New Magazine: Tekka

I missed this on Sunday when Mark Bernstein posted it (although I definitely knew about it -- see below):

At Eastgate, we're starting a new Web magazine, Tekka.

Tekka will be about enjoying new media and creating beautiful software. Serious reading for serious readers. Ideas and tools.

Tekka is going to be fun. We're going to create a market for good writing and solid thinking about the art of software and the craft of hypertext. Tekka will be edited by Anja Rau, the immensely-talented young hypertext critic whose skillful probes have inspired so much discussion this year. (Her weblog, Flickwerk, is fine reading)

Tekka won't be for everybody. No kid stuff, no management fluff. Tekka will assume you know how to use your computer. If you just want to know what to buy at the mall, Tekka's not for you. If you need to create a new program, a new Web site, or a new company, Tekka assumes you can get it done.

There's nothing more important happening right now than the great flowering of software that's about to unfold. You don't want to sit back and watch this. You want to be a part of it. (Odds are, if you're reading this, you are.)

Charter subscriptions are $50. Someday, lots of people will say, "Oh, sure, I was part of Tekka from the start." Subscribe right away, and you can feel good when you say this.  [_Go_]

As long time readers know, I have tremendous respect for Mark.  I've known him for 15 years now and he's always done great work, previously with StorySpace, currently with TinderBox (a very cool blogging product) and soon with Tekka.  I'm looking forward to it.

Very Obligatory Bias Disclaimer: Remember when I said that I "definitely knew about it"?  Well I'm a contractor to Mark for implementing the security system for Tekka and some ancilliary PHP scripting.  That's how I knew about it.  So view my enthusiasm for Tekka knowing that.  Still beyond contributing content ideas via IM to Mark I don't have an editorial relationship at all.  And if I do write anything for Tekka, I'll definitely be clear about it.

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Cat Fight at the PHP Saloon

Over at PHP Everywhere there's a good "bitch slap" session going on over an article which casts PHP mostly as a tool for front ends.  Note that this type of argument never actually solves a damn thing.  "Awk!  Infidel!  Perl!" is always amusing but what it does do is force interesting technical issues out into the open that you often don't think about.  Or it tends to show you how language X can do what language Y does but isn't generally known (there are some good cluster deployment comments in this discussion). [_Go_] and [_More_] 

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Very Cool: Anagram's Map Gizmo

Here's a very cool thing: MapGizmo.  Ever get tired of manually cutting and pasting an address from a webpage into MapQuest or Yahoo Maps?  Now you can paste the whole address into MapGizmo and it will feed it to right to the mapping web site.  Very useful, very cool:

Annoyed that you have to separate addresses by hand to use popular mapping services? MapGizmo to the rescue!

Cut-and-paste a complete address to view it with your favorite mapping serivce! MapGizmo will remove unneeded information, split up the address, and fetch the map for you. [_Go_]

Bias Disclaimer: Nicholas who wrote this software (there are server side and client side versions including one that adds address info right into Outlook easily) is a friend of a friend that I've been helping on a pro-bono basis figure out how to make money with his software.  But there's no business relationship between us so I feel ok blogging it.  And MapGizmo was at least partially my idea so I'm a little biased.  I've also tried his stuff and it works really well. 

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Ooops!  Security Alert: Time to Upgrade Your Flash Player

Even though I could use this as an opportunity for a flash rant, I'm not going to.  But I suspect that you should update Flash in your browser.

A flaw found in Macromedia's animation software leaves Web surfers vulnerable to attack when they visit an Internet site or, possibly, open an e-mail, a security firm said Tuesday.

The vulnerability, found by security firm eEye Digital Security, allows an attacker to create a hand-edited Macromedia Flash, or SWF, file that can compromise a PC or Macintosh if its user views the file with the Shockwave Flash Player plug-in for Internet Explorer, Netscape or other browsers.

The flaw's danger is compounded by the fact that Flash is so widespread and the software doesn't have a built-in upgrade system, said Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer for Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based eEye. [_Go_]

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Is Yahoo Anti-Blogging?

It strikes me that this:

Articles listed in those results will cost $1.50 each to access. Yahoo said nearly 1 million AP stories were available in the Yahoo News archives. Yahoo said AP products such as stories, photos and audio clips will remain free for 15 days after publication before converting to the paid archive. [_Go_]

could be bad for blogging.  Note that I am not saying that it is bad just that it could be.  While not all blogging is commentary on existing content, certainly a lot of it is.  But since I don't know the previous Yahoo policy on retention I can't say if something is being taken away from us or we have a new source which is at least cheap to acquire research content from.

I can comment that its unclear to me that this is a big revenue source.  I used to work for Dataware, which founded Northern Light, an Internet search engine with a focus on selling "premium" content and that effort didn't work.  Although I never saw official results on content sales, I always got the impression they were quite small.  And they had much better content then just AP sources (i.e. articles from magazines, etc).  And a $1.50 per article !!!!  For AP content !!!!  That's just plain wrong.

