Jamel Cato

Even though Audible.com has all the usual marks of a monopoly (sky-high prices, mediocre customer service, little innovation, etc.) I continue to subscribe because I spend a lot of time in my car and it’s the only game in town when it comes to mass market audiobooks. Even the audiobooks sold on iTunes come from the Audible catalog.

Instead of lamenting Audible’s flaws or theorizing about the lack of competition in the audiobook market, I’m going to list a few things that would make the service better:

• Provide a way to “follow” your favorite authors. Currently the only way to find out if your favorite author has a new title available is to go to the Audible site and manually search, which is a gigantic fail. A feature like this would be trivial to implement with Atom or RSS feeds.
• Social Network Integration. It’s unfathomable in today’s world that Audible has no integration with any of the major social networks. If you have a great listening experience, there’s no way to automatically share it on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social network. Audible doesn’t even support Shelfari, a social network for book lovers that’s part of its own corporate family. What’s the deal with that? Combined with its dated 90’s style site design, this gives Audible the aura of an uncool, isolated island.
• Listener Choice Awards. How about an award program based on customer votes? It’s hard to believe Audible’s claims about how much it values feedback from its “literate” customers when it doesn’t have a single award or “best of” list not chosen by its own editors (whom we never meet). I can’t be the only one to notice that many of the titles its editors grace with their blessings have customer ratings in the 3’s (out of 5). This we-tell-you-what-to-like approach has always struck me as a little condescending and elitist. It’s especially stark when juxtaposed against Amazon.com (Audible’s parent company) where EVERYTHING is based on customer ratings.
• Fix the My Library feature. Currently each individual part of a single audiobook is listed and counted in your Library like it’s a separate audiobook. This is highly annoying when navigating or managing your library. Please fix this or at least allow customers to collapse the individual parts.
• Offer a Subscription Plan for Commuters. I saved the best (or worse?) for last. I’m fairly certain that people with long commutes are Audible’s biggest customers. The rub is that if your commute is an hour one way, it will take you only a week to finish the typical audiobook. After you spend the one or two credits Audible gives you under its current subscription plans, you’re left with the choice of either waiting a month for your new credit(s) or paying Audible’s outrageous retail prices. This choice, which I face nearly every month, is the thing I dislike most about Audible and will most likely be the reason Audible loses me as a customer. I would be much happier with a plan that offered a special discount for your 2nd or 3rd purchase in a month or a special discount on audiobooks longer than 20 hours for monthly subscribers.

Based on what I’ve read about CEO Jeff Bezos, I’m surprised that Amazon paid a third of a billion dollars to acquire Audible without insisting on any of these things.

I like having the cool gadget-of-the-moment as much as the next guy, so I pre-ordered a Kindle Fire almost as soon as Amazon announced it.

I’ve been putting it through its paces for a few days and here’s my take:

• Personally, I love how the small 7” form factor fits comfortably and naturally in one hand, leaving the other free for swiping and gesturing. I read a lot and had some concerns about the screen size, but as others have noted, the screen is the same size as a trade paperback book and I had no trouble at all easily reading text on it. In fact, I’m halfway through a book I’ve read exclusively on the Fire (when I can pry out of my Kids’ hands – more on that below).
• The synchronization with my Kindle library. It’s very cool to open a book on the Fire and have it pick up at the exact spot I stopped reading the very same book on my iPad.
• The user interface. It’s clean, intuitive and very iPad-like (which is a good thing).
• Although the Fire’s hardware specs are lesser than the Nook tablet’s and most other tablets on the market, it’s performance is nice and snappy. No complaints there.

• No built-in calendar app. Yes I know there are a bunch of third-party calendar apps available in The Fire’s App store, but I would’ve MUCH rather had a built-in calendar app than say, the useless IMDB app.
• No true Facebook app. The Facebook “app” that ships with the device merely forwards you to the mobile version of Facebook.com. I would’ve thought that securing an impressive native FB app would have been among the very first things on the project team’s Todo list.
• While it connects to secured Wifi networks flawlessly when it has the password or key, the device has had trouble connecting to many unsecured Wifi hotspots, especially those that require a confirmation click to access.
• No external media slot. C’mon Amazon. I get how leaving one out was an intentional strategy to promote use of Amazon’s cloud-based storage, but I’ve already encountered a half-dozen scenarios where a media card would have been ideal.

