Dylan Schiemann

I had thought about writing a treatise on why bailouts are bad, but Ron Paul saved me the time with his article that is appropriately called “The Bailout Surge“, a clear poke at the Iraq Surge (emphasis below is mine):

We must remember that governments do not produce anything. Their only resources come from producers in the economy through such means as inflation and taxation. The government has an obligation to be good stewards of these resources. In bailing out failing companies, they are confiscating money from productive members of the economy and giving it to failing ones. By sustaining companies with obsolete or unsustainable business models, the government prevents their resources from being liquidated and made available to other companies that can put them to better, more productive use. An essential element of a healthy free market, is that both success and failure must be permitted to happen when they are earned. But instead with a bailout, the rewards are reversed – the proceeds from successful entities are given to failing ones. How this is supposed to be good for our economy is beyond me.

Read the full article, The Bailout Surge, for more details

ICANN has opened up the process for gTLD. I’m certain that we’ll now finally see .mac and .msn. The application process looks grueling, and the application fee is expected to be a relatively staggerring $185,000, so don’t expect to see .dojo, .sitepen, or .dylan any time soon.

That said, if someone wants to set up .lan, I’ll be first in line to pay for dy! For now, I’ll stick with dylan.io.

Something weird is going on, because the prices of everything are going down rapidly, including oil, gold, silver, etc. However, this is mainly a reflection of the dollar going up against foreign currency:

Prices of commodities are being crushed. Gold, the barometer of inflation, is being crushed in the USD even as I write, even though I reported last week that it set all-time highs in the Canadian dollar, Indian rupee, South African rand, British pound, and Australian dollar. The USDX is a nice number to look at (although technically it’s for the birds) but it has climbed sharply where some factors I did not register such as foreign dollar-denominated bank accounts redemptions, especially in places like Europe, are forcing banks to buy dollars and sell Euros, and most likely some derivative movements hidden from view.

This means gold is at an all-time high in the UK, while down more than 20% in the past few weeks in the US. So, now that everyone is in debt, and owes more on their house than it is worth, the only thing not going down in value in the US is your debt!

Michael Carter of Orbited recently published a fun and colorful introduction to WebSocket:

I was at first overjoyed at the prospect of the World Wide Web’s new status as a real boy. But such feelings were just a precursor to the greatest technology-driven depression of my life. You see, as recently as twenty years ago the world was brimming with real programmers, who knew how to do such amazing things as write programs that conversed with far-away computers by using bsd sockets. We’ve traded those programmers, by and large, for JavaScript kiddies. Its not that the real programmers all died, retired, or gave up with programming; rather, every new programmer of the past decade is a bright-eyed 22 year old who thinks he’s the best thing since Google, what with his domination of rails (, java, or php) and JavaScript.

For more of Michael’s writing about Comet, visit Comet Daily, a web site I helped create to better explain Comet.

Frank Zammetti has released a new Dojo book, Practical Dojo Projects.

I haven’t seen the book yet, so it’s too soon to review, but knowing Frank’s other books, it’s sure to be a great and informative read.

This book follows on the heels of the first three Dojo books.

A number of Facebook users are petitioning to keep the old Facebook design. I switched to the new design when I first noticed the option, and it is such a significant improvement over the old design that I would consider switching back to be a bit silly.

It’s a cleaner, more efficient, more informative design, that uses more of your screen space if it’s available. It is concise and refined by comparison to the old Facebook design. At the end of the day, a lot of people don’t like change, hence their desire to petition.

The outcome may not make the petitioners happy in the short term, but the bottom line in my opinion is that a complex social platform like Facebook cannot afford to maintain two diverging platforms indefinitely, and we’ll see the old platform removed shortly.

The new iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2.0 software update can best be described as the most successful failure I can remember. Apple has sold an astounding number of phones and applications, and yet is failing in so many different ways:

• MobileMe: A terribly bungled deployment that is still suffering through issues of data integrity and push between the desktop and the iPhone is not what users expect.
• Lines and availability: Lines are long every day that phones are available, as a result of the terribly inefficient activation process. Since when did it become acceptable to make customers wait 2-4 hours to purchase a phone? I want to give you my money for a new iPhone, but I won’t until you stop wasting our time with a process designed to block people from unlocking their phones, but instead just slows things down for everyone.
• Cracking: Reports of the plastic cracking on new iPhones (sounds like the MacBook and G4 Cube mess all over again.
• Instability: iPhone software instability from dozens of people I know. My first generation iPhone is crashing much more regularly, is much much slower and less responsive when switching applications, and while the new apps are decent, the user experience for entering passwords is cumbersome, having apps not preserve state when quitting and returning later, and the phone locking up repeatedly during calls has so far not been worth the update. A jailbroken 1.1.4 iPhone was much more stable.
• StyleThe white iPhone looks terrible… 3-toned white, black, and silver? Who let this design get out the door? Saying that the white model is fugly is an understatement.

And yet, Apple can chalk this release up as yet another major success. I love my iPhone and other Apple products, but so far my expectations are not being met with the iPhone 2.0 software and the 3G iPhone experience. I fully understand why existing iPhone users are not as excited as new buyers.

I recently upgraded to the iPhone 2.0 software, and then finally upgraded my desktop to Leopard after waiting for the “best beta evar” to stabilize. I noticed shortly thereafter that iTunes no longer recognized my iPhone. After a software update, reboot, and moving the iPhone to a different USB port, I still couldn’t see the iPhone.

Fortunately, the solution was quite easy in the end, thanks to the answer provided on this Apple support forum: “Have you tried reinstalling iTunes over iTunes?”

This classic, Windows-esque brute force fix worked like a charm.

I’d like to propose a simple plan to really change things in the US. I don’t really know if this is even an original idea, but here it goes…

Our current woes are due in large part to the two-party duopoly of the Democratic and Republican parties, and the people controlling the candidates within those parties that are allowed to be nominated for election. Third-party candidates are treated as fringe and irrelevant, because they believe strongly enough about their principles to not agree with anyone else (a similar parallel comes to mind with Linux distributions).

The only way to break this cycle is to actually get a third-party candidate elected. It doesn’t matter what party or really even what they believe in (see US Presidents, 1988-2008), provided they agree to a few things if elected:

• Choose a cabinet of members representing all of the other third parties that helped get said candidate elected
• Work furiously to change election laws that favor the current two-party system (this is probably naive)
• Do right by the people of this country

The goal would be to replicate this model across the congress and the senate throughout the US, to completely strip the two main political parties of their dominant positions, allowing legislation to pass that would eliminate the benefits of the two-party system. A final goal would be voting reform to follow a model like New Zealand where every vote counts. So how do we make this happen:

• Pick the candidate with the best chance of winning (Barr, Nader, Baldwin, Paul… at this point, I don’t care who, just get someone in there that will work to remove the two-party monopoly
• Have all other parties rally their supporters to get this candidate elected

Is this just an odd, quirky idea that’s failed before, or something so simple that it might actually work?

A recent post from David Hyatt on the www-style-list answers my question from April 15th: Will we see CSS variables next?. The short answer is yes!

WebKit now has an experimental implementation of CSS variables:

You can test this feature using a WebKit nightly

Test cases

Thanks to David Hyatt and Daniel Glazman for bringing something to CSS that many of us have wanted for nearly a decade! For additional information, go read the discussion thread.