Mason Hale

My mom passed away a little more than 14 years ago. Today would have been her 65th birthday.

A year or two before she passed, she shared a secret with me that she had been carrying around her entire adult life. She told me that when she was sixteen she had become pregnant, that she had a baby boy and had given him up for adoption. She told me I had another brother somewhere out there in the world.

My mom told me that she often thought about that baby boy. She wondered how his life had turned out. She wondered if she made the right decision. She told me she hoped she would get to meet him some day.

At the time, I remember being taken aback by this new information. I was surprised to learn I wasn’t her first child after all. But the thing that struck me the most was realizing my mom had been carrying this secret around for so long. I was in my thirties before she told me. It was clear that talking about it made her uncomfortable. It was a pained conversation. I’m sure talking about it stirred up feelings of shame, guilt and worry that she had been carrying around and wrestling with for more than three decades at that point. I remember wanting to do something or say something to ease her pain, and not really knowing what to say or do.

After that conversation, we didn’t talk about it again. Sadly, my mom died before she had the chance to meet that baby boy and to answer her questions and put to rest the worries she carried with her most of her life.

Mom, I’m very pleased to share with you, and everyone, that your baby boy turned out just fine.

Mom, you made the right decision. You don’t need to worry or feel guilt. You should not be ashamed. Instead, you should hold your head high, with pride, knowing that the sacrifices you made, the anguish and doubt you endured, they were all worth it.

A few weeks ago, thanks to the wonders of Facebook and a change in Colorado state law that opened up previously sealed adoption records, I received a cryptic message from someone trying to locate my mother. He had her full maiden name and date of birth. I had a hunch who this might be when I saw that first message. My heart was racing. After a few more tentative exchanges with a few more details, and some fact-checking with some other relatives, I was able to confirm that my mom was, in fact, the birth mother of my mystery messenger. My long lost older brother had found me, at last.

My excitement of finally connecting with my newfound brother was tempered by having to break the news that his birth mother was already deceased. I sent him one of the last photos I have of my mom, sitting with my two young boys eating cotton candy at a school carnival. She loved her grandbabies. They called her “Nawie” (it rhymes with Maui).

I also sent a copy of her obituary, listing her children and surviving relatives. Pulling up those photos and re-reading that obituary stirred deeply buried grief in me. But it also underscored the hole that was still unfilled when my mom died. I was sad to break the news that she was gone, but sadder still to feel the regret that she would never get the chance to meet him, to get to know him, to hug him. She would have really liked that.

I don’t believe my mother shared her secret with many people. I’m sure she must have told a few close friends. I don’t know whether or not my mom would have made this revelation public if she were still alive today. And when I thought about sharing this story, I worried about revealing a secret that she would rather have kept private. But at the same time, I know my mom would have been excited to share this good news with her friends. She would have wanted to tell anyone she had confided in that this story had a happy ending. Because I don’t know who my mom shared her story with, and I don’t want a cloud of secrecy to hang over the relationship I hope to have with my new older half-brother, I have decided to share this story with the world. My mom took her secret to the grave. I think that’s plenty far enough for anyone.

If you know me, you probably know I already have a lot of brothers. Both of my parents had multiple marriages and between them and combinations of “yours”, “mine” and “ours”, growing up I had eight step and half brothers, and no sisters. It was like an all-male Brady Bunch, only bigger. The step- and half- designations have never really mattered. We have always just been brothers. And now I get to put another one on the board. My daughter Katie asked me when I told her this news, “How many uncles do I have now?” Believe it or not, I now have NINE brothers. Along with my two brothers-in-law, Katie now has ELEVEN uncles. I think that is freaking awesome.

A couple weeks ago, my new brother and his wife drove up from Houston to meet me and my wife for dinner. We traded questions and answers. We shared forty years worth of stories over nachos and margaritas. We laughed. We fought back tears at times. But most importantly we got to know each other for the very first time. My newfound brother’s name is Dan. He lives in Houston with his beautiful wife and family. He’s a good dad and a proud father. He was a college athlete. He’s had a successful career. He’s built a good life for himself and his family. He’s happy and healthy.

Mom, he told me he wanted to thank you for giving him the greatest gift he could have ever asked for. He grew up in a great family with loving parents. He’s had a great life.

