So many important people have died this year, I thought it best to have at least a rough draft of an epitaph on record in case I need one. I feel fine, but you never know. Ergo:
Nerd post follows; non-nerds, move along.
This took me a while to figure out, and in the end I had to dig around in the
source code to figure out just what was going on, so here’s a quick note for
posterity since I’m sure somebody else will have exactly this problem at some
point. Caveat lector: I’m probably making a bunch of mistakes here. And
thanks to brian d foy for showing us how to
use test_via_harness.
Basically what it boils down to is this: you are going to have either a
bunch of test files in a t directory, or a single test.pl file in the
main directory. Or possibly both.
The thing you need to override is different in each case. You might just want to do both in case you change your mind later about the test setup.
Let’s say, for instance, that my special little requirement is that I can get
at some shared libraries in the /opt/special/lib directory. The examples
below should be understood as code inside your Makefile.PL file. And
yes, they are almost identical in this case.
test.pl override test_via_script.sub MY::test_via_script {
my ( $self, $perl, $script ) = @_;
# Here is some special sauce for the environment:
my $env_setup = 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/special/lib';
# Here are some Makefile variables that are handled by `make`:
my $harness_args =
'"$(TEST_VERBOSE)", "$(INST_LIB)", "$(INST_ARCHLIB)"';
# Here's the command that will create the target:
my $command =
sprintf "\t%s %s -MExtUtils::Command::MM -e 'test_harness(%s)' %s",
$env_setup,
$perl,
$harness_args,
$script;
return $command;
}t/*.t override test_via_harness.sub MY::test_via_harness {
my ( $self, $perl, $tests ) = @_;
# Here is some special sauce for the environment:
my $env_setup = 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/special/lib';
# Here are some Makefile variables that are handled by `make`:
my $harness_args =
'"$(TEST_VERBOSE)", "$(INST_LIB)", "$(INST_ARCHLIB)"';
# Here's the command that will create the target:
my $command =
sprintf "\t%s %s -MExtUtils::Command::MM -e 'test_harness(%s)' %s",
$env_setup,
$perl,
$harness_args,
$tests;
return $command;
}I think it’s a much better practice to keep your test files in t/ anyway,
and to always run with the test harness. In fact I usually skip the explicit
test harness altogether and run everything with the appropriate prove
command (the one that belongs to the Perl I’m using).
However, if you’re dealing with legacy code or not interested in doing real
Perl stuff or otherwise just need to “get on with it” then you might well need
a test.pl – and remember, test_via_script for that guy!
Here are the obvious links you should follow if you want to know more about this:
And finally, for anyone nerdier than I who is reading this: I know about
package MY and I agree it’s probably the better solution, but I think it’s
(even more) confusing for novices; and I assume at least some people trying
to do this aren’t even Perl programmers.
I recently attended a silent auction, the modest proceeds of which went to the IFRC. The things being auctioned were artworks, mostly on paper. I got three, about which more in a future post after I photograph them. But I will at least give a sort of preview: Two by Ryuta Suzuki and one by Kati Verebics.
It’s a safe bet that I got all three well under market value. I almost got into a little bidding war with someone, but he mysteriously declined to bid on the things I wanted, perhaps intimidated by my hovering around waiting to double down. And I had passer’s remorse about not having bid on something, until I found out the winning bid belonged to a very nice guy.
I don’t often buy art. Very rarely in fact. And not because it’s expensive; while it can be very costly there’s always something you can afford, however minor. The thing is, if you’re collecting art you have to put it somewhere, and you feel sort of bad if that somewhere isn’t a wall.
I suppose you know you’re actually collecting art when you no longer feel bad about not displaying it. I could imagine getting to that point, or if you like falling into that trap, but not soon. I’ve got a sweet little apartment with more windows than walls, and a lot of geographic instability in the mix, and I’m not yet ready to invest in another flat file. Not quite yet.
It’s probably not an easy thing putting together a charity auction. This one had some local artists I’d heard of (including a few I know personally); and some I hadn’t heard of; and some strangers from far afield, whose contributions were sometimes relevant and sometimes not. The quality was very uneven, but in Budapest the quality of a museum show can be just as uneven (I’m lookin’ at you, MüPa!).
Some good things about the auction: admirable transparency about the finances; no hidden reserves; good art on the cheap for a good cause.
