diego's weblog

In Alan Moore's 1988 masterpiece The Killing Joke we got the clearest vision yet of the Joker as Batman's "dark side," and a Joker that was as vicious and demented as anything we had ever seen.

Until The Dark Knight, that is.

The movie borrows narrative strands from some of the best Batman graphic novels: Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, Loeb's The Long Halloween, and The Killing Joke. One of the core plot elements of the movie in fact (The Joker wanting to prove that everyone can essentially become like him given the right circumstances) is at the center of The Killing Joke, and many story elements and characters in The Long Halloween reappear in both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, most notably perhaps the plotline involving DA Harvey Dent and his transformation.

Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is nothing short of astonishing. In a sense Batman can be defined by contrast with his enemies, and Bale's Batman is better because Ledger's Joker has so much ferocity. Without it, one of the few shortcomings of the movie (that Batman's own latent insanity and his finely tuned detective skills are for the most part conspicuously absent) would be much more glaring.

A review I read somewhere said that The Dark Knight is a "modern bullet train of a movie" and it's true. The last half hour in particular is something to behold. It's one of those movies that really require a giant screen to be experienced in full.

Supposedly this is the second part of a trilogy, and if commercial success leads to sequels then this one is almost guaranteed (it broke the opening day box office record), and hopefully it will be as good as the first two.

In the meantime, we have The Dark Knight to take us once more to Gotham, in all of its bleak, chaotic intensity.

Posted by at 3:34 PM | Permalink

• Disable push. Yep, this could be a deal-braker for some people, but I switched push to checking every 15 minutes and battery life improved remarkably.
• Disable "Ask to Join Networks". For Wifi, the default settings of the iPhone have it scanning for networks to join, even if areas where you wouldn't use WiFi. Disabling this also helped significantly.

Posted by at 1:51 PM | Permalink

Anyway, the iPhone 3G is a good incremental improvement over the original but there's a couple of annoyances that subtract rather than add to the experience:

• Battery Life: this is a bad one. Right now, with moderate to no use (i.e., mostly on standby) the battery gets consumed as if the phone is itself playing with those new apps. The culprits are 3G and WiFi. Other phones do 3G quite well without killing the battery, so what's up with this?
• 3G Coverage. Decent around the Bay Area in general, but terrible at my house. Meh. I may have to get a cell signal booster. That said, when you do have coverage 3G is heaven. But we knew that.
• GPS. It's there, and finds where you are pretty fast. It seems to lose signal easily, but aside from that, it's all good.
• The apps. Of the apps, the iTunes remote is for me one of the most immediately useful. I can now control the Apple TV without having to turn on the TV and navigate through the menus, which means more music goodness. Other that I like are Netnewswire (really well done), the Yellow Pages app, and Tetris, which has a really nice touch interface. Oh, and Lightsaber of course. :-)
Dirt. Somehow, this phone (at least the black version) picks up smudges way faster than the previous one. Maybe it's the 3G that increases the rate :). All I know is that smudges are more noticeable on the 3G than on the old phone.
• Over-The-Air Sync. Not much to say about this -- really a feature that works as advertised, but that works as well with the old phones, even over Edge. We use Exchange at the office, so the phone has now become basically the only way I look at the calendar, and the ActiveSync push works well.
• The dock. Or rather, the old dock, which is no longer compatible since the shape changed. Curses!
• The charger. It's tiny! But ugly. Oh god, it is ugly. What were they thinking? Round edges people!
• The no-longer-recessed headphone jack. I am now vindicated in my refusal to purchase a headphone jack adaptor.
• The screen. As good as the old one, but the touch sensitivity sometimes seems to be a little off around the edges. Maybe it's my imagination though.
• The new contact list features. Much improved use of the contact list.

About the battery life: an interesting tidbit is that when I upgraded the old iPhone to one of the 2.0 beta firmware (I'm on the developer program) about 6 weeks ago, battery life suddenly went to hell when using WiFi, and it may be my imagination but the phone ran hotter too (which the 3G does as well). It very well may be that the battery problems are related to power-management issues with the 2.0 firmware, rather than hardware related, and that they may be fixed in a future update. Here's hoping!

