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The Curse of the Middle

Don’t you hate being in the middle? I mean, I ask you this assuming you are one of those people in the middle somewhere. All you experts and know-nothings can stop reading right now…

What is “The Curse of the Middle” you ask? It’s simply being in a position of being good and/or knowledgable at something, maybe better than a lot of people, but just not an expert. Mark at BrainWagon hit on this recently in a podcast when he said “People who don’t draw think that I draw reasonable well, people who actually are artists think that I draw terribly.” Bam! That nails it.

I sometimes feel I’m doomed to the middle. To always be a middler. Stuck. Never to go up (please?) or down (hopefully!) It’s like that episode of Seinfeld title "The Opposite" where Jerry is “even Steven” and things just always work out, no big wins, no big losses.

So on to my area of expertise… I don’t know if I have one. If I do, I can’t quite see it. I mean, I dabble in a lot of different technologies, Linux, Mac OS X, Perl, HTML, syndication, MySQL, automation, and on and on but I just don’t consider myself an expert on any of them. Why is that!? It is just me? I mean, other people think I’m an expert on things, of course this is just due to them not knowing as much as I do about a subject. How can I be an expert when there are people who know 10 times more than I do, and are 10 times better than I am, and are looked up to as experts?

The last time this subject came up in a career-type question it was sort of explained that I was someone who was not an expert in any one thing, but had very broad experience in many different things… Is that it? Am I ok with that? Should I even care about this “expert” thing?

It’s all so very confusing…

I used to work at a place where I was convinced if anyone else figured out that Google existed I’d lose all value. I suppose back then my expertise was in finding answers no one else could.

Does it all have to do with the pool you swim in? Is it all relative? I mean, at home I am the “computer expert” but if I go to a LUG meeting that might not be the case. That’s the geo-angle, but expand that to the internet, what does it take to be an expert at something on the big old internet? (I don’t even want to think about it!)

What makes an expert anyway? I know this guy who is often amazed at some of the things I come up with. To him I guess I’m an expert. He tells me I should write a book, and I pass it off. Of course we’ve learned that you can make more money selling the book than writing the book, but which one will make you an expert? An expert at what? The subject of the book, or the subject of selling books?

Anyway, I thought about it a bit more and told him “I am writing a book, it’s just on the internet!”

(New chapters daily!)

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Fear of an Aggregated Planet

Let’s mix it up a little… Perl, Python, HTML-Template… Atom, RSS… Words, Photos, Links, and Objects of Desire…

Say what?

Say Planet Planet!

Or say Planet RasterWeb!

There are billions and billions of planets out there, well, ok dozens maybe. (Heck, there’s even a WordPress Planet.) the one that was the tipping point for me was Planet Burningbird, which is explained in It’s the Oddest Thing.

After seeing Planet Burningbird, I said “Heck, let’s do it!”

The Planet website has no real documentation and very little explaining things. (True geek software, eh?) I downloaded whatever version I could from whatever link I found, and took a look. Python. I mean, I completely gave up on Python earlier this year, but, well, OK. We’ll give it a try…

Now, on Mac OS X I did have a hiccup or two. Searching…. Ok, this post about Mac OS X fixed things. After that it was on to templating. Ah! HTML-Template, but done in Python. (Gosh, where have we heard about HTML-Template before?)

So templating was fairly simple, since I knew the tags. What’s next? Feeds! Yes, we need some feeds… I grabbed my own feed from this site, as well as my feeds from del.icio.us and Flickr and… Is that it? Hmmm, I need more feeds. Luckily I had been experimenting with a Perl module named WWW::Amazon::Wishlist to create an RSS feed of my Amazon Wish List. Of course some of the stuff on my wish list was from the year 2000, so I had to update it. (Honestly I don’t expect anyone to ever actually buy me a gift, but you know, if you want to, the option is there… hint, hint. Aw, who am I kidding? I can barely get feedback on the stuff I do here…)

So where was I?

Ah yes, Feed the Planet, yes… Oh, PubSub! I got two feeds there! One for sites that link to RasterWeb! and one for sites that “mention” RasterWeb!. You’d think if they mention it, they’d link to it, but they seem to have different results. So in theory now, if you link to this site, you should show up on the planet. (This might go sour in the future, we’ll see…)

Is there more? Sure! Though Planet doesn’t seem to handle enclosures in any way, we also have RasterWeb! Audio, which is one of those “podcasting” things we started back in August before podcasting even had a name…

Ok, so that’s the lowdown on the planet. It’s seems to have been released under the same license as Python, and a quick check with the Open-Source Initiative’s Licenses says it’s open-source. (I think.)

