Mile
Zero

I wish I could say I'm surprised by the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case. It would have been nice to see the manslaughter charge stick--even Florida should be able to prosecute the poor man's murder--but that was probably a long shot. The fix was in from the moment that the police had to be embarrassed into even charging Zimmerman in the first place.

There were a lot of ugly parts of the American character wrapped up in the case. There was the casual, almost off-handed racism of the whole affair, but there was also the clownishness of our national fixation on firearms. That's the narrative that drove George Zimmerman, after all: a one-man neighborhood watch, following whatever "punks" were unlucky enough to find themselves the antagonists of his inner screening of Death Wish. I imagine that there are a lot of people who knew Zimmerman, who thought he was a nut and a caricature--almost a joke. After all, I have known people who were a hair's breadth from being George Zimmerman, and I've laughed at them. They're a lot less funny now.

Over the last year, since the shooting in Newtown, Josh Marshall has reposted stories to the TPM Editor's Blog whenever there's a story on the wire services of child deaths caused by guns. On average, there's probably one a week. It's a powerful, if understated, kind of journalism, like one of those Family Guy hanging gags: at first it's horrific, then it becomes routine, and then the normality of that routine becomes devastating in and of itself. There have been a lot of kids killed in the last eight months, with surprisingly little outcry.

It's as if, across the country, we've decided to raise our kids in a tank filled with deadly scorpions. Even though we lose children on a regular basis, discussing the obvious solution--getting rid of the scorpions, maybe buying a puppy instead--doesn't seem to be an option. To the contrary: more scorpions, screams the NRA! Scorpions for everyone! Only when everyone is covered in poisonous arthropods will we truly be safe!

(Of course, as various people have commented, the NRA is oddly silent on whether or not Trayvon Martin would have been safe from assault if he had been packing heat. This differs markedly from their usual argument that the solution is always more, and more powerful, weaponry. I can't imagine what's different in this case.)

With every recent shooting, there's been a sense on the left that this time, people will see how terrible our firearms fetish has become: Tucson, Aurora, and Newtown each brought a fresh sense of unreality to the whole debate. And now George Zimmerman walks, after shooting an unarmed black teenager for the simple crime of being where George Zimmerman didn't think he belonged. Maybe, finally, this will be the case when we start to think about what all these guns actually mean as a society, but I doubt it. That gives us too much credit: the deadlier our guns, the more we cling to them for comfort. Heaven help us all.

I bought a Chromebook (the Samsung ARM model) a couple of weeks ago. It became increasingly obvious that the battery situation on my beloved Thinkpad was going from bad to worse, and trustworthy replacements are hard to find--especially on a budget. I still have lots of uses for the Thinkpad (it may end up serving as a media center if the XBox dies again), but it can't really be portable the way I need it to be when my classes start back up again.

I don't particularly want to get into the question of whether the Chromebook is a good solution for other people. I'm not other people. I can't tell you whether they'll like it. I think it covers a great deal (if not all) of the average person's computer usage, most of which is spent in a browser, but I don't have evidence to back that up, and I'm not going to treat my case as representative. What I can say is how it's working for me so far, specifically as a writer and a web programmer with a heavy emphasis on Linux tools. And the answer is that, for the most part, it's working very well.

My top priority was battery life and portability. I'm on a bus for two hours a day, and one of my goals this year has been to turn that into productive time by working on my textbook, lesson plans, or other projects, preferably with some juice left over for when I get off the bus and walk into my classroom at night. The Chromebook definitely has that covered. I'm not sure the battery meter is 100% accurate, but I tend to run out of energy before it does, and the ultrabook size is easy to carry or slip into a small Timbuktu bag. The build quality seems solid, although I'm a bit uneasy with the idea of cheap, "disposable" laptops like this.

Second priority was a decent browser experience, since (like most people) I spend most of my time these days in a browser. Depending on the page, the Chromebook can be a little slow sometimes, but it handles most things the way you'd expect Chrome to do. It's easy to forget that it's basically a smartphone chip hooked up to a big screen. WebGL performance is surprisingly good: I loaded up the new Google Maps beta, and had no problems panning around a 3D textured version of downtown Seattle. Flash is built-in, so I'm not missing that (the new XBox Music site, like a lot of its competitors, still uses Flash for streaming audio). Tethering works flawlessly.

