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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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| Wednesday, February 27, 2008 | |
If we didn't succeed at the PC, they wouldn't have a business," [Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig] Mundie said of Google, in comments made via webcast at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Okay, that's admittedly a quote pulled out by MacWorld UK, so perhaps there's a bias, but let's go ahead and tee of the appropriate response... Wheat farmers in Mesopotamia claim, "If we didn't succeed in making the goods for bread, they [Microsoft] wouldn't have a business." posted by ruffin at 2/27/2008 02:11:00 PM |
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| Monday, February 25, 2008 | |
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I thought the Baen Free Library, a collection of free to download, science fiction ebooks, was a pretty neat idea in theory. There are something like 97 free ebooks in various popular formats ready for download, some apparently by relatively successful authors. Many of them are supposed to be the first in a much longer series, which makes their inclusion in the library a pretty bright idea for the author as well. If you like the first, you're likely to keep reading. Releasing your first book for free is a good marketing decision in many cases, I'll have to bet. The problem for me is that there's really no way to tell from the site -- at least no way I could find quickly -- which ones are likely to be better reads other than downloading tons and trying them out. The only thing I hate more than not finishing books is starting a really bad one. Well, that's a bit hyperbolic, but I believe the point is clear enough. What to do? Well, obviously I whipped out NVu and started copying and pasting what turned up when I searched on the titles on Amazon. Hopefully I'll slowly go through and get Amazon's reviews. No, I'm not planning on dating when I retrieve them nor even, in some cases, will I likely ensure I've gotten the right book if there's more than one by the same name. Still, hopefully useful. Labels: DRM posted by ruffin at 2/25/2008 08:17:00 PM |
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| Saturday, February 23, 2008 | |
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None of it's rocket science, but Joel Spolsky does a wonderful job explaining what 'opened Office' means for you. Here's the most important take-home: The file format is more useful for academics and archivists than it is for practical programmers. I like the following "hint" from Joel best, where he explains what to do if you really think your company needs to do any Office translations using the Office binary format. [You think you need Office's binary format, and] your web hosting environment is Linux. Buy one Windows 2003 server, install a fully licensed copy of Word on it, and build a little web service that does the work. Half a day of work with C# and ASP.NET. There's absolutely no good reason to roll anything with the Office formats in house. There's zero reason to ever open the formats other than curiosity. If you need to write to office, you use, as Joel suggests, comma separated values for Excel, html or rtf for Word. If you need more complicated Office documents, you create them with Office, as he suggests above. Here's a key for those not familiar with Office: A web service means any app, anywhere can give your Windows 2003 server a call. If you need to ship this functionality in a heavy client, let your clients know that, at least for complicated Office formats, they're going to need to either have Office installed on a Windows box or access to the Internet. It's not insane to invest $2500 on a server with one license of Office, one license of Windows Server, and a C# coder for a day. Long run, you're going to easily save that cash which you would have poured into some geek geeking out over Office file formats. So now that we're through with Joel and your business needs, another interesting set of questions remains. First there's the XML Office formats, created in part for those governments that demanded an open file format as part of their RFC requests. How easy is it to use XML Office files? Though certainly easier to use than binary (and I wonder if the open binary format isn't an attempt by Microsoft to more easily qualify for some of those same jobs), it's still a huge mess. Still, XML is the format for machines and humans, here aka programmers, to read at the same time. It's gotta be much easier to write out specific subsets of the Office formats using XML than binary formats. That is, if you have a specific need to produce very specific documents for Office, XML might be a good option, if your users have recent versions of Office. Second, sure, in the typical capitalist view, it's better for five-thousand individual companies to spend twenty-five hundred dollars a piece on Microsoft products to create five thousand different but incredibly similar web services all over the US. But then what if those five thousand companies decides instead to form a co-op and remake Microsoft Office. Now where are we? What if they pitched in on Open Office to make it easier to automate via JSP? Would we save serious dough across the board now? What if we were already 80% feature complete with an Office replacement, and the binary information makes another 10% of that quite a bit easier for the co-op to finish up? What should they do now? (Unfortuantely I'm still a fan of the Windows 2003 server with Office.) posted by ruffin at 2/23/2008 02:38:00 PM |
