A few days after the Iowa caucuses (Jan. 3), I was browsing MediaGazer (sort of a TechMeme-like site, except for articles about media, not technology), and I ran across this curious article:

How Google beat AP with Iowa caucus results (and why it matters).

The article details how the free data and tools offered by Google allowed some coder at a local news site to easily update polling data and present them in a map format. Interesting in itself, but what struck me was that the station used Google Fusion Tables, that I had never heard of.

Basically, a Fusion table is new document type in Google Docs – and is still in beta.

It allows you to upload – from desktop, Google Docs or whatever – a CSV file and, if you geocode the entries, it’ll allow you to create a map, generate a link that’s an iFrame (pointing to Google) that displays the map.

This is potentially very powerful. One could, for example take a weekend trip to somewhere and then build out a map showing all the places you’ve been in a very easy fashion.

I decided to try this out – I live in the Chicago area, so I generated a CSV file of random pictures from the Chicago area from my gallery database and created a Fusion Table.

The hard part was geocoding the dozen or so pics (I can’t wait for cameras that will do this by default moving forward). But once that was done, I created the map and it’s embedded here.

The Google tutorial was a little muddled, but if you know what you’re doing it’s pretty intuitive. I’m still looking for an API guide for this; nothing so far, but I haven’t tried that hard.

And interesting tool – I just wonder if Google will maintain support for this. The company is famous for putting stuff out there and then, sometimes years later (after some have been sold on the tool), dropping support. And example is the SOAP search (so one could fetch data from Google via SOAP and display results on one’s own site. I remember playing with it (using Perl), and it was a good exercise. I never used it for anything except to play with it, but what if I had and it just “went away”?

Anyway, Fusion Tables are an interesting approach to mapping, and I’m sorta surprised that I ran across it not on a tech blog but on a web story about media.

Go figure!

I just finished reading Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Seekers – The Story of Man’s Continuing Quest to Understand His World. Man’s attempt to answer the “why are we here?”, “what does it all mean?” questions.

This book is the third in an unofficial trilogy of Boorstin’s works attempting to tell the story of man’s search for new lands, new arts and new ways to understand the world in which we live. The first, The Discoverers, focused on man expanding his realm, both physically – Magellan and other explorers – and intellectually (science and technology), from the invention of clocks through Galileo to splitting the atom. The second, The Creators, is about man’s creations: art, music, literature and other works of the imagination.

I liked The Seekers greatly – Boorstin can’t seem to write a bad book – but I didn’t like it as much as the earlier two books in the trilogy.

I get the sense that, in writing The Seekers, Boorstin had run out of energy or enthusiasm for the concept he began in The Discoverers. For example, the first two books clocked in at 700+ pages; this one was only about 250.

All three of Boorstin’s books kind of seemed the same to me in that he spent the bulk of the story in the ancient times – the time of Greece and Rome, for example – but once he hit the industrial revolution he kind of rushed to the end. At least that’s my impression. It could be that Boorstin just is more familiar/enamored with ancient times than modern times. Or it could be that my perception is out of whack, simply because I’m more familiar with modern history. Whatever.

But whether it’s just my perception that Boorstin, in general, peters out at the end of the books, I do have some evidence that The Seekers wasn’t as full an effort as the two earlier books.

The Seekers is about man’s search to understand the world: Myths, religions, the battle between religion and the rise of science, philosophy and so on. Yet there is no mention – at all – of Lenin, Freud or Jung. Yet all three helped shape the 20th Century, for better or for worse.

And while Existentialism is touched on, it’s mainly about Godot, with Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche and other existential giants mentioned only in passing.

Nihilism isn’t even mentioned, yet Swedenborg is (in passing, but at least twice, I think).

Complaints aside, an overall great book. Reading Boorstin is humbling: I don’t know if he’s that smart or just a good researcher, but the vast amount of data he presents – and ties to earlier/upcoming sections of the book – is just amazing. And he ended the book with section on Einstein, and how the physicist changed the way we look at space and time. I’m a big Einstein fan, so the book went out on an up note to me!

