Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

In opposition to the article I called brilliant, earlier, here's what appears to be the OP's response...

ongoing: Open-Sourcing Apple Apps:
And remember, if Apple gets the licensing right, they’d be free to grab the good hacks & patches that the community comes up with, and this would help them keep up in the UI race with Windows on one hand and GNU/Linux on the other.

Sorry, but I'm not buying. First, I certainly hope Apple has more know-how in the QA department than to let user-crafted hacks into the OS distribution (that is, the OS and its stock apps, like Mail.app, Safari, etc). Incorporating end-user hacks and patches into a desktop-consumer, user-friendly, tightly-controlled package (eg, the Macintosh operating system) is simply not worth the QA work. I can't imagine -- one of the most important things to keep constant in a software development house is coding style, a coding rhetoric. I've yet to be impressed with the coding rhetorics of an open-source project which is not either one-coder or incredibly tightly controlled by one maintainer. With the latter, I'm often unimpressed with how "not Open Source" contributing to the project feels.

For the most part, I'm afraid Apple's interactions with open source are going to continue like they have to this point. They'll take large, mature, useful codebases like FreeBSD & Konq, spend their time cleaning these apps up (Apple-ifying them), which includes having them pass internal QA, and then occasionally return small favors to the open source commune when the opportunity presents itself. I'm personally not a big fan of that approach, but it's a sound business plan. If you don't want people stealing your large apps, don't license them with BSD-style licenses. If you like GNU, talk to the BSD folk and try to convince them to stop allowing such "robberies" to take place. If you use BSD, congratulate Apple for taking advantage of your contributions correctly as a corporation whose birth was enabled by and whose existence remains fueled by capitalism.

The kicker from the post is the idea that user-created hacks could benefit Apple on the UI front compared to Windows and Linux, even the idea that Apple has work to do in that department. With Darwin underneath, which is an indescribably gigantimongous improvement over the Classic kernel, good UI really still is Apple's primary claim to fame. Haven't we seen the new Apple commercial about iTunes -- the Mac's got iLife and Windows has Clock? That you can plug the fancy camera into a Mac out of the box? Interfacing *is* Apple's gig. And, um, what desktop app UI is so wonderful in GNU/Linux again?

Who in the world would champion using user-provided hacks as a way of helping a company -- a company whose best gig *is* interfacing -- surpass an OS more famous for its use on servers than desktops?

From the post:
I work at Sun Microsystems. The opinions expressed here are my own, and neither Sun nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.

Sun may not necessarily agree with him, but it looks like the corporation's culture is meshing right well.

(In case this is too oblique a reference, please search this blog for Swing and AWT rants. Why did Java have a UI at all after they'd lost the war (skirmish?) for the desktop in the 90s? This is a rhetorical question, but the answer involves JDBC. Sun [seriously] does a great job incorporating open source server-side apps into their business model, but Solaris didn't exactly win the desktop either.

Before you get too upset, this post, what you're reading now, is from a guy who writes desktop apps in Java as a side-business. From a development standpoint, Windows has won the UI battle. From a user standpoint, Apple's developers have, in many arenas, overcome their initial deficit with UI development tools and won the practical UI battle. Windows has the potential, Apple has won the war in practice. (Unf. for Apple, the UI war is not the end-all of software design!))

If there's any middle ground, it would be to open source the internals of the applications, well stubbed to allow laying any UI on top one would like. Mail.app's UI would remain exclusively an Apple creation. I still don't like the idea (and neither does the OP, afaict), and think it's nearly impossible to provide a well-tested, Apple-like interface without quality in-house testing of each code submission (which includes knowing, even picking the coders), but internals are where open source has much better credentials.

Here's some free advice, though it's worth about the price you're paying.

If you want to do work for yourself on the web, target your first professional position to involve "Free" support techs if at all possible. I'm a pretty good programmer, but having used ASP 3/MS-SQL Server almost exclusively for the first two years of my professional career (and continued to use them ever since), there are still some things I know how to do at the drop of a hat that, though I have a leg up on newbie programmers simply by knowing what needs to be done, I have to waste hours digging through when learning techs that are new to me. Let's say PHP, as an example, which I'm slogging through now.

Those years of on-the-job training with Microsoft techs translate quite well into VB.NET and ASP.NET. I've also been using Java, first at home and then on the job when appropriate, for years as well. Java has helped me with C# (combined with VB background) and, of course, with JSP. Luckily, if you'll learn ANSI SQL and a good, multi-rdbms isql client, you can have a pretty nice database background no matter the backend, which has allowed my SQL Server T-SQL skills to extend to Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, and Postgres easily throughout my career -- up until a point. Heck, it's even easier for me to find answers to ASP questions than php, as I've been doing the former longer.

Can I administer Apache like I can IIS? MySQL like I can MS-SQL or Oracle? Php like I can ASP? Nope, nope, nope. My original job choice (and those that have come after) has (have) me favoring my original skill sets, just as MS wanted (cue manical laughter). It's not a big deal, and I've gotten some pretty high-end BLOB work into my latest php site, but I know I've lost a significant amount of time teaching myself the PHP-way of doing what I could have done in ASP in a flash (not that I know Flash).

If you feel you'll want to start your own company and create your own products, MySQL, php, Java (via Tomcat), Postgres, Perl, C/C++, even Python (ick!) are your friends. If you can get your first few employers to pay to train you in those skills whose hosts don't require constrictive licenses, consider it. If you want to learn to program quickly in a well-supported environment and prefer to grow within others' companies, making [lots of] safe money all the while, then using Microsoft's offerings aren't a bad way to go at all. In fact, I'd highly recommend them.

So I guess the end lesson is this: If you have an inkling how you'd like your career to turn out, don't discount the importance of the skills you learn at your first few jobs, and plan accordingly!

Here endeth the worthless lesson. All the best, etc.

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Friday, June 30, 2006
If there's one neat thing about the "death" of Mac Classic (OS 9 and less), it's that I finally have, almost by definition, a stable platform. It's nice to have a computer whose apps run reasonably quickly and for which I'm not constantly trying something new. I'm currently using Outlook Express, Internet Explorer 5, Mac OS 8.6, AIM v4.3, and print66. When I fire up my old Mac (a StarMax 3000 with a G3 upgrade), the old apps are still there, waiting, doing exactly what I expect. The ImageWriter is still willing to spit out text quickly, Word98 still does a great job letting me word process, and with print66 I'm even sharing out that out printer to my Windows boxen. It's also not like I'm lacking for some pretty robust applications. Transmit 1.7 runs well, and is free for Mac Classic now. I've not yet gotten the VNC client to tunnel via ssh, but apparently it can be done. SoundJam still plays mp3s quite well if I don't feel like messing with iTunes 2. VIm runs well on the box, and there's even an old version of Tomcat available. I'm beginning to feel the pain of programming in Java 1.1.x, but even there I have options. Quake 1 still runs well with my Voodoo 2, and Quake 2 is at least playable. Madden 2000 is still the best American Football game on any Mac as well. Nor must I wait for the Classic environment to boot up when I feel like playing. In any event, I'll end the rambling lovefest. Sure, memory management still stinks (I've got virtual memory off, but with only 96 megs I run into trouble now & again, and one app's crashing still kills 'em all), but it's nice to come back to a well configured computer -- and one I won't be tempted to mess up anytime soon. Bizarre to think that my once mightly PowerPC, one heck of a step up over my Powerbook 150 back in the day, is a "low end Mac" now, though! posted by ruffin at 6/30/2006 11:10:00 PM

Sunday, June 25, 2006
Visual Studio Express Well, I've been out of the loop. Was looking at a Madden editor that does pretty much everything I wanted to make in a similar app for Madden 2000 years ago[1], and noticed that not only was it created in C#, but that it said you should grab a copy of Visual Studio Express: Visual C# 2005 Express Edition. What is this free IDE, anyhow? A great combination of power and productivity for the Windows developer. Hrm, well, perhaps not the most informative description, but the above link gives more. Certainly seems aimed at SharpDevelop, and fills in the niche nicely that the free VB.NET IDE givaway about two and a half years ago filled. In any event, I'm downloading the .NET 2.0 runtime now and hope to see if it's worth a rip later. Then off to some GPL'd Madden app code. Wonder why the fellow isn't selling it? [1] For some reason, I feel compelled to say that I did write a proof of concept app that picked apart rosters and showed attribute scores for 2k, but never wrote it into something more than a viewer where if I edited the values with a hex editor, things changed. I really should finish it, as it doesn't look like another MacMadden is coming out soon. Wish they'd update the application to run as a Universal bin on X. posted by ruffin at 6/25/2006 10:18:00 PM

Friday, June 23, 2006
Following up on "Open-Sourcing Apple Apps" In opposition to the article I called brilliant, earlier, here's what appears to be the OP's response... ongoing: Open-Sourcing Apple Apps: And remember, if Apple gets the licensing right, they’d be free to grab the good hacks & patches that the community comes up with, and this would help them keep up in the UI race with Windows on one hand and GNU/Linux on the other. Sorry, but I'm not buying. First, I certainly hope Apple has more know-how in the QA department than to let user-crafted hacks into the OS distribution (that is, the OS and its stock apps, like Mail.app, Safari, etc). Incorporating end-user hacks and patches into a desktop-consumer, user-friendly, tightly-controlled package (eg, the Macintosh operating system) is simply not worth the QA work. I can't imagine -- one of the most important things to keep constant in a software development house is coding style, a coding rhetoric. I've yet to be impressed with the coding rhetorics of an open-source project which is not either one-coder or incredibly tightly controlled by one maintainer. With the latter, I'm often unimpressed with how "not Open Source" contributing to the project feels. For the most part, I'm afraid Apple's interactions with open source are going to continue like they have to this point. They'll take large, mature, useful codebases like FreeBSD & Konq, spend their time cleaning these apps up (Apple-ifying them), which includes having them pass internal QA, and then occasionally return small favors to the open source commune when the opportunity presents itself. I'm personally not a big fan of that approach, but it's a sound business plan. If you don't want people stealing your large apps, don't license them with BSD-style licenses. If you like GNU, talk to the BSD folk and try to convince them to stop allowing such "robberies" to take place. If you use BSD, congratulate Apple for taking advantage of your contributions correctly as a corporation whose birth was enabled by and whose existence remains fueled by capitalism. The kicker from the post is the idea that user-created hacks could benefit Apple on the UI front compared to Windows and Linux, even the idea that Apple has work to do in that department. With Darwin underneath, which is an indescribably gigantimongous improvement over the Classic kernel, good UI really still is Apple's primary claim to fame. Haven't we seen the new Apple commercial about iTunes -- the Mac's got iLife and Windows has Clock? That you can plug the fancy camera into a Mac out of the box? Interfacing is Apple's gig. And, um, what desktop app UI is so wonderful in GNU/Linux again? Who in the world would champion using user-provided hacks as a way of helping a company -- a company whose best gig is interfacing -- surpass an OS more famous for its use on servers than desktops? From the post: I work at Sun Microsystems. The opinions expressed here are my own, and neither Sun nor any other party necessarily agrees with them. Sun may not necessarily agree with him, but it looks like the corporation's culture is meshing right well. (In case this is too oblique a reference, please search this blog for Swing and AWT rants. Why did Java have a UI at all after they'd lost the war (skirmish?) for the desktop in the 90s? This is a rhetorical question, but the answer involves JDBC. Sun [seriously] does a great job incorporating open source server-side apps into their business model, but Solaris didn't exactly win the desktop either. Before you get too upset, this post, what you're reading now, is from a guy who writes desktop apps in Java as a side-business. From a development standpoint, Windows has won the UI battle. From a user standpoint, Apple's developers have, in many arenas, overcome their initial deficit with UI development tools and won the practical UI battle. Windows has the potential, Apple has won the war in practice. (Unf. for Apple, the UI war is not the end-all of software design!)) If there's any middle ground, it would be to open source the internals of the applications, well stubbed to allow laying any UI on top one would like. Mail.app's UI would remain exclusively an Apple creation. I still don't like the idea (and neither does the OP, afaict), and think it's nearly impossible to provide a well-tested, Apple-like interface without quality in-house testing of each code submission (which includes knowing, even picking the coders), but internals are where open source has much better credentials. posted by ruffin at 6/23/2006 12:01:00 PM

Tuesday, June 20, 2006
iChat ain't free, y'all I believe I've explained before that my definition of brilliant is when something that would have never occured to you becomes, after you've heard/seen it explained, so obvious that you'll never be able to go back to thinking the way you once did. This is that. Bray is right that releasing the source code to these apps would be unlikely to hurt Apple competitively against Windows or Linux, but he overlooks another form of competition: existing versions of Mac OS X. The role these apps play isn’t just to make Mac OS X look good compared to Windows or Linux, but also to help make each new version of Mac OS X look better than the previous one; i.e. to convince Mac users that it’s worth paying for the latest upgrade. More over at Daring Fireball. posted by ruffin at 6/20/2006 12:40:00 AM

Monday, June 19, 2006
Mine, yours, or ours? Do people check the license of a Wiki before contributing? posted by ruffin at 6/19/2006 10:44:00 PM

Sunday, June 18, 2006
Playlist: Swinging and missing at an AM iPod add-on Playlist: Swinging and missing at an AM iPod add-on: I’d like to know if the ability to listen to baseball games on the AM dial via my iPod is just around the corner or some pie-in-the-sky fantasy I should resign myself to abandoning. We’re a month away from the All-Star Break—there’s still a lot of season left to get this one. What? Is this guy kidding us? Now that he commutes, he's upset because he can't listen to baseball on his iPod? He's willing to pay $15 to MLB.com, but the games he wants to hear are apparently blacked out. No problem, he's game to spend $70 just to hear the games at work through the audio of his computer. Unfortunately this apparently doesn't solve the commute problem. Look folk, I'm all about finding the perfect all-in-one gadget (ask me how many portables I own sigh), and I'm one of the three people under 80 who own a $65 AM antenna so I over-value AM for sports just like this guy, but at what point doesn't it make more sense to quit with the iPod fetish, shell out the $10 that a pocket AM radio sets you back, and call it done? Seriously, there are many cheap (and I mean cheap) AM radios that do just fine with an internal ferrite antenna that should provide this guy with all the local Oakland A's coverage he can stand. New does not always mean better. There are still some niches the old techs fill perfectly. This may very well be one. posted by ruffin at 6/18/2006 12:17:00 AM