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| Thursday, February 21, 2008 | |
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Mozilla looks beyond Thunderbird - Digital Lifestyle - Macworld UK Claiming that 'email is broken,' [David Ascher, CEO of the just-named Mozilla Messaging] said that Thunderbird 3.0 would build on the already-available Version 2.0 but add features such as calendaring, better and faster search, and a wide range of user-interface and usability improvements. Goodness, yes, email is broken. I wish I'd get off of my duff and finish writing a client. Here's a hint: What's not broken is a calendar. It's all about usability. Tell me what percentage of my emails came from a particular sender when I view. Tell me the last time they emailed. The last thread I've had with them. The longest thread. Other people they've CC'd or emailed a mail I've gotten. The time I've spent reading from and editing emails to them. The number of links they've sent, etc. There's crudloads of information, of varying usefulness to varying users, that's simply ignored right now. It's painful. Mail handlers need to use that information intelligently as well. Let me know when I've overlooked an email in my inbox for a week (2 weeks, a month) from, say, a top ten correspondent by number of replies I've sent, for instance. Here's the key: Make much of the information display, unobtrusively, by default. Don't overload, but give Oh yeah, Thunderbird? How about fixing the d****d edit window? There are all sorts of linebreaks I didn't add and wacky formatting issues when I edit (usually to truncate) quotes. Editing plain text in a window should be pretty old hat by now; there's no reason it shouldn't properly in my mail handler. Labels: email, thunderbird posted by ruffin at 2/21/2008 04:44:00 PM |
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| Tuesday, February 19, 2008 | |
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I noticed a discussion quite some time ago about Firefox dropping 10.2 support. From its tone, I always assumed the support would be and, by now, had been dropped. Not so fast. I've now got Firefox 2.0.0.12 on my old clamshell with 10.2.8. It feels a little slow relative to Safari, but I'm awfully happy it's available. Safari has started crashing quite a bit on me, and Firefox with Flashblock is about as nice a browser as you can get. Labels: firefox posted by ruffin at 2/19/2008 09:35:00 AM |
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| Sunday, February 17, 2008 | |
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One random train of thought that's been going through my head today is why designers don't pick a platform and try their dangest to milk it for all it's worth. I've seen projects, take Firefox as an example, claim that they *need* a particular version of the operating system to solve some particularly difficult bug or to fix some nasty, untraceable behavior. What would they have done had OS X 10.4 (for example) not been released? Or if the latest and greatest didn't fix the bug? Why not develop for an older platform and stay committed until its lack of forward compatibility is shot? Why is it always that people rush with the bleeding edge and make decisions from the opposite direction, waiting until things get so ugly that they feel they have to leave the older version behind? Does that make sense? The consideration for when to cut ties with an older version of a platform is always taken from the point of view of when there's something in the newer version that's so spiffy that it must be used at the expense of the older -- rather than continuing to use the old platform until whatever functionality the program's trying to provide absolutely can't be done. You'll notice the stacked deck. Outlook Express on OS 9- still does email about as well as any consumer mail handler. The only reason you'd trash it is because it lacks forward compatibility. There simply aren't enough OS 9 users, and the codebase is useless on Intel Macs. But that's not the case with Firefox created with Objective C on OS X 10.0. There's very little inherent to the 10.0 zeroes and ones that makes it an unusable platform. Anyhow, obviously this train needs more time in the roundhouse, but there you go... today's worthless exercise in thought unrelated to what I'm actually working on finishing. posted by ruffin at 2/17/2008 03:22:00 PM |
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| Saturday, February 16, 2008 | |