Makes you feel enlightened, but overall, pretty stupid compared to him.

My favorite of the three books is easily The Discoverers: It’s one of my all-time favorite books. Yep, it’s a door-stopper of a book, but you’ll be glad to took the time to wade through it or just poke around in it. Trust me…

Could 2012 be the year??

Well, 2011 was quite the year on many levels, but the most striking characteristic of the year for me was the blatant vitriol, the self-consuming hatred that we saw in so many ways this past year.

In part, this lack of human empathy was a continued reaction to the wars in the Middle East, the 9/11 tragedy (yes, a decade old but not going away quickly) and the election – in 2008 – of the first African-American president.

Yet it was also fueled by culture moves – primarily in the arena of gays rights – and the ever-earlier race to replace the current president. The first Republican presidential caucus isn’t for another two days, but Mitt Romney has been running for pretty much the last three or four years, and we’ve had a half-dozen or so televised Republican presidential debates already. Yowza! That’s a lot of airtime for a lot of crazy talk, and most stepped up and gave it his/her best shot.

What follows, in an absolutely random order, are some examples of the Year of Hate that I hope we’ve left behind.

• Presidential candidates endorse racial profiling: At a nationally televised presidential debate, Rick Santorum says one of the ways to keep the country safer would be to racially profile airline passengers – to more easily identify those who may want to cause us harm. He is seconded by Herman Cain, still a candidate at this time (Cain termed it “targeted identification”). First of all, racial profiling tramples all over the civil liberties Santorum and others – me included – hold so dear. Second, when’s the last time you heard an African-American male – Cain – support racial profiling? It’s an unfortunate reality that there are still instances of young male drivers being pulled over for, basically, “driving while black/Hispanic.” It’s not right; it happens; we should deplore such. Not encourage same.
• Herman Cain says banning mosques is an American right: His rationale?
  

  Herman Cain [again, speaking as a Republican presidential candidate in July, 2011] said Sunday that Americans should be able to ban Muslims from building mosques in their communities.

  “Our Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state,” Cain said in an interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” “Islam combines church and state.”

  Yes, in some countries Islam is both church and state, but here in the US, we still have our constitutional state, and a mosque doesn’t break that.

  And every religion has a “state” of sorts, laws that reach beyond the faith itself. Why not allow the ban of Catholic churches, which have Papal Law?

• Immigrants are evil: Laws in states such as Arizona and Alabama have had chilling effects on these states. The basic premise is to arrest a foreign/illegal-looking individual (how does one ascertain that??) who does not have papers on them proving they are actually citizens. I couldn’t do that, and I’m a second-generation American. Not too worried about this personally, but what if my last name was Rodriquez?

  These laws can also have unintended consequences, such as when a Mercedes-Benz executive was arrested in Alabama. The German executive, in the state to visit a plant it has in the state, couldn’t prove he wasn’t there illegally. So much for fostering an open trade partnership. Oops.

  Now, I’m not meaning to ignore or minimize the huge issue of illegal immigration in the US. It’s a very serious problem that has no easy answers. I’m just pointing out that some of the solutions offered thus far appear to be willing to trample on citizens’ rights, and that’s not going to help anyone in the long run.

• Gay-bashing is still in style: With the threat of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) for the military, there were cries from conservatives that it would basically implode the military. Now that DADT is officially off the books – and the military keeps doing what the military does, are there any apologies? Nah.

  And Rick Santorum has been saying (I can’t find a link) that, as president, he’d reinstate DADT because “homosexuality is a sin.” For the sake of argument, let’s say it is a sin, at least as in defined in the bible. How does DADT make that homosexual soldier less of a sinner? Basically, DADT asks homosexual soldiers to pretty much lie about their sexual preference. Isn’t lying a sin, as well?

• Gay bashing, part deux – gays can’t marry: Michele Bachmann, running as a Republican presidential candidate, answered a question about gay marriage by saying gays can marry – but only to people of the opposite sex. Okey-dokey!

