Today, as a result of becoming a better programmer over the last five years, I am pretty capable of using the appropriate quotes in differing contexts. In fact, I’ve noticed that the better I get, the more troubled I am by even little things like inappropriate quotes for strings. I don’t think that using double quotes for a simple string is too big of a performance hit, but it has become almost a cognitive hit for me. I also get little hits when I see old loops that are inefficient, badly formatted code, and the like. None of which is really affecting the bottom line of the website. But I’m noticing that as I get better at the big stuff, my brain is learning to be picky about even the smallest stuff.

Half of all registered users still log in to Facebook every day, says Sandberg in the interview. That’s 175 million people. And that doesn’t include Facebook Connect logins, only those people that visit the Facebook website.

175 million people is far more than the number of people who voted in the 2008 US presidential election (131,257,328). It’s far more than the population of Mexico (111,211,789). It is far larger than the nation with the second largest national economy on Earth, Japan(127,530,000). And it’s still growing like crazy. Facebook, of course, is not really comparable to a country, but at some point the size of a community becomes a very important feature.

When it came to the notorious split infinitive (e.g., “to boldly go where no man . . .”), [Fowler] observed that those English speakers who neither know nor care about them “are to be envied” by the unhappy few who do.

- H. W. Fowler, the King of English

Certainly, any grammatical advice that goes up against Star Trek, deserves what it gets. Somehow Fowler understood that, decades before anyone met Captain Pike, never mind Kirk.

John McCormack of the Weekly Standard fell Tuesday night as he tried to speak with the Democrat while simultaneously videotaping her and trying to pass a metal grate on a Washington sidewalk.

- Reporter takes stumble chasing Mass. candidate

Let’s see the video:

It’s hard to describe that as anything other than sheer abridgment of the freedom of the press. An unfriendly reporter was asking questions of a candidate and someone working for the candidate assaulted the reporter. I mean, what else is there? The Boston Globe is happy to edit history’s first draft in this case and YouTube is here to provide the second draft.

Ultimately, this incident isn’t about an election, or partisan politics. It’s about a fundamental American value that is being ignored by the Coakley Campaign (and the guy is definitely with the campaign). Americans want a free and functioning press. We want tabloid journalism and Pulitzer Prize journalism. We want to hear lies and we want to see journalists expose the truth. We don’t want to see some flack assault a journalist and we certainly don’t want to see other journalists covering it up. That is just as much against American values as police protecting themselves by arresting innocent cellphone videographers.

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. – The Official Google Blog

Good for Google! As an American, I grew up with a pretty steady drumbeat of praise for free speech. It’s not easy for me to think of many values that resonate with me as strongly and as clearly as freedom of speech. And so I’m very happy to see Google withdrawing from their arrangement with the Chinese government. Freedom is the ultimate complementary good.

Oh, Android phones aren’t better than an iPhone, not yet; but the Nexus One and the Droid and such will push Apple to do things its closed mentality would rather not do. It will push battery technology — you need power to use a network machine all the time. It will push cellular companies to commoditize their bandwidth. Add in Google Voice, and you no longer need a separate voice plan. Having lots and lots of super-capable smartphones will push people (and then companies) to cloud data, which will make RIM unhappy but Google very happy. The list goes on.

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Google is intent in raising the average in areas it thinks are key to its future. – Why Did Google Build a Phone and a Browser?

Another way of saying this is that Google is a company that takes complementary goods seriously. When the price of the PS3 goes down, the sales for PS3 games will go up. When your browser’s javascript engine gets faster, you will be happier to use websites with more javascript. These things complement each other.

Google is the only firm I’m aware of with a position of Chief Economist, held by Hal Varian, a UC-Berkeley economist. And it’s with issues like this that we see why such a person is worth their weight in gold (probably literally). I think a lot of what makes Google the friendly company that it is is its understanding of complementary goods. In general, Google seems happy not only to help the growth of industries that it makes money from, but also complementary industries. As far as I know, Google doesn’t sell bandwidth. But they do give it away for free sometimes. Google would be happy if people were a little more used to using the web at the airport. Every additional unit of time on the web that a person spends is a win for Google, because time on the web is a complementary good to their advertising and other services.

For this reason, Google gets to be the technology industry good guy. They’re not trying to squeeze money out of every sector they look at. They do shake things up, as in mobile phones and desktop browsers. But they are great friends of the web for solid business reasons. So, maybe the industries that are fighting the web, like mobile telecoms and some media companies, have something to worry about in Google. But those of us who are also friends of the web have nothing to worry about.

