This is exactly right, and it’s the same reason I’ve been using YAML a lot lately.

There is a reason why JSON is becoming very popular as a data exchange format (more important than it being less verbose than XML): programmers are sick of writing parsers! But “wait”, you say — “surely there are XML parsers available for you to use so that you don’t have to roll your own…”. Yes, there are. But while XML parsers handle the low-level syntactic parsing of XML tags, attributes, etc…, you still need to walk the DOM tree or, worse, build one yourself with nothing but a SAX parser (Objective-C iPhone SDK I’m looking at you!).

Why is JSON so popular? Developers want out of the syntax business. | MongoLab

After a minute or two you don’t even think about it. This is how it should be: formatting is of no interest to the writer. Only one thing matters: words.

davidhewson.com - Blog - IAWriter: Sometimes less is more

There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.

The Clock is real. It is now being built inside a mountain in western Texas. This Clock is the first of many millennial Clocks the designers hope will be built around the world and throughout time.

The Technium: The Clock in the Mountain

This anxiety is about more than failing to keep up with a serialized source, though. It’s also about the primitive pleasure of constant and arbitrary stimulation. That’s why the Facebook newsfeed is no longer shown chronologically. Refresh Facebook ten times and the status updates rearrange themselves in nonsensical, anachronistic patterns. You don’t refresh Facebook to follow a narrative, you refresh to register a change—not to read but to see.

And it’s losing track of this distinction—between reading and seeing—that’s so shameful. It’s like being demoted from the category of thinking, caring human to a sort of rat that doesn’t know why he needs to tap that button, just that he does.

n+1: Sad as Hell

Now and then you hear an old-timer rant about how we young people never sit down and write a real letter anymore. (Young in this case is probably defined as under 75.) We’re too busy with our email, our Twitter and Facebook, our IMs and texts.

Clearly, they are technically correct. Nobody writes letters anymore. It’s archaic, a relic of a bygone era. It’s simple economics. In the old days, a letter was the best option to reach across a great distance and communicate with someone. Technology has changed the equation; many better options now exist.

Think of the oldest person you know. Consider life when they came of age. That’s when we set our expectations of how the world is supposed to work. I’ll use my wife’s grandmother as an example. She will turn 91 in a few weeks, meaning she was born in the spring of 1920, in rural Poland. Since then she has seen a lot, including the inside of a Nazi work camp.

What was life like when she came of age? Well, she lived in the country. She probably walked everywhere. Maybe she had a bike, maybe not. There was no Internet. There were no mobile phones. The television would not be invented until she was eight years old, but I suspect she did not personally see one until she emigrated to the United States after World War II. A trip to the next town over would probably have been a major undertaking, let alone a long trip (even one to a country next door, a fairly short trip by modern first-world standards).

I am not saying she rants about people not writing letters; I can’t say I have ever heard her say anything on the subject. But within her life experience, a letter was the best option for most of the time. Only after she was entering her 70s were better options coming into play: cheap long-distance rates and the Internet.

As I age, I find myself thinking about the longevity of the information artifacts we generate. In the beginning, I was mostly worried about digital photos. How could I ensure they survived? Unlike film negatives, digital storage technology changes quickly. Think fast: here’s a ZIP disk. Can you read it? No? What about this 5.25” floppy? 3.5”? What is the likelihood that the JPEG format will be readable by computers in common use when I am a grandparent?

These days, I am concerned about digital artifacts as a whole. My life is ever-increasingly digital, as it is with all of us. I have scanned and shredded most of my file cabinet. I get my bills via email. I communicate with everyone online, leaving no persistent trail (or so I hope). I haven’t used a film camera in years. My magnetic-tape videocamera is in a bag somewhere, but my Flip Mino and my iPhone shoot video all the time.

For the past ten years, I have been a member of Distributed Proofreaders, whose mission is to help Project Gutenberg digitize public domain works for safekeeping and distribution. We scan old books using OCR software, and then the hive mind goes to work. I and many others proofread scanned text. Others take the output from proofreaders and add formatting markup (italics, footnotes, etc.). After several rounds of work, a completed ebook is handed off to Project Gutenberg for publication. It is, for me, important work that I am happy to help with. Time will destroy all old books eventually; I believe they should be preserved for future generations.

