Monthly Archives: December 2006

RSS: Either publish in full, or gimme a meaningful summary!

I’ve become a big fan of RSS. Using an aggregator means I can catch up with way more web sites than before.

If web sites are interested in eyeballs for their content, they should be sure to publish a full RSS feed. Not doing so is a very bad idea — why do you think I have the time to come click on your web site every day? I don’t. I’ll read from within my aggregator, and if I want to comment, then I’ll click.

I’m a little more forgiving than Scoble. Okay, so some sites want you to visit so they get the advertising revenue, so they don’t do a full feed. But for heaven’s sake, if you’re not going to publish a full feed, then please get your headlines and summaries in order. Don’t make me guess what the article’s about, because I won’t bother — I’ll just skip to the next thing.

ArsTechnica does okay on theirs: An article entitled “EA brand ‘tarnished’ according to analyst and with the summary “A game industry analyst has issued a report stating that poor ratings and low-quality games are starting to diminish the EA brand. We’ll delve into the challenges the gaming giant may be facing” sums up everything the article is about, so I can make an informed decision about whether it’s worth clicking through.

The brilliant Daniel Rutter does absolutely crap at this on his blog: An article entitled “Saving the environment without looking stupid: A primer with a summary of “There’s something to be said for dog-sleds, too” gives me absolutely no clue that it’s a very good, detailed look at the qualities of the Toyota Prius.

No clues. Should I click, not knowing if it’ll be worth the X seconds to decide if it’s worth reading? If I’m at all stretched for time, I won’t bother. It’s not like there’s nothing else to read out there.

PS. Interesting article on full feeds vs partial.

Who invented microcomputing?

There seem to be a number of histories out there that try and paint Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Paul Allen or Apple’s Steves Jobs and Wozniak as the inventors of microcomputing.

6502 chipI reckon it couldn’t be farther from the truth. I reckon it was Chuck Peddle.

Chuck Peddle not only invented the 6502, which cut the cost of microprocessors markedly (making them affordable to people like the Steves to play around with them and put into the Apple) he was also behind the PET, from which the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 were descended.

These were the first computers to sell in their millions, introducing affordable microcomputing to the masses of the western world, and pathing the way for the PCs and Macs you see in homes today. (The Commodore 64 is still the biggest selling computer of all-time, though given the proliferation of PCs, I suppose the comparison is a little unfair.)

And the 6502 went not only into Commodore and Apple machines, but also into Ataris (including the VCS 2600), the BBC Micro, Nintendo NES and many others. It’s said it directly inspired today’s ARM processors (ARM came out of Acorn, the BBC Micro manufacturers) now found in so many consumer electronic devices. (So is the 6502, as it happens.)

Commodore BASIC was bought from Microsoft, making Commodore one of their earliest big customers (though it was a cut-throat deal). Microsoft’s BASIC went into a lot of other computers at the time, and lives-on in Visual Basic, now the most popular programming language on the planet.

As Peddle says in the book I’ve just finished reading (On The Edge — The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall), “We changed the world.” And he’s right.

Unfortunately Commodore’s role in all this tends to get overlooked in many histories, such as Triumph of the Nerds and the like.

Other things I learnt reading the book:

    Jack Tramiel was a ruthless businessman, but he did make this all happen, until he was ousted from Commodore by Irving Gould.

  • Irving Gould couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. He and many of his appointments were the epitome of bad management, and what directly drove Commodore to bankruptcy.
  • The Commodore marketing department produced some real clangers of promotions, which didn’t properly advertise the great machines at all well.
  • Some of the brilliant engineers involved should have been household names, but alas aren’t. That’s the way of the world I suppose.
  • The PET had a metal case because Commodore had a file cabinet-making business.
  • The C64 had the same case as the Vic-20 because they didn’t have time to build anything else.
  • I must have been out of my mind when I bought that Commodore Plus 4 all those years ago. Obviously I couldn’t see it at the time, but it had lemon written all over it.
  • The Amiga 1200 I bought in the early 90s was a much better buy. One day I hope I can play the Amiga AGA version of Aladdin again.
  • People who are useless are known as human NOPs.

All in all, the book is a great read. Bagnall and his editors apparently don’t know how to use apostrophes, but that doesn’t detract from what is a compelling story. Recommended, especially for anybody who dabbled with computers in the late 70s or 80s.

No Need To Standalone

Web developers have been using the very handy IE standalone for a while now. It gives access to IE versions dating back to IE3. While a handy tool to check backwards compatibility there are some limits and drawbacks.

