The other day, I sat down to add a small feature to the Tabblo code. I mentally plotted out what pieces I'd have to build, and how they would interact. I wrote the first piece, and then moved on to where I would have to add the second piece. When I got there, the code was already there!

Sometime quite recently, in the last two months let's say, I had actually pretty much already written the very feature I thought I had to write now. Whoa.

At least it made coding it up easier!

Surfing blogs and the web in general, I often end up at the home page for a new project, and I need to figure out what it is. Too often, the information is not forthcoming. Sometimes, these pages are small open-source projects, where documentation is a clear weak point, and the page will be mostly detailed news items intended for those familiar with the project. I can cut these pages some slack. They should do a better job advocating their work to new users, but I understand how it is that they don't.

Odd, though, that Fire Eagle, Yahoo's latest Web 2.0 gizmo, falls into the same sandtrap. It has a very nicely designed page, but again, I don't know what it does.

When I arrived at the home page, I saw "Take your location to the web!". What does that mean? Is this a hyper-local advertising service? A way for municipalities to promote local events? The next text I read on the page says, "Update anywhere: send updates from your phone". Update what? Here I am trying to learn about their service, and I already feel behind the times and out of touch with the cool kids.

Clicking the Join button takes me to a page that starts,

Fire Eagle looks after information about your location. You can use web sites and applications to update your location, and then use that information all over the Internet.

OK, now I think I get it. Other than the odd "looks after information" verb, I'm beginning to see that this a service that tracks where you are physically, and provides that information to other applications so that they can use that location information to enrich their offerings. Why didn't they just say so?

Helping Max with DateDifference, we wanted a way to parse a date string using the user's current locale. We naturally found the dateWithNaturalString:locale: method on NSDate. It sounds perfect. The documentation for the method includes this statement:

This method supports only a limited set of colloquial phrases, primarily in English. It may give unexpected results, and its use is strongly discouraged.

There's an obvious next question here, and I wish the doc writer had thought enough about their reader to answer it: if this method's use is strongly discouraged, what is the recommended way to solve my problem?

This isn't meant to be a dig at Apple. There's tons of reference documentation all over the place just like this. There are probably even tech writers that defend this style, in the name of modularity and brevity. Don't believe it. This is unhelpful, exactly the opposite of what docs should be.

Extra bonus question: if you can help me understand how to parse dates according to the user's current choices in the International system preferences panel, I would really appreciate it!

A trio of MIT students found security weaknesses in the MBTA, the Boston public transporation system, colloquially known as "the T". The students were going to present their findings at Defcon, that is, until a judge ordered them not to.

Of course, the injunction did far more to spread the news than the talk alone would have, including making public the students' whitepaper about the vulnerabilites. Their slides, Anatomy of a Subway Hack are also online, including a photo of an over-the-top modded shopping cart that they somehow used as part of their work.

How many times do we have to see this story played out? A system is deployed with poor security, someone figures out the weaknesses, tries to talk about it, and is sued to prevent disclosure, only making the information even more available to the public. These injunctions are like putting a flashing red light on top of something: they only attract more attention to the situation. The presentation slides have already been distributed to all Defcon attendees, that toothpaste is not going back in the tube.

The MBTA should either decide that this is not that big a deal (how many people are really going to hack RFID cards to get on the T for free?), or get to work designing improvements. And they should hire these students to crack the new system before it's deployed.

Bridges is an annual conference on connections in math, art, music, etc, and this year it was held in Escher's birthplace of Leeuwarden. It sure looks good.

dataisnature has a more detailed description.

Max and I made some git t-shirts spoofing a well-known dairy campaign, promoting git, the fashionable source control system:

and an alternate style:

Go ahead, buy a git t-shirt, you know you want to!

PS: as has been pointed out to me by a few friends, I don't use git. I know this. But "svn code?" isn't a good slogan!

PPS: the Zazzle terms of service request that I state that these shirts were made "in partnership with Zazzle.com".

Barack Obama suggested that people properly inflate their tires and tune up their cars to help reduce oil consumption. John McCain ridiculed him for it and said we need to start off-shore drilling. Why do people so easily laugh off the idea of maintaining your car as a way to use less gas?

As Time magazine points out, tire gauges are a good solution:

The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 barrels per day by 2030. We use about 20 million barrels per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. In other words: Obama is right.

And don't forget that time line: offshore drilling would take ten years before it changed anything, while we can immediately begin using less gas now with simple maintenance. Heck, if need be, do both. But what's so funny about maintaining your car?

Everyone knows these tips: drive slower, inflate your tires, tune up your car, you'll have better efficiency right away. If the experts' estimates are right, you can immediately use 5% less gas. Put another way, pay 20 cents less per gallon.

Why do people find this so ridiculous? Americans, especially voters being pitched during an election year, want big actions, not tweaks. Any idea that includes "less" or "smaller" or "work" is ridiculed as somehow eating into our way of life. And as much as people cry out for personal responsibility, they don't want to get their hands dirty checking their tire pressure.

Shop around for cheaper gas? OK. Use a little less, even if it doesn't mean driving less? No thanks. Sheesh...

Apple computers are beautiful, Apple computers are the pinnacle of usability, I grant all of that. But here's something that for the life of me I cannot figure out. Why don't the menu symbols for modifier keys (control, alt, shift) appear on the keyboards?

