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My friend Matt Manger-Lynch died Sunday in a tragic bike accident. This is just one of those things that leaves me at a loss for words.

Matt was and will continue to be an inspiration to us all.

Some pictures from last summer-

Obituary

It is great to see Facebook taking some measures to reduce spam. Since I’ve been working on some Facebook (and related) type things lately I think about these issues a lot.

The deeper issue is that the Facebook app authors are taking this “land grab” “get rich quick” approach. Except they aren’t getting rich, they are getting “users” that when abused have no value.

My favorite latest example is Social.IM. This looked like a very cool thing- its an IM application that is integrated with Facebook so it automatically knows my Friends List from Facebook. This is a perfect example of the kind of application that really leverages the social networks knowledge of my interactions with others, while providing a useful function. If this app worked well, it would quickly be my main IM client.

But its currently on the road to being deleted from my machine for two reasons. The first is just that the client is not done very well. The chat flickers a ton, every time you type it jumps the whole window, and it has a huge block for every line you type with your user tile. After GTalk shipped, it felt like there was a new standard for the baseline experience in IM, and these guys are far from that to the point where using it is annoying.

But the worse problem is that they try to abuse me to spam my friends to install their thing. The saddest part here is they don’t even need to- when I’m running the app I have a list of my friends, those who are running Social.IM and those who aren’t. If I want to talk to one of those that are not running it, I can click on their name and invite them. Great.

Why do they pester me to invite a bunch of people when I first sign up too? Completely unnecessary- your sign up experience should get people into your app as quickly as possible without that kind of hassle. Then I’m chatting with someone and playing with the smiley’s. They have some funny bigger ones, and I click on one to my shock my browser opens-

They want me to spam my friends to unlock some damn smiley’s? This is classic “abuse your customers” stuff and I’d thought it had gone out of fashion a few years ago but Social.IM has brought it back. Social.IM is going on my “ban” list until they cut this crap out.

Hopefully as people figure out how to make Facebook stuff sucesful, they will focus on customer value, great experiences, and making the social aspects (invites, news feeds, etc) tied to relevant things (like I want to chat with you) rather than spam.

Kat and I went to the Washington Caucus yesterday. This write up in slate captures many good points and is aligned with what I observed.

It was not at all as bad as what I have be angry about over the past few months. The key thing is that in a 1 out of a 100 occurrence, the Washington Caucus actually mattered, and the whole neighborhood seemed to have turned out. The local school that held ours was overflowing. I suspect they were 3-4x over the fire code and they still had a line of people looping around 3 sides of the block when they started going (I’m pretty sure they managed to get everyone registered). I read some press reports quoting party folks saying the turnout was twice normal- the only folks I’d talked to at the actual event who had been to a caucus since 1968 said it was more like 10x normal or more.

As Slate said it was “more like a really disorganized primary”. There was some premise of speeches in theory trying to convince the undecided voters, but as Kat observed they ended up being directed more at the “other side” and didn’t really sway anyone. The group of undecided folks in our precinct was small enough anyway that they didn’t really matter at the end.

So a couple of observations-

1) I’ll retract my previous comments about the evils of the caucus system. I still don’t love it- it excludes people who are out of town on business that day. It excludes people who have to work that day (there were reminders on the radio about leaving plenty of time to take the bus, but no reminders that the bus-drivers don’t get a vote). I don’t really feel like it added much over the primary system beyond the overall cool vibe that we were watching democracy in action with the whole neighborhood getting together.

2) I had a conversation with a party official about the nomination process a couple of months ago. One of the key points he made defending the role of Iowa and New Hampshire is that those states take their role (often choosing the nominees) very seriously. Yesterday made it clear to me that Washington State takes that role just as seriously when given the chance. Hence its even more important to focus on breaking the strangle-hold that Iowa and New Hampshire have on our process.

3) The super-delegate system is still very sketchy. I wish more of the super delegates would take the attitude that Barbara Boxer did when she announced before the California primary that her vote was going to go with whichever way the state popular vote went. It seems like we may be very much on track to have one candidate win the most delegates from the votes of the people but the other candidate win based on the super delegates.

