This time it goes up to 11

By Michael Fraase

Saturday, 17 July 2010 08:19PM CST

Section: Announcements

Train wreckHere we go again. Major changes coming. This is the 11th major update to www.farces.com since February 1993. Hopefully you won’t notice anything different for a while.

The back-end is all done and I’ve had about as much as I can stand of MySQL, PHP, and ExpressionEngine. The site is now running ExpressionEngine 2.1.0, and either this has to be the most excruciating upgrade ever or I’m getting older and crankier. Let me just say, dumping and importing databases is within my comfort zone; dropping and importing tables within that database is pushing it; modifying the actual database is way over the line.

This update experience is precisely why I ceased doing IT consulting work eight years ago. The various disciplines within user experience design are all much more within my comfort zone, and I’m finding that things I know are starting to get pushed out by new things I’m learning.

I had hoped to have the front-end finished by now as well, but no such luck. Someday soon.

Whoa, the new image picker in the editor sure is snazzy.

Anyway, there’s almost certain to be some breakage; please let me know by using that Feedback link in the upper right corner (it won’t be there for very much longer).

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Google’s App Inventor = HyperCard 2010

By Michael Fraase

Monday, 12 July 2010 07:08PM CST

Section: Technology

No poopAs Dave Winer notes, marketeers have been selling us this particular bill of goods—that anyone can program software by writing English sentences or dragging icons around—since the days of Cobol. Now comes Google with the same promise, updated for mobile devices, with its Android App Inventor. That its web page fails to render properly in Safari is not a good sign.

Dan Gillmor writes, “but from what I can see this is going to be a seriously big deal if it works as advertised.” The problem is, these things have never worked as advertised. Nonetheless, Gillmor writes he’s “going to start working on an app for the journalism marketplace, a project I’ve wanted to do but couldn’t get going with because of the cost.” Godspeed, Dan, but I’ve seen this movie before. Anyone remember the name of Danny Goodman’s personal information manager HyperCard stack? Gillmor notes that App Inventor is built on Scratch, a programming language for kids developed at MIT. Apple, predictably, rejected Scratch for iOS.

Steve Lohr, writing for the New York Times, reports that App Inventor “has been under development for a year” led by Hal Abelson (one of my heroes) and has been tested with “sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students, and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.”

The fruits of the initial users can at best be seen as minimally useful applets. A program that sends a text message every 15 minutes informing a list of friends of the sender’s current location. A program that auto-replies to text messages. And a program that’s the software equivalent of the “help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” gizmo.

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The blotter: Week ending 11 July 2010

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 11 July 2010 11:21PM CST

Section: Blotter

Janis Joplin blotter acid

Censorship

Centre County (PA) Judge Thomas King Kistler ordered the Centre Daily Times and the Daily Collegian (Penn State’s student newspaper) to delete news stories about two defendants from their websites. The defendants’ lawyer “was concerned the media’s First Amendment rights to free speech were trumping his clients’ rights to have cleared records,” according to Genaro C. Armas writing for the Associated Press. The judge for the other three cases, Centre County Judge Bradley Lunsford reversed his original order to expunge the stories. Neither US federal nor Pennsylvania state law require newspapers to change archives that are factually correct. Sara Ganim, writing for the Centre Daily Times, reports that Kistler later met with fellow judges, district attorney, and the defense attorney and rescinded his expungement order.

ESRD

Apropos of nothing, but it fits as well here as any of the other categories. Jeremy Messersmith is one of the best under-the-radar songwriters to come down the pike in quite a while. He was on Minnesota Public Radio this week; here’s a video clip of him singing “Organ Donor.”

Internet

Last month Twitter reduced the number of API calls allowed for third-party applications from 350 to 175 per hour. This week Twitter third-party vendors reported that the the number of allowed API calls was reduced to 75 per hour. What that means is that Twitter is throttling its servers—if you follow a lot of people on twitter, or only a few really prolific ones—you can’t keep up with the stream. As Ryan Singel aptly writes for Wired, “... take this as another reason why communication services work better as open protocols—like email—not as proprietary platforms like Twitter and Facebook.”

Media

One of the stupidest newspaper headlines ever run is indicative of how truly far the Star Tribune has fallen: “15 homicides aside, serious crime drops on North Side.” To think that I can remember when the Star Tribune was one of the best papers in the US is simply stunning.

More...

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