It’s been really interesting this year seeing how various sites handle liveblogging (or tweeting) Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote. Twitter, naturally, handled it by going down for a while. What has surprised me so far is how badly Engadget’s liveblogging page has performed. Not only did Ars Technica’s equivalent consistently load faster, it had better updates, faster. C’mon, Engadget! But then, both of them were stomped flat by the excellent, auto-updating goodness of Mac Rumors Live (tip to @brainopera, to which I have switched and closed the other two tabs by halfway through.

It ain’t over yet; so far everything’s been pretty good, and I think the new Apple TV 2 is going to be big. I know the chances of us buying a big ol’ flat-screen HD box just went up a good bit. But we’re all waiting for the “one more thing”.

Chris Brogan and Clarence Smith Jr. (am I supposed to just say “@chrisbrogan and @dykc” to appear more ‘linked-in’ and whatnot?) just posted a collaborative piece about managing the (many, many) streams of information from sources like Twitter (or any aggregator, like Google Reader, I’d add).

My immediate thought is that this is a perfect task for adding intelligence on the client side. For instance, I would love to have more options in Twitterific for controlling the incoming tweetstream.

With a ‘pause’ feature, if @InterestingDude is temporary at ReallyBoringConfFest07, and will be until Thursday, I’d love to be able to put him on “pause” until then, so that I don’t see all his excited tweets about impromptu hallway meetings with ReallyBoringPeople and ReallyBoringProjects.

But I don’t want to quit following @InterestingDude permanently; I’ve just lost interest for the next few days. I don’t want to have to remember to re-follow him, either; I just want to skip the next couple of days (or hours or whatever) of tweets from him.

The problem Chris and Clarence are examining is how to get more of the info that’s interesting and less of what’s not, when the “interestingness” isn’t always determined by the person or the topic. The ability to follow tweets or blog posts by “interesting people” is a start, but only a very primitive one. There are lots of fascinating people doing fascinating work, but who have hobbies that bore me to tears (and vice versa). There are a very few people who write so well that it hardly matters what they’re doing, I just enjoy reading their writing. And there are many, many people who normally would not be of interest to me at all, except when they happen to have seen/talked to/read/bought/tripped over the very piece of information which is extremely relevant to something I’m working on or discussing with other people.

Perhaps I should just quote Chris and Clarence a bit:

The problem arises when the people you follow are initiating and participating in conversations that you do not find interesting at all. [...] Said another way: I might like YOU, but not be into every little thing you are into. [...] How can we catch your tweets about social computing but skip the tweets about being stuck at JFK for a 3 hour delay?

It’s not that YOU should have to twitter differently, but rather, we should have a way to adjust the lens on what comes through our “interestingness” gate. And of course, this is all relative to whatever you’re interested in, who, and often times where. For instance, if we’re visiting Seattle, we might want to get MORE about the area around us than less, in case something newsworthy is happening (like avoiding a traffic jam).

They also (briefly) consider the personal/social implications of such filtering:

How do we on/off the conversational flow of people in such a way that we receive more of what’s interesting to us (again, very relative), without it signifying anything negative about a person?

This I don’t find as compelling, partly (perhaps) because so far I only have an extremely limited scope of friends (in anything resembling the traditional sense) who are Twittr/Whatevr users. But I feel pretty confident that the notion of any social implications of being filtered or un-followed (is that a word?) will adjust with the tools. As people spend enough time swimming in the flow of social network infostreams, it will become more apparent that social standing with a person is largely disconnected from how much of your socnet output they’re consuming at any given time (perhaps it will always have more to do with which parts of our output they consume than how much).

C&C continue:

Why can’t we have a system that’s partly like Flickr’s “interesting” and “favorites” system, that helps train Twitter (and other networks) to predict which conversations will matter to us? Something more than keywords. How do we apply this same thinking to the people we currently “follow?” What if Clarence loves when Chris talks about data centers, but doesn’t care about Chris’s current trip to New York City? How could we “gate-on” based on information, and then “gate-off” when the interestingness vanishes? [...] How could we build tools that turn on and off our view of someone’s Twitter stream based on things like: location, context, content?

This is where I think there’s a big ol’ gaping opportunity for an interesting next-gen aggregator. How many different ways are there to arrange the panes in a blog reader? Well, OK, there’s a zillion, but the point is, how many of them are enough better to compel me to change to them? Just like with the mail client, the things that really are going to motivate people to change en masse will be the addition of “intelligence” to make managing the burgeoning information therein easier.