But my third priority (and still a must-have factor for me) was the ability to develop and write on the Chromebook itself. Being able to log into a server from the Chrome OS SSH client is fine, but a lot of the time I still don't have a network connection. If I can't work locally using the tools I'm used to, it's useless to me.

There's a thing called Crouton that installs a full, semi-sandboxed Linux distribution alongside Chrome OS. The two operating systems share a kernel, but have separate sets of binaries and processes. The result is a complete Ubuntu server stack that I can dip into whenever I need to work offline, including Git, NodeJS, PostgreSQL, and all the other command-line utilities I've gotten used to having. Crouton's totally supported, by the way: you need to be in developer mode, but that's just a keystroke away.

You can even set Crouton to run the graphical interface for the second OS, toggling between them, but considering how much I hate the Linux GUI situation, I haven't bothered. Chrome OS works nicely to manage my terminal and browser windows--the Aura interface that they've added lately does a decent impersonation of Windows 7, including an improved version of Aero Snap. There are some quirks--the dedicated "switch windows" button doesn't seem to quite work consistently--but it's already the best Linux window manager I've used.

The weirdest thing as a developer is the lack of full-powered editors running within Chrome itself. Cloud9 doesn't run on ARM yet, and Brackets isn't available as a packaged app. I'm personally fine using a terminal-based editor--I wrote most of Weir using Nano, and I'm getting more comfortable with vim--but it surprised me that none of the web-based editors have made a serious effort to run on a web-based platform.

The second-weirdest thing is the way Chrome OS distinguishes between "bookmarks" and "applications," considering that (for the most part) they're the same thing. There is a legitimate set of "packaged apps" that get more privileged API access, but most of the products in the Chrome "web store" are just links to web sites, so why can't I add bookmarks (such as the aforementioned XBox Music site, which I prefer to run in its own, chromeless window) to the Chrome OS launcher? I've been using this method to build single-serving Chrome Apps for the few sites where I want this ability, but it really ought to be built-in, and (considering that all you need is a JSON manifest and a .png file) I have a hard time understanding why it's not.

Oddities aside, though, the Chromebook is a great little machine for my needs so far. If I edited photos/audio/video on the go, or wanted a portable gaming laptop, I'd probably feel differently. On the other side of the power spectrum, if I didn't need a keyboard, I'm sure an Android tablet would cover a lot of my needs. My work, however, is almost entirely centered on text-editing in a web-friendly (preferably Linux or Windows) environment, and Chrome OS handles that gracefully and without complaint. It's surprisingly close to being useful even without Crouton. I'm excited to see whether (between Chrome OS and Firefox OS) the web platform can become legitimately self-sufficient in the future.

It seems cruel to suggest that the worst half of Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson's new memoir, Mo Meta Blues, is the half that's actually about him. Cruel, but not untrue--and not undeserved, given that ?uest himself opens the book by complaining about the predictability of most musical memoirs. Maybe that's impossible to escape. But when the rest of the book practically sparkles with mischief, I can't help but wish it was willing to spend more time dancing around expectations.

The book opens with a great deal of self-awareness. We're dropped into an interview between ?uestlove (a nickname that is wreaking havoc with my keyboard muscle memory) and an unnamed interviewer, debating how the memoir should be written. A letter from Ben Greenman, co-writer, then fills in some context: the interviewer is Richard Nichols, co-manager of The Roots, the band for which ?uestlove has been drumming for many years. Nichols proceeds to almost steal the show: a passionate and wry speaker, he takes over the narrative during the interview chapters, contradicts ?uestlove's account of events, and then decides he doesn't particularly care for the interview format. He spends the rest of the book weaving arch comments into the footnotes instead.

This is a book that takes the "meta" part of the title very seriously.

The problem is, when Mo Meta Blues actually slips into memoir, that awareness and playfulness seems to vanish. There are times when it picks back up, like ?uestlove's amazing Prince anecdotes or his year-by-year recounting of the best records he listened to throughout his childhood and why they're important, but these are few and far between. For the most part, the biography part of the story follows a traditional trajectory, with little scandal: The Roots form up in Philly, struggle for years, mingle with a collective of other artists, and eventually reach a kind of working success. The group comes across a lot like ?uest himself: wholesome and largely uncontroversial.

