Out of Cheese

A couple of friends are visiting over Thanksgiving, so I’ll get to play tourist in Seattle for the first time in a while. I hope the weather cooperates….

Michael Dirda reviews Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch for the Washington Post. The review is definitely worth a read, particularly if you’ve never read a Pratchett novel.

The book’s certainly worth reading, too, of course, but I can’t truly recommend it till I’ve read it myself. That’ll have to wait until its paperback release because I have all of the other Discworld novels in paperback and it just wouldn’t do to have one book be taller than all the others in the set.

Note to self: Never agree to do both copy editing and technical editing for a 50-page document in a single day. Never again, that is.

Tim O’Reilly provides an interesting definition of “productivity application”, originally from Doug Carlston of Broderbund Software.

We tend to think of “productivity” applications as Office-type apps — things that you use when you’re not having fun. Carlston gave a better definition a few years ago, calling them “any application where the user’s own data matters more to [the user] than the data we provide.”

O’Reilly uses this to declare Apple’s iApps — iTunes, iPhoto, and others — to be productivity applications. It sounds odd at first, but when you think about it more, he’s right. It’s a new use of the term but it really does fit, and it shows that Apple is finding new ways to make people productive with their computers.

Brian Weir has joined Luke Francl and Boing Boing and Slashdot, among others.

If you sign up — and you should, since if you support technological freedoms you can hardly make a better statement than this — send mail to Luke and he’ll add you to his page.

The thought occurs that (semi-)professional writing would be much easier if I did it more than once a year. Or that it’d be easier if I’d done any real writing in college after the first quarter of my freshman year. Come to think of it, the last time I spent any significant amount of time writing was my junior year of high school.

While writing anything is certainly better than doing no writing at all — and that’s one of the reasons why this site exists, as I hinted at a while back — writing is one of those things in which you’re only likely to get substantially better if you receive good feedback and criticism. It’s especially important to get comments from people who care more about your writing than your content. That certainly wasn’t the case for the book I co-authored last year, where the publication schedule was so rushed that barely more than a week passed from the first draft of my chapter to its final submission.

I’m likely to be given the opportunity to do more professional writing soon. Hopefully this experience (or experiences, if I’m lucky) will turn out better than my last one, and my writing skills will improve in the process. With a bit more luck (and effort, but effort makes its own luck), perhaps I can make this a more regular effort than merely once a year.

Chuq Von Rospach mentions a new technology that can automatically detect offsides in a soccer match. He isn’t convinced that’s a good thing:

My only real worry — a few years ago the NHL went to a “no tolerance” rule for in the crease to protect goalies, and started using video replay to judge marginal issues. The end result was a total disaster on any number of levels.

We complain and moan about referees, but referees play a significant and not-well-understood role in games. their job is not only to call penalties, but to know when to not call a penalty because it’s irrelevant within the flow of the game.

He follows that up with a question:

Would objective refereeing of offsides in soccer be a good thing for the game? I dunno. Where else could something like this be used in sports, and would it make the game better?

Baseball might be a good answer. Major League Baseball has tried for years to get its umpires to call a consistent strike zone and the efforts finally seem to be paying off in recent years, but they’ll never be perfect. And you can always have umpires miss pitches, and miss them badly. Sure, that’s part of the game, but it isn’t supposed to be that way.

Of course, there have been calls for years to automate strike zone calls. One of Ron Luciano’s books (I don’t recall which, but probably Strike Two) mentioned an electronic system involving lasers that was tested at spring training sometime in the 1970s. The story goes something like this:

The first day of the test, the machine called every pitch a ball.

“Oops,” said its creators, who fixed it and came back the next day to try again. This time it called every pitch a strike.

“Oops,” said its creators again, who disappeared for a few days. When they came back, they were convinced they’d fixed the bugs. They’d put a little chip inside each ball, and that got the job done. There was just one catch — the balls cost about $300 apiece. “Oh, and there’s one more thing,” said the inventors. “You can’t hit the ball — the chip will break.”

That ended the experiment.

Luke Francl proposes “Lessig’s Challenge”, which is derived from Larry Lessig’s talk at OSCON this year. The Challenge: Those who believe in the laws and code required for the Internet to remain open and free should donate as much to the EFF, Rick Boucher, and others who are fighting for those rights as they pay to telecom and entertainment companies who are trying to stifle technological innovation.

I’m willing to take that challenge. I’m donating $100 to the EFF, which will double with my employer’s matching contribution (even though my employer probably isn’t much of a fan of the EFF’s views). I probably won’t keep quite track of my spending quite as precisely as Luke does, but I’m willing to contribute a reasonable approximation, effective immediately.

So I’m in. So is Luke. Who else?

Peter Gammons published a terrific column today that lists 25 things wrong with baseball. I don’t agree with his example for the first item on the list — the Phillies’ pursuit of Jim Thome, Tom Glavine, and David Bell isn’t a PR stunt — but the list is largely spot-on.

If you take a look at baseball in recent years, you can come to a couple interesting conclusions that contradict traditional thinking. You don’t need a massive amount of money to win; instead, you need a focus on good scouting and development. You need players with good tools who are willing to learn, and then you need to teach them to value getting on base over hitting home runs, and throwing strikes over throwing fast. The teams that follow these strategies and have a strong focus on worthwhile statistics to back up their beliefs — Oakland is by far the best example, with Toronto and Boston likely to follow in the next few years — can do better than teams with much higher budgets simply because they know how to put together a team that can win.

Someone on an Apple mailing list just pointed to a free version of K&R online. Wow. That’s completely illegal. I see from browsing around the site that O’Reilly noticed them a while back and forced them to take down their O’Reilly books. I’m shocked that other publishers haven’t done the same. If I knew who to mail at Prentice Hall, I’d gladly let them know about the site.