Friday, June 16, 2006
Swing Transparently I think I've admitted before that I'm a World of Warcraft addict. I've "frozen" my account, as Blizzard likes to term it, as I finish up some writing that's long overdue. Still, I'm stressed, and stress breeds some sort of therapy via painfully repetitive tasks that slowly progress towards the completion of some task of minor importance. Enter Netbeans, the WoW replacement. Luckily things are not all bad. Thanks to some Swing hacks over on O'Reilly, I've discovered how to make Swing objects partially (or completely) transparent in OS X. I've enjoyed using iTerm on OS X in large part b/c its transparency allows you to get dual use out of your screen real estate. I can hack along merrily in VIm and still see when I get new mail, for instance. Unfortunately I can't check for mail and see if I've gotten a new iChat message, etc. Enter JavaMail and Swing hacks! Okay, what I've got pictured, below, isn't exactly a working app, but does give you an idea of what you can do with a single line in OS X's Java. (That line in this case, btw, is, `this.setBackground(new java.awt.Color(.8f, .8f, .8f, 0.3f));`.) Check out the corners of jButton1, a button "of correct height" that keeps its rounded look. Smaller and larger buttons on OS X go from the standard look to the more rectangular format of jButton2, which also has some border issues if you look a bit more closely. Still, the return on a single line of code is very nice, if we ignore Apple's penchant for changing Swing and Java behaviour on a dime. As an aside, I'm also still quite impressed with Matisse, Netbeans' new layout manager that finally makes its GUI RAD RAD. Nearly VB-style form creation, and components adjust with form (sorry, Frame) resizes every bit as well as they do in Windows.Forms. A bit processor hungry still, but a great improvement. It's a shame Java is already so far back in the client app race. Messing with event thread jive recently has reminded me of one reason why it'll stay that way for a while yet. posted by ruffin at 6/16/2006 06:41:00 PM

Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Apple - Xserve G5 - Design Been trying to figure out how Xserves work to see if a project I'm working on could use an Xserve cluster node as a stand-alone server with a 3-4 drive RAID. Here's today's surprising find... (from here): All access pass: The DB-9 serial port allows for system access through a serial console session, even when the network is down. That's right folks, a DB-9 port! It would appear that, in case of emergency, you could hook an Atari 2600 paddle up to the Xserve -- even when the network is down! posted by ruffin at 6/14/2006 03:13:00 PM

innerHTML and DOM Methods Well said. When a de facto standard operates more easily than its proposed replacement, it's time to make de facto the de jure: If you haven’t noticed, there’s been quite a few posts out there squandering about the web where we have been discussing the very matter of innerHTML versus W3 methods of doing the same thing with createElement, createTextNode, and appendChild. ... What do I think about all this? Well, for what it’s worth. It’s about the user. innerHTML is plain and simply faster. Yes, it’s non-standard, but so is xmlHttpRequest. Sure, I know the W3 is developing a working draft on xmlHttpRequest… I say, let’s standardize innerHTML. Glad there's sense out there in the web's working world. Wish it'd invade the ivory towers of w3c & Sun more often. posted by ruffin at 6/14/2006 01:35:00 PM

Saturday, June 10, 2006
Tiny, but slick ne'rtheless Wanted to email a link to eBay that was rather long and didn't want the, um, less than advanced recipient to run into a URL that wrapped in the mail handler. What to do? tinyurl.com it, of course. Got this interesting comment with my link: The URL your entered is a link to Ebay. Ebay has an affiliate program and we have made this TinyURL into an affiliate link which helps support this site. However, if you wish to have a TinyURL to Ebay that is not an affiliate link, then please click here: make non-affiliate TinyURL. Now that's The Right Way (originally with a capital "I", no less). Is there really any possible negative side effect of cashing in a touch if someone buys the item using the tinyurl? Absolutely not 90+% of the time, I'd imagine. Why not piggyback the process with a little pocket lining? And for the 10-% left over, they provide an easily accessed way of removing any conflict. Slick. posted by ruffin at 6/10/2006 09:48:00 PM