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Patent Stupidity

Sigh.  According to News.com AOL has now gotten a patent on Instant Messaging:

The patent covers anything resembling a network that lets multiple IM users see when other people are present and then communicate with them.  [_Go_]

It seems to me like there is so much prior art here (Unix talk / chat programs) that this can't be enforceable.  Please let there be prior art.

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Marketing 101: Focusing Too Much on the Competition

Yesterday McDonalds announced the 1st ever loss in their 39 year history.  Here's what CNN Money said:

NOT-SO-GOLDEN-ARCHES McDonald's posts its first quarterly loss ever. EVER! Now, granted it was because of a restructuring charge, but still, things continue to tumble down for Ronald and Co. It's ironic that this occurred on a day that word came out the company was moving into Italian food!

Here's the bottom line: People are eating less hamburgers. U.S. is saturated. Overseas is dicey. Same store sales this year are down 1.6 percent. The discounting program is not having its desired effect. Earnings have fallen in 7 of 8 quarters. Its U.S. market share has fallen from 15.7 in 1999 to 15.2 today. Stock fell $1.47 to $15.91, an eight year low. New CEO Jim Cantalupo has his hands full.  [_Go_]

Note: Whole commentary reposted above since there are no permalinks and this will go away whenever they update the page.

Think about that: 39 years.  How'd you like to be that CEO? 

There has been quite a bit of analysis as to why but the best I've seen was an analogy to the auto industry i.e. they focused so much on Burger King / Wendy's as the competition that they missed the whole issue of Subway, Panera Bread and other "healthy" competitors.  That's the same way that Ford and GM focused on each other and let the Japanese creep into the U.S. market.  And market share, once lost, is not easily recovered.  I'd have to think that this analogy is true.  McDonalds is a restaurant company feeding people in a quick way not a burger company.  Now it's unclear if they can (or should) change the perception of themselves as a "burger company" but their view of the competition is what basically blindsided them.

Moral of the Story: Whether or not you agree with this analysis of McDonalds, and some don't, there is still a valuable lesson here.  As a business you have a view of who and what is your competition.   Unfortunately so does your customer base and the public (i.e. your potential customer base) as a whole.  If you don't regularly confirm that who you view as your competition matches what the external world views as your competition it often comes back to haunt you.

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Here's a Nice Mozilla / Phoenix Trick: Just One

Here's a nice trick for web developers.  Its not rocket science at all but its certainly helpful.  All (well at least folks like me) of us have too many browsers open.  This makes it hard to know which browser is open to a Blog, which browser is open to Slashdot and which one has the web application you're working on.  What I do is save Internet Explorer for blogging and content I'm reading / researching, Mozilla for development tools like PhpMyAdmin and Phoenix for what I'm testing.  This makes my ALT+TAB switching between windows very easy -- I just look for that one icon for what I'm testing or the tool I need instead of trying to "Step right up.  Pick an Internet Explorer icon and you have a 1 in 10 shot of getting the right one".  (Replace 10 w/ the average number of IE windows you have).

Note: This could also be very useful on OS-X where the implementation of ALT+TAB is brain damaged.  At least brain damaged in my opinion.  I suspect Jeremy who has vented on this same topic would like this trick.  Just three browsers and you can always ALT+TAB directly to at least one or two of them.

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Damn Its Cold or What Do You Wear When You Work from Home?

This will probably put a chuckle on people's faces this moring.  When you work from home there is always the question of "What do I wear today?".  I mean I don't think anyone ever wears exactly what they did in the office.  Not that I'm saying that you want to slack off and be a slob or anything (and, no, I'm not a slob who is trying to cover up for himself) but it's always a bit different.  Personally I tend to my "summer hacker" outfit year round i.e. Bermuda Shorts and a shirt.  Since winter has once again arrived, that shirt tends to be a long sleeved shirt about 50% of the time.  Notice what I'm not wearing: Pants, Shoes, Socks.  Well since I stopped wearing socks regularly in '82ish I guess that actually doesn't count.

Now since I tend to treat working at home just as I did when I was in an office, i.e. rarely going offsite during the day, this generally doesn't matter -- except for once a day.  That's right: getting the morning paper.  And all I can say about that this morning is "Damn its cold".  I just came back in from getting the paper and, even worse (farther walk), taking the trash out.  There I am in shorts and a T-short with a temperature that Weather.com tells me is 16 degrees but "feels like 1 degree".  And the looks you get from people walking / driving by you.  You'd think they never saw a man in shorts in 16 degree weather before.  The nerve!  I shouldn't complain thought -- it wasn't as bad today as yesterday since I wore shoes today.  Yesterday I padded out into fresh snow to get the paper.  Now that was really cold.

Oh and do I keep my indoor temperature high?  Am I wasting energy with this regular focus on Winter shorts?  Nope.  My thermostat is regularly at 62 - 64.  In case I get cold, I keep a small quilt in my office room that I can drape over my legs -- or I just grab one of my very furry cats and plop them on my lap.  They bitch at times but generally help out.

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