Tumblelogs are blogs with less fuss and more stuff. Tumblr is your friendly and free tool for creating tumblelogs.

Think of a tumblelog like Daring Fireball’s Linked List. Its a place for quick posts that in and of themselves do not warrant an entire blog entry. The sorts of things you post to your tumblelog might also have been gathered together in a single summary post for the day or week. Unlike Twitter which I still don’t see the use of, Tumblr makes it easy to share little tidbits of information with people without derailing the flow of your main blog. They provide quick ways to post text, photos, quotes, links, conversations, and videos.

Now I just wonder how long it will take before someone creates a desktop client for the Mac like Iconfactory did with Twitterrific for Twitter.

Update: I’ve created my own tumblelog on Tumblr.

There were only a handful of questions asked and none of those were anything specifically about climate change which was disappointing to me. But, Mr. Obama has recently signed onto the McCain-Lieberman bill to address greenhouse-gas emissions and he was able to highlight that at one point last night. He mentioned E85 and other biofuels, though personally I see these as little more than a stop gap. He also mentioned raising CAFE standards by 4% per year, which would be great, but even better if they were already at realistic numbers. There was only one question I felt he avoided and that was with regard to his lack of experience with foreign policy. His response was to outline the experience he does have and how it would be relevant to the presidency and that was probably more politically wise than simply conceding that he lacks experience with international affairs.

One person raised the question of gay marriage (I think the audience would have been better served with a question on climate change) and Mr. Obama’s response was sensible even if not what some wanted to hear. The short version is that he is in favor of civil unions with full legal benefit instead of gay marriage. Personally I’m all for gay marriage. Regardless of what many people may believe marriage is nothing but a legal agreement between you and the state you live in. You can have a religious ceremony, but it isn’t a requirement. A marriage certificate is. If two people love each other and want to be married it should be legal. But I really don’t see gay marriage as a presidential issue. Many states have already passed laws against it and so in order for there to be gay marriages that are accepted throughout the country the supreme court would have to declare those laws unconstitutional. I’m not sure why anyone would expect anything more than Mr. Obama’s response out of a serious presidential candidate. Saying you were in favor of gay marriage would instantly lose you some percentage (and probably a fairly large one) of your supporters or potential supporters.

I look forward to seeing some of the other candidates speak at UNH later in the year. I’m not ready to sign up for any campaign at the moment but I’m sure I will before the primary rolls around.

Programmers don’t like to code, we like to solve problems. Coding is not problem solving, but software problem solving usually involves some coding.

Solving problems is far more interesting than writing code. Writing code is tedious and annoying half the time. And personally, once I’ve solved the problem I am very disinterested in the rest of the code that needs to be written to create a full application. I’m not really a finisher. Any projects I have finished took a lot of effort to push through the de-motivation of working on something I was fundamentally not interested in. When you’ve got a problem you want to solve you are generating ideas and ideas are fun to play around with. Once you’ve got a solution in mind finding how to implement it can also be fun (though not always). I enjoy writing prototypes and getting the guts of the solution in place but once it comes time to move beyond that I start to slow down. My interest wanes and my procrastination increases.

This isn’t only in relation to software projects. I enjoy the act of photographing and solving the problem of creating the picture I want but I rarely bother to print the result. The series of articles I want to write for this blog were a lot of fun to research and makes notes about but I haven’t sat down to write them yet. When I took my first course at The Workshops the founder of the school gave a presentation that resonated with me. He said it was quite alright that you not be a finisher so long as you form a relationship with a craftsman who is one. In photography this means finder yourself a master printer. I wonder if such detail oriented folks exist in the software industry? Perhaps I need to find one for my software projects.

Let’s take a look at some of the content:

We’ve been taught that a president should come from right here, born, raised, bred, fed in America. To go outside and bring somebody in from another nationality, now that doesn’t feel right to some people.

Hrm. Now I could be wrong, but I don’t recall a single Native American president. Seriously, you’re going to ding this guy because his family hasn’t been American that long? News flash, none of our families have been. The only thing truly interesting about American history is the amazing lack of it. The Queen of England lives part of the year in a castle that is more than twice as old as our country. Being born here, a so called natural-born citizen, is a requirement for becoming president but Mr. Obama qualifies on that count. The rest of the very short list of requirements doesn’t say anything about eating your meals here or even being raised here.

He married black. He acts black. But there’s a lot of distance between black Africans and African-Americans.

Phew, well its a good thing he married black, because we sure as hell wouldn’t want him to marry for love alone. What exactly is “acting black”? Is there a set of guidelines that those of us at home can keep in mind to judge the “blackness” of our candidates by? I’m assuming the last sentence implies that Mr. Obama is a black African instead of an African-American but this is very confusing to me. Isn’t he in fact the very essence of African-American? He father was a black man from Kenya and his mother a white woman from Kansas. Let’s see, Kenya is in Africa and Kansas, I’m pretty sure, is in America. Would that not be an African-American? Ah but see, his ancestor’s weren’t brought here from Africa during the time of slavery, so apparently African-American carries with it a time requirement as well. Well hey, two out of three ain’t bad.

His supporters, who note that he carried the black vote in his Senate race, say they are unperturbed by a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll that found that 20 percent of black voters surveyed supported Mr. Obama while 60 percent supported Ms. Clinton.

I can’t blame them for being unperturbed. Who exactly were they polling? No, strike that, I don’t want to know what demographic is comprised of a majority of voters who think Hillary could actually be elected.

He doesn’t share the same kind of background as most African-Americans

How many serious contenders for the presidency do?

