Leon Atkinson's Blog, page 15

Google Reader goes away

So, Google announced they were shutting down Reader in July. After about a week, I’ve settled into using Feedly as a suitable replacement. TheOldReader has a good interface for desktop, but it’s virtually unusable on my phone. Newsblur is attractive because it’s all open source, but I’m thinking that setting up a local instance would be too much work. I tried a few others that aren’t worth noting.

You can see a bunch of suggestions at replacereader.com.

Also, remember what I said that Google would be the new Microsoft? Was that almost five years ago?

The analysis below about Google snuffing out RSS is great. I expect the Internet to route around this problem. I’m wondering how bad this is going to be for Google. On the one hand, they seem to be playing on long, steady game against Facebook. On the other hand, dumping Reader seems like an obviously bad idea. Just the removal of the sharing causes lots of vocal influencers to boycott Plus.

Embrace, extend, extinguish: How Google crushed and abandoned the RSS industry | ZDNet

Most of the commentary I’ve read so far about the loss of Google Reader has been about its use as an RSS client. But that’s a red herring. The real victims were companies that had planned in 2005 and 2006 to build RSS sync engines. Google stomped them out of business like Godzilla sweeping through Tokyo.

Sorry Google; you can Keep it to yourself — Tech News and Analysis

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Google may think it can waltz into a market that Evernote and others have staked out, but I’m not going to dance.

Three Months to Scale NewsBlur – The NewsBlur Blog

At 4:16pm last Wednesday I got a short and to-the-point email from Nilay Patel at The Verge with only a link that started with the host “googlereader.blogspot.com”. The sudden spike in NewsBlur’s visitors immediately confirmed — Google was shutting down Reader.

Marcelo Calbucci’s Blog: Google is about to learn a tough lesson
A very common mistake entrepreneurs make is to assume that a feature is not necessary because it doesn’t have a lot of usage, thus it can be safely removed from the product. Sometimes that’s the case, but sometimes, not so much.

Google made a big mistake cancelling Google Reader that will have severe ripple effects to its empire. I know a lot has been written about it, but let me give you a different angle on it.

Free works – Marco.org

Google Reader’s upcoming shutdown and Mailbox’s rapid acquisition have reignited the discussion of free vs. paid services and whether people should pay for products they love to keep them running sustainably.

But users aren’t the problem. As Michael Jurewitz wrote, many tech startups never even attempt to reach profitability before they’re acquired or shut down. Nobody ever had a chance to pay for Google Reader or Mailbox.

 

Job board exclusively for remote work

All jobs listed on HireThere.com are for working outside of a traditional office. I agree this is increasingly a benefit that programmers will seek.

The remote-only job board called HireThere.com

With traditional companies like Citibank and American Express on one hand, and cutting edge companies like 37signals, StackExchange, and Balsamiq on the other, a distributed team of remote workers is the future.

However, with more and more attention being drawn to remote working, there’s no dedicated job boards for it.

Free education materials

Here are recent stories about Open Source and education.

CK-12 Foundation

CK-12 provides open-source content and technology tools to help teachers provide learning opportunities for students globally.  Free access to high-quality, customizable educational content inmultiple modalities suited to multiple student learning styles and levels, will allow teachers, students and others to innovate and experiment with new models of learning. CK-12 helps students and teachers alike by enabling rapid customization and experimentation of teaching and learning styles.

The “Linux” of online learning? edX takes big step toward open source goal

Moving closer toward its vision of being an open-sourced learning platform, edX on Thursday released its XBlock SDK, the underlying architecture supporting edX course content.

 

Meaningful charity

Please indulge me in some Sunday morning philosophy.

Often, perhaps more often than we’d like, life offers the opportunity to empathize with our fellow human beings, to feel a measure of their grief as they struggle with a challenge. In the theater of the mind, you stand in place for lead role and ask yourself, “how would I feel? What would I do?”  The sting of injustice drives you make it right. Then frustration reminds you, there will be no making it right, only making it better.

Every day, I ask myself how I can improve the world. Every day, I am keenly aware of the violence that lurks beneath the surface of many human interactions. So many of us are hurt, and the only tools we think we have involve hurting others. We tell each other we have no choice. How many times have we heard there is no choice but to start a war? How many times has the excuse been that if we don’t force you, you won’t do the right thing? How many times has a parent raised his hand to strike a child with the intent to bring peace to the world?

We do have  choice. Our lives are values that exists for a brief moment of time. We can surrender to suffering and heartbreak, or we can cooperate to improve life. I choose the latter. I accept that what little power I have in the universe, the most effective actions are those closest to me. One day, there will be no wars, no murders, no violence. I won’t experience it, but I will help it come to be. Closest to me, most precious to me, offering the most hope–are my children.

