using it as a place to post videos and quotes. You can subscribe to the RSS feed here.

Editing Is Highly Overrated

2007-08-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

I used to think it was important to keep all of my information in easily editable form. Lately, I find myself moving away from using electronic documents to ordinary paper. I have even stopped using pencils.

As I slowly accumulate pages of hand written notes and drawings in various journals and drawing books, kept in chronological order, yet indexed by topic, I find I can learn a lot about how an idea evolved over time by flipping back to earlier pages. I will often rediscover things that I had learned in the past, which take on new significance in light of what I know now.

You do not get any of this, when you store knowledge in a Word document or text file, that you edit over and over again.

I Use This!

2007-03-22T04:34:00.000-07:00

I use this.

Bruce Campbell in "Old Spice" Commercial

2007-02-10T07:50:00.000-08:00

I love this advertisement!

Neologisms and Domain Names

2007-02-03T07:20:00.000-08:00

Google has become a verb. I wonder how long it will be before other domain names become words. Will "to flickr" someday mean "to share pictures?" Probably not.

I think you need the perfect collision of a web site, used for a single purpose, a domain name that sounds like something meaningful, and excellent branding.

So what will be the next word to be added to the English language?

The Profane Game

2007-01-28T09:28:00.000-08:00

The Profane Game is a mash-up, that asks you type in as many dirty words as you can remember in 60 seconds.

I only managed a score of 21, which does not speak well of my cussing skills.

I Will Hit You With My Ring Hand!

2007-01-25T15:16:00.000-08:00

Dear Blogger

2007-01-25T14:56:00.000-08:00

Dear Blogger,

When it comes to microformats, I have drunk the Kool Aid. It feels like we are just around the bend from something truly interesting. We just need to get to the tipping point.

The recent announcement that Firefox would act as an information broker, allowing you to move properly encoded data from one web site to another, is very exciting, but I think it goes beyond that. When microformats become common, we will see hundreds of vertical search engines appear, each tuned to a particular format. Instead of reading reviews on Amazon.com, you'll be able to search across millions of blogs. Reviewers will get to own their own words, rather than rely on a third party to mediate between them and their readers.

This is really cool.

You need to support microformats as well, by adding a "Insert Microformat" link to your Post Editor.

Now that would be really cool.

The Literary Offenses of Lost

2007-01-25T07:17:00.000-08:00

Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was the broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred other handier things to step on, but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one.

Mark Twain, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"

The title is a bit harsh. I actually love Lost, but, after watching an entire season on DVD, I have started to notice certain patterns.

The Tree Root

In the spirit of Cooper's dry twig, we have the tree root. It is easy to lose count of the number of times that someone trips on a tree root, thus separating him from the rest of the group. You would think that they would have gotten their "jungle legs" by now. Tripping is pretty much a signal that something terrible is about to happen to either the person that trips or the person that leaves him behind. No one ever trips by accident.

We Don't Talk Anymore

You would think that a group of people, stuck on an island, would have nothing to do but constantly rehash their situation, yet they hardly ever talk at all, neglecting to share information which could be crucial to their survival. There does not seem to be any reason for this, other than to foster a situation where ill informed characters blunder into bad situations.

Are Extras That Expensive?

We know that there are dozens of survivors, but you hardly ever see anyone other than the main characters. If Lost was a movie, there would always be a few bikini clad young women in the background of the scenes on the beach.

Again, it is a contrivance of the writing. They cannot just hire some extras, because those other survivors may come to the foreground as main characters die off. Casting one of those roles is a big deal, and they cannot cast good actors to stand in the background on the office chance that they might be needed, so they keep the other survivors off camera or out of focus.

Flashbackus-Interruptus

Normally, flashbacks serve to fill in the bits and pieces of a character's back story, but in Lost, they serve a double role. Flashbacks are used to build suspense, by interrupting the main narrative whenever things start to get hairy. Quite often, I am tempted to hit the fast-forward button, because I want to get back to what was happening on the island.

7 minutes of Horatio Caine/David Caruso one-liners

2007-01-24T10:14:00.000-08:00

Frankly, I obssess over what will be the opening line on each episode of CSI: Miami.

Lost - Season Two

2007-01-24T10:09:00.000-08:00

And now we are watching season two of Lost.

They seemed to have settled on to this technique of cutting to a flashback whenever things in the now are getting tense.

Sometimes, it can drive you crazy!

Object Navigation Considered Harmful

2007-01-20T11:40:00.000-08:00

Most computer technology books play up the spiffy object models employed by the technology that they are explaining, so it is only natural that one would want to emulate those object models in your own code.