  And Texas Governor Rick Perry has – again, as a Republican presidential candidate – signed a pledge to support a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between a man and a woman. Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney and others have signed the pledge, as well. Here are my questions:

  1. I thought Republicans were for limited federal government. Doesn’t this proposed amendment seem to be a federal overreach?
  2. I thought most conservatives consider marriage a “sacred” (i.e. faith-endorsed) endeavor. If some faith denies a church marriage to a gay couple, I don’t agree with them, but that’s the church’s business. But if you have to get the legal document – a marriage license – from the state, not allowing gays to marry (with a justice of the peace, for example) seems to be discriminatory.
• Yes, we have an African-American president: Let the slurs begin. To be fair, the slurs and racist pictures/cartoons sprung up once Obama (the candidate) first gained traction in the 2008 election, but it’s still going on. I’m not going to point to any of them, but a recent Facebook post by a sick individual called for the assassination of the president and his family, and worded in a very racist manner. Unsavory stuff.

  Come on people – we’re a century beyond the Civil War, almost 50 years beyond the Civil Rights Act and 60+ years beyond Jackie Robinson’s Major League debut.

That’s just a small sampling of the hate I heard/read/saw this year. I think the normal reasons are behind it:

• The proliferation of 24-hour news, blogs and so on demands the beast be fed at an ever-increasing rate. Measured thought is sometimes not an option/used.
• We still have a disturbing number of bigoted/narrow-minded individuals in America.

Here’s to hoping we turn down the volume on the hate in 2012.

In Valpo for the holiday weekend, Day Two of the “Eat Feast” was getting underway on Christmas Day.

In the pic: Had the brats, sausage and sauerkraut, stuffing, potatoes, beans and so on.

Yet – still to come – steak, beer can chicken, turkey, mashed potatoes, rolls and so on.

A day later, I’m still full. Yowzaa!

Good company, good fun. Actually, good weather – sunny and somewhat warm (40ish). Kids might not like it (they can’t try out the new skates/sleds), but just fine by me!

Today’s pet peeve is very simple: Anyone who writes for the web should have to, up top, supply the date said article/blog post was posted. If a multi-author site (or a single author site, but with a visiting voice), the author’s name up front, as well. Why not?

This has always irritated me – I’d read through this or that well-meaning (and interesting) article only to discover it was written in 20XX, before this or that happened.

With politics, especially, timing matters.

It’s frustrating to read a long article/blog entry and then, after three screen of text, you see that it was written even a week ago. In internet/political time, that’s years.

And what’s the downside to this suggestion? Maybe you won’t get the read? You already got the click…

Why not??

Watching – and greatly enjoying – Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary.

He’s divided it up into nine innings (get it?); we’re at the end of the fifth, which ends before WW2.

So far highly enjoyable (I know the names, even if I don’t know the stories), and well weaved.

I like that many different voices – Studs Terkel, George Will, Red Barber (and so on) – providing some balance. Or an unscripted voice.

As I said, we’re at the end of the fifth, before WW2. Negro leagues are still segregated from the regular leagues.

Yep, warming up to Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey.

Update 12/19/2011 – One of the more interesting stories in the Fifth Inning, which told the story of baseball in the 1930s, was how baseball was introduced to radio.

In the 1930s, the US was – of course – in the midst of the Great Depression. There was 25% unemployment, and every industry, including baseball, was adversely impacted. Going to the ballpark was a luxury many could no longer afford, and attendance suffered.

All sorts of gimmicks were used to lure folks into the ballpark – pre-game beauty pageants and give-aways. The usual.

And then someone hit upon the idea of harnessing the then-nascent medium of radio and actually deliver the games live (I think they were telegraphed into the broadcast room and then read out on the air).

Many owners were against this: They feared that broadcasting the games – for free – would undermine attendance, which was their cash cow.

Sound familiar?

At the end of the day, broadcasting the games increased the fan base, especially with women. Before, Burns’ film notes, only men and “women of questionable character” attended games. With radio, the game of baseball was reaching across genders, and now 50% of the population could potentially become a fan.