Which, to be fair, is not untrue: The Roots are not another Motley Crue, behind-the-music tabloid tale. But I think it probably undersells them. As Mo Meta itself points out, they're an uncommon outlier in modern hip-hop: a live band with lots of members and a long chain of albums, not to mention an expressly political viewpoint. There are hints of analysis there, but I wanted more.

So what we're left with is half slightly-dull memoir, half guided tour through hip-hop's sonic history. Which half wins? To me, it's a no-brainer: as a fan of his music, I'm happy to indulge ?uestlove for a few hours. But I'd love to see him cast his critical net a little wider next time.

I'm not entirely sure why you would make films based on a franchise that you never liked. I'm on record as believing that the first JJ Abrams Star Trek flick was a reasonable popcorn flick but it didn't share anything with the original product except some character names. That's not true for the second movie. Into Darkness (to use its weird, not-really-a-subtitle subtitle) isn't just bad Trek, it's loathesome filmmaking.

The low-hanging fruit is that the plot doesn't even try to make sense for more than five minutes at a time, but since the original series was hardly airtight, I have a number of other bones to pick, including:

• The Enterprise is not a submarine.
• In a franchise known for its progressivism, it's painful to see all of the women reduced to either needy girlfriends or passive sex objects.
• Along the same lines, I like Benedict Cumberbatch just fine (actually, I think most of the actors do a decent job), but he is surely one of the whitest people on earth and should not be playing Khan Noonien Singh.
• The Enterprise is not a submarine.
• Scotty's Magical Transporter and Plot Hole Device can now send people all the way across to the Klingon empire, but our heroes still get in a ship to follow him because there wouldn't be a chance for a pointless shootout otherwise.
• Star Fleet dress uniforms that bear an uncanny resemblance to Death Star formalware.
• Warp speed is now basically Rainbow Road, complete with starships spinning out into space with skidding sounds when they get hit with a blue shell magical laser beam.

Sure, much of this probably seems like nitpicks and nerd rage. I've watched a lot of Star Trek, probably more than most people, and so there are a lot of things that to me are instinctively not right but aren't necessarily invalid. I think it's a shame to lose those parts of the Trek canon (and I tend to think that Abrams' alterations are worse than the material he's replacing), but I'm hardly objective. Lance believes that he's just trolling us, and I'm not sure that's wrong.

I find the movie's general incoherence to be frustrating. But that's not what actually makes me angry.

At the end of Star Trek Into Grim Serious Incoherence, Khan crashes his spaceship into San Francisco. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are killed, but that's okay because they're not the protagonists and presumably their psychological issues were less attractive. This is, to put it lightly, not really what Gene Roddenberry had in mind when he pitched "wagon train in space" to some bored Desilu executives.

Speaking personally, I'm getting a little sick of the whole "it's been a decade since 9/11, so let's crash a flying vehicle into a city and call it emotional resonance" thing that every hack director with a render farm has been on lately. Abrams is doing it, apparently the new Superman movie does it, The Avengers did it. It's a cheap, transparent ploy to make otherwise airy summer entertainment seem important, so that critics can write that your otherwise incoherent summer tentpole flick has "real-world allusions" in it. Blowing up a planet in the first reboot movie wasn't enough, I guess.

Nowhere is that more true than in Star Trek No Subtitles Just Darkness. Khan doesn't really have a good reason to crash his ship into a major city. It doesn't particularly help him achieve his goals. He just does it because, as with every other reason that anyone does anything in a JJ Abrams movie, it's part of the story checklist they wrote before actually getting to outmoded concerns like "dialogue" or "motivation" or "character." City destroyed: tragedy achieved. On to the next setpiece!

Reboot or not, there are some things that a Star Trek movie shouldn't do, and mass murder is one of them. I'm under no illusions about the ideological purity of Star Trek, especially under Paramount's management, but I like to think that Roddenberry's vision should mean something regardless. As it is, there must be a little whirlwind somewhere around the ionosphere where his ashes are spinning. If JJ Abrams wants to participate in a little cinematic disaster porn, he's welcome to do so, but I wish he'd restrict it to some other, less established franchise. It's probably just as well that he's moving on to Star Wars: this kind of bankrupt cheesiness will fit right in there.