He’s a black politician for whom whites don’t have to feel guilty.

Reh? Do we have to feel guilty about other black politicians? Hrm, I must have missed that amendment.

He’s going to have to win over some African-Americans … They have a right to be somewhat suspicious of people who come into the country and don’t share their experience.

Why is that exactly? Why must Mr. Obama be treated with suspicion just because his ancestors didn’t suffer slavery? How many of the other candidates’ ancestors were slaves? Perhaps a better question if they really want to dwell on this is how many other candidates’ ancestors owned slaves?

Barack will tell us that we don’t have to go back to being just a white America or a black America, that we can now become something else, together … That’s the promise of his campaign, and his challenge.

It would certainly be nice if that were true, particularly since whites and blacks are not in fact the only races who call America their home. Unfortunately this article has made that seem a little less likely than I might have otherwise thought. Go back far enough and all our ancestors were black. Africa was the birthplace of homo sapiens. Let’s not judge our candidates by the color of the skin but by their values, their record, their sincerity, and their goals. I don’t know Mr. Obama’s position on most topics yet, having really only caught him briefly being interviewed by Charlie Rose, but I know that his degree of “blackness” is not what will make him a good (or bad) president.

And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

And then goes on to blatantly lie about vulnerabilities in Mac OS X in response to a question about why the features of Vista seem suspiciously similar to those in Mac OS X Tiger, which has been out nearly two years now:

Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

Perhaps he was referring to the Month of Apple Bugs which as far as I can tell was much more of a publicity stunt than a serious list of vulnerabilities against the OS. It appears from a quick perusal of their site that many of the bugs aren’t even in the OS, but in applications, some of them not even Apple’s. As far as I’ve heard there hasn’t even been one exploit where your machine can be taken over, totally or otherwise. But there certainly are not such exploits released daily. I expect the MoAB people took quite a long time to compile their list in order to know they would have a month’s worth of bugs.

Unfortunately, and I’m sure Bill knows this, all it takes to start a myth is a well publicized lie. I don’t know if Steven Levy pressed him on this because MSNBC only saw fit to publish excerpts of the interview. What a shock.

UPDATE: Michael has a similar view of this interview in his blog entry Is Bill Gates on Crack?

I would say Golf comes in second place in terms of enjoyment, followed by bowling, baseball, and boxing. I’ve really only spent time in the training modes for the other sports and I can definitely see an improvement in my ability. Boxing is just exhausting. If you want to sweat, boxing is the choice for you

Tennis the real star of this pack-in and makes me hope we’ll see a more advanced tennis simulation for the Wii. I envision a game where you can play singles (Wii Sports is always doubles) still using the Wii remote for racket motion but able to move your player with the nunchuk analog controller.

Trauma Center: Second Opinion is arcade-style, futuristic, surgery tied together with storyboard style cut scenes. The operations are faster paced than I expected and somewhat stressful as a result. Happily you can return to any point in the story line, including the operations and perform them again to raise your score. Playing at normal difficulty I’ve come in with a C score on most which ranks me as a Rookie Surgeon. There isn’t enough time for precision so I hope that as my skill with the Wii remote increases so will my skill in the O.R. Not only are you racing against the clock but you must also maintain the patients vitals. You might be tasked with removing 4 tumors and in between each you’ve got to inject the patient to get their vitals stabilized. There is a nurse with you that tells you what to do during the procedure. This gets a bit distracting because you need to know what she says but you’ve also got the clock ticking and the vitals dropping. I think there could be room for a more precise and possibly more realistic operation game, though one nice thing about Trauma Center is that it isn’t realistic enough to make me squeamish.

Recently some friends of ours began their quest for a Wii and my wife learned a bit about the system through them and seemed more interested than I’d ever known her to be in video games. She was anxious for them to find one so we could try it out. I was excited too, but I knew I’d like it, I wasn’t convinced she would. We’ve had the chance to play Wii Sports for about 3 hours now and to my surprise Sara has contracted Wii fever. She began to read about some of the games available and got more excited. So we’re on our own Wii-quest now and are planning on getting Wii Play, Trauma Center: Second Opinion, and Rayman Raving Rabbids to start with. Wish us luck!

Overall I thought the event was worthwhile if, like me, you weren’t able to attend WWDC. I suspect that if you did attend WWDC this was better as a meet and greet than an educational experience. I will echo what others have said with regard to the exciting APIs coming in Leopard. Much of what was shown really makes you contemplate a Leopard specific version of your applications. My suggestion to people is branch your development to work on Leopard features and put your Tiger code base into maintenance. That doesn’t necessarily mean do it now, but definitely look to take advantage of what Leopard offers as soon as possible.

I think that for the most part Apple did a wonderful job on the Tech Talks, especially considering it was free to attend. Still I think there is room for improvement and I’ll be sure to send these suggestions to Apple.

• Make sure the hotel hosting the event isn’t connected to the internet via a 56k modem.
• Consider tables in addition to chairs.
• Please, please, please consider providing power to us. You ask us to bring laptops knowing well that no laptop (Apple or otherwise) will run for 9 hours yet provide us no way to power them.
• Ditch the box lunches in favor of a buffet. If something runs out at a buffet it is replaced, not true with the box lunches. I wasn’t the only vegetarian there that didn’t score a box. Alternatively poll us for our preference when we sign up so you at least have a semi-accurate count to base your boxing on.

But as I said overall it was great and if you didn’t make it to WWDC and are near one the cities where the tour is going (and it is worldwide now) definitely try to secure a slot.