As of today 10 years

Today marks the 10 year milestone from when I registered my open source application Class Viewer for Java on SourceForge, and I guess I should commemorate that with a post. So here it is.

Downloads over the last 10 years are 35367 from over 150 countries.

That last one is what keeps me thinking and open source software is definitely a way to put something out there that people all over the world can use.

I highly recommend putting something out there.

For must of us not celebrities, rich or whatever, how many ways do you have to in any way speak to your planet? Give something useful for it?

But as magnificent as that sounds typing it, perspective is that popular apps have billions of downloads and have downloads from just about every country.

Enough said on that subject!

And my application is not done. I think I may have learned a few things over the last ten years and I still use it.

It has been such a cool adventure so far. Pleasantly quiet in most ways but there have definitely been some interesting things over the last ten years.

Thanks for the interest over the last decade! There is a profound pleasure in putting something out there that people choose to use.

I'll end with screenshots showing the country counts:

Word choice and climate instability

Turns out that our Sun heats the Earth which I think is an uncontroversial position.

Without the light from the Sun, the Earth would be an iceball. Or a bare rock after the water eventually left over billions of years (I think) but getting a bit esoteric there, which gets to the problem of the relevance of certain scientific knowledge.

For instance, to whom does the average global temperature matter?

Climate scientists study it, but for every day concerns it doesn't tell you much.

Without searching on it, I can't tell you what the average global temperature is. And the phrase "global warming" confuses lots of people with scientific perspective hard to process in everyday life.

The phrase "climate change" is more accurate I think, but is still vague, as change can be good or bad: if you live in an arid climate is a little more rain--no doubt change--good or bad? If you're in a desert and get floods, change is bad. If you're in a farming region under a drought? Well then, a return of rain is a good change!

So our Sun heats our planet, and certain gases in the air help keep our planet warm like a nice warm blanket. Pumping more of these gases into the atmosphere is like adding layers of blanket which anyone can tell you can get uncomfortable.

The more energy from the Sun that our planet keeps the more energy there is to change things, which could lead to climate instability.

Politicians understand the importance of word choice. Infamously Republicans in my country which is the United States exploited variations on words, say to make claims about "death panels" or to shift perspective on estate taxes by calling them "death taxes".

I think it's past time that scientists focused less on their perspective when talking about important matters to the public and more on being understood.

Understanding that putting more gas into the air that keeps more energy from the Sun can lead to climate instability and screw up our weather is a lot different than hearing about "climate change" or even more esoteric and distant, studying debates about "global warming".

If you know the global average temperature, feel free to reply what it is in the comments.

And ask yourself, what does it really mean to your daily weather? It is important, but in terms of understanding for billions of people on planet Earth, the average global temperature is esoterica.

But climate instability hits close to home.

Scientists need to understand a responsibility to be understood as they are on the planet with the rest of us, and will suffer the consequences with the rest of us.

We all are invested in planet Earth and should behave accordingly.


James Harris

In praise of the little app

Coming up on 10 years with my lightweight application Class Viewer on SourceForge, I've put out a request for feedback with no response at the time of the writing of this post. But that's NOT a surprise. I have almost ten years of experience with this project and over that entire time period I have almost no feedback beyond downloads. Which isn't terrible. It's GREAT to be downloaded.

But it occurs to me that I should try things to see if it might not entice people to talk about their use of the project--assuming it's being used after being downloaded--by talking more about the design philosopy around it.

So, for instance, it's deliberately small and lightweight. I like little apps.

Years ago when I was developing I got frustrated with development tools that took forever, in my opinion, just to load for me to do something simple, like get some info. Also I got hostile towards IDE's that suggested methods to me! I considered it cheeky.

I pick my methods. I don't like some tool pushing a method at me.

The project is also stateless, deliberately, so that every time you open it, you have a clean slate. I even made that emphatic by giving you a lot of blank screen when it loads versus some "splash". I don't like splash with apps.

So there is a LOT of my possibly peculiar philosophy in my application. And it will be 10 years in February where I've stuck to it.

Also along with the above is the principle, only just enough!

I don't like feature creep.

In addition I think that needing a lot of documentation for simple application probably means you have a design problem. That's just my opinion.

However, I think it kind of ironic as mobile devices begin to really take over that my approach is probably better.

Who wants to have to read a book before they can really use their smartphone? Do you really wish to need to take a course before you can get your tablet really working really well?

Oh yeah, and back in February 2004 when I put Class Viewer up on SourceForge, I was giving the world a web enabled app that didn't care if it was working on the desktop, or as an applet.

To me THAT more than anything else IS the future, when applications will be web enabled, web active, web-centric, or useful completely off the web.

(Should add that applet functionality is mostly gone now until and unless I address things like security certificates and security settings. So yes, I am aware of this issue. I really don't like how Java does security. I think it needs to be entirely re-done from the bottom up. But what does my opinion matter?)

So why so little user feedback with so much in the process?

Maybe because I never really explained.

Next month marks ten years of my Class Viewer for Java.

If you've used the application during that time, hey, do me a favor! Tell me something.

I'm curious to know if any of the above resonates.

Did the app appeal to people with similar notions about software development?

What do you think? Will the web take over with applications blurring the line between the desktop and, um, what else is there? I guess browser?