You would be very proud.

Happy Birthday.

Love, Mason

Here is a poem I just performed at Cloud Camp Austin.

Partly Cloudy

We have a dream
A vision
An aspiration
To compute in the cloud
To pay as we go
To drink by the sip
To add cores at our whim
To write to disks with no end
To scale up with demand
And scale down when it ends
Elasticity
Scalability
Redundancy
Computing as a utility
This is our dream
Becoming reality

But…
There’s a hitch.
There’s a bump in the road
There’s a twist in the path
There’s a detour ahead on the way to achieving our goal

It’s the Database
Our old friend
He is set in his ways
He deals in transactions to keeps things consistent
He maintains the integrity of all his relations
He eats disks for breakfast
He hungers for RAM
He loves queries and joins, and gives each one a plan
He likes his schemas normal and strict
His changes are atomic
That is his schtick

He’s an old friend as I said
We all know him well
So it pains me to say that in this new-fangled cloud
He doesn’t quite fit

Don’t get me wrong, our friend can scale as high as you want
But there’s a price to be paid
That expands as you grow
The cost is complexity
It’s more things to maintain
More things that can go wrong
More ways to inflict pain
On the poor DBA who cares for our friend
The one who backs him up and, if he dies, restores him again

I love our old friend
I know you do too
But it is time for us all to own up to the fact
That putting him into the cloud
Taking him out of the rack
Just causes us both more pain and more woe
So…
It’s time to move on
Time to learn some new tricks
Time to explore a new world that is less ACIDic

It’s time to meet some new friends
Those who were born in the cloud
Who are still growing up
Still figuring things out
There’s Google’s BigTable
and Werner’s SimpleDB
There’s Hive and HBase and Mongo and Couch
There’s Cassandra and Drizzle
And not to be left out
There’s Vertica and Aster if you want to spend for support
There’s a Tokyo Cabinet and something called Redis I’m told

It’s a party, a playgroup of newborn DB’s
They scale and expand, they re-partition with ease
They are new and exciting
And still flawed to be sure
But they’ll learn and improve, grow and mature

They are our future
We developers should take heed
If our databases can change, then maybe
Just maybe
So can we

UPDATE: Someone shot a video of me reading the poem and posted it on YouTube.

UPDATE 2: Another video posted to YouTube, this one has the entire poem and a little better audio.

I got a big kick out this post by Kevin. I’ve been friends with Kevin a long time, and through discussions over lunch, coffee, or beers over several years I’ve watched him wrestle with issues about working and launching new companies in a super-networked world. The nature of doing business, especially in technology, is changing dramatically and it looks like Kevin is way ahead of the curve piecing the puzzle together. My discussions with him helped form the basis of my Master’s thesis (Learning from Open Source) but now he’s taking it to a new level. Kevin’s also written a new book, which he describes as a field manual for launching new ventures in a network economy. I’m definitely looking forward to reading it.

Man, you’d think from reading this post from Dave Winer that when I suggested over 10 years ago that UserLand Frontier would make a great scripting environment for the web, I somehow set into motion a series of events that would ultimately lead to his misery.

In 1995 or 1996 I got a prophetic email from Mason Hale, who had discovered Frontier and thought it would make a wonderful environment for CGI scripting. He was right, but I came to wish I had never gotten that email. Seriously.

While it is nice to be remembered, I wish it were a little more fondly. ;-) I hate to think Dave genuinely regrets our interaction and the cool things we built together or pushed each other to build back in the early years of the web. We did some crazy stuff. Some of which has faded to history, but I still remember well – and fondly. Like when we wired Frontier up to Netscape to run client-side scripts using a custom usrtlk: protocol. It was a security nightmare waiting to happen, but it was geeky-cool and a fun and still mostly uncharted territory to explore.

So it is a bit sad for me to read that Dave associates me and that time with a negative turning point in his life. I have not kept in touch with Dave over the years. We didn’t have a falling out or anything, we just started working on different things. I am thankful for the many lessons I learned from working with Dave Winer. I wish him well, and I am sorry to hear he’s had a rough stretch these last few years.

I received an email recently from my friend Stephen Dulaney reminding it was time for my annual post here on flowdelic. Stephen noticed that my previous two postings were made in March 2006 and March 2005. So to keep my one-post-per-year streak alive, just under the wire, here’s a quick update.

