Dan Weinreb’s blog

If any of you deal with the technology press, i.e. want them to publish stories on your stuff, you may know about the concept of a “press embargo”, where you send them info and say “don’t release this until X date”. Last night at a panel I found out some interesting info about this.

These used to exist and be widely used. They let a company manage the time at which it’s “big news” would come out, and it let reporters have some extra time to prepare their story and make it higher-quality without risking being out of date.

However, lately the whole thing has broken down. TechCrunch and the Wall St. Journal, in particular, have been undermining the “gentleman’s agreement” that made this work. A tech jouralist now has to assume that by following the embargo, he or she will end up being out of date (“scooped” is apparently not really a term-of-art any more). In general, journalists do not like them, and will not honor any that is more than one week out. They worry that someone else will discover the news and not have agreed to the embargo, or the news will leak some other way, or someone will just ignore the embargo. Also, some journalists now consider them just too problematic and too much trouble and ignore embargoed press releases entirely.

So, take this into account if you were thinking of doing an embargo’ed press release.

The panel session was called “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR”. It was at last night’s Web Innovator’s Group meeting, at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA. The panelists were excellent.

Microsoft is complaining that Google’s deal giving them access to millions of digitized books is anti-competitive and monopolistic.

The idea of Microsoft demanding protection from monopolistic practices is utterly breathtaking in its degree of chutzpah and hypocrisy.

I suspect that Microsoft is trying to appeal directly to Christine Varney, the head of the anti-trust division at the Department of Justice, who has been an outspoken critic of Google. (I mean “appeal” in the colloquial sense, not in the term-of-art legal sense, of course.)

Lots more info about the Google case can be found in a recent Wired article.

I have not used C++ in many years. It was so long ago that templates, in the way they are used today, were not in C++ yet. I hope I never have to program in C++ again. That said, it’s interesting to know that C++ templates are so powerful that you can write a compile-time Lisp interpreter in them!

The following is from the notes at Amazon about the book “C++ Template Metaprogramming” by David Abrahams and Alexey Gurtovoy:

“In 1998 Dave had the privilege of attending a workshop in Generic Programming at Dagstuhl Castle in Germany. Near the end of the workshop, a very enthusiastic Kristof Czarnecki and Ullrich Eisenecker (of Generative Programming fame) passed out a few pages of C++ source code that they billed as a complete Lisp implementation built out of C++ templates. At the time it appeared to Dave to be nothing more than a curiosity, a charming but impractical hijacking of the template system to prove that you can write programs that execute at compile time. He never suspected that one day he would see a role for metaprogramming in most of his day-to-day programming jobs.”

Thanks for David Mankins for bringing this to my attention!

I recently learned about Python’s powerful metaprogramming techniques, from a talk by Adam Baratz of The Echonest. This was very impressive and I hope to find time to learn more.

I greatly enjoyed the Adrian Belew Power Trio last night at the Natick Center for the Arts. I mentioned this concert in an earlier blog posting. Adrian Belew is a great electric guitar player and composer. He’s a member of Robert Fripp’s band King Crimson, and has performed with some of my favorite bands and musicians, including Laurie Anderson, Talking Heads, and Mike Oldfield.

The trio includes Julie Slick on bass and Eric Slick on drums. Julie is 23 years old, and her brother is 22. As a 50-year-old, I’m never quite sure whether to characterize people that age as “kids” or not. Friends of mine who I consider to be my age have children in their early 20′s, but these people are adults. I have to learn to change the way I deal with one of the most basic characterizations/classifications in life! Adrian referred to them as his “youthful compadres”. What I can say for sure is that I would have been quite impressed with their musicianship even without seeing them or knowing anything about them, but that they can play that way at such a young age is stunning. What will they be like in ten or twenty years? I definitely want to keep track of them!

Their mother, Robin, sold CD’s and tee shirts. Although I aready have enough tee shirts, as my wife keeps reminding me, I bought theirs, both because I want to support them and because I like the design.

For some reason, the otherwise-nice packaging of the CD of “e” does not include a track list. From what Adrian said at the concert, I expected to find five tracks named “a” through “e”. However, there were 11 tracks. The Gracenote CDDB did not find a track list; that’s also very surprising, as the CDDB has never failed me before, even for some pretty obscure stuff. I tracked down an email address for Robin Slick, who helpfully sent me the track list. It’s “a”, “a2″, “a3″, “b”, “b2″, “b3″, “c”, “d”, “d2″, “e”, and “e2″. I told iTunes to submit this to the CDDB, and I hope it’ll be installed so you won’t have to type these in manually. Thanks, Robin!

Julia and Erik studied at The Paul Green School of Rock in Philadelphia, which was showcased in the excellent documentary film Rock School (not to be confused with the fictional film School of Rock). The Paul Green school seems to be training a whole new generation of progressive rockers. The best-known is C. J. Tywoniak, who was so awesome in the Rock School documentary playing “Inca Roads” by Frank Zappa; he has performed extensively with Jon Anderson of Yes. (Eric Slick has also performed with Jon Anderson.)

The performance featured the songs “a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, and “e” from their new album, “e”. They also performed two King Crimson songs: Neurotica (from Beat) and Three of a Perfect Pair (from Three of a Perfect Pair). Here is a (low-quality) video of them performing Neurotica in Budapest, and you can find more such videos on YouTube. Here is an Animoto MTV-style video of the beginning of Three of a Pefect Pair from Eric Slick’s web site. They also did two of Adrian’s own songs, Big Electric Cat and Lone Rhinoceros, both from Adrian’s first solo album, Lone Rhinoceros, and several other songs.

If they perform in the Boston area again, TourFilter will let me know. TourFilter is a wonderful free service. You tell it what bands you like, and it tells you when and where they’re coming. Thanks to Chris Marstall for creating and operating this gem.

I usually don’t write blog entries that are merely pointers to someone else’s blog entries, but I’m making an exception this time. A blogger named Lukas Biewald, in a blog called/of Dolores Labs, wrote an entry called The Programming Language With The Happiest Users.

He measured Twitter “tweets” that mention certain programming languages, and ascertained which were positive. I’m particularly interested because Lisp came in second place.

Interpreting this as “the programming langauge with the happiest users” depends on several tacit assumptions that seem dubious at best.  We don’t know that the people writing these comments are actually users.  The number of tweets sent about a language is not uncorreleated with the langauge; I bet there are fewer COBOL programmers using Twitter than Perl programmers.  Not everybody tweets about how much they like or dislike their langauge as much as everybody else. He knows this and mentions some of these problems at the end of the post, so I’m not saying this to criticize him.

Yes, the title of the blog post is sort of misleading, but written to get the attention of readers.  I cannot criticize him for that either, since I do the same thing.  Sometimes it backfires; a lot of people seem to have seen my post named “Why Did M.I.T. Switch from Scheme to Python” without getting my points, which were (1) they didn’t make a high-level decision to switch languages, but rather this fell out as an end consequence of decisions that had nothing to do with languages, and (2) this is only for the freshman core courses, not the whole curriculum.

It’s hard to draw any hard and meaningful and useful conclusions from this research, but I still find it interesting and entertaining.