The “pause” thing would be cool; but man, a client that could determine what I was interested in at the moment, and help me find “more of this and less of that”, would really pique my interest. Whether it did it by reacting to explicit actions like tagging or even rating (3 stars or 4?) tweets or people, or by implicit observation of my behavior (in the same vein as how Google Reader’s “Select by Auto” works), it would be a great step in the right direction.

Plus, you know, a pony. And an aeroplane. And a perpetual motion machine. I mean, it can’t hurt to ask, right?

In the “well, that just sucks” department, Dan Fogelberg died today at 56 years old, after a long struggle with prostate cancer.

Dan Fogelberg, to me, was one of those artists whose great songs (“Longer”, “Auld Lang Syne”, “The Leader of the Band”) were just spectacular, amazingly poignant and brilliant, ones that just resonated with something already inside me, and whose other stuff was just this side of un-listenable. I think it was something about the ’70s, as Al Stewart (“The Year of the Cat”, “On the Border”), Gordon Lightfoot (“Sundown”, “If You Could Read My Mind”) and a few other of that era were the same way for me.

I actually sang “Longer” to my wife in our wedding, and at least she liked it. It’s just sad, and it makes me feel old, when artists I grew up with start dying of, well, natural causes, for lack of a better word.

And I have to say, with Keith Richards still alive, perhaps Billy Joel was right: Only the good die young. And speaking of old, you know I’m feeling it when I start talking about 56 as ‘young’.

p.s. – One of the funniest Bloom County strips ever (and yes, I know how much that’s saying) had Opus sputtering, “Who’s Dan Fogerburp?” after his girlfriend Lola Granola scandalized him by admitting to having a Dan Fogelberg tattoo. Alas, we never found out where it was, which was apparently more scandal than Opus could have handled.

OK, prepare to be astounded with my ignorance. And please, if you are, enlighten me.

Marketwatch reported today that Countrywide reported that mortgage loan fundings for November 2007 were down 40% from November 2006.

The market has peeled off another 5% from CFC’s price today, though CFC’s been so volatile lately that it might be a little imaginative to call it a “reaction” to the news. It could be “reacting” to a butterfly landing on some institutional trader’s window and causing him for some reason to remember to unload another 100k of the shares. I don’t know.

Still, it’s interesting that this is being reported is that “CFC reports mortgage fundings down 40%”, as though this is the real news. But didn’t we already know that things are worse than last year? That’s not news any more. The news – the thing that is unexpected (or was to me) and of immediate interest – is that its total mortgage loan fundings were up 5 percent from the prior month. Why isn’t that the headline? When was the last month that CFC saw mortgage loan funding up from the prior month?

Again, I realize that there can be seasonal factors that make some months stronger than others, and so normally, comparing year-over-year makes more sense. But given that we’ve seen a massive dislocation and an ongoing effort to reprice mortgage risk, the huge year-over-year decline is already priced in. It seems to me.

Really, this isn’t about CFC, but about how financial reporting, and maybe most reporting, has to fit the current template. “CFC Mortgage funding up” doesn’t fit the “We’re all going to die because the 4% of the mortgage market in sub-prime loans is going to have above-average failure rates for a while” template. So the news, whatever it is, has to be reported in such a way that the template remains undisturbed (at least, that is, until the next template comes along).

Disclaimer: As you may have guessed, I am currently long CFC (though not in a big way).

I couldn’t resist. Note the is_numeric? method, which is not very pretty Ruby (I should open up a base class somewhere and put it there), but it works and is only syntactic sugar anyway, to make the simpleEncode method itself a little nicer to read.

Note that it produces slightly different output than the PHP one, namely because Ruby handles integer arithmetic a little differently, thus the round() method was not needed here. If I changed this line:

      chartData < < simpleEncoding[simpleLength * val / maxValue];

to this:

      chartData < < simpleEncoding[(simpleLength * val.to_f / maxValue).round];

the output is identical. But visually they're nearly indistinguishable when charted, as the difference amounts to (literally) a rounding error at any given point.

def is_numeric?(arg)
  Float arg rescue false
end

def simpleEncode(values, maxValue=-1)
  simpleEncoding = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789'
  simpleLength = simpleEncoding.size - 1

  # Just ignore any non-numeric values                                                               

  maxValue = values.select{|f| is_numeric?(f) }.max if maxValue < 0

  chartData = 's:'
  values.each do |val|
    if is_numeric?(val)
      chartData << simpleEncoding[(simpleLength * val.to_f / maxValue).round];
    else
      chartData << '_';
    end
  end
  return chartData;
end

The docs for the new Google Charts API include a Javascript function called simpleEncode. It demonstrates encoding a data set into a “Simple encoding” as expected by the API. You can read the docs to see more about how this works (as well as the other two encoding methods if you need more granularity), but I didn’t catch on the first time through. So herewith, a quick explanation in my terms of what’s going on, followed by a PHP function which does the same thing.