So you immediately set out to build an object model that allows you to say things like:


customer = Customer('xyz')
for order in customer.orders:
 for item in order.line_items:
    print item.name, item.price

This is really cool, but comes with the cost that it is virtually impossible to build an object model like this without violating the Law of Demeter. Every new relationship that you add between classes, makes it harder to change them in the future. You have to worry about cyclic depdendencies between objects. And the whole thing is darn hard to unit test without something like an Object Mother.


customer = Customer.find('xyz')
for order in Order.find_by_customer(customer.id)
  for item in LineItem.find_by_order(order.id)
     print item.name, item.price

Yes -- it is a little more verbose, but the classes remain decoupled. You can write finders for nearly any criteria. They can retrieve data from a database or from an in memory cache.

And, most importantly, in a static language, like C++, your classes can be completely isolated from each other, making unit testing that much more easy.

(You might argue that Rails provides this sort of navigation with its Active Record relationships, but, if you think about it, those relations are really just a declarative way of generating finder code.)

Lost

2007-01-18T09:23:00.000-08:00

A friend lent me seasons one and two of Lost on DVD. Last night, my wife and I watched the first three episodes for the first time, having completely missed out on the whole Lost phenomenon.

I have to say that I was tremendously impressed with its cinematic quality. At times, I did not feel like I was watching a TV show at all.

So now we are trapped. We have to watch all the episodes, which we will probably do obsessively over the next week.

How to Subscribe to This Blog

2007-01-18T08:37:00.000-08:00

Note: This post is targeted at people like my mom, who just don't have a clue.

Short Answer

Click on this link.

Long Answer

You can be notified whenever an update is posted to a blog in a variety of ways:

Web feed readers, like Google Reader or Bloglines.
Custom home pages, like the Google Home Page or Page Flakes or My Yahoo!
Desk top feed readers, like RSS Bandit.
E-mail notifications, provided by Feed Burner.

You can find links to all of these things, if you click on "Subscribe in a Reader."

Personally, I am partial to the Google Reader, but that it is because I read lots of stuff.

If this is the only blog you plan on looking at, just add it to your home page. If you aren't using one of those custom home pages, I recommend using the Google Home Page, but, truthfully, they are all pretty good.

Finally, if you absolutely have to go old school, Feedburner provides e-mail notifications, but I would recommend trying the first two options before you resort to e-mail.

1/19/07 - I am told that Live Journal users can add me to their friends list as "john_blogspot" to subscribe to this blog.

iPhone Ad from Conan O'brien

2007-01-17T17:58:00.000-08:00

How Delightful!

2007-01-17T08:37:00.000-08:00

Good design is often described as "delighting one's users."

I have been wondering, what does that mean?

I think the iPod's external speak, which audibly clicks as you scroll through your playlists, is a good example of a delightful design. It does what you expected, but not quite in the way that you expected.

I find that delightful design is harder than it looks. You struggle just to get things to the point where everything works, at which point, you realize that (a) you need to head off to implement the next feature and (b) the design of this feature sucks.

At some point, we need to ask, how much do we value good design? And, are we willing to sacrifice features for a better design?

I find that we nearly always overestimate the feature set we think that we will need, and underestimate the importance of good design to the quality of life of our users.

Going back to the iPod, as example, when the iPod was first announced, all the techno-geeks on Slashdot pounced, predicting failure, because its feature set was not as comprehensive as some of the other devices on the market. Cut to today, and the iPod dominates the MP3 player market.

The key difference between the iPod and its competitors is its design.

Secure Computing

2007-01-15T21:00:00.000-08:00

My cousin recently bought a new Windows PC, and I thought I would write up my standard advice on keeping one's computer secure.

Don't Run As Administrator

You only need to login as the admin, when you want to install software. You don't want to install software inadvertently. That is how you get spyware. Some applications won't run in a limited user account. These applications are crap. You should look for an alternative to those applications rather than put your computer at risk by running as the administrator.

Keep Windows (and Other Applications) Up to Date

From the moment an exploit is published, it is only a matter of time before someone takes advantage of it. You need to keep ahead of them, by keeping every installed application current. Turn on auto-update whenever possible.

Switch to Firefox

There isn't much spyware for Firefox. And it is a better browser. Nuff said.

Turn on Windows Firewall

It is included with Windows. It is rather basic, but it gets the job done.

Install an Anti-Virus Program

They are a necessary evil.

First Post

2007-01-15T07:22:00.000-08:00

After a lengthy hiatus, I have decided to get back into blogging.

For the past year, all of my communications have been by e-mail. The problem with e-mail is that it is temporary and fleeting. Not quite as disposable as chat, but nowhere near as permanent as a blog, e-mail lives in some middle ground, where you make these little quips that are disconnected from everything else you have said.

I love the continuity of blogs, and their permanence (as permanent as anything on the web), which encourages a higher level of discourse.

So here we go again...