The biggest news is that I left my job as Chief Technologist at frog design in June 2006. I left to help start up a new company, LargeSmall Systems, with another friend, Matt Cohen. We are not quite ready to publicly disclose the nature of our business or product, but it has been a great ride so far. We’ve assembled a terrific team and together we are building some really cool technology. It’s been hard work, and a lot of fun at the same time. I’ll write more about this new venture in the future.

Leaving a comfortable position at frog for the relative uncertainty of a not-quite-yet-funded hatchling startup last year was a tough decision to make. Having gone through a boom and bust during my eight years at frog, the digital technology team I founded in 1998 was doing better than ever. We were doing great work and some strategic bets we had placed earlier were starting to pay off. Yet, I had the opportunity to do something new and exciting with this start-up. I was fortunate to be able to leave frog at the top of my game, so to speak, with my department growing and with strong leadership in place behind me to keep things rolling. For me, it was a textbook case of how to leave your job on good terms.

It’s been great to watch from sidelines, since I left, and see my old team continue to crank out great work and to establish themselves as leaders in some hot emerging technology areas. One example: a frog project I played a key role in early on, the Alltel Celltop, was recently awarded Best of Show at the CTIA Wireless industry conference. Another: the new Hawaiian Airlines website is gorgeous, highly-functional, and technologically sleek and elegant. I am bursting with pride.

While I would be enjoying a bit more glory about now had I stayed at frog, I don’t have any regrets. The last nine months have been intensive training for me in the starting, funding and growing of a company. For the first time in my life I am fully focused on creating a single product. It’s been an awesome experience and the future only looks brighter.

There have been some benefits to my personal life too. For one, my commute is now just under a mile. And while at frog I was a platinum-level frequent flyer, now I am closer to home and have been able to do things like coach my daughter’s soccer team – something I never would have been able to do with my previous travel schedule. I’m still working as hard as ever, yet I’ve also been able to spend more time with my family. And that has been priceless.

More to come…

I was a presenter at Microsoft’s Mix ‘06 conference, held in Las Vegas March 20-22. Videos of all the sessions (including mine) are now online. I presented with my frog design colleague, Nelan Schwartz. The title of our session was “Better Design, Built Faster: Using New UI Technologies to Speed Development.” Here’s the session description:

Achieving complete separation between visual design, content, and logic has long been the Holy Grail of the Web design world. By keeping these separate layers loosely-coupled, they can be developed and changed independently of one another, resulting in faster, more parallel development and more manageable code. That is the vision, but in practice, achieving truly clean separation has been easier said than done. New techniques with AJAX and CSS, and new technologies such as Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code named "Avalon"), have made achieving the ideal of clean separation more attainable. This session dives into the experiences and lessons learned by Frog Design while using these techniques and technologies on real projects. We explore the impact (good and bad) on processes, collaboration, and efficiency.

As you can quickly deduce from the frequency of posts to this blog, I’ve been on a bit of a blogging hiatus for the past six months. I have a lot of other things competing for my attention, and keeping my blog updated is pretty far down my list of priorities. After having a blog for a bit, I naturally arrived at some ideas for making it better. And in a way these ideas have contributed to my laxity. I have a mental picture of my new blog (which is much improved) and so posting to this, my “old” blog, is now somehow a little less appealing than it was before. I feel like I need to do some renovation around here, but I just haven’t had enough free hours strung together to sit down and do it.

But in the last two weeks or so, I’ve had three separate people comment on the lack of posts to my blog. Two of these were strangers I had never met before, candidates interviewing for positions (by the way: frog is hiring) who had Googled my name prior to their interview. Knowing that some people are still reading these pages gives me motivation to tidy things and update a bit more frequently. Spring break is coming up, I’ve requested a few days of vacation, and we’ve farmed all three of our kids off to visit their grand parents. Colleen and I aren’t quite sure what we’ll do with ourselves, without having to shuttle kids around to school, baseball practice and birthday parties. So with any luck, I’ll squeeze in some time to work on flowdelic.

One other thorn in my side, that has soured me a bit to the whole idea of blogging is comment spam. I’ve got comment moderation turned on, and I’ve never let a spammy comment get through, yet I still get 50 or spam comments a week here. Continually having to delete advertisements for online pharamacies and poker sites (and worse) has made this a little more of chore and a bit less of a joy than I had hoped for.