Some less-good things: no alcohol (what were they thinking?); a rather, shall we say, distant house staff; no real PR about the artists or works (remember, most people at a charity auction know nothing about art); and, sadly, not enough people wanting to spend money.
As one of the modestly solvent people in the room, I definitely would have spent more on the works I bought if there had been enemy bids. I wouldn’t have gone to the moon, but I definitely would have gone to double what I spent. In one case I almost felt like bidding against myself but part of the adrenalin kick of an auction, even a noncompetitive one, is the tension between wanting what you want, and wanting to get it at the lowest price going.
I know these things are easier said than done, but it seems to me that there are some obvious steps to help raise more money at a charity auction. So I shall play Lucy for a moment and offer...
In short, it was fun, I totally scored, and I think I’ll try this sort of thing again. But first I have to find a good framer.
Why is it that artists and cultural institutions, much like restaurants, generally have not heard the news that Flash-only websites are broken and reflect badly on their owners?
In the case of individual artists, I’m inclined to think of it as similar to the restaurant problem. Creative people get talked into some gimmicky animation and don’t know any better, so up it goes. But when a well-funded Palace of the Arts hires some clueless two-bit company to rain misery on its potential ticket buyers, then I have no choice but to smell a rat.
An example of the first: Mr. Suzuki’s portfolio. Of the second: MuPa.hu, a study in inaccessibility.
Tech publisher Tim O’Reilly has just posted a very thoughtful case against the 30% number in Apple’s subscription model. He thinks it should be more like 5%.
The post and the comment thread are very informative, and I highly recommend reading them if any of this interests you. Here it is on Google Buzz, incidentally proving that Google Buzz has a few actual users. Who knew?
One minor point on which I disagree with O’Reilly, but in which we’re both just wildly speculating: I don’t think Apple is arrogantly trying to price the competition off its platform (e.g. Netflix vs. iTunes). Rather, I think they have considered those businesses and, perhaps just as arrogantly, assumed they should be smart enough to make a profit while still coughing up 30%. I sort of imagine Tim Cook saying, “Well I could do it in a weekend, so why shouldn’t Reed Hastings?”
Apple, which still has nothing like a viable competitor to its ragingly popular iPad tablet device and happens to also make most of the profit in the smartphone world, recently announced new rules for in-app content purchasing, particularly for magazine and newspaper subscriptions.
In a nutshell, they are:
I’ve been following the reaction online for a while now. As you might expect, publishers and various other middlemen, as well as a typical assortment of irrational Apple-bashers, are raising a stink. Or at least trying to; with Rupert Murdoch on board, it’s hard to argue there isn’t money to be made by publishers.
I see the arguments against Apple’s new policy falling into three main categories, which I will briefly address below. My gut feeling is that this new model will work in most instances, and in a few instances will fail so utterly that exceptions will soon be made.
This argument usually has little to do with the 30%, which after all isn’t that much compared to traditional printing and distribution costs. Instead, the big fear is that publishers have built a business on selling subscriber data – usually to people who turn around and try to sell crap back to the subscribers. Ever wonder where all those catalogs come from?
If Apple limits what data you can collect, and requires it be easy to opt out, what becomes of this revenue stream?
Well, in fact a good part of it will probably go away. I expect people will still happily provide enough personal data that you can reasonably prove the value of your “demographic” to the advertisers.
But according to what logic, exactly, should a business be allowed to harvest as much of my personal data as their little database elves know how to, without my consent and directly against my better interest? I understand that this helps keep subscription prices low, but then making sandwiches out of your customers’ own flesh would keep sandwich prices low. How is that good?
So Apple is in effect forcing the publishers to be honest if they want to be on Apple’s platform. We’ll see how it goes, but I mostly expect that they’ll grumble but give in, exactly as far as they absolutely must and no further.
There is also some minor echo on the Innernets suggesting that easy subscription cancellation is an unfair burden for publishers, to which the only reasonable response is a much simpler blow me.
Here the argument is very much about the 30% cut. Content resellers tend to have fairly low margins, thanks in no small part to Amazon. I would expect that a large portion of a la carte content sales, particularly books and essays, simply can not survive a 30% reduction in sales.
This would effectively force someone like Amazon to raise prices, but how will the market react to that?