Obviously I've been a little obsessed with RSS the past couple of weeks (get used to it: it'll be everyone else's turn come July 1). Along the way, I've been trimming my subscription list: I've been blogging for more than nine years now (!), and collecting feeds for nearly as long. A lot of those URLs are now broken, which is a little sad. In a precursor to the whole Google Reader situation, if you were on Feedburner, there's a pretty good chance I'm not reading you anymore.

Speaking of things that people don't really do in a post-Twitter world, I was reminded this week that I need to post another set of links--not so much because anyone else is interested, but because between the dismal searchability of social media and the death of bookmark services like Delicious, it's the only way I can be sure to find anything more than three months from now. And so:

• A lot of people linked to Jeremy Keith's defense of RSS-as-API this week. Indeed, when I was at CQ, getting RSS running for our various services and reports was one of my constant campaigns. In many ways, it's one of the purest expressions of the web: a machine-readable format of human-centric information.
• What reminded me of link-blogging in the first place was this study of privacy and de-anonymization, which I knew I'd posted to one service or another but could not for the life of me locate when I wanted it. It's a fascinating case of matching health records to individuals through obscured metadata and demographics--food for thought in light of the NSA metadata hubbub.
• Earlier than expected, and all too soon, Iain Banks died last week. Ken Macleod has a passionate remembrance in the Guardian.
• I have always been skeptical of WebGL, but it looks like it'll graduate to legitimate technology with a rumored inclusion in IE11. I still think it's a terrible API. That said, this article by Greg Tavares (one of the Chrome coders on WebGL) got me more excited about it than any other tutorial has ever done. Tavares points out that it's not actually a 3D API, but a 2D drawing API with decent tools for projection math. In that light, and given my love for 2D, I've actually started screwing around with WebGL a little.
• If you are interested in using WebGL for 3D, though, this presentation does a great job of presenting both the what and the why of the math involved. It almost made me care about matrices again.
• It is taking years, but people are finally realizing that the web is not killing long-form journalism. If anything, it may be enhancing its chances.
• I really enjoyed this retrospective on the Portal 2 alternate reality game. The section on false clues and coincidence is a testament to people's ability to match patterns, whether they exist or not. It sounds like a fun gig.

I'm happy to say that Weir is now in a beta-ready state. You'll need a server capable of running NodeJS and PostgreSQL (for now), and you'll need an OPML file to populate the feed list (Google Takeout will accomodate you nicely with a subscriptions.xml if you're fleeing Reader). But if you pull from the repo and then follow the instructions in the readme file, everything should be in a good-enough state to fetch, read, and mark stories as read. Feedback would be awesome.

The front end for Weir is written using AngularJS, because it's supposed to be great for rapid development and I'm all about failing fast on this project. Indeed, getting the client-side application up and running has gone very quickly, but Angular itself takes some adjustment, especially if you're used to other JavaScript frameworks.

I'm not convinced that this is a bad thing. Predictions are a mug's game, but I suspect that future libraries are going to look a lot more like Angular than its competitors. Before I can explain why, we have to first look at the way client-side JavaScript has been traditionally organized, and then see how Angular works differently.

JavaScript MVC libraries, from Backbone to Ember, find themselves confronted with a language that's very different from the languages where Model-View-Controller philosophies evolved:

• JavaScript has no privacy, and (until recently) no getters and setters. Between the two, it's hard to know if a given object has changed since the last redraw.
• The DOM is not designed to be strongly linked with JavaScript data structures.
• Multi-level inheritance of values is fine, but inheritance of behavior is a mess.

