dsandler.org

So, there were no “zingers” (as John McCain said on Larry King). I don’t think Kerry’s really a home-run king; he’s a solid RBI hitter, and, to continue the metaphor, he brought in the runs tonight. Bush, on the other hand, seemed to foul-bunt about half the pitches. (OK, metaphor over now.) Despite an entire program about his favorite topic, the war on Tara terror, Bush frequently appeared bewildered and lost, trying to pluck his train of thought from the air in front of him. He also seemed unable to listen with patience and grace while Kerry spoke; he came barely short of sighing on several occasions. When rebutting, his quintessential conspiratorial lectern-lean turned, over the course of the evening, to a crumpled bunker-dive behind the podium, as Erin pointed out. He looked cowed, tired, frustrated and stubborn, looking for a rock—or Iraq—to hide under.

USA Today: “A scientific review that appears in this month’s edition of the journal Psychopharmacology reports that half of all adults experience drug-withdrawal symptoms when their coffee or soft drink supply is cut off.”

So: Manga. It’s being read by everyone but regular comics readers, and being bought everywhere but comic stores (Go with the generalization, please, so I don’t have to qualify every statement from here on out). We could go on and on about what it means to the market, if anything; about what the market did, is doing, and will do to chase after those sales, and how many copies AMBIGUOUSLY-SEXED POP STAR GOES A’COURTIN’ sells over IDEALIZED MALE POWER FANTASY, but that would require, you know, math and stuff.

[…]

What I do want to talk about is the pure dose of alien culture manga’s had on how I consider comics, pop, and “visual fiction”– it’s literally been like finding a hidden bookstore on the moon or something. The last three, four years have been a learning experience to say the least.

I couldn’t have summarized this conversational piece on manga better if I’d tried. Which I won’t.

Oh, one more choice quote:

Fashion, tastes, accessories, fads– The sun rises and sets on the whims of Japanese girls. Wouldn’t it be great if the Stan Lee of Japan wasn’t a hyperbolic carnie huckster raising a boy-army of misfits and pop junkies, but a nervous, shy, post-schoolgirl still obsessed with boy bands and losing weight, leading all of the other unpopular girls to stuff their backpacks with phonebook weepies? Mayu Shinjo is the Bizarro-Stan. AntiStan!

Stop calling it a debate!! IT’S NOT A FUCKING DEBATE!!

Jesus christ, if tonight’s farce can be called a “debate”, then what you’re reading right now is an essay.

Thanks, Amar. I like to think of tonight’s spectacle as a mock debate. Meaning, it mocks the idea of a debate. President Lincoln is spinning in his grave (or, possibly, another dimension).

Feedreading News Flurry

Employ a grain of salt in your consideration of course, but CacheLogic claims that P2P traffic is blowing everything else away in terms of ISP bandwidth. Yes, including HTTP. Also interesting: BitTorrent makes up more than half of P2P traffic. (This means either the few geeks willing to put up with BT’s foibles are consuming all the bandwidth in the world, or there are lots of people out there willing to put up with BT.) The P2P Weblog has the story.

“Life is a game of patterns and chance, and those who play well, will win.” An eight-minute Flash (comic? essay? movie?) about Scrabble called Craziest by Liz Dubelman. Great stuff!

The Lone Star Iconoclast, out of Crawford, TX, has officially endorsed Senator Kerry for president in a scathing editorial. (It endorsed George W. Bush four years ago.) The website is hammered at the moment, so you might want to check out the Daily Kos abridged version of the editorial.

Likely Voter Sample Party IDs � Poll of September 24-26 Reflected Bush Winning by 52%-44%

Looks dire, right?

Total Sample: 758
GOP: 328 (43%)
Dem: 236 (31%)
Ind: 189 (25%)

The Left Coaster has more on this absurdity.

Last night Mark Fletcher spilled the beans, and today we have a press release: “New Bloglines Web Services Selected by FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Blogbot to Eliminate RSS Bandwidth Bottleneck.” Let’s take a look.

Does this solve anything?

I’ve been a huge fan of Bloglines for a couple of years now, but this “solution” concerns me, because the RSS bandwidth bottleneck is now Bloglines. Once more, polling does not scale, and we haven’t solved that problem at all. What Mark is saying is the following: “Content providers are currently complaining about the load imposed by N RSS aggregators polling their servers. So we’ve set up a service that allows those aggregators to poll us instead. We’ll poll the content providers, in turn, but responsibly and as infrequently as possible.”