Although I finished my master’s report nearly six months ago, I just now got around to publishing it here. I’ve distributed it to a few friends and colleagues, some of whom have asked to link to it. So here it is: Learning from Open Source. This version is slightly edited from the version I submitted to finish my master’s degree. For more about the topic, see My Thesis Topic.

I know that metereologically speaking, the current season is still Summer, but with three kids, for us, Summer effectively ends when the kids return to school. The first day back to school was last Tuesday. Our Summer ended in a whirlwind of activity. You wouldn’t know it looking at the blog postings here. It seems that for me at least, blog activity is inversely proportional to the amount of non-blog activity in my life. I wonder if this holds true for others in the blogosphere?

I finished my master’s report and have been awarded a Master of Science in Engineering (yipee!). The last few weeks of writing were an ordeal – many late nights, lots of coffee, lots of anxiety. I had planned to wrap up my paper early and head out for our annual family vacation to Corpus Christi on the Texas coast. Alas, I was not quite done when our departure day arrived (that last 10% is a bear) – and so I took my laptop (and my anxiety) with me and worked on my paper a few hours a day. It’s done now and I’m quite happy with the way it turned out. I’m going to do a little reformatting and give it another round of editing before posting it here.

Despite my paper ordeal, we managed to have an excellent vacation, I played some golf, took the boys fishing and worked on teaching our daughter to swim. She turned 3 at the coast, and we celebrated with a poolside birthday party. We made tie-die shirts, did the limbo and ate birthday cake and ice cream. As they say, “fun was had by all.”

No sooner had we returned from the coast than we dispatched our oldest son to two weeks of camp in the rolling green Texas hill country. He spent 16 hours a day outdoors doing things they do at camp: swimming, hiking, shooting, eating, singing and playing. He learned a new game, gaga, and made some new friends. When I first saw him, two Saturdays later, I was struck by how relaxed and confident he seemed. I was amazed how much my little boy had grown up in two short weeks. Instead of a homesick boy, here was this healthy, happy kid – glad to see me – but also a little sad to see his camp experience come to an end.

School started the Tuesday after we picked him up from camp – and now we are back to our usual school-year routine. The days at camp proved to be good training for waking early, and so getting to school by 7:30am was not as painful this year as in years past. I too am picking up a routine, one that, I hope, includes more frequent blog postings.

BusinessWeek covers the recent equity investment by Flextronics in frog.

Somewhere in my surfing today, I ran across a link to Scott Rosenburg’s post titled “Blogs, bosses and bucks.” This caught my eye, because in my thesis research, I’ve been thinking about the role money and power structures have on collaboration amongst virtual teams.

In my research, I’ve been studying successful “open” collaborative communities like the Apache Software Foundation and Wikipedia, looking for “new” practices that could be applied to help virtual teams be more successful in a corporate setting. But what I’ve found is that the practices used by these organizations have, for the most part, already been widely documented in business and academic literature. These include things like have a well-defined purpose, clearly defined roles and responsiblities, recognition of achievement, etc.

It is not that these groups are doing anything drastically different, yet it does appear to be the case that good management practices seem to occur more naturally in these contexts. Why? Ultimately, I think it ties back to two key things:

1. Volunteer organizations are easier to leave. Volunteers who lose interest in the project will simply move on to something else
2. Criticism and alternate ideas are freely shared, because no one is afraid of losing their jobs in retaliation

I’m sure there is more to than this, but these two factors play together as well to promote strong leadership. In these organizations, leaders emerge not because the wield the power to over someone else’s paycheck, but rather based on their ability to build consensus and the value their own contributions to the project. When leadership fails in an open organization, it is obvious if not immediate. Failing projects are identified by recurring flame wars and by an inability to keep a steady, stable group of contributors involved in the project.

My point is not that leaders in volunteer organizations are better than their corporate counterparts, but rather that the role of money can mask poor leadership in an organization. Is everyone involved because they want to be? Or are they just drawing paychecks until they can find a better position somewhere else? Is the lack of debate a sign of silent agreement or fear of retailiation?