Like any modern operating system, OS X menu items have keyboard short cuts, and because there are so many menu items, they occasionally need modifiers other than the command key. Here's a menu from Safari:

The command symbol we all understand because it appears on the keyboard, but what are those other two modifiers? Why not print them on the keys?

The thingy next to "Show All Bookmarks" is for option, which is labelled on the keyboard with "option" and, alternately, "alt", but doesn't have the symbol. The big up-arrow next to "Add Bookmark Folder" is not the up-arrow on the keyboard, but the shift key, which is labelled only with "shift".

And God forbid you should have to ever Force Quit an application. Is that a Quicktime symbol?:

I must not be the only one who is confused, because Dan Rodney started off his thorough Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts page with a translation chart:

Why no symbols on modifier keys? Or, why is the command key special? Why is it labelled with its symbol while the others are not. This seems like a really basic usability rule: refer to the same thing the same way in different contexts. Is there some logic to this, or is it just that the minimalist hardware design gurus win out over the operating system usability guys?

This is a great hour-long documentary about a technology start-up. It's got all the classic elements: the spark of an idea, the quest for funding, the need for secrecy, the ups and downs of investors, the early products that fuel the drive to the big dream, the disruptive technology winning in the marketplace, and so on. The only difference is this one happened 500 years ago.

The Machine That Made Us is Stephen Fry's telling of the story of the Gutenberg press. It's a good overview of the whole story, inclduding all the technology that went into it. The Youtube link is to a search page because the videos get taken down, but new copies crop up eventually.

My son Max released his first app last week: Date Difference is a small OS X application that simply gives you the time delta between two dates. It's been fun helping him puzzle through Objective-C, Cocoa, dates, and all the rest of the details that go into even a very small application. Go give it a try. With it, we realized that Max is coming up on his 6000-day birthday.

It's also been an interesting jumping off point for talking about all of the weirdnesses with time and dates. First off: time zones. Although motivated by physical reality, time zones are really political creations, and so can be very random. Some are not even whole numbers of hours. In fact, Iran, Afghanistan and Myanmar are all in the small club of countries a half-hour out of step. Perhaps an explanation for bad behavior? Think about it...

Another date anomaly: switching from the old-style Julian calendar to the more accurate Gregorian calendar meant correcting accumulated error by skipping days. For example, in Britain and its colonies, the day after Sept 2, 1752 was Sept 14, and in Russia, Jan 31, 1918 was followed by Feb 14. Hard to imagine the logistics of making that happen.

I never took a course in economics, but it always seemed like a fascinating subject. It strikes me as either cutting to the heart of the matter, or completely missing the point. I've long wanted to understand more about how economists think, and what they think about, so the EconTalk podcast has been a great find.

Russ Roberts does a good job interviewing other economics thinkers, mostly keeping out of the way, and giving them a chance to explain their ideas. He'll chime in with his own ideas, but rarely falls into the trap of hogging the spotlight for himself.

One thing is clear: Russ and most of his guests have a particular world view. They are unapologetic free-market small-goverment guys. For example, the episode on Subsidies and Externalities is really a chummy conversation about the absurdity of government planning doing a better job than the free market. I was disappointed that Roberts couldn't put aside his politics to find even one example of a good reason for a subsidy. To chalk up North Carolina's subsidizing of their forestry farmers to the powerful farmer lobby seems simplistic.

The most interesting episode politically was Sowell on Economic Facts and Fallacies, wherein Thomas Sowell shed light on his view of economic fallacies. While I disagree with him politically, it was interesting to hear a consistent approach to a number of issues ranging from CEO pay to third-world labor, all of them coming down clearly on the side of letting the market have its way. He attributes concern over CEO pay to people (he never says liberals, but you know he wants to) wanting to design society according to their own ideas. He comes back to this misguided notion a few times. The final topic he discusses is immigration, where he suddenly does an about-face and without the least shame, declares that we need to control who can immigrate to this country, so that we can make sure that the right people come in and the wrong people stay out!

I'd be interested to know if there are similar podcasts making counter-arguments out there. It would be good to get the other side as well.

These political peccadilloes aside, many of the podcasts are very interesting as a discussion of economics, though sometimes quite advanced. Being professors talking together, it can also veer a bit to the inside: Roberts will throw around names and terms like Austrian School without explaining them.

But it has helped deepen my understanding, both in the specifics of economics, and in familiarizing myself with the idiosyncrasies of economic thought. For example, there's the classic mindset that says that if the world does something a particular way, then by definition it must be a good way to do it. This overlooks the possibility of a radical shift that uncovers a previously untried possibility. For example, food markets in the early half of the 20th century employed counter clerks to retrieve items from shelves. An economist of the time would have said, "everyone does it this way, there must be an economic advantage". But then someone invented the supermarket, where customers could get things for themselves, and everyone switched.

Economists often pretend real-world forces like culture and non-economic interests ("I invest in cattle stocks because I always wanted to be a cowboy") don't exist. Ideal markets are an abstraction. But economics is the best way we've found to explain the anthill of human business activity. EconTalk has helped deepen my understanding of it.

If you like font-related humor, you will like this: Font Conference. I have only two complaints: Comic Sans shouldn't be the hero, and it should have been called Type Cast.