Over the last 5-10 years though C has fallen out of favor with the young hipster coders. You know the guys I'm talking about. The ones that have those hot pictures of their slightly pimply faces all done up in their best super model "Blue Steel" looks off to the right of their eloquent prose about how awesome Ruby's latest incremental feature is the coming of Jesus. Or, the guys who just write endlessly about Cucumber, or whatever the testing framework of the week is.

These are also the guys who love Apple. Mostly because DHH loves Apple. Never mind that getting up and running with Ruby on Rails on a Mac takes a metric fuck ton of ass raping while on Linux it's next to trivial (well, at least if you aren't on Debian). Nope, real coders use Apple because the typography is sooooo awesome. "Look at the serifs on my Ruby do block!"

I have even heard one ruby coder say these words:

"Typography is the most important part of information science."

What?! Uh, huh? Information science has nothing to do with typography. Why would anyone ever think that? Information science is about books and human knowledge and how it's stored and searched for and the fucking font doesn't matter. That's like saying 1+1=2 but 1+1=3 because it's "emphasized font".

Well today, I am in love with Steve Jobs. He apparently agrees with me that these guys shouldn't be coding.

In 1987, my company, Living Videotext, had a hit product -- MORE. It was one of very few products selling on the Mac platform, having shipped in the prior year. It led a new category we called Desktop Presentations. The other product in the category was PowerPoint, produced by a company named Forethought. 

I had a meeting with Bill Gates at Esther Dyson's conference in 1987, and he popped the question every developer wants to hear -- Can we buy you? I said of course. So we started negotiation, agreed on a price and due diligence began. Then I got a letter from Frank Gaudette, the CFO of the company, and a phone call from Gates, saying they decided not to do the deal. They were buying our competitor, PowerPoint.  

I totally wanted the deal. In 1987 Microsoft was freshly IPO'd. The deal was for stock, and its value had doubled while they deliberated. So I sent a letter basically begging them to do the deal, but I got back the rejection above. PowerPoint became a household name, and MORE did well, but I probably would have had more fun at Microsoft, and certainly would have made more money.

Seventeen years ago, on April 10th 1991, a plane landed in John F. Kennedy airport. That plane had just crossed the Atlantic carrying, amongst others, passengers escaping the crumbling Soviet empire. One of whom was me. I walked off that plane with a first ever taste of Coca-Cola in my mouth, a lame teenage mustache, and not a clue about what to expect.

When my sister emailed me on April 10th 2008 and reminded me of our immigration anniversary, I was suddenly overwhelmed with memories. A lot has happened since then. 17 years is such a long time that it is difficult to fathom. I am left with bits and pieces of memories and the person that I am today. Each memory by itself is rarely strong and profound. A single memory is a just a dot in your timeline. But when you pile the memories on top of each other, you get a bigger and better picture. Here is to everyone who made my American Dream come true and all of you who helped me grow as a software engineer.

In the new version of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement released by Apple today (and which developers must agree to before downloading the 4.0 SDK beta), section 3.3.1 now reads:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

My reading of this new language is that cross-compilers, such as the Flash-to-iPhone compiler in Adobe’s upcoming Flash Professional CS5 release, are prohibited. This also bans apps compiled using MonoTouch and Unity3D — tools that compiles C# and .NET apps to the iPhone. It’s unclear what this means for tools like Titanium and PhoneGap, but it sounds to me like they’re on the wrong side of this new rule, and the folks behind Appcelerator already realize they might be out of bounds.

There was no mention of this change during the announcement event today, but the language in the agreement doesn’t leave much wiggle room. It could hardly be more clear if they singled out Flash CS5 by name. (Wonder what Adobe does now? CS5 is thisclose to release and the iPhone compiler is the flagship feature in this version of Flash. They’re pretty much royally fucked.)

An animal that forages will hang out in a small area, looking for nuts or berries, then will realize it has used up all the likely sources in this spot. It will then head off in a random direction, walk many paces, and start foraging again. When you plot the Levy flight, it looks like this:

Someone discovers your site. They poke and prod and join and return and return again. Then they feel as though there's no more benefit and they move on, surfing until they find another place to forage.

Back in December of last year, John Gruber noticed that the on-handset iPhone user guide exhibited a bunch of behaviors that web apps normally couldn’t. Tool bars locked in place, clicks felt natural, and scrolling elements seem to emulate those found in native apps. He did a bit of tinkering, discovering that this was all made possible by a custom Javascript framework built by Apple called “PastryKit”. This iPad sorcery appears to be an extension of that.

The guys who brought it to our attention, Done21, are tentatively referring to this unannounced, not-quite-public framework as “AdLib”, after the file that contained it all: AdLib-ug-ipad.js. This name is by no means official – it’s just the best thing we’ve got, so far.

Coming in at just shy of 45,000 lines of code, the entire purpose of AdLib appears to be to bring native app-esque functionality to Web Apps, often counteracting the default behaviors that make Safari play nice with the rest of the web.

