Rolling Stone magazine profiles Senator Sam Brownback in God's Senator. It's a scary look at the Christian far Right.

The latest issue of BusinessWeek covers Atlas On Demand, the product that I've worked on for the last six months, in a piece called TV Eyeballs Close-Up

Ever since the advent of commercial television, advertisers have wondered exactly what they get for the megabucks they spend on 30-second spots. After all, the networks and cable companies offer only a crude approximation of who is watching what. With such thin information, advertisers can't target specific neighborhoods or consumer tastes. As for converting ads directly to sales, well, that's virtually impossible. Yet the Web, with its sophisticated per-click metrics, does all of that billions of times a day. "The problem," says Yankee Group analyst Aditya Kishore, "is that there's not enough math in [the TV] business."

But aQuantive Inc. (AQNT ) aims to change that. ... Despite the hoopla about advertisers moving online, the $70 billion television ad market dwarfs the Web business 5 to 1. Says aQuantive CEO Brian P. McAndrews, once an ABC executive: "TV is the largest medium out there."

... 

That's why aQuantive is taking baby steps. Starting in June, the company's Atlas on Demand unit will begin testing technology that measures video-on-demand (VOD) viewers for Charter Communications Inc. (CHTR ) VOD's Web-like interactivity is what sold aQuantive. Besides, the medium is taking off, with digital cable now in 25 million homes, far ahead of TiVo's 4.4 million.

By gathering data from the same set-top boxes viewers use to order shows and movies, Atlas on Demand plans to figure out how many people watched a show and when, as well as how many watched the ads vs. skipped them. From there, company executives hope to help advertisers determine precisely how much attention their money buys. "You know people watch Lost," says John Chandler, Atlas on Demand senior analyst. "[Now] you'll know if they watch the ad."

... 

Proponents of VOD hope the medium will become as interactive as the Web itself, allowing viewers to get discount offers, enter contests, and even buy stuff. Burger King is considering running ads offering drive-through deals to late-night VOD viewers. Such ads could be priced based on the number of leads or sales they generate rather than the number of viewers they attract. "The intersection of video on demand and interactive TV is the next frontier," says Time Warner Cable (TWX ) Executive Vice-President Peter C. Stern. "I look for it to emerge in 2007."

... 

Despite myriad challenges, the cable guys have little choice but to become more Web-like. Every other day, it seems, marks the launch of yet another ad-supported online channel. Karl Siebrecht, Atlas' general manager, bets Web video will become a major ad market sooner than VOD, but he says on-demand TV eventually will be bigger. He and the other Atlas folks don't care whether the next great video market is TV or the Web. They plan to make money either way.

Read the full article here.

By the way, the Atlas On Demand team is hiring. We have current and future openings for a dev manager and for senior developers. There are other openings at Atlas in Seattle too: look at the Atlas Careers page.

If you want to send résumés through me, email me at George.Reilly @ AtlasSolutions.com

Emma now has a personal blog.

Via James Wolcott and Jane Espenson, a pilot for a sitcom called Depressed Roomies by Charlie Kaufman.

Funny stuff.

I often complain about being busy, no doubt because I have a talent for complicating my life. Things were relatively quiet for a while, but that's not true anymore.

At work, we're close to releasing the first version of our product. Happily, crunch time at Atlas isn't nearly as bad as it was at Microsoft. Instead of working eight-ish hours a day, it's more like nine or maybe ten. The pressure level has risen, of course, but it's far from intolerable.

The real busyness is in my extracurricular life. I'm the president of BiNet Seattle, a bisexual community group, and have been for the last three years. I also do a hell of a lot of the work and I'm burning out. I recently gave notice that I'm stepping down. (It looks like a successor has been found.) Meanwhile, a lot of planning is going on in an effort to revitalize BiNet, as attendance has been dragging.

For the last few years, I've also been heavily involved with The Wild Geese Players of Seattle, as the webmaster and the co-dramaturge. We do readings of Irish literature, particularly that of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. Every June 16th (Bloomsday), we do a staged reading of a chapter of Ulysses. This year, the longtime director has moved back to Northern Ireland. Currently, I am acting as the director, on top of my other roles, but I don't think I'm the right person for the job, and I'm hoping to find a replacement soon.

I'm a member of Freely Speaking Toastmasters, an LGBT speaking club. I've been working on my CTM for far too long, and I intend to knock off the final three speeches this year.

I resume my woodworking class next week, which is going to tie up ten Tuesday evenings. I haven't decided yet what I'm going to work on this time. In previous years, I built a very nice set of nesting tables and an unsatisfactory pair of bar stools.

In my Copious Spare Time, I'm also making occasional contributions to two open source projects, DasBlog and Vim. I made Vim compile with VC5-VC8, and I promised Bram that I would provide some documentation on debugging Vim with WinDbg and dealing with minidumps. I'd also like to produce a native Win64 version. With DasBlog, I've provided some feedback on the usability of the installation instructions, as well as a fix for dodgy permalinks. I'd also like to make use of my former expertise on IIS performance (see 25+ Tips, 10 Commandments, IIS 5 Tuning, and Professional ASP 3.0) to do some performance tuning of DasBlog.

I'd also like to fit in some time for photography; for reading my way through our enormous backlog of books and magazines; writing the occasional blog post; cooking; bicycle riding; traveling; working out; hanging out with my wife; socializing with my friends; movies; and more. Not to mention all the very dull projects around the house and garden that I've neglected.

I was born 41 years ago today. (Technically, yesterday, as it's now the early hours of March 16th.) I was to have been called Vincent after my father, but my mother's father, George Victor Clery, had died just 12 days before. I was baptised George Vincent Reilly on March 17th, St. Patrick's Day.

Beware the Ides of March, I tell people: You might have to buy George a present. Better a birthday present than the reception that Julius Caesar received on March 15th, 44BC.

I've never liked the name George all that much, but I've never disliked it enough to do anything about it. (Emma legally changed her entire name about ten years ago.) "George" has the advantage that it's largely gone out of fashion, but everyone recognizes it. How many Jeffs and Mikes and Scotts do you know? And how many Georges?

I realized over dinner with Emma that 15 years ago today, I took a momentous step: I came out as bisexual. It scared the hell out of me at the time. It hasn't always been easy. But it was definitely the right thing to do.

WashTech has a piece on frustrations with Microsoft's compensation system. Sounds about right to me. I don't miss the horseshit of Microsoft's stack ranking one little bit.

I just saw Mozart's Così Fan Tutte at the Seattle Opera. I had a great time. Lots of fun. Well acted. Great music. And a modern dress production that works.

The plot, in case you're unfamiliar, involves fiancée swapping. Two officers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, accept a bet from Don Alfonso that their fiancées, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, are fickle and will easily betray them. They pretend to go off to war, then disguise themselves and each woos the other's fiancée under false pretences. Don Alfonso, along with Despina, the sisters' personal assistant (maid) sows mischief. Dorabella, the flirt, wears down quickly. Fiordiligi is tougher, but eventually yields. Ostensibly a comedy, by the end, everyone has been hurt. The three men are shits and deserve what they get; the sisters do not.

In most of the operas that I've seen, the acting has been pretty wooden. Most of them seemed to be glued to the spot. The acting was a lot better than usual. Perhaps because it was directed by the legendary Jonathan Miller.

There's an interesting interview in the program with Jonathan Miller.

JM: ... It’s not even about fidelity, which is what most people think it’s about, it’s about identity. It’s about people. You see, feminists often object to the opera because it depicts the women as gullible and foolish; but the fact is that the men are much more deceived than the women are. The most dangerous thing is to get into disguise in the belief that your original identity is invisible. What happens, of course, is that you actually bring to life aspects of your identity which you didn’t suspect. And I think that’s what happens here. It’s very dangerous for a man—or anyone—to disguise themselves because, in addition to deceiving the person who in fact you intend to deceive, you actually find that you’re behaving in ways which you wouldn’t normally behave if you thought your identity was apparent.

EH: So you’re letting a little too much of the beast out, as it were.

JM: Well not so much “the beast;” but all sorts of alternative versions of yourself which you didn’t suspect come into existence. I was partly inspired by a novel which my mother, a very successful English novelist [Betty Spiro Miller], wrote after the war about the experience of being an officer’s wife. My father was a medical officer. She noticed that as soon as all of his colleagues got into uniform, they suddenly started to misbehave in a way which they wouldn’t have done if they were in their professional civilian clothes. They somehow felt that they were not recognizable and therefore not culpable.

That’s one of the reasons why people get into disguise at masked balls. It allows them to be someone else. It lets out an alternative version of yourself—not necessarily a beast, but something that you didn’t expect.

Awww! Ain't he cute!

Via Emma, from CuteOverload.com, a cornucopia of terminally cute animal photos.

A couple of months ago, the Science Times section of the New York Times had an article on the Cute Factor.

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

And if you do overload on cuteness, head over to Dependable Renegade for some really snarky, political photoblogging.

I needed to add some declarative error checking to some XSLT templates recently. Specifically, I wanted to throw an error if my selects yielded an empty string, indicating that the input XML was wrong.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way of doing this in XSLT, nor in XslTransform. The approved way is to validate against an XSD schema, but for various reasons, I didn't want to go to the hassle of creating one.

I found a partial solution using xsl:message with the terminate="yes" attribute. Under XslTransform.Transform() the following code throws an exception if the XPath expression is empty.

 <xsl:if test="not(/some/xpath/expression)">
     <xsl:message terminate="yes">Missing expression</xsl:message>
 </xsl:if>
 <xsl:value-of select="/some/xpath/expression" />

It doesn't do anything, however, in XMLSpy.

The downside, of course, is that you have to maintain the expression in two places, and the template becomes littered with those annoying tests.

A very interesting piece in last Sunday's New York Times magazine: A Talib at Yale. Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is the former "roving ambassador" for the Taliban, now studying at Yale. An interesting and improbable life story.

The right-wing blogosphere is furious about it. I say it's better to co-opt moderate former Talibs than to freeze them out.

Besides, his B grades at Yale are better than George Bush's "Gentleman's C".