To tie this back to Scott’s article – I agree that in many organizations, the fear of being fired is going to keep people from blogging. But I would also argue that creating an environment that punishes criticism and curbs open debate can also put a company at a distinct disadvantage.

I agree with Tim Bray’s statement that companies who don’t adopt blogging will be playing “catch-up” – not because blogging itself is inherently advantageous (though it may be), but because it is an outward symptom of a company that internally values open sharing of ideas and criticism.

Sorry for the lack of traffic here – it’s been a very busy month for me. At work, we’ve had several projects wrapping up and new ones kicking off. Still we found time to hold a 2-day technology summit in Austin. We brought everyone in my group together to talk strategy, discuss process, share best practices, and repeatedly hurl 14lb. balls at formations of wooden pins. ;-)

On the personal side of things, I’ve got less than 4 weeks to go to finish my thesis(!), so I’ve been spending any spare time on the weekends working on it. Finishing that paper is the most important thing I’ll do all year.

This weekend, I finally found time to spend on the blog. After making sure all my old links would still work, I removed the final remnants of MoveableType from the server. I’ve started on a new look and feel template, but won’t finish tonight. Maybe check back next month?

I had planned to spend a few hours this weekend converting this blog from MoveableType (the software I was previously using to write this blog) to Wordpress (the software I am using now) and customizing my blog a bit in the process.

As it happened, I ended up having a better weekend that I had planned. The weather was terrific, and I spent most of my time outdoors with family and friends, including the better part of Sunday floating in the cool, clear waters of the Blanco river.

So I didn’t end up with much time for blogging this weekend, but I’m not complaining. Nevertheless, I’ve got Wordpress installed and my MT data converted, all in a little less than 30 minutes since I started. Very nice. Now that I’ve got it running, I’m finding there is a lot to like in Wordpress. I’m looking forward to hierarchical categorization, link management, and comment moderation in particular. I’ll being squeezing an hour here and there this week to finalize the conversion and customize the look and feel.

Warning: MoveableType techno-rant ahead…

Lately, every time I save a new post I get an “Internal Server Error” message from MoveableType. The error in my server log reads: “Premature end of script headers: /var/www/html/mt/mt.cgi”. After a lot of Googling I found a mention somewhere (can’t seem to find it right now) that indicated SmartyPants might be the culprit.

SmartyPants is a MT plug-in I use, which converts straight-and-boring quotes (") to typographically-correct curly, or smart, quotes “like so.” I removed SmartyPants, grudgingly, as I like to be typographically correct, and the problem disappeared, for a while. Now it is back.

Unfortunately, because I had set “Markdown + SmartyPants” as my default text format, when I re-rendered my site, all my postings reverted to the “None” formatting option. Blech. Worse – all my RSS feeds were updated, with raw, unprocessed [Markdown] code in them. My apologies to everyone who may have seen a “flowdelic” update in their RSS readers, only to find a bunch of old posts, but stripped of formatting.

So last weekend I planned to take a crack at learning the MT template language and finally customizing my templates. But instead, I spent my time tracking down Internal Server Errors. Sorry kids.

All is not lost however, I think I have found my solution – WordPress. WordPress is open-source blogging software that has gotten a lot of recognition of late, and it has typographical-correctness built in! The fact that it is written in PHP is appealing too, as I am much more comfortable with PHP than Perl.

So rather than investing in wrestling with/learning MT when it looks like many are leaving in the wake of the new MT 3.0 licensing brouhaha, I’ll be trying my hand at WordPress this weekend. Wish me luck!

The cover of this week’s Newsweek magazine sports a picture of a frog-designed phone of the future. The article is a fun piece about the convergence of phones and computers, and where it all might go. More about the “petfrog” concept is here. No you can’t buy it – but we can dream can’t we?

As part of my thesis research, I have been reading a stack of books, including Linked, Six Degrees, Design For Community and The Future of Ideas. At the same time I’ve been exploring and studying various online communities, trying to determine what makes them tick.

Is there a common characteristic of successful communities? So far, I’ve been nursing along the notion that “openness” is a common feature (among others) of the groups and communities that I’ve been studying.

By “open”, in this context, I don’t mean source code or software licensing, but participation. An open community is one where anyone is invited to join, provided one supports the goals of the group and adheres to the established rules of conduct. To put it another way, the barrier of entry to join an open community is very, very low.

So, last night I’m reading chapter eight of Linked (a terrific book by the way), wherein a number of connections are made between the mathematical properties of man-made networks and naturally occurring phenomenon.

Up to this point, the network models presented overwhelming favor the earliest entrants into a new industry (“the oldest nodes win” in network-speak). By way of explaining the success of Google, a late-entrant into the search-engine market, Barabási injects the notion of “fitness” into his model, to measure the relative competitive quality of each node. Simple put, the superiority of Google’s technology, its fitness, gives it a competitive edge that outweighs the first-mover advantage then enjoyed by the previously-established players.

All of this takes a decidely unexpected turn, however, when Barabási draws a parallel between the quantum theory that predicts Bose-Einstein condensation – and the market dominance of Microsoft. In essence, just as a certain rare set of conditions in a network of sub-atomic particles can create a highly-condensed new form of matter, a similar set of circumstances can give rise to a monoply in an economic network. Barabási describes it as the “winner takes all” scenario.

But what factors led to the dominance of Microsoft, and more specifically Windows? When it debuted, Windows was neither the first-mover nor the fittest competitor in the graphical operating system market. That spot was held by Apple and the Macintosh. So what was it about Windows that enabled Microsoft to replace Apple as the market leader?

I propose that “openness” had something to do with it. Specifically openness with regard to hardware manufacturers. While no one but Apple was allowed to make hardware that ran the Macintosh operating system, any kid in a dorm room was able to make computers to run Microsoft’s OS.

I know that the idea that Microsoft benefitted (greatly) by becoming the de-facto standard operating system during the PC boom in the early 80’s is not a revelation. What I have not seen, yet, though is this idea captured in the context of network theory. I am neither a physicist nor a mathematician but it occurs to me that in the same way “fitness” was added to the model to explain Google’s success, a measure of “openness” could be injected to describe Microsoft’s success.

In the language of network science, openness would be a measure of the “cost” required to link to a node. In the case of hardware manufacturers, “linking” to either Apple or Microsoft is equivalent to creating products that are compatible with the Macintosh or Windows operating system. Viewed from this perspective, the cost to “link” to Apple was very, very high (approaching infinity), while the cost of “linking” to Microsoft was very, very low. As a result, despite being a late entrant to the market, and being an inferior product (at least at that time), Windows nevertheless quickly became the dominating force in the industry.

Looking beyond the operating system market, what other examples exist where the “openness” of a network gives it a distinct competitive advantage? A few examples jump to mind. Captialism vs. Communism. Democracy vs. Monarchy. The Web vs. AOL/CompuServe.

From a software developer standpoint, it also explains the advantage “simple” standards have over more complex, yet full-featured standards. For example XML-RPC vs. SOAP. The complexity increases the “cost” associated with supporting the standard, and hence the barrier to entry is higher for one rather than the other. It also shows how that barrier can be lowered via better development tools and supporting standards like WSDL and UDDI.

It is also interesting to consider that the biggest threat to Microsoft’s dominance is Linux, an operating system that is arguably infrerior (from a average user’s perspective) yet is much more open.

This model seems so simple and perhaps even obvious, that I expect I may not be the first person to happen upon it. But so far I have not run across this idea in my research.

So what do you think? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Is this an already well-worn path in the study of network systems? Or is this, in fact, a novel observation?

I am currently working on my thesis for a Master’s degree in Engineering Management. The topic I am studying and writing about deals with online collaborative environments and communities. Specifically, I’m compiling case studies of various successful online collaborations, looking for the qualities that are common among them. My hope is that I will be able to identify some fundamental characteristics necessary to foster effective collaboration across geographical and cultural boundaries.

The groups/communities I am currently investigating are the Apache Software Foundation, Wikipedia and {fray}.

I’ll be posting more on this topic in the near future.

A fun little distraction amid a very busy week…

Scripting News: “At some point in the next few months, there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel.”

Congratulations to Dave Winer on reaching a new milestone in the history of Frontier. Another loop closes as a new door opens.

The roots of blogging today can be traced back, in part at least, to the release of Aretha in May 1995. At that time, Frontier was locked away, unused, unprofitable and largely unappreciated. It could have ended there. But Dave made the software free (as in beer) and so started a chain of events that eventually lead to Clay Basket, Manila, Radio, XML-RPC and RSS. It also helped launch the career of Brent Simmons, the author of NetNewsWire.

