Jeff Bezos Hawks the Kindle

It’s still not clear whether electronic books are the wave of the future or a consumer products cul-de-sac. Technology continues to improve, and there are certainly lots of good reasons for a device like Amazon’s Kindle to be the leading edge of a major wave of adoption. A few of the more obvious arguments include:

• Reduced cost of distribution. The publishing industry wastes a lot of money printing and shipping books, and because of historical practices, creates huge numbers of books that never even get sold. Not very green, and a waste of money.
• Niche markets that can be very well-served. For example, high school and college students can replace those 30-pound backbacks with a 30-ounce tablet-sized device.
• Removal of barriers to publication. The news and magazine businesses are being revolutionized by self-publication in the form of blogs. Self-publication is possible in the printed book world, but it is still a rather awkward process. Publication to electronic format is presumably a trivial problem.
• Integration of information resources. A device like the Kindle allows you to consult the Internet, written reference materials, and your personal notes all from the same device, making it a true information portal.

But consumer acceptance is a fickle thing, so we don’t know if these rational arguments are going to fly. And of course, every writer who reviews a device like the Kindle or the equally capable Sony Reader feels compelled to write something along the lines of “But I just can’t imagine forgoing the pleasure of curling up on my couch with a good book.” I’m sure that when Gutenberg introduced movable type there were millions of industry reviewers posting notes to their blogs saying “The uniformity of the type is just esthetically unpleasing - I love it when I recognize the script of one of my favorite transcribing brothers.”

And then of course there’s the Steve Job’s money quote on the subject:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore, forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

So it’s really pretty hard to be sure just which way this is going to go.
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Jerome Kerviel is (or by the time you read this, was) a stock trader for French bank Societe Generale. Jerome is supposed to execute stock trades, probably according to some very specific programs, in order to keep the bank’s assets humming along.

But like any of us, Jerome had a rough day or two. His trades didn’t get executed properly, his numbers fell, and he was going to look bad. And like many of us, Jerome thought he could cover it up by doing better on his trades the next day.

Problem is, Jerome’s catch-up strategy failed him. He started deviating from his programmed trades, kept his losses hidden, and kept trying to get back to even, until somebody noticed that the bank was $7.2 billion in the hole. Whoops.
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American Express is so excited about having me as a customer that they were willing to pay me $5 to take part in a survey:

American Express Needs YOUR Feedback!

Dear American Express Blue Cardmember:

American Express would like your feedback. We would like you to participate in a survey about your Blue card from American Express. Your participation will provide us with valuable feedback and help us tailor card benefits to better meet your needs.

As a token of our appreciation, you will receive $5 from American Express*. Please note that this survey will be running for a limited period of time. To increase your chances of receiving the honorarium, please complete the survey at your earliest convenience.

The web address for the survey is shown below. To begin the survey, simply double-click on the address to go directly to the questionnaire. However, if you are unable to double-click on the address, please copy and paste the text below into your browser’s address bar.

Well, I need five bucks, and a little bit of checking gave me moderate insurance that this was really from American Express, not a phisher. The survey was being outsourced to Confirmit, a real company, and they don’t seem to be on any malware site lists. Furthermore, as things went on, there was an enormous amount of content in the survey and seemingly no payoff for phishers, so it seems unlikely that this is a scam.

However, right off the bat there was some cause for concern. Double-click on the address? How many browsers do you use that need a double-click before they follow a link? If Confirmit is a real company, they clearly didn’t assign their top copywriter to this project.

The real fun started when I actually started the survey. The classic “make a good first impression” rule that your mother taught you is just as true for web pages as it is for anything else. And the first page of the American Express survey was the equivalent of showing up for your first date with a big gravy blotch on your tie:
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For the last few months I’ve been up to my eyeballs in algorithms - school, work, writing, you name it.

In honor of the often puzzling topics I’ve been working on, here’s a little crossword with an algorithms theme.

The java applet that lets you solve online has a bit of lameness, but it’s not mine and so it’s kind of out of my hands. I’d love to have a higher quality engine, but the free choices are limited. In particular, there doesn’t appear to be a free javascript crossword engine for the taking, so I’m stuck with Java, as are you.
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Hi loyal readers,

I’m doing a little background research for an article on music downloads, and as a result, need some people to fill out a survey.

The goal of the survey is to get a little background on people’s attitudes, plus a comparison of differences in attitudes between old people (me) and young people (?).

The survey is super-simple, 4 pages that should take no more than 3 minutes. If you’re interested in helping, the best of all possible worlds would be for you to fill it out completely, and if you’re over 25, strong-argm some under-25 type, like your kid, into filling it out as well.

