Cubegeek

Mou

Everyday I find another reason to celebrate that I am living in the future. Today I heard about Markdown for the fifth or sixth time, it clicked in my head and I started using it. Markdown is RTF for the web.

If you don't remember RTF, it was the predominating word processing format before the great Microsoft Word - Wordperfect wars of the 80s and 90s resulted in the triumph of Microsoft Word. RTF has always been great, but there has been no need to use it considering the ubiquity of Word and the periodic need to use tables and pictures. 

The web has changed all that with HTML and with blogging in particular. I've been blabbing and blogging for about a decade now and 99% of what I need to do is handled with this little short two level toolbar that's above the small text window in my browser. I'm talking about the Typepad editor. Well, you take some combination of that and a wiki editor and you have what Markdown is and does. It's perfectly lightweight for the overwhelming majority of writing I need to do, especially considering that I pretty much want to get everything out onto the web. Everything else that I want more permanently, I print *from* the web into a PDF and send it off to Evernote.

But I can tell you this. After more than 20 years on the web, I need embedded graphics and fancy formats about 4% of the time, if that. And the best fancy graphics are put together as an embedded graphic that speaks for itself, regardless of where some layout genius decides to put it. If you're like me, you love Evernote Clearly and other tools that de-slickify web pages and gives me the text I need in a clear, readable format. 

Titles, headers, bolds, links, bullets, blockquotes, italics and the occasional table, strikethrough and graphic. That's what I need. That's what Markdown delivers. I'm sold.

It turns out that for Mac, Mou is the prizewinner. Perfect, simple, effective. This is where everything goes from now on. Let somebody clever turn my Markdown into HTML5 of XML stuff. Let some CMS put together the CSS template and fancify. I've got my new editor. 

The Meeker Presentation

2012 KPCB Internet Trends Year-End Update from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Because it's information you have just got to know.

The Answer for Apple Television

OK. I know what it is. Call me intuitive or foolish but here's my bet. My bet is that the revolution of television is going to be what the revolution of iTunes was. iTunes was basically digital distribution of every profitable song ever recorded that might sustain market interest today. iTunes for TV is the same thing. 

Get it?

It's all about getting the Jetsons and the Flintstones and every other property into the Apple distribution, and ultimately superdistribution. Tim Cook is going to come up with the market, soon to be joined by everybody else (meaning Amazon) that is going to allow Apple product users the ability to turn up the Wayback Machine and find their 32 favorite episodes of I Love Lucy. He's going to make an offer that the heirs and scions of Desilu Productions cannot refuse. It's a big data solution to the last holdout, which is the gigantic library of syndicated television. And he's going to show them how it has been done with music, including AC/DC and The Beatles and it has made those rights holders more money than they could have ever expected through a planet full of Tower Records stores. Apple has the platform, now Apple TV is all about managing the content. 

That's what Apple TV will be. 

The actual hardware is basically already done. There's not much that needs to be done to take that tiny thing that is the actual product called Apple TV right now and embed it into any set. In fact, Apple's probably spending lawyer time trying to keep Samsung from doing that right now. What Apple can do is negotiate the rights for the back ends.

Abulafia

I have an abiding passion for imaginative fiction, but not of the sort in which an individual's perspective is involved. But the closest thing I got to that was perfectly done by Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum. Now that I think about it, I have forgotten Eco, and the last book I read by him was Baudolino. Since then, nothing. But in FP, there was a conspiracy of individual perspective to invent a bogus world and that conspiracy began on a misfunctioning computer: Abulafia.

'Technical fascination' is my way of evading the term 'geek', because there is something deep within me that is unsettled by the idea of being a 52 year old 'geek'. So I have abandoned the term 'geekery' and am likely at some point to sink the ship of Cubegeek. But I can't resist the urge to ask that geeky question, have you ever named your computer 'Abulafia'. I have, standing at the nexis between computer geek and literature nerd.  Heavens to mergatroid what is wrong with our culture?

It turns out that I am about to enter the days of perfection where the tools of AWS have begun to resemble the inner workings of the Krell Machine. I try not to be excitable and paranoid, buy make no mistake, Amazon has built 'mydatawarehouse.com'. In fact, they have built my super grid compute resource, and few of us have even begun to think big.

This week in Vegas, of course, re:Invent took place for the first time. Full360 was mentioned amongst the most glitterait of ISVs. And we have launched our new website as well. I'm starting to feel the hotness. 

Again. Bezos is absolutely right. I'm not quite sure these days if I find him or Elon Musk most admirable.  Bezos is a deep contributing member of the Long Now, and he understands the future very well as he demonstrated in his chat with Vogels. And in that regard, Bezos is the Sam Walton of our generation. Chances are that if I don't get rich, then it will be the Blue Origin spaceship I ride in, not the Virgin Galactic or the SpaceX. 