Now Microsoft, yes, Microsoft, have come to the party and released a virtual hard drive that comes with a licensed copy of Windows XP SP2 and IE 6.0 installed. While targeted for the cross over time as people update from IE 6 to IE 7 it’s an incredibly handy (yet large) download. All you need is the, also free, Microsoft Virtual PC and you can have fully functioning IE 6 and 7 on the same PC. Hopefully further down the track they may release the 5.0 versions as an alarming number of people are still using these dinosaurs.

What I learned from Scrutineering an Election

I scrutineered the 2006 Victorian State Election. Comments are made in the context of the voting systems used there: Preferential for the lower house, and Single Transferable Vote for the upper house. I was in a very safe Labour seat.

  1. HTV cards seem to hold quite a sway over voters; about two thirds of them vote as per the HTV card. In the upper house, HTV cards are unnecessary – the preferences are built in to the system. The informal rate is still disturbingly high.

    Because of this, I think the lower house ticket should allow a single “1”, tick or a cross to be entered – just like the upper house. It would eliminate the need for HTV cards.

  2. How To Vote (HTV) cards don’t affect upper house results. The Democrats were handing out HTVs at my booth. The Democrats weren’t running a lower house candidate, only upper house. The DLP and People Power were in a similar boat, but weren’t handing out HTVs. They all got the same number of Above The Line (ATL) votes.
  3. The ALP don’t care about the upper house. After the lower house count finished, the ALP scrutineers left. No Liberal scrutineer ever showed. The Labour guys said they were there “to make sure the Liberals don’t pull one of their dirty tricks” – no, they wouldn’t elaborate.
  4. Donkey voting is alive and well. I didn’t capture the rate, but I have been told 1%. I think it might even be 2% or more, looking at my figures. But in my booth, a donkey vote could easily have been classified as a “Not the sitting candidate – I hate major political parties” vote.
  5. The preferential voting system is not well understood.

    The VEC has made it as easy as they could for voters to vote formally.

    While the general process of numbering from one to the number of candidates is broadly understood by Election staff, even they don’t get the finer points of what constitutes a formal vote. The general gist for this election was “do as much as you can to make the vote valid” – so if the last digit was missing off a lower house ballot, it was clear what the voter’s intentions were; if the upper house ticket had marks both above the line and below it, the more specific (i.e., BTL) vote was taken. In addition to a “1”, a tick or a cross was acceptable; digits other than 1 didn’t invalidate a formal ballot. Basically, within the voting rules, great allowances were made for what counted as a formal vote. I spent a lot of my scrutineering time adjudicating as to what a formal ballot looked like. Which brings me to:

    • What does a valid “1” look like? Some fonts put a bar at top, or top and bottom. And it seems some people write them like a seven, and others like an upside-down square-mirror-imaged J. Is a half-cross a “1”, or enough of a cross to make a formal vote?
  6. Some people object to compulsory voting.

    Nearly half of the informal votes I saw were completely blank. They suggest a decision to not vote. From my read of this AEC research paper on informal voting, 1.5% – 3.5% points of informal voting are by people who don’t want to vote (something like 25% of people don’t want to vote). These figures correlate to what I saw.

    15% of voters didn’t bother turning up to vote. Another 9% shouldn’t have bothered – their votes were informal. So the election was decided by the 75% of voters who could (both willing and able to) vote.

  7. People are idiots

    Apparently there are some other correlated predictors for informal voting: English as a second language (ESL), little education and too many candidates. The ESLers have no excuse, election materials are provided in the twenty or so dominate foreign languages. Too many candidates for your little brain? Boo hoo. My booth had a stunning four candidates – most people can count to three. Didn’t go to school? Doesn’t preclude you from counting to three. The only reasonable explanation is People Are Idiots.

    This observation is also made in the context of the first point in my list.

I scrutineered to confirm my last point (it’s not that hard, I really couldn’t believe the informal rate was that high), and to challenge my assumption about HTV cards – they don’t work. Wrong. They work wonderfully. I also couldn’t believe that so many people vote “1” for a major party – but I was wrong, nearly 90% of valid votes cast were for the majors. I still don’t know why, but at least I’ve seen with my own eyes that it happens.

Perhaps we should just let our kids vote.

Cool stuff for Windows

Easily block Flash animations in Firefox with Flashblock. Has a whitelist so you can let your favourite sites through. I’m finding it handy to stop advert-laden (mostly MSM) sites stealing inordinate amounts of CPU just to show their ads. (Though the Herald-Sun must use something else for its slow moving mid-page picture banner thingy.)

Could Democracy be the Firefox of media players? It looks pretty cool, and there’s a new version just out, though at the moment I’m using the Real and Quicktime alternatives from Free-codecs.com.

Looking for something like Co-pilot, but free? How about UltraVNC Single Click? (via Anthony)