Any problems? Well, it doesn’t quite validate. I mean, all the feeds I have control over seem to validate fine, but the Planet page itself doesn’t, partly due to the foreign content from the PubSub feed, and maybe because of Planet doing something silly as well.

So that’s my combination of Perl, Python, HTML-Template, Atom, RSS, del.icio.us, Flickr, PubSub, and other things I won’t mention again. Enjoy!

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iPod eVerywhere?

I know, you punks online all day with your blogs and chat rooms and www’s think the iPod is all the cat’s pajamas and the bee’s knees, right? Well, it ain’t…

See, yesterday I was talking with a Youth, my nephew in this case, who is somewhere between the age of 0 and 18 years old, and he did not know what the iPod is. This is a kid who has been using a PS2 and Gameboy for like 1/2 his life, and uses computers, and rocks out to music, and he said he wanted an MP3 player for Xmas.

So I sez, “Ah, you want an iPod, eh?” and he’s all puzzled, trying to figure out what I’m taking about. So I ramble on for 5 minutes about usability, and bring up the Rio, the iRiver players, and other such stuff, and he’s not quite there. I tell him that in the “ease of use” and “user experience” categories, the iPod appears to be the clear winner. Sure, I even mention that if you do want features like voice recording, and FM radio, the iPod don’t do it without add ons while some of the other players do.

I tell him that he can put his home directory on it and carry it everywhere, a safe backup right? (His mom thinks I’m nuts, but I point out that a kid has important files too!) I said you could get a crappy player that’s a pain in the “ease of use” and “user experience” categories for around $100, or for around $250 you could get one that holds 10 to 20 times more stuff, and is a portable Firewire hard drive, and was the clear winner in the “ease of use” and “user experience” categories.

The verdict is out. Expect an updated on December 26th.

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The New Flash(y) iPod

In Paging Jennifer Beals Mr. Gruber says that an iPod without a display is just silly. (I’m paraphrasing here…) What he doesn’t know is the new iPod will be using a display that utilizies Spin technology.

That’s right, the new iPod will display information by being rapidly spun in the air by the earbud wires. I know it sounds ridiculous, because it is. Wait. that’s just the leaked story, the real story is that it will project the display onto a flat surface just like that atomic projection clock at your Mom’s house, where you can lie in bed at stare at the time slowly changing while being displayed on the ceiling. Wait. that’s just the leaked story, the real story is that there will not be a Firewire port, USB 1 or 2 port, or even some special new dock. The new iPod actually comes tuned to your brainwave patterns and will be controlled (only by the owner) using thoughts and brainwaves. It will respond to your mood, and what you are thinking. (“Hmmm, I’d like to listen to The Clash” or “That Dawn and Drew Show is funny!”) The fact that it can only be controlled by the owner’s brain will also lower the risk of theft. Oh, also, it won’t actually have a hard drive or flash memory, it will just use the audio stored inside of your brain, talk about DRM‘d music!

Now folks, I must have made hundreds… ok, dozens… well, at least a few posts on Apple’s iPod audio player, and even though I do not own one (yet) don’t you think I’m probably right this time?

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Fun with SVG Graphs

[Editor’s Note: If your browser does not support SVG images, you should be seeing PNG images instead, which will not look as good as the SVG versions. If you don’t see any images, let me know what browser, version, etc. you are using. It seems some of the popular browsers out there don’t “do the right thing” hmph!]

[Editor’s Note Part 2: Seems that RSS 2.0 can’t handle the <object> tag properly? At least that’s what the validator tells me. The Atom feed seems ok though…]

I’ve been working on some simple graphing utilities in Perl to create SVG graphs… Here’s a few samples…

graph

Our cost for phone service seems to have gone down.

graph

Local utilities continue to rise. Ugh…

graph

We’re spending less on food, well, most of the time. ;)

I like the fact that these are very simple, showing just the trend and not going into details like month, amount, etc. In fact, to create one of these just takes the following: 

perl ggraph2.pl "Phone" "44 54 50 53 44 41 43 53 42 42 44" >phone.svg

Run the script passing in the name you want on it, and a string of numbers space separated, and output it to a file. It’s still a bit fragile, and only does some basic normalizing, so wacky things will break it, but it’s a start. Like all other quick little hacks, in the hands of the guy who wrote it, it “gets the job done” while users would break it in less than 10 minutes and start yelling.

I really like SVG. It reminds me of the old days of plotting out graphics on the Apple ][+ and that’s a good thing! It’s another one of those “edge technologies” I keep hoping will finally catch on big one of these years…