I am currently working on a biography about William Cowper, a writer and poet who lived during the latter half of the 18th century. As with many such books, it is full of correspondence, which tells the story of his life. You get a feel for who he was, how he lived, how his relationships worked. I had never heard of William Cowper before I began scrutinizing these scans for errors, but I now find myself fascinated with his story.

I wonder: will anyone be able to write such books about us in a hundred years? How would they go about it? There will be so little left behind. Will your blog still be running for someone to analyze? Where will your emails be accessible? Your tweets? God help you, your Facebook photos from college?

They say the Internet never forgets, but I’m not so sure. I suspect that over a long enough period of time, the Internet will in fact forget. It will forget us all.

What’s so amazing is that Apple hasn’t even needed the fastest chips on the market to guarantee a silky smooth, memorable tablet experience for its users. The original iPad performed incredibly well. The new iPad 2, however, just screams. Any slowdowns in entering menus, or launching apps, or waiting for a Web page to render have been completely eliminated. This is incredibly important, because the experience Apple promises, and delivers, is an instant love affair with its iOS devices; something that to this day, no other manufacturer can come close to matching. Not by a mile.

This is why I waited out the first iPad and didn’t order until the second version. I remember when Apple made this jump with the iPhone and figured I’d skip their first attempt this time around.

(No, I don’t have mine yet. The earthquake in Japan distracted me that morning and I didn’t get around to ordering until 10:30, so I have another two and a half weeks to wait).

Apple iPad 2 review | BGR

1992:

Friday, 3am. I wake up. Groggy, confused. This isn’t my bed. Where am I?

Conclusion: PAAARRRRTTTTYYY!!!

2011:

Friday, 3am. I wake up. Groggy, confused. This isn’t my bed. Where am I?

Conclusion: Must have fallen asleep in my kid’s room at 8pm again.

… by which I mean that if you buy a Xoom and want all its whiz-bang features, you’ll have to wait a while until the future catches up.

The Xoom has an impressive list of features that will only come to work by way of future upgrades.

1. 4G LTE support, which will require you to ship the tablet back to Motorola for over a week.
2. The microSD slot is not functional (they blame this one on Google).
3. Adobe Flash isn’t there. Wasn’t that the “big thing” that made this better than an iPad? Hmmmm?

Oh, and you can’t charge it via USB.

I can’t wait … to order an iPad 2.

Unless you live in a hut in the Sahara somewhere, you probably already know the iPad 2 is coming in a week. I keep running across articles that bemoan this or that feature that they hoped for but didn’t get. Some of it really makes me roll my eyes.

Retina Display

This would be awesome. And I bet Apple would do it, if people would pay $699 for the base model. So… no. Check back next year.

Stereo speakers

Really? You’re confused about this? Let’s review how stereo works. You have a right channel and a left channel. You use them to create an illusion that is targeted to the right and left ears of the listener. Let’s review how the iPad works. You hold it in any orientation as you see fit. Now, where exactly do you suggest we put the “left” and “right” speakers?

Thunderbolt

Oh, sure. 10gb/s I/O wouldn’t kill the battery at all. Especially because, like USB, it can power connected devices.

4G/LTE wireless

Really? Okay, so people in the ten square miles of the US with 4G/LTE coverage would be happy, and everybody else would think the iPad sucks.

Paul Graham on college education (from 2007):

A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college.

For me, as for a lot of middle class kids, getting into a good college was more or less the meaning of life when I was growing up. What was I? A student. To do that well meant to get good grades. Why did one have to get good grades? To get into a good college. And why did one want to do that? There seemed to be several reasons: you’d learn more, get better jobs, make more money. But it didn’t matter exactly what the benefits would be. College was a bottleneck through which all your future prospects passed; everything would be better if you went to a better college.

A few weeks ago I realized that somewhere along the line I had stopped believing that.

What first set me thinking about this was the new trend of worrying obsessively about what kindergarten your kids go to. It seemed to me this couldn’t possibly matter. Either it won’t help your kid get into Harvard, or if it does, getting into Harvard won’t mean much anymore. And then I thought: how much does it mean even now?

It turns out I have a lot of data about that.

News from the Front - Paul Graham