I want my children to learn that all good works on this earth are voluntary. When the bureaucrat from thousands of miles away decrees that I shall donate part of my life for the benefit of others, and that I shall do so or face death, we all suffered. It exploits our good natures and perverts the meaning of charity. And it’s not enough to endure this torment. We can demonstrate an alternative.

My principle: meaningful charity is personal and voluntary. I don’t consider the money that the government takes from me to be meaningful charity, regardless of where that money goes eventually. The ends never justify the means. I don’t consider generic, anonymous donations to be particularly effective or meaningful, either. For me, it’s never about sacrifice–it’s about making things better. And it’s about demonstrating how things ought to be.

Now let’s make this concrete. There’s a little boy in my community who’s recently been diagnosed with Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG). It’s a brain cancer that’s difficult to treat and offers little hope. I’m having a tough time allowing myself to contemplate the full magnitude of what it would mean to me to be in that situation. There will be no justice. We can only hope to make it a little better than would be otherwise. Time will slip away, and his parents will need help with bills. This is one of those opportunities I mentioned at the start of this post.

Click to get the full-sized Marty O’s flyer

Click to get the Kinder’s flyer

A pair of local restaurants are running promotions today where 15% of purchases will go to the family. That’s great. It gets word out. Three cheers for local business owners doing what they can to aid people in the community. Marty O’s Pizzeria is offering a buffet today. If you choose to go, print out the flyer to the left.

All Kinder’s Meats locations are also donating 15%. You need to bring a different flyer there. Click the image to the right, or download a PDF version.

Alternatively, and the plan that I feel will be most effective, is a direct donation of money. 100% sounds better than 15% to me. My understanding is that this is possible through lotsahelpinghands.com once you are accepted as a member.

Hope for Dominic Klapperich

https://www.lotsahelpinghands.com/c/701727/

How Free Services Make Money

Here’s a good list to scan if you’re working on how to fund your startup. The list probably could be refactored to be half as long–some of the ideas are really variations of each other. Anyway, I find it interesting that Forbes is re-publishing Quora answers.

How Do Free Services On The Web Make Money? – Forbes

How do Free Services on the Web Make Money? This question was originally answered on Quora by Balaji Viswanathan.

ISO 8601

ISO 8601 was published in 1988. It seems abundantly obvious, yet I am still annoyed repeatedly by files named with whatever pet format the creator likes. Damn it! Name it MyProject-2013-03-08.tar.gz, already!

ISO 8601

XKCD: ISO 8601

Jobs chart suggests there will be no recovery

So, 10 months, 26 months, 30 months, 45 months, 60 months and counting. Looks like a trend. Maybe Molyneux’s right–there will be no recovery this time.

The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever Isn’t Scary Enough : Planet Money : NPR

One of the defining graphs of our time (yes, there are defining graphs of our time) comes from the blog Calculated Risk. It tracks the job market in every U.S. recession and recovery since WWII — and it shows just how brutal the the past few years have been.

The inscrutable Dwarf Fortress

It sounds like Dwarf Fortress is more fun than watching golf on TV. Maybe it’s really just performance art.

Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time | Ars Technica

Who knew trying to build a virtual chair could lead to questions of self-worth?

Dwarf Fortress is one of the most complex computer games in the history of computer games. How complex? In the game’s discussion forum, one player asserts that after 120 failed games, he can finally “get into the swing of things.” One of his many fortress death spirals began, as the downfalls of society often do, with an immigrant dwarf who suddenly succumbed to a “secretive mood.” A short time later—kaboom.

The chilling effect of a “mother, may I” economy

The tentacles of spying state agents reach into all of our lives, but imagine having no choice but to invite a police detective into your home to open all your drawers on the off chance there’s something that could be turned into an indictment.

Fishing around for lawsuits

When the Department of Justice Antitrust Division sued to stop the merger of two beer makers last month, the complaint filed in court quoted more than thirty times from internal company documents.

The two companies involved (Anheuser-Busch InBev and Grupo Modelo) are private companies. How, one might wonder, did the government get its hands on their private internal documents, prior to making its first legal claim of wrongdoing?

jQuery 2.0 will drop support for IE8

With both Google and Facebook already dropping support for IE8, this makes a lot of sense. It’s more leverage for developers to argue against IE8 support. I recently added a functionality to freshstep.com that makes IE7 users jump through a hoop to log in. It’s bad enough getting all the code to work on IE7, but pulling in Facebook’s SDK means that most users see the little yellow triangle warning about javascript errors.

How correlated?: jQuery conference 2013 Europe Vienna review (part 1)

Some breaking news that popped out: jQuery is going to DROP SUPPORT FOR OLDS INTERNET EXPLORER (6,7 and 8) !!! in it’s 2.0 (big applause from the audience).  It should be noted however that IE9 and IE10 are much more standards compliant so they will be automatically supported.