On the one hand, the market probably wouldn’t much care. Books in Europe cost a lot more than books in the US, and people don’t read less as a result. Steep discounts are not a requirement to secure readership, at least not if your content is any good.
However, with the same-price stipulation for in-app and out-of-app purchases, Apple is sending a very clear message: if you want to sell content on our platform, the content had better be of sufficiently high quality to be priced above a 30% cut in revenue.Or it had better be sufficiently dirt-cheap that all the money’s in the resale. This is probably not what Apple has in mind, and it’s already a problem in the iBookStore as well as the App Store.
I expect some retailers, and especially Amazon, will feel their backs are to the wall, and will try to find a way out. That might well be regulatory: changing the contract terms on your direct competitor, effectively denying them shelf space in your store, may not go over well at all in the EU, especially regarding cultural goods.
But I think it’s more likely that some folks will try to give you an upside to purchasing outside the app, and Apple will generally not approve those apps except in the cases where they sorta-kinda have to. For example, what does Apple do if Amazon lets you buy content in-app that is tied to that app (i.e. to your various iDevices), but lets you "buy once read anywhere" if you purchase outside the app?
A lot of publishers also bundle digital and dead-tree editions. In Germany, publishers charge a lot for subscriptions but usually offer gifts (a toaster, a Zune, whatever) for new subscribers. (Jetzt Prämie sichern! they shout at the consumption sheep.) Does that mean physical items purchased through the app also have to give Apple a 30% cut? Or that you can’t run a different promotion in each store? What about eBay? Does Apple get 30% of your auction price, or 30% of eBay’s premium?
Here I think Apple has once again failed to address the inevitable grey areas that exist or will soon exist in the app ecosystem. I expect that a combination of regulatory challenges, untenable implications of rules (e.g. the eBay case), and market nuances will force Apple to revise the rules, and possibly the percentage, several times over the next year.
If I had to guess at an outcome, I would guess they’ll allow you to sweeten the deal however you like as long as the part that goes on your iDevice costs the same in-app or out. And I think they will clarify that they don’t expect a cut of anything that doesn’t go on the device; and maybe even clarify that you can sell Kindle for iPad for $20 while giving away Kindle for Android free, if that’s your best solution. And finally that yes, you can sell your newspaper for half price on Android as long as the Android subscription doesn’t give you iPad download rights (at which point I think most smart product managers would give up the 30% instead of taking on the engineering challenge).
This argument is really fascinating, and is being applied not only to fly-by-night startups trying to fill some app market niche that was miraculously still empty an hour ago (e.g. subscription aggregators). The interesting ones here are the purveyors of digital media.
The gist is that streaming media services are built on such impossibly thin margins that it’s completely absurd to give up 30%. The only way to survive that and not go bust is to raise prices, and that’s like raising taxes, and so on.
The problem with this argument is that most streaming media services are built on such impossibly thin margins that they are not, by themselves, viable businesses. That doesn’t mean the 30% cut isn’t onerous, but when the people who created the work in the first place are getting as small a cut as they are from the streaming services, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the middlemen.
I expect this will be a tempest in a teapot at most. The additional charge won’t invalidate anybody’s fake valid business model, nor will it put any real business in the red. Some startups may go belly-up as a result, but isn’t that why they call it venture capital?
I just read an interesting blog post by Mac developer Manton Reece titled I hope iAds fails (via DF).
He makes two very good points:
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but I think he’s missing an important part of the picture.
When Apple first announced its iAds advertising program, I joined the nerd herd and assumed they were trying to head Google off at the pass. Google clearly thinks that in-app advertising is going to be a big deal, and as the dominant advertising-engineering company (AdEng? AE?) they want to control that market. Google paid $750 Million for AdMob, a company pursuing exactly that aim and one which Apple reportedly also wanted to buy.
Yes, that would be a terrible outcome for users and indie developers alike. If people get used to ad-supported apps, it will be much harder to sell small apps, and small apps are the foundation of the ecosystem. And, of course, the user experience will be severely degraded for most types of application.
But I now think that’s unlikely, and I further think Apple is on to something more interesting (and arguably more innovative) than Google’s subtlety-of-napalm approach to advertising.
There are, I believe, three interesting scenarios where in-app advertising is essential to the very concept, and by no means a bad thing for users. Whether it destroys user experience in these cases depends on the interaction design, not the concept itself.