This works--and is certainly a million times better than writing jQuery spaghetti code--but it's not what you'd call "clean." For example, here's some code written in an imaginary (but typical) library, just to update a simple list view: var Song = new Vertebrae.Model.extend({ title: { value: "" }, listens: { value: 0 }, file: { value: "" }, starred { value: false } }); var SongView = new Vertebrae.View.extend({ render: function() { var model = this.get("model"); var el = this.get("element"); el.find(".can-template").html( templates.song(model.toJSON())); var rev = model.get("review"); el.find(".cannot").val(rev); } });

That is a lot of boilerplate just to display a song (and it doesn't even include the templates, or loading the actual data). Heavy object classes are necessary so that the framework can be notified of changes--hence all the extend and get calls, as well as the awkward way of defining default values. In places, we can at least use templates, but we're still having to place them manually into the DOM. It's like a terrible parody of Java's worst bits glued onto jQuery.

In contrast, Angular uses regular JavaScript objects, written with normal JavaScript syntax, for its models. There are no getter or setter functions, unless you really want them: change an object, and if it is attached to the $scope variable, it will be scanned for changes automatically. And while you're not discouraged from using inheritance, you're not really encouraged to do so, either. Angular uses prototypal inheritance to manage values under the hood, but its developer-facing APIs tend to bear more resemblance to AMD or CommonJS modules. It feels like JavaScript, in other words.

On the other hand, Angular is all about augmenting HTML: although templates are available to ease re-use, an Angular page actually gets marked up using custom tags and attributes, then compiled and linked into components that respond instantly to the application's backing data. This is very forward-thinking--in fact, it's not dissimilar from the Extensible Web Manifesto, and I can dig that--but it definitely comes across as "magic" the first time that you use it. After years of logic-less template engines being popular, Angular stakes out a very different position.

Normally, I'm not a fan of magic in programming: it's hard to debug what you don't understand. In this case, the novelty of Angular's approach--and its undeniable effectiveness--overcame my skepticism, to the point where it's really grown on me. Using Angular makes me much more aware of the boilerplate that's required by the traditional MVC frameworks I use in my day job. Simple tasks require less code, and I don't feel like I'm fighting my way through thick layers of abstraction.

If there's a place where Angular still feels awkward, it's anything to do with the DOM. Angular will let you get access to elements of your page, but only reluctantly--it would really prefer that you only alter your model data and let the DOM react. Most of the time, this is fine: the less page manipulation I have to do, the happier I am. But there are some times when it is inevitable, such as when I'd like to perform deferred image loading, and those are definitely the ugliest parts of Weir's client code so far.

But here's the rub: if the web ecosystem teaches us anything, it's that you can always make a simple framework faster and more powerful, but people won't use an API that's clumsy and tiresome (see also: jQuery vs. pretty much everything else). Yes, DOM manipulation isn't great in Angular--they'll have to write some new directives, to cover the edge cases and holes. Yes, the object polling that Angular does is kind of scary, but browsers will add features like Object.observe() to make it faster overnight. Meanwhile, nothing's going to make those heavy Model and View classes any more fun to use.

There has been (and still is) a lot of time in the JavaScript community spent trying to make it work like something more familiar. That's how you end up with Coffeescript, or YUI, or all these MVC frameworks. Those projects have a place, and there are certainly times when I want something familiar, but it's also good to see tools (like Angular, Node, or D3) that are built around JavaScript weirdness. There hasn't been an oddball language with a profile this high in a long time, so let's shake things up while we've got the chance.

A month from now, Google will shut down Reader, leaving RSS addicts in the lurch. I suspect this will be both more and less disruptive than anticipated: expect replacement services to go through another set of growing pains, but RSS isn't exactly a high lock-in situation, and most people will find a new status quo fairly quickly.

I am not eager to move from one hosted service to another (once burned, twice shy), nor do I want to go back to native applications that can't share progress, so as soon as the shutdown was announced I started working on a self-hosted RSS reader. I applied the same techniques I'd used for Big Fish Unlimited: an easy-to-configure router, a series of views talking to the database only through model classes, and heavy use of closures for dependency management and callbacks. I built a wrapper around PHP's dismal cURL library. It was a nice piece of architecture.

It also bogged down very, very quickly. My goal was a single-page application with straightforward database queries, but I was building the foundation for a sprawling, multi-page site. Any time I started to dip in and add functionality, I found myself frustrated by how much plumbing I needed in order to do it "the right way." I was also annoyed by the difficulty of safely requesting a large number of feeds in parallel in PHP. The language just isn't built for that kind of task, even with the adaptations and improvements that have been pasted on.