Now, if we only we could get copy/paste...

Posted by at 10:26 AM | Permalink

At Ning, we often hear the following question from people outside the company: how do we see the 'social graph' from our perspective?

They don't ask what people enjoy doing on the service. They don't ask for stories of users, of finding long-lost friends, or of newfound friendships. They don't ask what makes people on Ning join ten different social networks, as they often do, even if this flies in the face of conventional wisdom about how people are sick of joining social networks.

No. They ask about the social graph.

I am honestly amazed at this question -- is that really what they care about? An abstraction? I am amazed, and at the same time I understand where they are coming from.

When I started at what would become Ning some three and a half years ago, I had spent a few years thinking about social networks, ad hoc group formation, and self-organization. I was completely immersed in the terminology with which we try to make sense of phenomena that is sometimes hard to grasp at an intuitive level. Groups of people are not just the sum of the individuals that compose them, and this creates a chasm that is hard to cross--for we, as individuals, project out of ourselves and into the world when we look for answers.

What I hear when I listen to someone talk about the social graph, what I think of when I read about the social graph as if it was a real, tangible thing --in fact the only real and tangible thing--, is a mathematician, talking to someone proudly showing off her new car, pointing at a wheel and asking: "how's that circumference working out for you?"

The notion of a circle, how it is unequivocally described, what its characteristics are, is undeniably of great value to anyone interested in mathematics or geometry, and even to anyone interested in designing a car or producing a wheel. And it is of no value to that same person when using a car. Not in the mechanics of the action, mind you, in which the device is at work, but in the actual use, and even enjoyment of what the abstraction, applied to something real, can do.

Likewise, the notion of a social graph is interesting to us in nerd-dom as part of our continued understanding of what it is that we're actually doing, but it holds almost no sway in determining whether something has value for people.

Hundreds of social networks have come and gone. They all had 'social graphs' as a key part of their functionality. If this mythical graph is of such importance, why, then, did so many of them fail?

A thousand factors, to be sure, but one of the most important surely must be that they didn't connect, in some meaningful way, people to each other, and to the service.

I choose words carefully when I say people and not users. Semantics matters. It's easy to fall into abstractions to handle numbers or notions that seem too big to grasp, but we should resist the temptation. Because it's when we start designing our software for abstractions, rather than for people, that things go off-course.

Don't get me wrong -- I live and die with abstractions. You will have to take my little diagrams and sourcetrees and formulas and tools from my cold, dead hands. But these are the things I build software with, not for. And that's how it should be.

We must see past the abstractions and speak to what people really use, and crave, and communicate with. Let's use the abstractions and obsess over them, but then translate that into something real and meaningful.

Graphs aren't social. They're just graphs.

And we should never lose sight of that.

Posted by at 8:16 PM | Permalink

As we wait with baited breath for the next move in the Microsoft/Yahoo saga, Marc just posted a must-read entry on what happens if microsoft goes fully hostile. Meanwhile techcrunch has some speculation.

Another interesting question is what exactly is Microsoft buying with this, given that many people would leave, many have already left, and there's nearly complete overlap on their technologies and products (see here) and in most cases full integration (rather than an orderly migration) would be a nightmare that anyone in their right mind would avoid. The easiest would be to just point yahoo.com to live.com, automatically migrate accounts, and you're done. Well, of course, not really, but you get what I'm saying.

If so, this would be the most expensive domain name acquisition ever. Business.com for $7.5 million during the bubble? Peanuts, I say. :)

Posted by at 6:33 AM | Permalink

An interesting interview with Professor Donald Knuth (via slashdot, where the slashdotter writes: "[Knuth] pitches his idea of "literate programming" which I must admit I've never heard of but find it intriguing" -- really never "heard" of that? I think it was one of the first things in programming I "heard" of... anyway...). Some interesting comments about various topics, including TeX, which continues to be nearly irreplaceable in some areas (academic papers in particular), but then drops a bomb:

I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won't be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Titanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific--until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.

Let me put it this way: During the past 50 years, I've written well over a thousand programs, many of which have substantial size. I can't think of even five of those programs that would have been enhanced noticeably by parallelism or multithreading. Surely, for example, multiple processors are no help to TeX.