The ‘Simple encoding’ converts your data values into an alphanumeric string, composed of upper- or lower-case letters or the digits 0-9. But to do it right, you have to realize what it’s expecting. For the purpose of the Google Chart, those values (ranging from ‘A’ at the bottom to ‘9′ at the top) represent the 62 discrete points you can plot using Simple encoding. If you have a graph which needs more than 62 discrete points, you’ll need to use one of the other encodings. But as the granularity guidelines say, don’t overestimate the granularity you really need for your chart. Remember that charting is about visualization, and unless your chart is quite large (and Google charts are limited to 300,000 pixels), there may not be much visual clarity gained by maximizing granularity.

More importantly, regardless of which encoding you use, you still need to understand this key point: Your data has to be mapped proportionally onto the available data points for the encoding you choose. This is simple once you get it, but maybe not so simple at first. So let’s try an example. Let’s say you want to plot this series of data points:

1, 3, 11, 8, 4, 2, 9

If you just chart those numbers directly without encoding them, Google will interpret them essentially as “a dot 1% of the way from the bottom”, “a point 3% of the way from the bottom”, “a dot 11% of the way…”, etc. You’ll get a graph like this.

That’s probably not what you were after. But if you encode it properly, you’ll end up with a chart like this.

Much better, don’t you think?

So the whole trick is to take your data points, figure out what the maximum and minimum values you want to display are, and then proportionately adjust each value in your data points to map them onto the available graph points.

In our hypothetical data set, 0 is the lowest value we’re going to plot, and 11 is the highest. Proportionately mapped, 3 would be about 27% of the way between 0 and 11, 8 about 72%, 9 about 81%, etc. The letter ‘R’ is about 27% of the way from from A all the way up to 9, so 3 encodes to ‘R’. ’s’ is about 72% of the way up, so 8 encodes to ’s’, and so on.

OK, so the following PHP function takes a one-dimensional array and an optional maximum value (used if you wanted, for instance, to specify the highest visible value on the graph, even if none of your data points go that high). If you don’t specify a maximum value, the function will calculate the highest value from among your data points and use that.

It returns a string representing the Simple encoding of your datapoints, prepended by the ’s:’ specified in the Google Charts API. In short, it does exactly the same thing as the sample Javascript function provided in the API docs, only it doesn’t require you to specify a max value.

So

print simpleEncode(array(1, 3, 11, 8, 4, 2, 9))

returns ’s:GR9sWLy’, which you can see if you ‘view image’ on the second graph above is what I used to create it.

No magic here, I just thought it might be useful to someone.

function simpleEncode($values, $maxValue=-1)
{
  $simpleEncoding = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789';
  $simpleLength = strlen($simpleEncoding)-1;

  if ($maxValue < 0) $maxValue = max($values);

  $chartData = 's:';
  foreach ($values as $currentValue) {
    if (is_numeric($currentValue) && $currentValue >= 0) {
      $chartData .= $simpleEncoding[round($simpleLength * $currentValue / $maxValue)];
    } else {
      $chartData .= '_';
    }
  }
  return $chartData;
}

The new Google Chart API is just awesome. I can say that with confidence, because even I was able to get it working in no time flat.

I have a web app (mostly PHP) I use to manage some sales data, and I used to graph my data using PHPlot. PHPlot is a nice PHP graphing package; at the time I started using it, it was the best I could find. Still, while I realize I’m not the brightest frog in the pond, it took me quite a few hours of noodling around with PHPlot to get it to look like I wanted a couple of years ago when I implemented it.

Well, I’m proud to say that after about an hour this morning, I had completely duplicated my existing graph using the new and hotness.