Take, if you will, BabyCenter. Here is a web site that is sort of about community (an online network of people expecting or having or raising children). Maybe it’s even good at that. But this is undeniably also a site that aims to aggregate people who need and want to buy stuff of a certain sort. The web site makes it very clear that this is what they’re about, and they even have an online store of their own. There is nothing wrong with this, and BabyCenter is very open about it.
How should a BabyCenter App make its money? By charging people to download it — people who, after all, are just as likely to go there because they need stuff as for any other reason? Or should they help connect eager purchasers to eager sellers? (The BabyCentrists have two iPhone apps in the App Store already, one paid and one free, but no BabyCenter app per se.)
Have you looked at LookBook? There’s a concept that would be great as an iPad app, and it would be almost criminally negligent to exclude the advertisers. And for their demographic, it’d be smart to make it a free app: the kids need to save money for clothes!
There are many more, but you get the idea already. Some things are simply about shopping, even if they might be complexly about something else too.
Now the question is: what sort of ads should those be? Should they be high-quality, unobtrusive, Apple-style ads? Or should they be ugly, creepily prescient, Google-style ads?
More and more Hollywood movies, TV shows, and other entertainment products have supporting apps these days. It seems to be the horrifically bloated interactive Flash site of the new era. And the kids, apparently, will download such stuff.
It seems obvious that the ad-as-app should also have in-app ads. You already have the brand loyalty, since after all they downloaded your ad-as-app. Why not make an extra buck selling them something else?
The only catch is that you probably don‘t want to sell your competitor‘s stuff. I assume Apple will give you some control over that.
This category of app may seem superfluous, but remember when you were young and fannish yourself. There‘s nothing new about hawking and extra bauble to the already-sated shopper.
Of the three areas where I see in-app ads as essential, one stands out as both obvious and difficult: ”print“ ads.
Consider this: you can subscribe to the New Yorker for under a buck an issue. They sell about a million copies each week. And this would be completely unsustainable without ad revenue.
I think the App Store gives us a chance to finally have high-quality magazines on portable devices, and I‘m impressed with some of the early efforts (cf. Popular Mechanics). But even though I‘m happy to pay for them, I can‘t imagine that business working without ads.
That‘s the obvious part. The difficult part is that, thus far, nobody has made this work. I would even argue that it has not worked for magazine web sites, though the Wall Street Journal has apparently done pretty well with a subscriptions-and-ads model.
This has got me thinking. If you remember the iPad introduction, you will remember that Apple is very keen on the iPad being used as a platform for high-quality publishing. The New York Times had an app available at launch, but it turned out to be a strange and indecisive beast: the ”Editor‘s Choice“ offers very little content, and has highly obtrusive, poorly designed, in-house ads, and costs nothing even though this is the strongest brand in American periodicals.
I believe there are two big reasons why this hasn‘t yet worked out as planned. First, magazine publishers generally lack the technical expertise to make good technology choices (let alone develop software). Second, they have no idea how to approach the new ad market. Their traditional approach is simply too inefficient; and yet they are reluctant to cede any control.
Of these, the first problem will solve itself with time, as there are more people who can design and build a solid app. The Guardian, for example, has a good iPhone app and a good web site, even though they‘re not yet on the iPad.
The second problem, though, requires major partners for the major print media. Google has not yet established itself as a good partner for high-quality ads, and Apple is attacking that market as opposed to the long-tail advertising market Google effectively monopolizes.
It‘s starting to seem obvious, at least to me, that Apple is much more interested in using its ad platform as a profitable carrot with which to bring serious publishers to its devices. I think Apple believes the numbers will speak for themselves, and publishers will be happy with Apple‘s cut if it gives them Apple‘s quality. This is especially important for major lifestyle brands. And if they go in-house or switch to another ad provider later, Apple still wins, with more and better content on iPad.
If small publishers can also benefit from this, so much the better. And if people are going to put ads in random apps, Apple wants to at least have a shot at mitigating the user-experience failure and getting a bit of cash along the way. But I really do not believe Apple is trying for an ad in every app.
Apple and Google are going to be the big players in app ads out the gate, but there is still room for innovation.
Apple doesn‘t play the long-tail game with any seriousness. And Google doesn‘t do aesthetic quality (in fact they are virulently indifferent to it).