• I desperately miss having a physical button to click to jump back to the home screen. On the Fire it almost always takes several gestures to accomplish this.
• I don’t care for Pulse, the feed reader that ships with the device. The interface is not intuitive at all and I can only imagine the struggles that non-technical users–most of whom have no idea what an RSS “feed” is–will have with it. I ended up preferring to just using Google Reader normally through the built-in Silk browser, which worked fine.
• The allegedly revolutionary Silk browser doesn’t seem all that revolutionary. I understand the split-browsing happening in the background while in Cloud mode (and the concomitant privacy issues), but from a user’s perspective it’s just another browser that displays web pages. In fact, given the browser is closed source and doesn’t allow plugins, I view it as more of a devolution than an evolution.

Almost from the moment I unboxed the device, my daughters were drawn to it. The size of it made them think it was a device for children. It fit easily in their hands and played back their favorite Ruff Ruffman videos smoothly and without a hitch. Within 2 hours they were both asking for their own units. That never happened with my iPad, no matter how many Princess apps I installed on it.

Therefore, the Kindle Fire is a hit in the Cato household.

A dark, intense character study of a man who offsets many personal acts of valor and selflessness with a few acts of horrifying cruelty. Literal warfare as a metaphor for the main character’s inner turmoil. Big Philosophical Questions about good and evil, the ethics of interfering with less advanced civilizations, finding purpose in a post-scarcity society, and most interesting of all, what it means to be human in an era when machines do everything better than people, including the things we thought made us uniquely human.

Great stuff. I would have given it 5 stars if not for the twist ending. I have nothing against twist endings per se (in fact I love them when they’re well executed), but in this case I felt like it robbed me of a perception that I had spent 468 pages developing.

In any case, the scene with The Chair was the most unsettling thing I’ve ever read. It disturbs me even now.

The CTO of the State of California, responding to being called out by Tech Crunch and the San Francisco Chronicle for setting aside $50 million to maintain an antiquated 70′s-era legacy system just to process unemployment checks, has challenged the public to “walk the talk” and propose better ways his state can conduct its IT operations.

Even though I don’t live in California, I can’t resist such a challenge.

Here are my ideas (which I’ll be cross-posting to the official crowdsourcing site):

• You currently utilize 100 different email systems for only 180,000 email accounts. Convert all of them to Gmail. Publicly ask Google, a corporate resident of California, to assist you with this.
• You currently operate 9,494 servers. To get an idea how excessive this is, consider that Facebook (which has orders of magnitude higher storage and processing demands than any government) currently operates about the same number of servers. Make your 130 department-level CIOs each produce a public online report that: (1) justifies each server; and (2) for each justified server, explain why it cannot be virtualized, put on a SAN or moved into a cloud for a fraction of the cost. I suspect you will find thousands of unnecessary servers.
• Implement a “Crowdsource Waiting Period” for new IT projects. The Statewide IT Capital Plan proposes the development of at least 25 web-based applications. Before awarding any of these projects to the usual gigantic IT vendors for the usual gigantic cost, require the Departments requesting these systems to post the functional requirements and a sample data set online and allow a 6-month period where any developer can submit a no-obligation prototype at their own cost. You will find that many of the systems you propose building from scratch can be developed at a fraction of the cost by building on top of existing platforms with existing tools. Some of these projects will still go to the giant IT vendors, but those are the ones which should.
• Any state government website that is merely informational or does not require transaction processing should be converted into a hosted blog (which can be operated for free at WordPress.com or Blogger for example) or to a Social Network group (which can be operated for free at Facebook or LinkedIn for example). Then you can get rid of some of your 400 web servers.

That should get you started.

As I write this, The Princess & The Frog has grossed about $93 million after 8 weeks of wide release.  Is this a failure?

The answer depends on whether you mean the movie or the franchise.

It’s hard to argue that the The Princess & The Frog has been anything other than a disappointment at the box office. After more than 2 months of wide release, it has yet to cross the all-important $100 million mark (and because it fell a sharp 54% last week, there is a possibility that it may never cross it.) To put this in perspective, consider that the family movie released two weeks before it, A Chistmas Carol, pocketed $100 million in just 24 days and the family movie released two weeks after it, Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, joined club 100 million after only 8 days. And even if PATF drags itself across $100 million with its last theatrical breath, its domestic gross won’t come close to recouping the $140 million the film cost Disney to produce and market.

Some people have argued that the Frog’s low numbers can be attributed to a bad release date. People who make this argument either don’t know or have forgotten that the first Chipmunks movie opened this same exact week in 2007 to a record $44 million.  Others have claimed that a “Princess” movie was a hard sell for boys. Are these the same experts who claimed that Pixar’s 2006 hit Cars was a tough sell for girls before it went on to gross $461 million worldwide? If this were a real issue, we would have seen it with the earlier Disney princess movies.

Whatever The Princess & The Frog lacked at the Box Office, it’s more than made up at the Mall. The merchandise is a smash hit.