I’m guessing that as the series continues, more and more stadium shots will contain more and more women.

Those corporate types just don’t learn. Even back in the 1930s there was an unfounded fear of free. History continues to repeat itself…

Finally.

We’re still leaving behind roughly 20,000 Americans (advisers, contractors, some troops), but the combat phase of the almost nine-year war is over.

Begun in March 2003 with a “shock and awe” campaign (remember that?) designed to allow rapid takeover of the country where we were supposed to be “greeted as liberators.”

Didn’t quite work out that way.

And the Mideast continues to be a tinderbox.

But one conflict down, one (Afghanistan) to go. It’s a step in the right direction.

Flipboard, that wonderful iPad app finally came out on the iPhone the other day, and I quickly downloaded same.

Fiddling with the app, setting up sources and so on, I ran across the readwriteweb.com, a site I go to way too seldom yet always enjoy. So I added it to my flipboard.

The next day or so, I ran across an following article on the site, describing the shift in popularity of various programming languages. It got me thinking about shifts in programming, but it hit home when I read in today’s dead-tree version of the Chicago Tribune about the increase in online/mobile shopping this past Cyber Monday:

IBM analysis of Cyber Monday sales after Thanksgiving last month not only found a 33 percent increase over last year, but mobile devices such as phones and tablets accounted for 6.6 percent of those sales, up from 2.3 percent in 2010. A recent ComScore report found 26 percent of consumers say they compare prices among outlets by scanning codes with their mobile devices.

— Phil Rosenthal, Amazon promo brings bricks, mortar to retail debate

Now, none of the Cyber Monday stats are that much of a surprise, except for the mobile number: While Cyber Monday sales went up 33% (great for a struggling economy), the mobile usage almost tripled over the past year – up 286%!

I see two trends shaping the shift in programming languages – and the shift in programming in general, and these articles reflected same.

1. The rush to the web – as opposed to enterprise apps – continues apace. Yet at the same time, how web sites are built is changing.
2. Mobile is opening a whole new front, one that gets larger everyday. Yet a great deal of mobile work is on stand-alone apps (Flipboard, HootSuite, Instagram etc) rather than web applications.

The rush to the web

I don’t have any links to point to this fact, but just look around. It’s almost impossible to not get good information online about any given company, and I know many, many companies that are ditching their proprietary, C/C++ apps and are moving to the web.

One big part of this is the rise of cloud computing. Look at SalesForce.com: Why have a desktop client/data center when you can put it all in the cloud and access via a browser from anywhere? Updates are immediate; your data is backed up (hopefully). With the cloud, there are security issues – do I really want to put company financials in the cloud? – but https and VPNs are making this less of an issue. Company financials’ distribution was formerly an Excel spreadsheet to an email list. How secure is that?

At the same time, one of the web trends I’m seeing is the rise of more robust, commercial web deployments – say, like SalesForce.com. Which is one of the reasons for the continued popularity of Java and the rise of C# (Microsoft’s answer to Java).

PHP and Python are, on the other hand, dropping compared to compiled languages for the same reason: Where a company – say a bank – may have launched a consumer site in PHP a few years ago, once it decides to go company-wide (inside and outside sites), it’ll probably settle on a more robust, compiled language. So that consumer site might be PHP today, but as the back-end gets completed, the bank’ll want all sites on the same codebase, so it’ll go to Java or JSP, let’s say.

The rush to the web continues, but deployment has changed – both in changes listed above and the evolution of web site deployment.

In the very recent past, most web sites were one offs: built for the company/customer. A lot of hand-built sites.

Today, with the much better browser standards support (mainly CSS and Javascript) and the proliferation of excellent CMS (content-management system) choices – WordPress, Joomla, Drupal – the need to start from scratch is in many, many cases unnecessary.

Let’s look at one CMS: WordPress (just as an example).

It’s been around for a number of years, well past the “we’re working the kinks out” stage.

Excellent documentation, robust functionality that is strongly OO (object-oriented).

Runs on PHP against a mySql database, which is a very common environment for many developers.