How many programmers do you know who are enthusiastic about these promised machines of the future? I hear almost nothing but grief from software people, although the hardware folks in our department assure me that I'm wrong.

I know that important applications for parallelism exist--rendering graphics, breaking codes, scanning images, simulating physical and biological processes, etc. But all these applications require dedicated code and special-purpose

Second, his statement

Surely, for example, multiple processors are no help to TeX.

"I hear almost nothing but grief from software people," Knuth says, but this is just because we haven't yet found clean, effective methods to write, test and debug multithreaded software at large scale. This doesn't mean it's bad, it just means we haven't figured out how to use it properly. And, worst case scenario, you can always write your software as services connected through a thin layer of communication (based on anything from IPC to RMI to REST) that can then run as multiple processes happily on a multicore machine.

He also rues that literate programming hasn't been embraced by the millions, but this is also only partly true. Java and other languages have been using Literate Programming concepts for years, and it has been a major advantage in productivity when using good IDEs like IDEA, Netbeans, or Eclipse.

Not that this invalidates anything that Knuth has done. :) The TeXbook and the Art of of Computer Programming are still gems that I end up perusing frequently. They may not be multicore-enabled, but they're still as relevant as ever.

Posted by at 9:29 AM | Permalink

A few Ning networks, viewed as graphs

Then today VentureBeat broke the news of our recent investment round. Marc has more details. As he says, VentureBeat found a mandatory SEC filing and put out news that we'd otherwise not have talked about, since there isn't a clear reason to be doing it. The reasons for the round, as Marc says:

We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don't need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it's good to be conservative with these things.

A lot done, still more to do. :-)

Posted by at 7:13 PM | Permalink

Sometimes it's hard not to wish that Hollywood would get its act together and produce some actual entertainment instead of drivel, or rather, not hand it out just one movie a year at a time. This year definitely looks like an outlier. The list so far:

• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Come on, admit it. You've been waiting for this for the last ten years. Yeah. Me too.
• Iron Man. Robert Downey Jr., one of the best actors of his generation, and what looks like a killer action movie.
• The Dark Knight. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, once more directed by Christopher Nolan. After the spectacularly good Batman Begins, I have little doubt this one will be the one that finally, finally, let us Batman fans forget about what Joel Schumacher did to the character with Batman and Robin.
• Wall-e. The latest from Pixar. I'd be surprised if the movie isn't as hilarious as the trailer. Fun to watch for the CG tricks alone.
• The Incredible Hulk. Second try at getting the big green man on the big screen. The first try wasn't great but it had some good moments. This time Bruce Banner is Ed Norton, which can summon enough intensity to turn green all by himself (just remember American History X). High hopes for this one.
• Righteous Kill. Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. Need I say more?
• Forbidden Kingdom. Jackie Chan and Jet Li go Kung-Fuing. Much fun is to be had by all.
• Get Smart. Part of what was funny about the TV series was the crappy faux-James Bond tech, but this time it looks like the effects make it perhaps a little too slick. Steve Carell definitely looks like the natural heir for the part.
• Bangkok Dangerous. Nick Cage tries the long-hair-weirdo-distanced-from-society thing again (last time it was Next), as a professional assassin who apparently grows a conscience. Might be a bomb, but willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
• Hancock. Will Smith goes superhero with an attitude, is (apparently) also a bum. What can possibly go wrong?
• Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. After the spectacularly good Hellboy, I hope this one doesn't succumb to sequel-syndrome.
• Wanted. Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman teach some dude that he can curve the trajectory of bullets. A premise this insane has to lead to a fun movie.

Posted by at 8:34 PM | Permalink

Alexa just changed their ranking system, Techcrunch has details. (The Alexa page, in typical clueless fashion, is not a permalink, so I won't bother linking to it). This is good news, but it still doesn't fix the problem. Why?

Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, Comscore, all have measures of "Rankings" or "Popularity" that put sites relative to others. These rankings, in general are a more-or-less accurate relative description of how a site is doing.

The keyword here, though, is relative, and, more specifically, relative to how the service in question measures other sites. Comparing a Quantcast ranking to a Compete ranking to an Alexa ranking for any given site is useless, and no one even attempts that.

