internet

In yet another example of why Ticketmaster should be broken up 404 describes how scalpers game the system. Essentially, scalpers are pros at buying up high-demand tickets and they are much smarter and more motivated than Ticketmaster who throws up some weak-sauce barriers to them. It’s an interesting discussion of the techniques used and how they short-circuit efforts to prevent multiple ticket sales. I can’t say that I’ve got a brilliant idea off the top of my head to prevent this abuse but with the money that Ticketmaster rakes in, you would think they could come up with something.

This article in WaPo by Brian Merchant makes some very good points about how tech has changed over the years and mostly not for the better. In the 1990s, the internet was so interesting and fresh and fun. There were a lot of crazy things that happened and most of it was driven by real people. Fast forward to the 2020s and the internet as it was is gone and replaced by the semi-walled gardens of content and information hosted by big tech companies.

I’m really glad I stopped using Lastpass and deleted my account. It sounds like even after the security issue, they were misleading to customers and have done nothing to improve matters. Bitwarden continues to work really well for me. I’ve used it on iOS, Mac and Linux and it works great everywhere. The Firefox plugin is handy and does what it’s supposed to. No complaints at all. I hope they don’t get acquired.

The Great Backyard Bird Count is taking place now. I’ve always liked birds and can identify a few common ones so this year I decided to participate in the event. It’s really nicely done. They have an app called Bird ID that helps you identify the birds and collects the data. It’s very easy. There is also a place to view the collected data that you need to have an account to access.

LastPass was bought by a private equity company. As is often the case, that change of ownership heralded a change in the business model. Usually, these changes are not beneficial to customers. Since the acquisition, LastPass has raised prices and had a very significant security breach. I dropped it early last year after they changed the subscription plan and switched to Bitwarden. Bitwarden has worked really well for me and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a cross-platform password solution.

37Signals has a large AWS bill. About $3.2M USD last year. It sounds like they have been proactive at managing the bill and that’s just what it costs to run their business on AWS. They are an interesting and smart company and it seems they are going to try to move some/most of that out of AWS. Dell will be happy to hear that but I don’t know if it will result in significant savings because you now have to hire and manage people to run the show robustly (especially the 8PB of storage).

The Register has an interesting article on the underlying economics of big tech. The Amazons and Googles of the world have grown huge by offering “free” products like Alexa and Gmail. As we all know by now, if it’s free, you are the product. Has this model run out of steam at huge scale? These huge free services are expensive to run. The most recent results from Amazon show how difficult it can be to make money on a free service.

Yet more JavaScript notes. This time, it’s all about equality. They key part to various control structures (e.g., if, switch, while, do and for)in JavaScript (and other languages for that matter), are the comparison operators. These are less than, greater than, equals and the combinations thereof. In JavaScript, the operands (the things that are being compared) get converted automatically. So, you need to be careful and favor the strict comparisons.

A couple of winter solstice notes on JavaScript from my recent reading. The first is on automatic semicolon insertion. You don’t have to use semicolons to write JavaScript, but if you don’t, some rules apply. The first rule is pretty simple: when processing a statement, the parser includes everything until it encounters a semicolon or an “offending token” that cannot be part of the statement. If this offending token is a line termination, end of input or a }, a semicolon is added.

As mentioned in my previous post, I’m reading JavaScript for the Impatient. Something I really like about it is that the author, Cay S. Horstmann is opinionated. Technical books need to have a point of view. If you disagree with it, fine. You can take another path but part of the value of reading a technical book is to understand better ways to do it and that is almost always an opinion.