Of course, that is not the whole story of blogging, but Frontier and Aretha are clearly high up in the Blog family tree. I’m glad to see Dave and Userland taking it a step further and I look forward to seeing where this journey takes us. Thank you and good luck. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

The cover story of this week’s Business Week is titled “The Power of Design”. It focuses on the process and practices of design firm IDEO, a major competitor of frog.

For me, it’s an interesting look into the way a competitor does things. I think this article is good for IDEO, obviously, but also good for design in general, by exposing a broader audience to some of the current design best practices (contextual inquiry, rapid prototyping, usability testing), and the real business benefits to be gained from them.

The problem is, the article portrays IDEO as if it is the only company using these practices, which is far from the truth. frog, for example, uses many of the same practices–and some others–and we are not alone. IDEO is portrayed as the 800lb. gorilla in the design industry, while its competitors (including frog) are described as if we really aren’t much competition at all.

This paints a misleading picture of the competitive landscape (IDEO is only slightly bigger than frog, and we regularly compete and win against them), though I’ll concede IDEO is currently winning the PR battle. It stings now, sure, but ultimately this will be good for frog and our clients. Nothing like some strong competition for the “world’s greatest design firm” title to sharpen our focus and create opportunities to innovate internally, improve our processes, practices, and (ahem) our PR.

Headline from the Austin-American Statesman, my local newspaper: “Rumsfeld doing ‘superb job,’ Bush says” (registration required). Apparently, Bush gave Rumsfeld a public back-patting yesterday. Atta-boy Rummy.

The Senate also approved a resolution condemning the torture of Iraqi prisoners, and apologizing to them and their families. That’s a good start, but condemnations and apologies ring hollow if they are not followed by action.

This is a great opportunity to teach the Iraqi people a core tenet of democracy–that leaders are held accountable to the will of the people. It is precisely this accountability that separates our leaders from tyrants.

Speaking of accountability, consider this statement from White House spokesman, Scott McClellan:

"The president's reaction was one of deep disgust and disbelief that anyone who wears our uniform would engage in such shameful and appalling acts."

Are you kidding me? The president is laying all the blame for this at the feet of the prison guards? What happened to “the buck stops here?”

When Saddam was in power, we didn’t blame his soldiers for the torture conducted in his prisons–we blamed him. And rightly so. Then, we toppled him from power because of it (that and some as-yet-undiscovered WMDs). Following the same logic, what right does Bush now have to remain in power?

This is no time to be shifting blame, now is the time to show the Iraqi people (and the world) the power of democracy in action.

My wife and I wrapped up another busy weekend last night with what has become our Sunday night ritual – take-out Chinese and a movie. We started this habit when we were newlyweds (we celebrate our 9th anniversary this week), but back then we were watching the X-Files with our Mongolian Beef and Lemon Chicken. These days, NetFlix has replaced the X-Files. Last night’s movie: Big Fish. My fortune cookie read: “You are imaginative in using your skills.” Ha!

Mother’s Day is a little hard for me – my Mom passed away two years ago this February. So when this day comes around, it reminds that I can no longer call her up and make her laugh, send her flowers, whatever, something… anything. And it makes me think about the past Mother’s Days I “wasted” – by missing them entirely or just leaving a message on her answering machine. I wish I could call her now, but I can’t.

So call your Mom, if you can. Tell her you love her. Make her laugh.

Still, I am lucky to have some wonderful women in my life, that are mothers or like mothers to me. So to Colleen, my wife; my step-mom Pat; my Grandma-Kaye; and my mother-in-law Sharon – today is your day – enjoy it. I love you all very much.

Sometime yesterday or early this morning, flowdelic was added to the Google index. It’s official – I’m now “in the book” as it were. Yeah.

As I expected, my site is in the top spot (easy to do with an invented word I guess), but I also found some sites that that pointed here that I didn’t see previously. Thanks and thanks.

It’s great to see those other links – but I wonder, why did I have to wait on Google to find them? Having been a reader of blogs for some time (okay a really, really long time), but not an author, I had thought that trackback links were more automated than they appear to be. I found the very helpful How TrackBack Works – but it really just confirmed what I’d recently discovered – trackback is a very manual, error-prone process. (BTW – I’m also using MoveableType)

That’s not what I expected. My expectation was that if I linked to another blog’s post in my blog entry, that link would be extracted when I posted the entry, and a trackback “ping” would be sent to the referenced article automatically. I understand that trackback URLs are different than permalinks – but shouldn’t the remote blog system be able to map permalinks to postings?

Why do I, the user, need to go track down a special URL? Is this how all blogging systems work – or is this something specific to MoveableType?

Before I got the hang of this I was entering permalinks into the “URLs to ping” box in my editing interface. (Why should I need to type these in at all?) MT gladly accepted these and dutifully “pinged” the incorrect URLs I had given it without a hiccup. I would have expected to see some kind of error message if the ping wasn’t accepted. At least then I would have know I was “doing it wrong” and could have learned faster how to do it right.

I see trackback as a crucial feature of the blogsphere. It enables readers to follow a conversation from blog to blog. Wouldn’t it be cool if RSS readers could organize posts by thread as well as by blog? Without that I feel like I’m missing part of the conversation (and I probably am). Why should the burden fall on users to discover and follow cross-blog threads? If any RSS readers do threading, I’d like to know, I just haven’t seen it yet.

It seems obvious to me that trackback is a useful feature of blogging – but to be really useful, it has got to be reliable. And if the reliability is based on trusting blog authors everywhere to track down and correctly use trackback URLs, well we’re going to have to continue to rely on Google to piece together strands of conversations for us for the foreseeable future.

UPDATE: I found “A Beginner’s Guide to Trackback” on the MoveableType site. There, I found that there is an auto-discovery feature that works how I would expect it to work. Nice. But – if that’s how it works, why didn’t I get trackback pings from all the sites that linked to my posts? It still seems that trackback reliability leaves something to be desired.

Also, I wish I could use the bookmarklets too, but they don’t work in Safari. (My laptop at work is Windows XP, but at home I have a G4 PowerBook with Mac OS X.)

Today I had the honor of being Scobleized. Given my measly two posts and the plain vanilla look of this blog, Robert has been most generous to point his readers in my direction. Thank you. I’ve just joined this party, and I feel welcome already.

First, I should apologize for the lack of personal information available on this site. I will fix that. I’m glad Robert was able to dig up a press release to introduce me – but it’s a shame that it is more than 6 years old.

So who is Mason Hale?

I am Chief Technologist at frog design, a highly-regarded design firm that has been consistently churning out great products and customer experiences for some 34 years now. I founded and manage frog’s digital technology consulting practice. We design, prototype and build websites and software for clients including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, General Electric, and T-Mobile. We specialize in creating rich, intuitive user interfaces using technologies such as Flash, Dynamic HTML, ASP.NET/C#, and Java.

However, this site is my personal site, and the views expressed here are my own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer. In addition, because the work we do is highly-confidential – I am generally not at liberty to to discuss the projects or clients I might be working with at any given time. So don’t expect this to be the “inside frog” blog.

That said, I am very lucky to work with some really smart, creative people on challenging, thought-provoking projects. That is bound to influence my thinking, and by extension this blog.

I am a husband and father of three – two boys, one girl. I live in Austin, Texas – and love it here. My undergraduate degree is in film production (radio-television-film) from the University of Texas at Austin, where I was a classmate of Robert Rodriguez and Matthew McConaughey. I went to high school in Fort Worth. Before that I moved around a bit, with stops in Breckenridge, Colorado; Casper, Wyoming; and Houston.

Some of you may remember me from my early involvement with Userland Frontier – the predecessor of today’s Manila and Radio Userland products. With Dave Winer, I spearheaded the development of the Frontier CGI Framework – a popular toolkit (at the time) for creating web-based applications on Mac OS web servers. I learned an amazing amount during that period of my life, and I’m very grateful to Dave and the rest of the early-Frontier community for that.

Today, I am in the final throes of completing my master’s degree in engineering management. I’ve completed all the coursework and am working on my thesis now. You can be sure I’ll be floating some of my ideas here.

That’s a brief, but more current and well-rounded introduction. I look forward to connecting with old friends and making new ones. Sorry I didn’t get here sooner.