At least for now. My previous post was partially about one of my worries for Google. Right now Google succeeds in large part because it has smart people like Hal Varian, LarryNSergey, and probably thousand of other folks I’ll never hear about. But corporations outlive their staff. One day Google might be run by folks with less sensitivity for a complementary goods strategy, but will still feel the pull of strong quarterly results. I think that Google will remain a company we can trust, so long as they talk the talk and walk the walk of the web. Once they start trying to push everyone into Google services and away from the rest of the web, we should worry. Which is exactly what worries me about Chrome OS.

We’re happy to announce that over the next few weeks we will be rolling out the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs. With this change, you’ll be able to upload and access your files from any computer — all you need is an Internet connection. – Google Docs Blog

Well, obviously Google is getting ready for the world of Chrome OS. Now we get to prepare, too. I don’t really want to list all the aspects of our digital lives already live on servers, but let’s all agree that it’s more than it was ten years ago. The trend toward moving your apps and data onto the internet is real and seems to be speeding up.

It’s also interesting to consider how different approaches to handling multiple devices used by the same person is handled by different companies. At Microsoft, let’s use Exchange as their ideal. A server managed by an IT professional with lots of relatively powerless users each grabbing data from it. For Apple, let’s use the iPhone/iPod model. The Desktop/Laptop is the master copy and for the most part the iPhone/iPod copies from it. Some data can flow the other way, but the Desktop/Laptop is the senior partner here. Google’s model is that all your data is on a Google server. Your devices don’t ’sync’ so much as ‘cache’.

These three models are pretty tightly coupled to how each firm likes to do business, too. Microsoft loves to sell software to companies, Apple likes to sell computers and devices to consumers, and Google likes to run everything themselves drop prices through the floor in order to bring in users. There are some really great things about having all your data managed by competent professionals, as would be the case with Chrome OS, but it’s hard to see how Google will be able to avoid following Microsoft’s path into making their users’ satisfaction secondary to other considerations. It’s an interesting constraint that Apple has, in that they sell almost entirely to end users. If Windows 7 isn’t compelling to the average Windows user, Microsoft can still try and sell to their real market, corporate IT. When Apple makes their users unhappy, they have nowhere else to turn (for evidence, see Apple’s market cap before Steve Jobs’s return). Sooner or later, it seems that Google’s huge reliance on advertising revenue will turn them against their users.

There’s a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn’t proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe’s Flash— always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth. – World Wide Mush by Jaron Lanier

Of course, all of Apple’s OS X-ish devices are already based on free UNIX distributions. The licenses of the open software requires Apple in some cases to provide the source code for the binaries they ship, and Apple complies. That doesn’t make the above claim false, exactly. I think it shows that the technology industry is a complex one. There are lots of relatively old and well understood problems that have open solutions, like compilers. Can closed solutions outperform GCC, for example? Sure. But a free, good enough, solution allows everyone else to spend their money and time on other problems. Maybe XCode wouldn’t be as delightful if Apple’s money and man power had been directed to reinventing GCC?

It’s easy to only point to the best example of closed development (but why would anyone point to Adobe Flash?), but these days there are lots of unsexy things that open source really excels at. A huge portion of internet infrastructure is open source, and this very blog is made of entirely open software. Blogging is a great example of a well understood problem that has several commodity solutions. There was a time, not so long ago, when it seemed like an open source web browser was too much to ask for, but obviously Mozilla eventually provided one for us. Then we got WebKit (really, KHTML, etc) and now we have Chromium. Whatever an iPhone is, exactly, is not well understood. Android is slowly figuring out how to solve the “small form mobile computer with phone” problem, but right now Apple has it nailed. And they didn’t even need to invent their own compiler for it, either. And, slowly, open source and culture is working its way up. Commodification is a form of wealth creation, and a really profound one. This is really what “Information wants to be free” means. Information wants to be copied, and after you get enough copies, you suddenly have a commodity.

I have an iPhone, and I hate AT&T… but I repeat myself. I use a Mac, and I hate Microsoft… but I repeat myself again. And now I learn that AT&T and Microsoft are going to team up to bring me television? Well, It’s really lucky that television is such a stable and uncomplicated business these days. Otherwise, I might worry that AT&T and Microsoft would be the worst possible team to make a consumer-friendly combination of hardware and TV. Oh, wait…

Then, we heard that Steve Ballmer will be giving a speech, but no slate hardware would be shown.

Even before the speech starts, we’ve already seen Microsoft seem like they’re playing catch-up with a device that hasn’t even been announced yet (the Apple Tablet) and then had even that taken away from us. And Microsoft didn’t even do anything. Microsoft has such a bad reputation that people are disappointed when even already disappointing rumors turn out to be false!