Thing is: if the amount of time you devote to lite correspondence with individual people exceeds the amount of time you spend on making things, then you may be in a different line of work than you’d originally thought you were. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But if you’re feeling off your game, it might be a good time to ask yourself whether you’re primarily a writer of novels or of email messages. Do you generate more IMs than comic panels? Have you drafted more web comments than scenes in your screenplay? Or, for that matter, do you find you’re taking more meetings than photos these days?

What is it that you really do? What’s the last thing you made that really excited you? Where are you and your work in all that “communication?”

Your wants are beautiful, your truths are powerful. Maybe you want to sleep on a pier or share a fairytale kiss under every triumphal arch in the world. Maybe you dream of diving the wreckage of a galleon or quitting your job and starting your own company.

They’ll say you’re crazy. They’ll say, “I wish I could be as impulsive as you are,” and that you should grow up. Life isn’t like that – there are norms, you know. There are ways to do things. You don’t talk to people at the security line at the airport. You get through it as fast as possible, go to your gate, wait for them to board you, sit down and be quiet. You go to your job, bust your ass, go home, change, go to some social thing, entertain the same questions, go home, watch bad television and do it all over again. Polite, proper, efficient. That’s life, right? Then you get old and maybe play some golf, then you die.

Fuck no.

The only way to remember who you are is to refuse to let anyone or anything dictate what you want. I write to share my triumphs and defeats and to remind you that wanting something other than herd-like, soul-crushing monotony is not only natural, but necessary.

And I’ll tell you something: for every e-mail I receive that says I’m out of my fucking mind, I have two more from people sharing their deepest desires. People that much closer to remembering who they are.

And every time, I think, “you don’t have to be lonely – I’ll be your cat.”

A waker is someone who is very good at waking other people up from their metaphorical slumber.

Some people just have the gift. Being around them or their work just makes you feel more alive, more inspired, more motivated, more awake. The best wakers will make you do crazy-ass things, like quit your boring job and start your own business, write that song, move to Thailand, forgive somebody that once hurt you, or finally tell that girl that you love her.

The mini-viewer was wasteful, but fun. It wasn't optimal and had no measurable benefit to usability, but it was "filled with win."  It took extra effort but it was endearing — an important attribute not easily captured with metrics and spreadsheets.

Now sure, there are many of aspects of business and product development where it's best to stop obsessing and just cut corners. Often we can and should accept 80% of the benefit if it means 20% of the effort. Customers generally prefer the right features over more features.

But sometimes it's your job to fill the screen with joyous win.

It's absurd to look at a three year old toddler and say, "this kid can't read or do math or even string together a coherent paragraph. He's a dolt and he's never going to amount to anything." No, we don't say that because we know we can teach and motivate and cajole the typical kid to be able to do all of these things.

Why is it okay, then, to look at a teenager and say, "this kid will never be a leader, never run a significant organization, never save a life, never inspire or create..."

As part of the research for the essay, I spent some time talking to ELEW about his apparent overnight success. What quickly became clear was that – as is almost always the case – there was almost nothing ‘overnight’ about it. But more interestingly, I realized is that ELEW’s story isn’t that of an artist at all. Not really. In fact it’s the story of an entrepreneur. Moreover, it’s a story that offers several valuable lessons for anyone – entrepreneur, artist, or otherwise – who wants to be ridiculously successful in their chosen field.

Felipe grew up in Brazil.  He came to the United States in 2001 to study Software Engineering at Auburn University.  In 2005 he was graduated and took a job in South Carolina working for technology company while he started his own web design company on the side.  He made some mistakes on his immigration paperwork so he was forced to leave the country for 8 months.  He spent a bunch of this time in Canada. By 2006 he had received proper authorization to move back to the US to join a company in the town I grew up in: Sacramento, California.

But TWTFelipe is an entrepreneur.  He started another company on the side while he was working during the day at a technology company.  His new company was called YowTrip and he wanted to work on it full time.  But in the US your immigration is tied to your employment with another company so if you want to create a new company (read: create jobs) you cannot easily do so.  So he decided to start his company in Canada.  He applied for the necessary immigration papers to run his company in Canada.

While he was waiting for the paperwork to be reviewed he moved to Boulder, Colorado and took a job with a local tech company there.  He told me that at the time he still held out hopes of being able to start a company in the US.  As a technologist he felt the US was “ground zero” for technology innovation.  But it wasn’t meant to be.  TWTFelipe moved to Montreal, Canada.  Naturally he is happy there and probably has few regrets.  But I have some.  TWTFelipe and everybody like him who want to start high-tech, green tech or other scientific companies in the US should be encouraged to do so.

While I can't argue too much with the idea of using tax breaks to spur hiring and investing in infrastructure, I think smart immigration reform might be a better way to create jobs in this country. Tom Friedman agrees and in today's NY Times, he writes:

“Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. “That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.”

and

“Roughly 25 percent of successful high-tech start-ups over the last decade were founded or co-founded by immigrants,” said Litan. Think Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, or Vinod Khosla, the India-born co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY