The Zeitgeist

[update: Of course,  the author of this excellent bit of analysis is Eric BURKE ..not “Burns” {/me blushes; looks at ground, fidgets nervously} Oy-vey. Major briano on my part … must have been channeling an old friend of mine who is, in fact, named Eric Burns. My Apologies to this Eric!! ]

Apple’s java-dev mailing list, and almost every major Java blog on the planet is simply buzzing with the news that Apple didn’t ship Java 6 with Mac OS X 10.5. People are screaming to the heavens about how Apple’s abandoned Java, and how the world is coming to an end: zuul and the key-master have hooked up, the Stay-Puft® Marshmallow Man is stalking the Upper West Side of Manhattan, dogs and cats living together^*… People are “threatening” to dump their Macs in the street, the Ubuntu Linux contingent is singing siren-songs to grief-stricken Mac-using Java developers.. it’s almost apocalyptic.Good grief! Everyone needs to CALM DOWN over this! A little perspective please… did you all know that with EVERY SINGLE Mac OS X release Apple has released a major Java update within a couple of weeks of the OS release?See for yourself, Eric Burke explains it with stunning simplicity:

Eric Burke’s Definitive OS X Java Timeline

Why not give Apple a few weeks and see what happens?

^*Yes, yes… lots of Ghostbusters references. If you have to ask, you’re too young to be reading this post, and too young to be surfing the Internet without parental supervision.

In just a little under 96 hours, Apple will loose OS X v 10.5 a.k.a. “Leopard” on the world. As a long time devotée of Apple’s stuff (I was writing software professionally back on my Apple ][ in high-school) I think this is the most exciting release yet.

Apple posted a very nice “guided tour“to the most visible new parts of 10.5, as well as a list of the 300 new features coming out on Friday.

Personally, as a developer, I am looking forward to the new version of Apple’s XCode development environment and Objective-C 2. As a general user, the enhancements to Mail, iCal, and NFS access will make my life a lot easier. Apple’s NDA doesn’t allow any ADC member of to disclose details about unreleased/seeded software, but suffice it to say that it’s really clear Apple’s engineers are simply among the best in the businesses. The sheer depth of the features they’ve added into 10.5, and the supporting APIs and tools they’ve made available to 3rd party developers are amazing.

My 7yr old daughter is a Mac fan too, and to enjoy the day of Leopard’s release, we’re going to camp out at the Apple store and enjoy the festivities along with all the other Leopard-smitten Apple aficionados, pick up a couple of Leopard “Family Packs” (yes, we have that many Macs…), and then scurry home and play with our new toys.

Huh… it’s not even out yet, and already Amazon is selling Apple’s update to OS X at ~$20 off list for both the single-user and the “family pack” (5-user) editions:

Oh yeah, and if past is prologue, Amazon will somehow manage to ship these puppies as soon as they arrive so ordering from Amazon may well get Leopard onto your machine before the official release (note: I am just observing that these things tend to happen with pre-orders from Amazon… so no flames or chastisement from Apple/Amazon fanboys, pls.)

This past Sunday’s NYTimes has a great article on FaceBook’s changing demographics.  The article starts out talking about the social “ick” factor for some 20-somethings that their Moms are on FaceBook (I’ve seen this first hand — a college friend of mine found her 18yr old daughter berating her — online on FaceBook no less –  for “friending” her friends, demanding to know why she “needed” to be on FaceBook), but quickly moves on to an interesting observation about how FaceBook as a connection medium is moving out side of the friend-tagging and sexual hookup phase an into something more interesting.

Like many Internet tools FaceBook is making that transition from a service started by a bunch of geeks to a service that’s defined by (and some could say co-opted by) its users.   Apropos of the article I wrote last week linking to  Joe Davison’s peice on FaceBook v. commercial FaceBook Apps, this could get very interesting very fast.  As people change the definition of what FaceBook is and does, what will FaceBook do?  Will it clamp down on it’s users?  Will it find a way to embrace all the various avenues that the user community are going to drag it in? Or, will the users themselves come to the conclusion that FaceBook itself was just a convenient social lubricant and go off and find better more expressive tools for furthering their ends…

So, suddenly the NY Times decides its a good idea to put comments from random readers on its front page… don’t we have a letters to the editor section for stuff like this..?

BTW, I don’t think the comment from the “pro-Gore” side should be on the front page either. My parents, who were both award wining newspaper reporters told me when I was young that “news” reports 6 things: “Who, What, Where, When, Why and How” and that anything else is an editorial/commentary…

I guess it’s a good thing that Thanksgiving is just around the corner… This just arrived from Amazon this afternoon: Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.

Now, if there’s one thing my close friends have come to know well, is that I love, love, love to cook. And one of my favorite things to experiment with is my smoker (the Weber “Bullet”); I’ve been smoking meats for several years, and in fact there’s a brisket curing in the fridge at-this-very-moment that will be soon transmuted into  my very first home-made pastrami probably tomorrow. (yuuuum…..)

Traditionally Charcuterie is often most closely associated with pork (something I don’t eat), but it’s not all about pork. Charcuterie is really about salting, curing and smoking meats. I’ve just started leafing through it, but I can already see a whole bunch of recipes that are going to have to be tested a few (dozen) times. The Pastrami was already in progress before I saw this book, but the first thing that caught my eye is a recipe for duck prosciutto which looks simply fab’. (I had duck prosciutto out in SF a few weeks ago for the first time …it was amazing).