Sunday, June 04, 2006
Free advice Here's some free advice, though it's worth about the price you're paying. If you want to do work for yourself on the web, target your first professional position to involve "Free" support techs if at all possible. I'm a pretty good programmer, but having used ASP 3/MS-SQL Server almost exclusively for the first two years of my professional career (and continued to use them ever since), there are still some things I know how to do at the drop of a hat that, though I have a leg up on newbie programmers simply by knowing what needs to be done, I have to waste hours digging through when learning techs that are new to me. Let's say PHP, as an example, which I'm slogging through now. Those years of on-the-job training with Microsoft techs translate quite well into VB.NET and ASP.NET. I've also been using Java, first at home and then on the job when appropriate, for years as well. Java has helped me with C# (combined with VB background) and, of course, with JSP. Luckily, if you'll learn ANSI SQL and a good, multi-rdbms isql client, you can have a pretty nice database background no matter the backend, which has allowed my SQL Server T-SQL skills to extend to Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, and Postgres easily throughout my career -- up until a point. Heck, it's even easier for me to find answers to ASP questions than php, as I've been doing the former longer. Can I administer Apache like I can IIS? MySQL like I can MS-SQL or Oracle? Php like I can ASP? Nope, nope, nope. My original job choice (and those that have come after) has (have) me favoring my original skill sets, just as MS wanted (cue manical laughter). It's not a big deal, and I've gotten some pretty high-end BLOB work into my latest php site, but I know I've lost a significant amount of time teaching myself the PHP-way of doing what I could have done in ASP in a flash (not that I know Flash). If you feel you'll want to start your own company and create your own products, MySQL, php, Java (via Tomcat), Postgres, Perl, C/C++, even Python (ick!) are your friends. If you can get your first few employers to pay to train you in those skills whose hosts don't require constrictive licenses, consider it. If you want to learn to program quickly in a well-supported environment and prefer to grow within others' companies, making [lots of] safe money all the while, then using Microsoft's offerings aren't a bad way to go at all. In fact, I'd highly recommend them. So I guess the end lesson is this: If you have an inkling how you'd like your career to turn out, don't discount the importance of the skills you learn at your first few jobs, and plan accordingly! Here endeth the worthless lesson. All the best, etc. posted by ruffin at 6/04/2006 08:36:00 PM

Saturday, June 03, 2006
Java on Macs about as far back as you'll ever care to go Been wondering where to grab a Java virtual machine for a Mac running OS 7.5? Well, duh, yeah! Here's the answer: MRJ 1.5.1 from download.info.apple.com. tinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/rxn9j Glad I could clear that up for everyone. There are apparently some real issues with MRJ 1.5.1, and I think Swing is a little wonky. If you can run on OS 8+ with MRJ 2.0 -- a nearly complete, ground-up rewrite of MRJ by all reports -- by all means do. But it's nice to know you can count on a 1.1.x JRE all the way back to OS 7.5. In other news, someone on the LowEndMacs.com Powerbooks mailing list pointed out a place that still hosts Em@iler 1.1. I believe 1.1 was what I ran on my LC and Powerbook 150, and I still remember it, rightfully or not, as the best email client I've ever used for an extended period of time. I'm going to try and retry it on my StarMax later and see how far off my memory is these days. posted by ruffin at 6/03/2006 11:32:00 AM

Thursday, June 01, 2006
Spam poetry Subject: Hi, middle body From: 6nmpue7fud@mail.ru Date: June 1, 2006 8:51:19 AM EDT To: ***** Passion play paring chisel Oxford clay net ton pad groom museum piece oily-smooth ox warble Panama wood Pannetier green Non-mason night light molding edge Non-stoic parcel-drunk oath-despising Neo-lamarckist Non-buddhist nickel steel omnibus driver ordeal root pass box out guide occupation stamp night green night bolt mine work paratyphoid fever Oxyrhynchus papyri narrow-nosed mouse-ear hawkweed new-rigged par value moth-eat ovate-lanceolate opera-mad palm cabbage paradise stock Non-british muslin delaine Neutral zone mort note nettie-wife oyster cracker mis-sworn orderly book parti-named north-northeast paper money much-revered near-sight nagaed wood Pan-americanism night bolt Most honorable nectar-streaming mitre-jointed much-mooted Neo-darwinist mid-carpal moon-god oak-tanned Paleo-siberian ocean-skirted Is it just me, or are spam filters creating an environment where spam has to read like poetry? posted by ruffin at 6/01/2006 09:54:00 AM

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