Eric and I had been planning on going skiing yesterday- I work up early and it turned out they have had so much snow the road was closed and they decided to close for the day. This morning we were going to go again, but again they were closed because they were digging out and they had no power.

Wow, over 3′ fresh during the past couple of days. Can’t wait to get out there, plus rafting season is going to be great!

My buddies at Jackson Fish made the New York Times, with a picture even!

Congrats! They couldn’t have picked a better set of folks to be the “poster children” for the Seattle startup scene, although Jackonfish is pretty atypical as startups go…

A good programmer’s editor is probably one of the most important tools you can have. I’ve been working with PHP and Javascript a bunch lately and the fact that I mostly use Visual Studio is really quite sad. It doesn’t know anything about PHP and so far I’ve not been that impressed by editing JavaScript in it either (its ok for debugging Javascript).

So I got mail today that the Antechnius JavaScript editor is out with version 10. The big deal in the new version is that they merged the PHP and JavaScript editors. I have played with both before but never stuck with them at all, mostly because it sucked that there were two different ones. The notion of one environment for both sounds great.

First of all, it doesn’t appear to have a “find in files” function. I use this all day long in VS. Find everywhere that calls foo(). Find this variable somewhere in the code-base. Especially when tackling a code-base that you aren’t familiar with yet this is crucial. The editor has a notion of a “project” but it seems limited to providing a file browser and uploading things via FTP.

It does have a handy thing that picks out all the functions in the current file, but again, it doesn’t know anything beyond the current file. So no help to find where foo() is declared.

It doesn’t really support mixing HTML and Javascript. So debugging Javascript in stand-alone JS files is fine, but if you put it in your HTML file you can only execute a little bit at a time by selecting it and saying “execute”. Its also not clear when you do that (or otherwise try out your Javascript) how it deals with bringing in includes and libraries and what-not.

It does let you run PHP stuff and do a syntax check, but its not really integrated. Its just running PHP.exe to do that, and displaying the results in a text window. You can’t even click on errors to go to the right line and they do nothing to help with the poor error messages in the PHP engine (two examples- you can be missing a close parenthesis but it tells you unexpected ‘{’, or forget to close a string and you get unexpected T_STRING, both referencing the wrong line. And yes, I know why the compiler gives the errors there, but its not user friendly and not really 2008-state-of-the-art).

I’ll play with it for a few more days but it feels like its still in the “not quite enough to be useful” category.

There is this fairly recent notion about making “transparent Javascript”. The idea is that you don’t complicate your markup with Javascript and keep it all in include .js files. The JS files identify various spots in your pages via IDs or classes and attach event handlers at some point on page load time.

So far I’m not a fan. I might warm up to it later, but I’ve been working with it so far and its really hard for me to tell where the code is for anything. I’ve got some piece of HTML, but finding out what it actually does or how to fix it when it stops doing what its supposed to is a pain. Just too “transparent”.

Its similar to various MVC patterns. Good factoring of code can be a really good thing. It can be crucial to build big projects that you can maintain. And I really do like the concept of keeping the HTML clean so that designers can work it it more easily without messing with script all over the place. But abstractions can go too far. I’m also not a fan of the purist MVC models- I’d rather have something that doesn’t abstract so much that its hard to trace the actual code execution.

Check out this PCI adapter that lets you use up to 4 CF cards as a SSD (via John).

Of course I have a bunch of more questions-

Can this support the newer huge CF cards? 64GB ones are supposed to exist although the largest on NewEgg is 32GB. But the 32GB one only costs $134, so a 128GB SSD for $600 would be awesome. The pictures only show the 2GB and 4GB cards so?

There are versions of this that work with notebook sized IDE and SATA adapters. I bought one of the IDE ones before I realized that the app I have in mind I really should have gotten the SATA one.

Is there going to be a PCI-Express version soon?

What does the performance look like? For boot? Does it help Windows runtime performance much? Would you want to use it as Swap? What about for running a database?

I wonder if this thing would be interesting for data-center machines. If you could have great performance and higher reliability than a hard-drive, this would be really attractive for servers. For your typical web-server 128GB is more than enough…