What this means, in practice, is that content providers will indeed see fewer polls as more end-user apps start polling Bloglines to get that same data. But now bloglines.com will have to satisfy N × C amount of load per unit time: the number of aggregators times the number of feeds. Of course, this is really on the order of N × C; there are some hidden linear factors there, since not all clients read all subscriptions. And it’s possible (likely, since Mark is a smart guy) that Bloglines will send customized sub-feeds to each client, containing only the information that that client is missing, so this will reduce the overall bandwidth associated with this load.

But what we’ve done here is trade one kind of bottleneck for another. It’s not just the bandwidth issue that concerns me, either: this solution is predicated on a dangerous dependency on the existence (and freedom) of the Bloglines service. When Bloglines shuts its doors, or holds out the collection tin, your choices will be to:

1. pay up, or
2. start polling feeds directly again

…and now we’re back to the bandwidth problem. The point I’m trying to make here is that computer science has made progress in dealing with distributed systems like this, and this solution doesn’t seem to take advantage of any of that.

More later, when I’m not trying to finish a paper critique for class.

Background.

If you hadn’t heard about the recent RSS bandwidth flap, it gained momentum again with a July InfoWorld piece on RSS Growing Pains. Then, earlier this month, MSDN started retracting some RSS feeds, citing bandwidth issues; Scoble elaborated. There’s a lot of other conversation on the topic, too, but most of it assumes that polling is here to stay, and that the way forward is to make the polling as lightweight as possible (with strict If-Modified-Since adherence, etc.).

Coverage elsewhere on the net.

TechDirt: building the RSS platform; Pedro Melo offers cautious hope; Ed Goodwin also sees the business angle; (more later)

Update 16:30: O’ReillyNet weighs in with an analysis. I continue to appreciate Mark Fletcher’s fondness for dirt-simple Web APIs; I continue to recoil in instinctive horror at the way this concentrates traffic at Bloglines.

DH 2062

Congrats, folks, on the release of Palm OS “Cobalt” 6.1. But couldn’t you have sent PalmInfocenter some new screenshots? That first one has some seriously out-of-date graphics, including my landscape icon (the portrait icon from that period is just as cute) and my mini-Pulse icon (alongside the extra-skinny battery).

Brilliant: If all stories were written like science fiction stories.

Do you think we’ll be flying on a propeller plane? Or one of the newer jets?” asked Ann.

“I’m sure it will be a jet,” said Roger. “Propeller planes are almost entirely out of date, after all. On the other hand, rocket engines are still experimental. It’s said that when they’re in general use, trips like this will take an hour at most. This one will take up to four hours.”

Digging around for stories about the new Fry’s locations set to open in Houston soon. Found one so far:

Fry’s Electronics is constructing a 150,000-square-foot retail store on the Southwest Freeway at W. Bellfort as part of a significant expansion in the Houston area that will triple its current square footage.

[…]

In addition, Best Buy revealed last week that it is leasing space in Pearland for a new store that will open in late fall. The location will be one of Best Buy’s large 45,000-square-foot concept stores, says Jay Musolf, a spokesman in the publicly traded retailer’s Minneapolis headquarters.

Voters Information Guide for the 2004 US Election. Nothing partisan or political; just helpful information about where to go and what to do. [courtesy Jason Kottke]

In real life as in computing, you can’t swap without a temporary.

Today we’re swapping offices.

Guess who’s the temporary?

From the Law & Order première last week: “I don’t know if Spiro Agnew is who you want to be quoting right now.”

If there is one thing that academics are supposed to be better at than people from industry, it is writing about their work. If you have a good advisor, then during your formative years as a Ph.D. student he or she will teach you the rules of good paper writing. This is the general perception; reality is very, very different.

—Werner Vogel, Evaluating Systems Papers

Also recently from this author: Once More: Polling does not scale. (RSS scalability is something I’m thinking more and more about these days, but the hard part is that an RSS is even harder to trust than an email. Its only inherent trust property is that you went out and got it from the website yourself. How do you allow peers to pass RSS information around without some kind of signed content? Note that any viable solution must have a clear and straightforward incremental adoption path for current RSS users.