And it’s free. (Did I mention that it’s free??)

So I see a lot of agencies that create web sites for clients essentially taking WordPress, modifying it to the customer’s/company’s needs, and doing the same for the next customer/company.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with this – why reinvent the wheel? WordPress (etc) has commenting built in, functions one can turn on and off, a master CSS file that can control the site’s GUI. What’s not to like?

But these are pre-packaged designs, and one main way to change same (mainly via AJAX) is to use JavaScript.

Yes, the other language that has gone up in popularity.

Javascript…oh, love/hate relationship. Powerful; hack laden (especially in IE; getting better); controlling more of the interface each day.

Libraries like JQuery are helping this javascript push because the rise of javascript against the DOM in getting more important every day. AJAX is javascript, as is JQuery, and they’re both helping your basic web pages act more like compiled programs. It’s amazing how much it has advanced over the last decade or so. Crazy.

I expect javascript to continue to gain popularity, as more sites – either powered by WordPress (or other clones) or by high-level language (Java/C# etc) – come online. Javascript is, on the web, controlling more of the user experience than the base language (compiled/interpreted).

That’s a big shift.

So, the web continues to grow, and it’s getting more “heavy iron” and built on the shoulders of giants.

How is the mobile space going?

© Apple – from www.apple.com

The mobile space

The last section was “The rush to the web” – This section could well be called “the race against the web.”

Why?

Well, for whatever reason (I’ve never programmed for mobile, so I only have opinions, little first-hand knowledge), mobile has gone app – downloadable, compiled programs – that are like Word or Excel on the desktop.

Very few web (browser-based) apps.

This accounts for the huge increase in Objective-C programming (for iOS) and part of the continued success of Java (for Android phones). Note: We’ll see what happens to numbers once Windoze 8 phones start making penetration – and I’m honestly not sure what language the Metro interface uses (I’m guessing C#).

But why not the rush to the web here?

I think that it is two-fold:

• HTML can’t support what we want on a mobile phone (Flipboard etc.; see above) natively today. Sorry.
• Mobile is tethered to a battery. Compiled is always faster than interpreted and so on. It’s all about – to a certain extent – the joules.

I predict that someday, HTML6 (or whatever) and better batteries (charge over WiFi???) will make the hold app vs. web app a thing of the past, and – for most uses – the web app will win.

But I dunno. I’ll be the first to admit this.

Well, I like astronomy.

And I saw – a couple of years ago – an awesome iPad app that shows what’s in the sky.

I only have an iPhone, but Star Walk – the iPhone App – is incredible. Pic is screenshot what’s in the east at this time.

Very well done.

One of the reasons mobile will rule….

OK – it’s been a couple of weeks since I got an iPhone; here are my initial impressions:

• The obvious – yeah, it’s better than a StarTAC.
• Battery life is problematic, and I’m not a heavy phone user. iOS 5.0.1 didn’t change anything for me.
• The camera is great.
• The lack of documentation – there is no owner’s manual included – is, to me, weird. Sure, this this the fourth iPhone. Does that mean everyone knows how to use it? While a very intuitive phone – if you know what it should do (gestures, etc) – how do I get pics off my phone? How to upload pic so I can have an old (non-iPhone) pic as wallpaper? Not intuitive. Lots of googling.
• Another, more basic, example of how lack of documentation is silly: There are five physical buttons on the iPhone. What do they do??? Not hard to figure out, but, come on…just a drawing with arrows and labels…
• Tight integration with iTunes is both good and bad. I’m on a Windoze desktop; probably less problematic on a Mac.
• If I turn off my phone, Angry Birds resets to Level 1. Makes me…angry…
• Notifications are awesome. I think this is new to this OS (iOS 5); to me, it seems like something that should have always been there. Part of the smartphone ecosystem.
• Siri rocks.
• I still mainly use it for a phone. It’s nice to have email there should I need it, but – generally – that’s rare for me. And I’m not into texting, so that’s another squandered opportunity.

That’s all I gots right now!