I could sell a mill saying nothing on the track.

I’m trying to right my wrongs, But it’s funny how them same rights helped me write this song.

Gør alt jeg kan for at elske det banale Ville da gerne redde den tredje verden, men har lidt travlt med min kabale.

We fought your wars with all our hearts, You sent us back in body parts

Han var […] rastløs som en satellit.

Don’t shoot I cried, I’m a man and all.

So, Gruber says that Hulu is out of beta. Yay; for all its Conservatism, Fox does have some pretty good shows (The Simpsons; Prison Break; Futurama). It even has movies, too.

So I check out The Usual Suspects, just for kicks. But, as it turns out, Fox and NBC do not like Europeans. At least they do not trust their content to us. “Well”, I think, “maybe it’s only like this for the films — that would make some sense”. So I check out Prison Break. Nope, no luck.

Now, I know calling discrimination is overly simplified, as there are copyrights and what not. But still, this is supposed to be Fox and NBC’s own content, why can they not show it to us overseas? The Daily Show works just fine here. No, maybe not all of the advertising would hit its aimed recipients, but you never have that certainty. You can do as much viewer analysis as you want to, you will never get a guarantee. So please, show it to us. Maybe we will even like the ads.

How wonderfully meta.

In the world of software there has over the past year or so been a quite heated debate over which is better: more or less features. The proponents of more features have an argument that seems so obvious: more features mean better product, right? This is a quite logical argument. In this debate, this view has been most prominently supported by Don Norman, who reports from experience, for instance regarding Asian technology shoppers.

In the other corner we have those who support less bloated products, the “less is more”–crew. 37 signals are notorious for holding this view, with slogans like instead of one-upping, try one-downing [the competition].

And then we have me. I find myself somewhere in the middle, as any good practitioner of dialectic. I believe that in their focus on being right, they miss the main point: selection.

First of all, I must admit that I lean towards the “less” camp. I believe many features are added to products, simply for the sake of adding a feature. Furthermore, I lean towards the “less” camp, because Norman makes a horrible case for himself, using arguments that do not suit his claim, and that can be counter-argued without much effort.

Norman’s argument that we should add many features to products because they sell better misses the goal by so many miles, I doubt it can even be counted as a counter-argument. What Norman is advocating is catering to the standards of today, and have the product seem attractive to prospective buyers. What 37signals are advocating is instead to make your product be more attractive. An idealistic approach, maybe, but one that will arguably result in greater software, which is always a good thing if you want to sell software.

What Norman does not seem to get is the fact that 37signals are not interested in catering to the common consumer, thus not interested in appearing great. In his most recent piece, he criticises their arrogant attitude, citing the fact that DHH has publicly admitted that he is building software for himself. But in criticising that, he is ignoring a conventional wisdom that the agile software crowd (lead by 37s) have accumulated over the past few years: if you build software you yourself use, you will have an immediate customer to test against. Of course, not all software developers are so fortunate that they have this opportunity, but that is some of the beauty of the 37signals concept: if focusing on stuff they can use themselves means they cannot grow beyond certain limits, so be it.

But 37signals are not home free, not even close. They are also missing the real secret behind great software: selection.

Furthermore, they do not even follow their own advice. They do, in fact, add features to their software, despite claiming the opposite is necessary to write great software. This shows that they do in fact get the secret, just that they preach something else.

“Have a feature less than the competition” works great as a slogan, but it blurs the spectrum, and adds fuel to the other camp. For it is an insane advice. Following that rationale to its logical conclusion, the best piece of software would be one without features. But of course, no one in their right mind would ever agree to this. In coming up with a rule of thumb, 37signals neglect the real point of it all: select what you need to remain focus on the task of the application.

Sometimes you do need to add a feature for the software to be better, to better fulfil its purpose. Oftentimes, a suggested feature will add unnecessary complexity, striding away from the main goal. Focus and selection are the keys to this. There is no golden rule you can always follow, you have to make a conscious decision for every considered feature: does it, or does it not, help users fulfil the goal this piece of software is aimed at helping them with? Only then can you create great software.

The day has arrived at last; I have merged Simply Jonathan and holst.notes at the simplyjonathan.com domain. The reasons for this are many, but the primary is that it seemed unnecessary to have them separated. So, starting some time last week, I began redesigning Simply Jonathan to accommodate for new, shorter entries.

I had a long time ago planned to redesign Simply Jonathan, and move it to WordPress. The things I said back then still are true; I just realised that it did not really matter. No, blog systems are still not geared towards the longer entries I want to write, but they are not hostile either, and so it seemed strange to keep on to a publishing engine that did not really cut it. The problem was, after I had launched it, I did not really want to do anymore. This left me with a raw Django admin that, albeit pretty, lacked all the automatic processes I need to write efficiently. WordPress had those, and then the horrible code throughout the system, and the stupid template system was of less importance. I still do not like WordPress, but it does as labelled, and that is fine for me at the moment.

In the midst of it, I also decided to merge my del.icio.us postings into the blog, to emulate a Gruber-esque Linked List approach. A, shall we say, interesting experience. More on that in a bit.

So, after I realised that I would move it into one WordPress installation, I did as follows:

1. I manually entered the three Simply Jonathan entries into the system. It seemed like too much work to write a conversion script from a custom format to WordPress, since it was only about three entries. Copy/paste in all its glory.

2. I then wanted to import all the 100-something notes into the system. Now, suffice it to say, this was too much manual labour. And since they were both WordPress, I figured I could just export the holst.notes posts table, and import it into the Simply Jonathan one. Not so. Apparently, I had used ISO-8859-1 with holst.notes, but I opted for UTF-8 on Simply Jonathan. Oh well, this is not really anything I can blame the WordPress team for, this was my own fault.

   So I decided to investigate the ex-/import possibilities I had discovered in the Simply Jonathan interface. However, holst.notes was running an ancient version of WordPress, one from before the time they realised that this sort of behaviour could happen. Bugger. Oh well, I would just have to use the WordPress-to-Wordpress plugin. So I did. But when time came and I had to upload it, WordPress was giving me an error. Turns up, upon code investigation, that WordPress believes it can safely write onto whatever location PHP stores its temporary upload files. Turns out, it could not on my host. So I had to FTP it to the server, and then hardcode the location to that file. Not pretty, but at least it worked. Then I did a bit of hacking regarding categories, as I decided to slightly change formats, and holst.notes was done.

3. Importing del.icio.us posts proved to be quite tricky, although that was to be expected, given the quite custom format I wanted. I wound up writing a hacked up parsing mechanism for the bookmark format del.icio.us exports into (which seems to be a browser parseable format). Using WordPress’ quite excellent custom fields, I managed to hack up a solution that works quite well.

So now I have a new style blog with three different types of content: links, notes and essays. I hope it will be great.