According to the L.A. Times, Princess Tiana merchandise already accounts for 20% of “Disney Princess” merchandise sales, which works out to about $800 million a year. The Toy Industry Association has nominated Mattel’s Just One Kiss Princess Tiana doll as individual Toy of the Year and The Princess & The Frog brand as Toy Property of the Year. I just checked a few minutes ago and Princess Tiana dolls still held the No.1 and No.4 spots in Amazon.com’s doll category weeks after Christmas. Princess Tiana bedding is outselling perennial favorite The Little Mermaid 3-to-1 at major retailers. Are there any Chipmunks who can squeak that?
And just think, if PATF follows historical patterns, these fantastic merchandise numbers are merely an appetizer to enormous DVD sales that will go on for years.

So where does this leave us? To me the verdict is clear: America was more than ready for Princess Tiana, but Disney didn’t deliver the movie it wanted.

I’m just glad nobody mentioned race.

I mostly listen to R&B, but ever since I heard the beautiful anguish in Norah Jones’ voice on I Don’t Know Why, there’s been room on my iPod for sultry jazz vocals. By the time another friend hipped me to Diana Krall, I was hooked.

So that explains how I came to buy My One and Only Thrill, the latest album from jazz sensation Melody Gardot. Wow. Five Stars. No wonder it’s number one on iTunes for the genre. A focused collection of Gardot’s trademark ballads with a couple of bassa nova and blues tracks thrown in, it’s a must-have for anyone who appreciates silky, demure vocals on top of smooth string arrangements. My favorite track is the opening one, Baby I’m a Fool, followed by the sunny and wistful If this World Were Mine. One of the pleasant surprises about the album is that, unlike many jazz releases, it’s mostly composed of original tracks instead of remakes.

Where R&B ballads have loud vocals with long-held notes, jazz ballads win you over with low-key nuance. Gardot is simply a master at this art of understatement. Once you develop an ear for this style, it’s hard not to find her discography stunning.

On a personal note, Gardot still lives in Philly and once attended the Community College of Philadelphia. I used to work about two blocks from there. I wonder if I ever passed her on the street.  These days she’s too big a star to be found walking down Spring Garden Street, but if I did see her I would buy her a juicy cheesesteak for gracing the world with this brilliant album.

Don’t take my word. Watch the video for Baby I’m a Fool on YouTube.

I decided to redesign my site for 2010. If you’ve been here before, you’ll notice that the layout is not the only thing that’s changed. I went with a more social approach. Gone are the technical articles that nobody but other developers would appreciate. Now I’m going to post about music, movies, books and other things that will probably appeal to a broader audience.

In my old designs, for various reasons ranging my private nature to the dreadful chore of moderating spam comments, I intentionally left out a way to contact me and I did not allow comments. With the new design not only do I allow both, but I welcome people to interact with me on the social networks, something I’ve found to be a lot of fun even with the downsides. The new generation of WordPress anti-spam plugins went a long way to changing my mind too.

We’ll see how it goes.

I do a lot of work with Sql Server Integration Services these days. Complicated Data Warehouse stuff mostly. While SSIS certainly shines with heavy-duty ETL work, it’s one of my favorite tools because it works just as well for simple automation tasks.

One of the simple things I need to do all the time—everyday actually—is confirm that particular files have been refreshed with new data on schedule (and then take particular actions depending on the outcome of these checks.) This is ideal grunt work to automate with SSIS.

In order to get a file’s Last Modified Date with SSIS 2008, you need to do three things:

• 1. Create a package-scoped SSIS string variable to store the actual date that your target file was last modified. Let’s call that variable File_Updated_Actual.
• 2. Add a Script Task to your package with a ReadWrite variable called File_Updated_Actual (it must be spelled exactly as it is in Step 1).
• 3. Add the following code to the Main() method of your Script Task (obviously replacing \\YourServer\YourFolder\your_file_name.txt with the actual path to your file):

Basically this code uses the System.IO namespace built into Windows to retrieve the date the file was last modified, convert that date to a string and then store the string in a SSIS variable.

Once you have the last modified date stored in a SSIS variable, you can use it anywhere inside your package. Something I commonly do is compare the variable’s value to a target date (such as the date the file should’ve been refreshed). You can make such a comparison by changing the evaluation operation of any precedence constraint to “expression” and then adding a simple equality expression in C# language syntax (which is different than the VB/.NET syntax used above for the Script Task—yes I know, this is one of many idiosyncrasies that give SSIS such a steep learning curve).

I hope that helps somebody out there.

I have one of those new Facebook vanity URLs.

Now, instead of that long and impossible-to-memorize URL, you can find my facebook page at facebook.com/jamelcato