One reason that it didn’t take me long is that the Google Charts folks (do they have their own nickname? Chooglers?) made a decision to return something from whatever mess you send them, even if it’s not what you wanted. This many seem like a small thing, but it didn’t happen by accident. There’s a significant amount of magic going on behind the scenes to return some semblance of a graph from the most twisted parameter arguments. But it’s a big, big deal because it makes it so much easier to incrementally make it look how you want.

What’s more, because it’s REST-based, you can right-click on an image generated by Google Charts, wherever you see one, and see the URL, which will contain all the options, right there for you to copy and even change. And since each image is just a URL, you can try variations, and they’ll all be in your web history, so if you make a misstep, the last known good one is but a back-button click away.

I love this thing! I’ve posted a bit of PHP that I hope will be helpful, along with a quick explanation of something that initially threw me about the chart data you have to send to Google Charts.

I’m a big fan of Google Reader. But one thing that annoys is that I can’t find a history view that would let me go back through my own reading trail. Shared items, sure, but while I don’t necessarily want my reading history public, at least I should be able to see my history, shouldn’t I?

I frequently read a post and then later decide I want to go back to it, and have no idea where it was. I often know about when I read it (if it was very long ago, I probably wouldn’t remember about it anyway), but that doesn’t help me without a history to browse through.

This is made worse by the fact that not only do I subscribe to more blogs than I can keep up with, I also frequently read links from other prodigious link sharers (like Scoble and Chris Brogan), and so there’s a good chance I don’t even subscribe to the blog where the item was actually posted.

That’s just a huge oversight. Or maybe I just haven’t found it yet. If you know of a way, please let me know. If you’re one of our Google overlords, please add it.

All-new, completely original haiku that I just now wrote, all by myself:

Dashing through the snow
In a one-horse open sleigh.
O’er the fields we go.

I wrote (from my own fertile imagination) this second stanza to this epic seasonal haiku-cycle, but I don’t think it’s as good (though the last trill is very Basho-like, and that’s a good thing):

Laughing all the way
Bells on bob-tails ring, making
Spirits bright. Oh, what fun!

Hey, you hear that sound?
That’s the sound of seventeen
Syllables ringing.

There’s lots more such drivel here.

A few years ago, I developed a mild Everquest addiction. I played for waaaay too many hours, passing up more important things (reading, working, wife’n'kids time, exercising, sleeping, etc.) to kill just…one…more…orc. OK, it wasn’t a real addiction; I was just indulging my normal impulse control problems and a surfeit of free time.

But I did manage to give it up. Quit cold-turkey, and stayed off for a whole year or two, right up until World of Warcraft came out. WoW is a lot friendlier to casual play than EQ was, and so I’ve managed (mostly) to keep my WoWing to recreational status. Mostly. Sometimes. Maybe.

During the interregnum, I talked with a friend who also played too much (a LOT more than I) about whether EQ wanted people to play more or less. We figured that they really didn’t want people to play (consuming resources) any more than was necessary to keep them interested enough in playing to stay subscribed.

We got to thinking if a game had the capability to let your character contact you – a phone call, an email or text message, an IM session – to draw you back in, it would be a lot harder to ever stop. I know that, after I dumped EQ, if I’d received a plaintive request from my ranger to come and get him out of a tough spot, it would have been hard not to jump back in.

I tend to game in spurts: if I play an hour or so, I’m much more likely to fire it up again later that night or the next day. If I stop for a day or two, for whatever reason, then I may go for days or even weeks without thinking about it much or feeling much desire to play. But if the game noticed that, and decided I was “at risk” of quitting (thus stopping the trickle of gold into the company), could it coax me back in?

Warcraft already has a “Resurrect a Friend” program, whereby a current player gets free playing time if he coaxes a former player to rejoin. Warcraft doesn’t typically delete your account or characters when you terminate your account, just to decrease the cost of you changing your mind later. They’re also doing a “first one’s free, kid” deal as well.

It’s a great idea for them. But I’m sure not looking forward to trying to quit this time.

Lara Eakins of the Tudor History podcast turned me on to the beautiful Pictures of England site. There goes the next, oh, 3 months, as I now have to browse through every…single…picture there.

Anyway, I’m currently making my way through County Buckinghamshire, and I’m struck by all the windmills. I’ve seen been looking at pictures of England for years, and picturing it in my mind (I’eve never been) from other people’s writings, and somehow I missed that there were lots of windmills. I wonder if this is true all across rural England?

I love this picture of the Quainton Windmill, in which it appears to have sprouted a little windmill on its head.