The survey is here. A free survey on SurveyMonkey is limited to 100 respondents, so if it tells you to buzz off, that might mean I’ve got all the feedback I can afford.

Thanks!

Yes, the New York Times is with it. So much so that they can pull off an ironic headline in full belief that they and their equally hip readers will all get the joke when they read this article.

Patent Owner Sues the Internet

We salute you, Gray Lady!

Actually

Well, it’s always fun to take a big shot to task, but in reality this article covers a not-so-funny lawsuit. You’ve probably never heard of Brightware Inc., Amy Rice, or Julie Hsu, but in 2002 they more or less claim to have invented automated email response systems, and were awarded US Patent 6,411,947.
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Angie’s List is a web site that allows consumers to see ratings on local service companies, such as plumbers, remodelers, electricians, and so on. All ratings are subscriber driven, and Angie’s List seems to make most of their revenue from the $5.95/month subscriber fee they charge - an anomalous revenue model in today’s web.

I subscribed to Angie’s List when in 2006 when I was in the midst of a batch of home projects, and found it pretty useful. When searching through the local ratings for a contractor or tradesperson in my area, I could usually find a least one or two highly ranked businesses, and they normally turned out to be as good as their ratings would indicate.

Angie’s List was useful, and provided a pretty good service for the price, but I finally dumped my membership this fall. Let me try to explain why.
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Exceptions are a necessary part of the C++ language, but for most programmers they are worse than worthless - they are unusable. When exceptions were first added to the language back in the days before standardization, they were seen as a brilliant improvement over the hideous setjmp/longjmp facility from ANSI C. Because exceptions unwind the stack when they are thrown, they call destructors and clean up all of your untidy messes as they go.

Tom Cargill

It didn’t take long for somebody to notice that the emperor had no clothes. In 1994, Tom Cargill published a prescient article in the late C++ Report. Tom pointed out in detail just how difficult it was to write code that actually held up when exceptions were used. Scott Meyers flags this as one of his five Most Important C++ Non-Book Publications…Ever. (Incidentally, Tom is responsible for a piece of wisdom that sounds like a an offhand quip: the ninety-ninety rule. Any project manager who doesn’t understand this rule all the way into his or her bones needs to quit. Now.)

The intervening years have not been kind to exceptions. The problems Tom foresaw in 1994 were real, and while they can be managed, writing exception-safe code is still fraught with peril. As a result, exceptions are basically unused by by most C++ programmers. After all, we have to deal with tough problems like writing safe multithreaded apps, understanding template metaprogramming, and dealing with the language’s high-maintenance memory management. The last thing we need is to make use of a feature, that while useful, is basically impossible to use correctly.

Naturally, after this rather verbose introduction, you have probably guessed that I’m using this article to tell you about a simple little utility class I use to help me throw informative, easy to build exceptions in my C++ programs. Yes, exceptions are problematic, but there’s one place I can use them with impunity: to cause a fatal error that aborts my program.
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Dr. Dobb’s Portal November, 2007 Article on DDJ site

As I’ve confessed in the past, I’m a sucker for word puzzles. My recent post on a Will Shortz puzzle from NPR Morning Edition ended up provoking a surprising amount of comment, much of it in the vein of Watch me solve it better, faster, and with more style using language XXX.

I certainly enjoyed watching other people solve the problem, and found their solutions instructive. As the XP crowd has figured out, we programmers spend too much time working on our own problems and not enough time watching how other people work. There’s a lot to learn, both good and bad, from getting a peek inside another person’s head.

Out of the Blue

Which brings me to the puzzle at the center of this article.
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I’ve bumped into this ad campaign from the sub-branded Visa Signature Card a few different places on the web. The ad trots out a list of “things to do while you’re alive”, (a bit of a tautology, isn’t it - I think they didn’t want to have the word die appear next to Visa in any context,) which includes such gems as Explore the Seychelles, Experience the Magic of Broadway, and the ever popular See California wine country from a hot-air ballon.

I looked at this list, and then went to the Visa Signature Living site to see all 31 items, and I came away with a total meh.

In fact, my blah reaction to this ad campaign has inspired me to create a counter reaction in the form of a contest, which will all be explained in a bit.

Us and Them

This ad just served to highlight a vague feeling I’ve always had, that the modern world is partitioned into us and them. You’re reading this article, so there is an excellent chance that you are a member of the us side of the partitioned set.

Without getting too You Might Be a Redneck If on you, you know you’re one of us if:

• You spend half of every holiday trip home performing tech support on your parent’s computer.
• You spend two hours every day on your RSS feeds and you still can’t keep up.
• Your pets make regular appearances on LOLCat sites.
• When you give your S.O. a surprise birthday present, you accompany it with a Boom!

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