This week I decided to start over, this time using Node.js and adopting a strict worse is better philosophy. When I use Reader, 99% of my time is spent in "All Items" pressing the spacebar (or, on mobile, clicking "Mark Items as Read") to advance the stream. So I made that functionality my primary concern, and wrote only as much as I needed to (both in terms of code size and elegance) to make that happen. In two days, I've gotten farther than I had with the PHP, and I'm much happier with the underlying platform as well--Node is unsurprisingly well suited to firing off tens and hundreds of concurrent requests.

I've just posted the work-in-progress code for the application, which I'm calling Weir (just barely winning out over "Audrey II"), to a public GitHub repo. It is currently ugly, badly-documented, and patchy in places. The Angular code I'm using for the front-end is obviously written by a someone with very little experience using the library. There's lots of room for improvement. On the other hand, my momentum is very good. By next week, I expect Weir will be good enough for me to dogfood it full time, and at that point improvements will come naturally whenever I need to smooth out the rough edges.

I like this way of working--"worse is better"--quite a bit. It's not always pretty, but it seems effective so far. It also fits in well with my general coding style, which is (perhaps unsurprisingly) on the left-ish side of Steve Yegge's developer politics. I like elegance and architecture as much as the next person, but when it all comes down to it, there's no point in elegant code that never gets used.

Writing my own Reader alternative is also proving educational. The conventional wisdom is that RSS readers benefit greatly from running at scale: operations like feed retrieval can be performed once for all subscribers, spreading the costs out. The flip side is that you're at the mercy of the server bot for when you get updates. High-frequency feeds, such as politics or news, get batched up instead of coming in as they're posted. I'm also able to get a lot more feedback on which feeds are dead, which came as a surprise: Reader just swallowed the errors whole. All in all, I doubt the experience will be any worse.

Currently, Weir isn't much good for public consumption. I've made a sanitized copy of my config file in the repo, but there's no setup script for the database, and no import step for getting your subscriptions loaded up. I hope to have that ready soon, and the code is licensed under the GPL, so pull requests and feature suggestions are welcomed as it becomes usable for other people.

Last Friday, I gave a short presentation for a workshop run by the SCCC Byte Club called "Technical Interview Mastery for Women." Despite the name, it was attended by both men and women. Most of my advice was non-gender specific, anyway: I wanted to encourage people to interview productively by taking into account the perspective from the other side of the table, and seeing the process more as a dialog instead of a confrontation.

Still, during the question and answer period, several people asked about being women in the interview process. Given that my co-presenter has many years more experience being a woman, I deferred to her whenever possible, but I did chime in when the conversation turned to interaction styles. One participant said she was ignored if she wasn't assertive enough, but was then considered unpleasant if she stuck up for herself--what could she do about this?

It's one thing, I said, to suggest ways that women should adapt their communications for a male-dominated workplace--that kind of pragmatic code-switching may well do the trick. But I think it's unfair to put all the burden on women to adapt to men. There needs to be a way to remind men that it's their responsibility to act reasonably.

The problem is that it's often difficult to have that conversation without falling afoul of the same double-standard that says women in the workplace shouldn't be too loud. Complaining about sexism tends to raise hackles--meaning that the offending statement not only goes uncorrected, but dialog gets shut down. I don't know that I have any good solutions to that, but I suggested finding ways to phrase the issue akin to Jay Smooth's presentations on How To Tell People They Sound Racist. I like to think that most people aren't trying to be sexist, they're just not very self-aware. This may be a faulty assumption.

There are still people who argue that the tech industry isn't sexist--that women just aren't as inherently good at coding (this is often hidden behind comments that it's a "meritocracy"--in which, conveniently, women somehow just haven't had merit). From my point of view, I don't see any way that could be correct. My best JavaScript students are split 50/50 between men and women (so are the worst students). I trained equal numbers of men and women on the multimedia team at CQ (and probably would have given the effectiveness prize to the women in a pinch). Moreover, I've never seen any evidence that the skills I use in day-to-day work--spatial reasoning, some basic math, navigating abstraction--are gender-exclusive (or, indeed, required for all programming: the job of a web programmer is markedly different from a systems coder or security investigator, and yet those also suffer from serious inequality issues).

