brian's blog

There have been a few stories about the large number of so-called "geek" shows returning or premiering this fall on TV: Chuck, Big Bang Theory, Reaper, Heroes, Bionic Woman, and so on.

Not as much attention was paid to this potentially upcoming show, though, and it sounds like the geekiest one of all.

From ABC joins geek streak with office project:

[...] ABC has ordered a script for "Foobar," a one-hour ensemble set at a fictional software company.

"It's a show about a lot of very smart, highly verbal people who are relationship retards running one of the most admired companies in the world," said its creator, Alice Wu.

She knows those people well because she is one of them. Before venturing into filmmaking, Wu worked as a software developer at Microsoft.

After a couple of internships at the software company, Wu started there in 1992 after graduating from Stanford with a master's in computer science.

I don't think a show can have better nerd credentials than that.

And she worked at Microsoft to boot. Maybe it's time for a career change...

Got a chance to play around this weekend with Yahoo's invite-only beta of its new Mash social networking platform. Here are some of my quick first impressions.

Pros:

• Slick, clean, intuitive UI; it's a nice experience, especially for a V1 product.
• Promising to open up the platform to third-party developers soon - and looks like it was designed from the ground up with this in mind
• The Karl Marx Paddleball is the best launch module of all - very Monty Python-esque

Cons:

• A curious lack of structured "About Me" info - your job, your school, your favorite movies, etc
• The Mash blog points out the capability to edit almost any part of someone else's profile as their biggest differentiator, but I'm not convinced of the long-term appeal. How many times will I want to add a new joke line to someone's "About Me" module before it gets old - or let someone else do that to me? I'd rather whitelist modules my friends can edit (Guestbooks, graffiti boards, etc) rather than allow them free reign to everything by default (I even accidentally deleted someone else's "Blurt" module today with a single click while poking around).
• Some people ruin the UI with awful, static background images on their profiles...very similar to MySpace. At least you can disable them with a click.
• Why can't I search for friends?

Overall, Yahoo Mash shows promise, but is a little underwhelming right now. It feels like Yahoo's trying to straddle a line between MySpace (limitless UI customization, lots of silly quizzes and toys) and Facebook (plug-in modules / developer platform, news feed). Considering the firehose of traffic Yahoo can provide, it seems bound to find a substantial audience. It seems hard to imagine an audience not already aware of or using MySpace/Facebook, though; perhaps Yahoo Mash may do well with the older, less tech-savvy crowd?

This blog gets a lot of comment spam - over 600 attempts each day. By the time I'm done cleaning it up, I have no time to write actual posts. (Yes, that's the reason I'm offering for my lack of writing. Buying it?)

So I spent the past few days devising a solution to my comment spam problem: I added a spam trap to the perl scripts running my blog. There are now some hidden input fields on this site that a human with a modern web browser won't see, but a spam bot will happily fill out. If they do, message blocked. If they don't (and none have even gotten this far yet), the message is checked against a spam blacklist just in case.

The only downside is that legitimate users can no longer specify their email addresses or URLs. Emails I'm not worried about - no one wants to fill out their email address anyway. URLs, maybe. Eventually I'll upgrade my blog software to the latest version to offer a more robust solution and allow legitmate commenters (all two of them) to specify URLs.

In the meantime, not a single piece of spam has made it through in 3 days...hooray!