The other day I was browsing at Coding Horror, and read this post about ‘Fear of Writing’. I had never thought of writing as something I was afraid of. I write all the time, mostly email and memos and documents at work. But those are for (mostly) private consumption. Writing for a public audience always felt like it was something that took an enormous amount of effort to do well.

So I don’t do it. I don’t post here (much). I don’t write articles. I haven’t written a book. It’s not because I don’t think (operative word here: think) that I have something to say, but because I just don’t have the time/energy/whatever to do it. But afraid? Nah, not me.

But I think Jeff’s right: writing is hard, and I am afraid of that. I’m afraid of the work, and the commitment, and most of all, I’m afraid that in the end, if I work really hard and take a lot of time and struggle with it, and pour my heart into it, it won’t be very good after all. And what is that but fear?

Well, fear sucks. But what sucks even more is letting fear keep me from doing stuff that I want to do. I like to write; I just find contexts to do it where I have ready-made excuses if it’s not very good (email, IM, forum posts using some nebulous “screen name”, etc.). It doesn’t have to be me that drooled out that random dollop of illiterate trolling. It was just, you know, a quick note, or a post that wasn’t under my name or something. No commitment, no worries. Well, that’s a bunch of crap.

Some people are really good at ferreting out their personal fears and smashing them into bits, one by one. Others of us occasionally peek in the anxiety closet where we try to keep them hidden and see if maybe today they look a little less scary.

This is one fear, however, that I can’t tolerate any more. In the past week, I’ve serendipitously read several smart people who’ve all said the same thing about it: if you want to get more comfortable (and better at) writing, you have to do it regularly. Yeah. No shortcuts there.

So herewith, a warning: my goal for the next (mumble mumble) is going to be to write something frequently. That means that you, dear (and probably only) reader had better have a high tolerance for drivel or just move along now and find someone more interesting to read.

So don’t come whining to me if you find what I write about trivial, obscure, bizarre or downright alarming. I’ll just say you were warned. In writing.

I ran across this quote from the 2007-02-27 issue of Forbes last year:

“Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable are the kind who do nothing.” – William Feather

I have to direct your attention (both of you!) to the newly-formed Indefensible Hats movement. Movement leader and Flickr group founder Jon has said that he hopes to “To hold a mirror up to society and force it to ask itself some difficult questions about its headgear choices.” Lead on, Jon! Lead on.

In a nod to the good old days of 2000 or so, http://usps.gov does this:

You gotta add the ‘www’ to the domain name. I kid you not.

I ran into a couple of friends from high school today at lunch. It was great to see them. At first, I was just completely flummoxed. Having been summoned from my normal fog of oblivion by someone calling my name, I think I sputtered a bit. They’re married (to each other, even!), and living near Huntsville (where my office is). I hadn’t seen either of them in at least 10 years – maybe 20 (they looked younger than me, I fear).

The thing is – it just hit me how many people have passed out of my life that I’d really rather hadn’t. Good friends, casual friends, close friends, sports buddies, bosom buddies – all have come and gone. And while it seems like there should be some cataclysmic event that separates friends more or less permanently, it doesn’t seem to take much. Just lose contact, slip away, and they’re gone.

Unlike a lot of people I know – maybe most people – I had a great high school experience. Some of the best friends I’ve ever had, and some of the nicest people I’ve ever been around went to school with me (Go, ‘Dogs!). And yet, almost without exception, I’ve lost touch with them. I don’t even know where most of them live. This is not at all because I didn’t like them or want to stay friends – it’s just that all of us went to college, went to work, went on to whatever, and in 1985 it was a lot harder to maintain long-distance friends than it is now.

So I’m planning to fix that – I’m pledging right now that when I hear from friends who knew me back when, I’m going to make an effort to stay in touch. It’s not like it’s hard, it’s just something you have to take a little time to do when the opportunity presents itself.

So Sherry and Richie, here’s to you for reminding me just how many people I’ve lost, and here’s hoping you use that email address I gave you.

The other day I drove by this thing, rolling into Huntsville. Of course, down here in Dixie, that’s not terribly unusual.

But what really made me laugh (and have to take a picture) was the tag:

OK, I figure that 10+ months between posts is long enough. And that my old and static and mostly useless homepage was really pointless. So I’ve moved the blog from its old location right up to the main entry point of the site, and I’m going to try (he said, wimping out in advance) to post here more regularly. After all, it’s not like there’s not plenty of stuff to talk about.