This is going to be a fun fall… and since I do (almost) all of the Thanksgiving cooking… my guests are going to help me taste-test all the goodies.

So, my 7 yr old daughter surfed on over to Disney this evening after finsihing her homework to play a few games.    No matter what game she tried to play she got a “redirect” message (see below - talk about your poor site design), and then a notice that the game she selected (and it turns out all of the games on the Disney site) are not supported if you’re a Macintosh user.   How sad…

And, how ironic given that the largest shareholder of The Walt Disney Company is none other than Steven P. Jobs.

I wonder, does Apple know that Disney isn’t interested in kids who use Macs?

Update: The Huffington Post’s Eric Williams has even more on this, and coins the term of the week:  “Flag Hag.”  Perfect.

So, in an unbelievably asinine piece, the LA Times has declared, as part of some really poor reporting centering on how self-proclaimed “conservatives” are upset with Google’s little logos commemorating historical events, that “public health” is a somehow partisan issue.

The article is basically a puff piece tossed to some fringe right-wingers about how “unpatriotic” Google is because they change their logos for different events (in the LAT piece, they show the Google logo with an image of Sputnik that they put up last week on the 50th anniversary of the first artificial satellite) but not for historical events these “conservatives” deem more important.

The whiny wingers want Google to be more “patriotic” by pushing American themed events in their logo art. Google rightly points out that it would be hard to capture the depth and breadth of something like, say Veterans Day with a small piece of logo art. In fact, it would trivialize such events which deserve actual full-brain attention and study by all of us. It should be obvious that Google serves an audience that is fare wider than the 300 million Americans… there are 6 BILLION other people in the world too. Should Google cater to everyone’s patriotic demands? How would these folks react to that? (One shouldn’t have to think too hard on that one to know the answer…)

More outrageous is the LA Times’ characterization of anything that Google does as “liberal” and that issues as basic as public health are somehow partisan. Last time I checked, even “conservatives” need (amongst other things) safe drinking water and sewers. Clearly the LAT Times reporter, a Jim Puzzanghera, and his “conservative” friends need the sewers even more than the liberals since they are SO clearly full of crap.

Google’s little logo homages to historical events are charming, fun and need no tweaking thanks. Oh, and a note to the LA Times: Paper and ink are expensive.. perhaps you should dedicate some of it to real issues that need to be exposed… like the lack of mental heath services for your city’s citizens, or perhaps your Mr. Puzzanghera’s sources.

Joe Davison over at Name Strategy has put together a very interesting post that dismantles any idea that writing apps for FaceBook might be a good thing under their current platform development license…

As more and more people open up their platforms, this is going to become a recurring theme: the idea that even beyond the fact that the provider (in the case, FaceBook) can arbitrarily cut you off, that many of these platforms can and do give themselves license to steal from the people who are generating traffic and content for their site is reprehensible.

Anyone (and I mean ANYONE) thinking about developing a commercial FaceBook app needs to read this post. Right now, any idea that anyone other than FaceBook is going to make money on that platform is just an illusion. Looking at these T&Cs, I’m willing to bet some beer that any commercial apps that are running on FaceBook right now are people who have special deals or are in-bed with FaceBook at some level with the founder or FaceBook’s VCs. This unctuous set of licensing terms also may account Tim O’Reilly’s “Long Tail” post last week regarding the viability of FaceBook Apps…

I’d say that have about 30 days to clean up this mess (read: fix their license and make it startup friendly) or FaceBook will be yet another dead social networking site.

Seriously.

No grown-up running a start-up will tolerate having their ideas stolen, having their users pulled arbitrarily out from under them, and especially not having “taxes” (in the FaceBook licensing parlance) arbitrarily levied on their profits. Any VC’s that would fund such an endeavor will have a lot of ’splaining to do to their LPs…

^*TNBT == The Next Big Thing.

It’s Columbus Day weekend, and here in Huntington that means it’s the end of the season at The Shack. The shack is one of those classic road-side eateries that’s so good you make it your business to go back again, and again, year after year after year…

We know the owners of the shack, Kat and Mace, and the fact they have always run their business with a warmth and friendliness to all their customers even though they are slinging more burgers, lobster rolls, fish & chips and beers than you can possibly count, from that impossibly tiny kitchen, on those impossibly hot and sticky summer days has always meant as much to us as the quality of the food. And the food, wow… really, really good food (My personal fave’ is the Fish & Chips, Michelle’s is the linguine w/mussels in Wine & Butter Sauce). From mid-April through October, we’re always at the Shack whenever we can swing it. The fact that it’s the end of the season is bittersweet (this is being written Sunday night, so technically Monday, Columbus Day is the last hurrah — we’ll be there…) — my daughter Sarabeth is always sad, but Kat reminds her every year that 1) its only a few months until April, and 2) its now even a shorter tme until she will be in High School and old enough to spend a few summers working at The Shack (which she’s wanted to do since she was old enough to talk) building some great memories and amidst the Clams and Choas at the “Tavern on the Gravel” known as the shack.

I’m looking forward to when, like every year, in just a few days, Sarabeth will ask me “So, Daddy, how many days until The Shack opens again..?”