If you ponder the dominance of an idea, consider the dominance of a name.

With so little feedback I will admit I've tried to keep my spirits up, with things like, web searches.

But what does it really mean?

Search on any web search engine: Class Viewer

How'd I do? An inquiring mind wants to know.


James Harris

What value news analysis?

As much as news organizations are fighting with the issue of revenue, along with plenty of others trying to figure out how to make money in our modern web age, I think it fascinating to ponder how news makes sense.

For instance, in our modern world, news travels fast.

And as a baseline I'm going to use the 2012 election year in the United States to make some points. For instance, how long did it take for results to travel? And did we have to have news agencies do it?

Reality is that when it comes to important news which matters to a lot of people they will spread it fast, and while I'm sure lots of people got their results about elections outcomes directly from some news organizations, others may have heard it, like, even shouted at them excitedly by someone else avidly watching.

Doesn't take much to say, this person or that person won or lost, right?

So why should we pay for it?

But what about the 'why' of the news?

Trying to explain the why of events, unlike reporting itself, is a thing called news analysis!

Twitter lets you embed tweets which is something I've found could be useful, and it has relevance here as I have an opinion, which I voiced on election night. Here it is:

Looks like this election is about 'demographics rule' and the steep decline of the overwhelming dominance of Big Money in American politics.
— James Harris (@jstevh) November 7, 2012

So there is this record of my opinion, with a date and timestamp, where looking at it now (and how else would I have remembered as I didn't care a lot at the time), which shows I put that tweet out November 6, 2012, at 5:44 PM PST. And I just favorited it. I favorite my own tweets to keep up with, yup, my favorites, like this one.

That is not news--it is news analysis. And it's JUST an opinion, which happens to be mine.

Is it true? I don't know.

However, unlike the news itself which travels rapidly, news analysis has a value which does not evaporate over time!

Isn't that weird? If I'm correct, then it still matters today, maybe even more than it did back then, as there are more elections coming up!

But who knows?

Time will tell.

When I look over the world of media outlets I am impressed not so much with breaking news--even though it still has a LOT of value but that value fades quickly as the news progresses--but with analysis, which is the key differentiator in my opinion.

And news analysis-- unlike breaking news--gains value over time if correct!

That's where the money is, in my opinion.


James Harris

Why not problem solve health insurance?

Growing up I was fascinated by the fictional character Spock on Star Trek. His obsession with logic fascinated me, and lead me to the library where I was disappointed by the reality of how logic is taught. Nonetheless I have remained interested in the subject and with problem solving as well, so I find it weird when I come across relatively simple analysis in big areas, where logic dictates.

Like health insurance is a major issue and in the US it has been problematic to properly provide it for our citizenry for quite some time. So I sat down some years back and analyzed the problem space and came to some simple conclusions.

And I concluded that if you boil down all the debate in the US around health insurance it is just about who pays.

The way insurance is supposed to work is you insure against risk by pooling funds in advance of it.

If a person is sick then they have already incurred risk.

It's like, if you already wrecked your car then you can't exactly insure it, correct?

But what if a wealthy uncle pays for your car to be fixed anyway? Well that's not insurance, it's charity.

So it's impossible from the business side to "insure" people when you are actually giving them charity if they are already sick. But from society's perspective it's important to give them that benefit, and insurance companies are the best at delivering payment on claims as it's their business.

But they don't have to be the ones actually paying.

For instance a wealthy person can hire an insurance company to administer claims made against him, even though he is actually paying out, because he lacks the experience to process the claim.

For instance, his chauffeur might run his vehicle into the back end of someone's car. Should he hire lawyers himself and fight the case in court?

What if instead his insurance company handles it, and determines that the accident was engineered because they've seen such things many times before? And they also determine that the supposedly injured party is in the database as someone who has been in many such accidents and is merely a con artist?

How would the wealthy person know on his own without the insurance company's help? He might get lucky and figure it out. And hire attorneys who could figure it out, and properly fight the case or he could end up taken as he does not have that kind of information and why would he? For instance, he couldn't have a database of insurance claims to search on to find the name of the person who had engineered such accidents in the past!

How does all of the above relate to health insurance?

Well, what if? What if the US Government or some other government entity paid for people who aren't really insurable, but the health insurance companies administer? Just like with the wealthy person example above you get the benefits of their expertise but someone else actually pays.

Years ago I put it all together in a tweet of exactly 140 characters:

My healthcare plan: Preventive Care--everybody, Core Care--insurables, Expected Care--not easily insured, Elder Care--quality of life at end
— James Harris (@jstevh) July 27, 2009

Part of the way I use Twitter is to store ideas. And now it's easy to put them back up later by embedding the tweets, which I think is an efficient way to propagate the information.

If that tweet doesn't make sense you can read it all explained on one of my blogs:

lostincomment.blogspot.com/2009/09/my-healthcare-plan.html

I've explained in various ways since then, but I like showing how long I've had this approach out there.

I feel confident that eventually something like it will be the way health insurance will work in the US, but getting there will take some time.

Why? Because unlike the fictional Spock, who loved logic, politicians tend to love other things. As things play out in the US along a predictable path, it will take some time before people get frustrated enough with how things are done to do them better.


James Harris