Rankings for each site are widely understood to be relative within its own index, and no one has a problem with that. So far so good.

The real problem start when we put their measures of Visitors (Alexa calls that "Reach" as far as I know) and Visits. So some news publication may take a comscore measurement and say "such and such a site has 1,000,000 visits", inevitably prompting discussion of whether it's true or not and (generally) silent fuming on the part of the site that sees in their logs, every day, different data.

This is the problem. The use of a heavily overloaded term like "Visitors" or "Visits" or "Pageviews" or even "Reach" causes the confusion. None of these sites claim that they have the ultimate truth at their disposal, but by using common terms, this is exactly what happens. After all, everyone knows what a 'Visitor' is, right? Well, maybe. Maybe everyone does know what a Visitor or a Visit is, but no one agrees on the definition.

Even if everyone did agree on the definition, you could still lose data unless you're looking at the logfiles for a service. Why? Several reasons, but the three key ones are:

1. The services extrapolate traffic based on measures they choose. Try a site that has low traffic, and the services give up. "Not enough data." Yep.
2. Not only that, the services extrapolate based on previously filtered data. The raw log data for a year for any of the top 1,000 sites can be counted in the petabytes, if not exabytes. None of these services have enough compute power or storage at their disposal to process that, clearly. So they are pre-filtering information, which is then extrapolated. The prefiltering presumably eliminates bots. What if a new bot shows up? How do they count it?
3. Domain mapping. Consider Ning. Suppose we agreed on what a pageview or a visit is. Would Alexa or Compete get the right numbers? No. Because they key on domains to define what is traffic to a service. In our case (as in many others) the service allows you to do domain mapping of your site, which means the services think that the traffic is going somewhere else, even though it's going to Ning. That's why I can assert without hesitation that the visits/visitors traffic reported by these services doesn't cover a good portion of the traffic Ning handles, and when on top of that you add uncertainty as to what is a visit, and what is a visitor (is it an IP? a cookie? A combination? What about internet cafes? and so on), then the actual absolute value for those things is pretty much meaningless.

Now, what the services do track correctly in a lot of cases is trends, especially over several months (again, in the case of Ning the fact that they miss domain-mapped networks is a big problem, but the data we have for non-domain mapped networks shows similar, and I say again, similar shapes and trajectories).

My take is that if these services stopped calling what they measure "visits" or "visitors" and just said these were some sort of generic "[servicename] traffic measure" or something, then they would get a lot more respect, something they deserve since they do provide a valuable service, and they should get credit for that.

Posted by at 8:03 PM | Permalink

Nothing like some breaking news to awake you from a blog slumber. Russ announced on his blog the end of Mowser.

Sad news, and I sympathize. Russ and Mike are buddies so I've followed the travails of Mowser closer than, well, almost anybody, so this also is a bit more personal for me. I've been there. My previous startup, clevercactus, also ran out of money after having put everything I had into it, and I experienced something similar (although a bit less drastic) in terms of financial impact. A lot of us are used to abundance and generally have absolutely no idea how stressful it is (to put it mildly) to have to choose what food to buy to avoid breaking the bank.

The good news in all this is that failure is a HUGE learning opportunity, something that isn't said enough. Throughout the process you're consumed by trying to make it work, but once it's done you can look back and find a lot of things to do differently in the future. Yes, in the future -- I don't believe that you can really say that you'd 'do things differently' since generally we make the best decisions we can with the information we have available at the time. Additionally, the next step (after a period of recovery) after having put everything into something that didn't work can actually be very refreshing and lead to amazing opportunities, like it did with me.

There is also some solace to be found in the online response. When you work with a team of a few people or more you can help each other, but when you work on your own or with a partner it's a harder situation, and the online response helps a lot. In the case of mowser, it's been at the top of techmeme for a while now and it's been covered and discussed all over the place, in part because of Russ' statement that 'the mobile web is dead.' (More on that later), but also due to comments of support.

As for Mowser, it's online for the time being and as Mike says they're looking to sell the site or code, which is in my mind a very possible outcome. It would be cool to see it live on in some form.

Posted by at 6:53 AM | Permalink