Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Martin was shocked. He’d purchased an options contract for some travel related services and when he wanted to renegotiate the terms his world model was shaken by the discover that the other party had failed to mention that his contract included the option change the terms. as he desired, for free!

Martin and I share the affliction that we now see all transactions in terms of option value. They aren’t exchanging a chicken, they are reshaping their personal and joint option spaces. It’s a delightfully wierd way of looking at the world.

I wonder though, has anybody told Martin about RyanAir’s policy that you get a free Creme Bruelee just for asking?

Spirit dancing suggests that my wife’s work triggers a reminding of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. interesting.

The end-to-end principle gets a pulled and stretched to serve many conclusions that it’s original statement didn’t actually encompass. That’s probably all for the best.

Here’s an article on Peer to Peer stock trading. Market hubs are a key example of the two sided network effects that support the emergance of the central points of control that enable regulation, taxation, and middlemen (to take a few examples).

Yoav’s post on Nagios reminds me I’d been meaning to post about Selenium. He’s right, by the way, about Nagios.

The best open source emerges when a group of “buyers” have a desperate need and no patients or budget to wait for a vendor to show up and bumble around cluelessly trying to figure out why they are miserable and how to make money off that. OpenQA looks like just such a project.

If you develop web apps and your not aware of OpenQA then your not happy. Particularly Selenium IDE, a Firefox plugin that will record and playback automated tests.

This system is marvalously hoky, plenty of “worse is better” here! But the price is right and it works! In a perfect example of how open source is more likely to have the features you must have v.s. the features that would make the salesman happy this system has horrible horrible doc, but actually works in most browsers.

These testing systems work by exercising the web app. using java script. The tests can be stored in a few formats, but the original format was an HTML table. The testing harness steps thru the HTML table interpreting instructions on how to do the test found in the table rows. Starting from there you get assorted hackery to let you write and run your tests in assorted ways that you might find more comfortable.

Highly recomended.

I wonder if the big blogging sites have AD sales teams that place exactly the right add on blogs which are suddenly having their 15 minutes of fame. The volitility of long tail actors is very high; so it’s critical to catch those slashdot moments. Automated (look ma no hands) ad placment is all well and good, except when it’s stupid.

This is analagous to the puzzle of how to deal with the traffic peaks around slashdot moments so you don’t capture all the eyeballs you possibly can when they go by; but in this case the consequences go directly to the bottom line.

In both cases this is an example of why aggregating a stable of longtail actors can be critical to making the system function well.

While can imagine decentralized automation that quickly spreads traffic peeks across a collaborative group it’s much harder for me to imagine a scheme that brings AD placment talent to bear in a distributed manner. I can imagine that this is a feature that all the add networks would obviously have, or ought to.