Here is the thing that strikes me, apropos Abulafia. There is an Abulafia wiki which seems to be just an index into a crowdsourced set of literary subroutines, although I can't figure out how to join that crowd (Bad UI! Bad UI!), it is an idea I have as part of something I'd been cooking up. My thing is called enumbra and it's basically an enumeration routine. It's a tool for what I call random dimensioning - which is essentially an iterative chunking process for handling large numbers of things.  This concept goes back to tabletop computing - which I have recently been thinking about in the context of building the perfect office, which is my enduring long-term wish. It has been about two years since I last talked about that, and now I think I'm reasonably competent in Ruby to build it.  It also ties in with Bucketmaster, which I'm sure I first thought about 12 years ago. I hope I've described all that well enough.

But I'm really drawn to the idea that there are naming paradigms that work well with each of our brains, and it's something that we can do to assist in analogous thinking. There seem to be a lot of possibilities for recategorizing  - taking off on tagging and the ontology problem. What if, for example, our whole way of naming animals and plants are incorrectly biased to the peculiarities of discoverers? I mean how much time is wasted when we think of - for specious example - "Fleming's Sparrow" aka the Red Throated Sparrow, and then it's Latin Name and what it's called in the Orkney Islands? What if you could crowdsource tag all birds? Now what if you had expert curators re-tag all birds? Now what if you had an enumbra type system re-tag and reclassify all birds? What if there were a most appropriate name for everything based upon the actual things that make it most outstanding? This is a kind of tagging problem and it needs a combination of human and non-human intelligences to do it. 

I bring this up because these days I am thinking about what it means to classify all sorts of data that have never really been organized, and some that are at risk of being permanently dysorganized, dysfunctionally organized according to the institutional biases of those we leave by default to do the organizing for us. Somebody mentioned this is a video I watched last night. Google is interested in personalizing my search. I don't want to know what people Google thinks are 'like me'  think is the best pizza. I want the opnion of the best person who knows pizza. I don't want all of my information to be served to me in a way that makes my search self-serving. I want to explore to find out things I don't know, which means I have to use some terms that are not completely familiar to me, or even anonymize the objects whose metrics and behaviors I find notable. 

I know this sounds all very abstract, but then so would be the opinions of someone in the business intelligence world who appreciates spycraft and understands semiotics. We have every opportunity to go off the deep-end to madness in our abstraction business.  How we structure up and index our data is important; we need to be able to do it iteratively from the perspective of many measures. 

Longitude

Part of my interest is in the upscaling of Business Intelligence. No, I don't mean scalability in the classic computer science context, I mean in the class contest from going middle class to upper middle class and beyond. What I'm saying is that most of BI is downright dowdy. But dowdy as compared to what? Well how about this dashboard to start?

It is impossible for someone like me to look at this and see it as a dashboard with several database feeds behind it. But I know that it is not a dashboard, which is to say there are not live database feeds behind it. It is merely a picture. Granted, it is a marvelously pretty picture and it is worth 1000 words, but it is also a one shot deal. It is good for a month and then it is out of date, which means that everything about the business model for its creation is also a one shot deal. Get it out to as many people as possible and change their minds NOW. Forget about tomorrow and nevermind yesterday. This is static, and it's exactly the kind of stuff journalists do most of the time. 

What if you got somebody like the graphic designer who put this brilliant snapshot in place with somebody like me who could set up live database feed behind all that data, with another front-end specialist who could add controls to tools that consumed that data. Wouldn't that be marvelous? It would, but it would only be a proof of concept. What it would not be is something anyone could rely on. That is because the world of people whose business is journalism do not generally communicate with the world of people whose business is business intelligence. But maybe that can change.

In this post, I'm going to jump on journalists for a moment. From here on out, every time I meet a journalist I am going to ask them if they have any longitudinal interests. We know folks like Michael J. Totten knows the Middle East and we will always, always have a pressing need for essays, dispatches, and compelling writing of all sorts. But when it comes to communicating data, editors of journals need to do a much better job, otherwise their move into internet media is only half-assed. Seriously. What happened to classified ads is a classic case in point. Not only has that little marketplace shifted but its dynamism has increased tremendously since it left the hands of print journalists.

However, print journalists have a monsterous and massive advantage. And that is that they have attention span, context and connections. That makes them curators and that's how the best of them get to be the 'papers of record'. Bloggers can be excellent, but blog real-estate is not necessarily longitudinal. 

What we need is an editor's hand at putting the history of matters in context for what essentially is a permanent exhibit. If you are the editor of the crime desk in Seattle, when is murder ever going to be uninteresting. Or as I was saying the other day to a journalist, how did milk cartons become the medium of choice for a search network of missing children. Every bureau in every newspaper has the capacity for becoming the data source of record, but only if they try. Who is going to try? 

If you think I'm only talking about charts and graphics, you don't get me yet. Check out Homicide Wach in DC. There are dynamic charts and graphics to go along with those, but this is social media hosting as well. Every aspect of a story needs to be put in place, and 'four column inches' is not the whole solution. What doesn't become referencable multimedia at the 'newspaper' website becomes market share for someone with the foresight to use all the technology. Now that there is AWS compute on demand for all such tech, there is no excuse. Again. It's all about the editors with foresight.