That suggests one clear niche market. And because you can plug in ad content in apps though a variety of technologies, neither Apple nor Google can establish any technical barrier to entry.
Another place I see startups, or at least studios, emerging is around truly interactive ads. Call them ads-as-games. The iPad, and perhaps some day its competitors, give you an amazing level of creative freedom. And that means you can push boundaries, if you know how. The publishers don‘t know how, nor do the traditional ad agencies.
While some people will just churn out multi-platform content from their publishing workflow and use whatever is easiest or that, user experience be damned (cf. Wired), others (cf. Pop Mech) will try to lead the pack through innovation. And they will want advertising content that helps them keep that lead.
As a loyal Apple customer, I want them to stay focused on products, not ads.
As a potential app developer, I want the App Store ecosystem to remain healthy and profitable for independents who want to sell their best work to real customers.
But as a potential iPad publisher — I‘m thinking seriously about starting an iPad magazine for fun and profit — I want a one-stop shop if possible. I would have to deal with Apple anyway for all financials and metrics of the distribution process. I could save a lot of headache by just plugging into their ad network and having it all integrated.
I‘m still not sure that‘s any better for the consumer. I trust Apple to have high-quality ads, but I don‘t trust them at all to have depth. I definitely trust Google to have the depth, because they will find a way for Aunt Minnie‘s Tin-Can Cookie Cutters to get into the stream at $3 a click, but of course their quality will be uneven. I hope that innovative startups will bridge this gap.
I do think there is already a precedent for high-quality, ad-free, reasonably-priced paid apps in the App Store. And I think there is enough momentum behind that, and so much potential in this class of devices, that it will not be broken by ad-riddled crapware any time soon.
Thus I think it‘s possible, and maybe desirable, for iAds to "fail" in terms of undermining paid apps, while also succeeding for both Apple and publishers in helping finally port the print-magazine revenue paradigm to the digital world.
And I think there are other things besides traditional publishing that would benefit, and whose users would benefit, from a high-quality in-app advertising system.
I followed a blog link - I already forgot whence - to an "article" on Mother Jones magazine doing several things Mother Jones is good at:
I realize the burden of passionate leftism is hard to bear if you don't happen to be South American, but hey, since when did Communists believe in Journalism? And who cares, if the end is nigh? Seriously, it might be.
Are you curious yet? Have you already gone and googled it?
OK, so let's have some more background. But only a bit. I've been thinking lately about scale as it applies to our current British Petroleum-induced nightmare. In short, we're thinking about the wrong sort of scale. A bunch of corporate geologists punched a hole in the bottom of the ocean, and it's leaking oil. We need to think in terms of geologic scale.
What if our little corporate geologist hole keeps leaking for four more years, nonstop, without any sign of abating? Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Four years? WTF?!
Go ask the folks in East Java how they like their mud. MUD. Oh yeah, and the mud is freely accessible, open-air mud, not five thousand feet below the friggin' ocean mud.
So, my point, which I freely admit I wouldn't be qualified to make if BP and the US Government weren't lying through their clenched teeth and enforcing a data blackout, is that we may be radically overestimating our ability to control this situation. And the scale on which it works itself out may be deeply uncomfortable for us: think hundreds of years without any fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, think permanent abandonment of all the relevant shorelines and as far inland as the hurricanes drop their black oily rain.
Even if I pretend BP is telling something resembling the truth, I think that all sounds eminently possible.
But here's a way scarier idea: What if the BP well is broken deep under the sea bed, and it's going to turn into some kind of massive expanding undersea gusher in the highly likely event that BP fails to relieve the pressure? What if the most optimistic version of success would still vastly increase the amount of oil being spilled? What if "bleeding" the well at, say, double the current release rate, for the rest of our lives, is the absolute best we can hope for?
Yep, that's the conjecture I ran into on the Innernets.
Here's the link you've been waiting so patiently for, thanks to the source, The Oil Drum.
Read the comments. Keep in mind that it's a largely anonymous forum in which both experts and paranoid cranks can be found. But of course also keep in mind that Tony Hayward is going to have to shoot his way out of the bank if he wants to live in anything other than infamy, and he's controlling your access to the truth accordingly.
I can see two potential upsides to this: first, it might maybe be the wake-up call to the dangers of our petroleum addiction, and thus trigger a real energy revolution; and second, there's no way in Hell we can fight two foreign wars while we deal with this.