My talk at the workshop was specifically about interviewing, but obviously this is an issue that goes beyond hiring. Something is happening between the classroom and the workplace that causes this disparity. We have a word for this--sexism--regardless of the specific mechanics. And I would love to have more discussions of those specifics, but it's like climate change: every time there's a decent conversation in a public forum about solutions, it gets derailed by people who insist loudly that they don't think there's a problem in the first place.

That said, assuming that people just don't realize when they've done something wrong, there are doubtless ways to address the topic without defensiveness. If the description "sexist" derails, I'm personally happy to use other terms, like "unprofessional" or "rude"--I'm just embarrassed that I (and others) need to resort to euphemism. We need to change the culture around this discussion--to make it clear that we (both men and women) take this seriously, including respectful responses to criticism. We can do better, and I'd like to be able to tell future workshops that we're trying.

Last year, Google spent most of its I/O conference keynote talking about hardware: Android, Glass, and tablets. This year, someone seems to have reminded Google that they're a web company, since most of the new announcements were all running in a browser, and in many cases (like the photo editing and WebGL maps) pushing the envelope for what's possible. As much as I like Android, I'm really happy to see the web getting some love.

There's been a drumbeat for several years now, particularly as smartphones got more powerful, to move away from web apps, and Google's focus on Android lent credence to that perspective. A conventional wisdom has emerged: web apps were a misstep, but we're past that now, and it'll be all native from this point out. I can't disagree with that more, and Google's clearly staking its claim as well.

The reason the web wins (such that anything will) is not, ultimately, because of its elegance or its purity (it's not big on either) but because of its ubiquity. The browser is the worst cross-platform API except for all the other ones, and (more importantly) it offers persistence. I can turn on any computer with an Internet connection and have near-instant access to files and applications without installing anything or worrying about compatibility. Every computer is my computer on the web.

For context, there was a time in my high school years when Java was on fire. As a cross-platform language with a network-savvy runtime, it was going to revive thin clients: I remember talking to people about the idea that I could log into any computer and load my desktop (with all my software) over the Internet connection. There wouldn't be any point to having your own dedicated hardware in a world like that, because you'd just grab whatever was handy and use it as a host. It was going to be like living in a William Gibson novel.

Java ended up being too heavy and too slow to make that actually happen. Instead, this weird combination of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS took over, like weeds springing up and somehow forming a fully-furnished apartment block. The surprise was that the ad-hoc web platform turned out to be competitive with Java on the front-end. Even though it's meant to be a document viewer, the browser is pretty good at building UI, and it's getting a lot better. I've been creating some web apps lately without worrying about backwards compatibility, and it's been remarkably pleasant, both as a developer and a user.

I don't believe that native programs will ever entirely go away. But I do think we see web applications spreading their tentacles over time, because if something is possible in the browser--if it's a decent user experience, plus it has the web's advantages of instant, no-install launch and sharing across devices--there's not much point in keeping it native. It's better to have your e-mail on any device. It's better for me to do presentations from a browser, instead of carrying a Powerpoint file around. It's better to keep my RSS reader in the cloud, instead of tying its state to individual machines. As browsers improve, this will be true of more and more applications, just as it was true of the Java applets that web technology replaced.

Google and I disagree with where those applications should be hosted, of course. Google thinks they should run it (which for many people is perfectly okay), and I want to run them myself. But that's a difference of degree, not principle. We both think the basic foundation--an open, hackable, portable web--is an important priority.

I like to look at it in terms of "design fiction"--the dramatic endpoint that proponents of each approach are aiming to achieve. With native apps, devices themselves are valuable, because native code is heavy: it takes time to install, it stores data locally, and it's probably locked to a given OS or architecture. Web apps don't give us the same immediate power, but their ultimate goal is a world where your local hardware doesn't matter--walk up to any web-capable surface, and your applications are there. Software in the web-centric viewpoint follows you, not your stuff. There are lots of reasons why I'm bullish on the web, but that particular vision is, for me, the most compelling one.

Soul Society is here again, and so am I. If you're in the DC area this weekend, check it out.