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Finally, DTV is getting the coverage it deserves, and it's, ironically, the coupons that are driving the coverage. Follow the money, dummy. Wired News - AP News: Aitken calls using HDTV broadcasts the 'low-hanging fruit' for TV stations to take advantage of. He points to another big possibility: sending live TV broadcasts to portable devices like cell phones. Adapting the handsets would be simple technically; the far bigger issue is getting broadcasters, programmers, mobile device makers to agree on a standard. Well, I think we've already got a standard to a certain degree -- it's called the DTV broadcast. The wonder of digital is the ease with which it can be translated onto multiple platforms. DTV signals are just another one-way stream for digital platforms that include a high-res screen to consume, and hopefully we will see inexpensive versions of DTV on our Game Boys sooner than later. Labels: DTV posted by ruffin at 2/16/2008 06:53:00 PM |
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Wired has this to say about Safari's upcoming update: While Safari began life mainly trying to catch up to existing browsers like Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer, in terms of functionality, it has arrived and now Apple seems to be focusing on speed. Where the heck was Mr. Gilbertson when Safari was released? The browser's proverbial raison d'etre was to make what was a horribly slow OS seem fast to Grandma One-button Mouse. And it worked. Safari made OS X bearable on my iBook 500, and continues to make it bearable on an old iBook 366 I've since acquired. Safari has always been about speed, not features. The question is why they continue to worry about speed now that the hardware makes Safari -- and Firefox and Opera and friends -- plenty quick themselves. My penny says that Safari is more about iPhone now than OS X or Windows (gosh, the Windows version S+1NK0RZ), and the codebase is very heavily shared between the three versions. Perhaps this sharing is a good thing, but part of doing things The Right Way is Right Behavior, which Windows ain't got. In any event, what really peeves me is that Mr. Gilbertson is pretty obviously a johnny come lately to the Mac, or at least someone who left the Mac for a few years when OS X came out. Why can't he check in with a buddy who knows Macs before blogging? posted by ruffin at 2/16/2008 05:10:00 PM |
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From The House Committee on Energy and Commerce's front page: On that day, analog televisions not connected to a converter box, cable, or satellite will stop working because they will be unable to receive digital signals. Again I'll state that the move from analog to digital over-the-air broadcasts unfairly impacts the have-nots of US society. If you're rich enough to be shelling out for cable or dish TV, you won't feel the change. If you're rich enough to have purchased a new TV in the last few years, you're likely already enjoying extra over-the-air channels thanks to DTV. If you're dirt poor, you won't have an inexpensive used TV to buy; you'll have to shell out $20 you could've spent on bread for a converter box, and that's with the government's coupon; once February 2009 rolls around, you'd better be ready to start enjoying radio. And let me critique the government's DTV converter box program again. The poor and elderly... 1.) Don't know the coupons exist. Fox News reports that, NTIA spokesman Todd Sedmak said Tuesday about 2.5 million consumers have ordered more 4.8 million coupons so far since Jan. 1 when the program came online. To think that I was worried 33.5 million coupons wouldn't be enough! Run through a neighborhood with an average income of $24,000 or less and see how many know about the program before you tell me these numbers mean my concern's moot. 2.) Still have to pay $20, based on the prices I've seen online, to get a converter box for their old TV. 3.) Won't necessarily be able to handle the extra barrier to entry between themselves and the TV. What about TVs with those dual screws on the back? Ones without inputs whatsoever? 4.) Will still, no matter what, be forced to pump money into converter boxes or TV manufacturers pockets... or they won't get to watch TV. Ludicrous. Labels: DTV posted by ruffin at 2/16/2008 03:34:00 PM |
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| Friday, February 15, 2008 | |
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K-I-S-S-I-N-G (see title): Critics panning any new Apple device will almost inevitably compare it to Appleโs only significant product failure this decade, the G4 Cube. Air critics are no exception. But hereโs the thing: the Cube was not underpowered. It was, if anything, overpowered. Iโve long thought that if it had been the G3 Cube rather than the G4 Cube โ powered more like the then-current iMacs than the then-current Power Macs, and down-priced accordingly โ it would have been far more successful. I offer the Mac Mini as proof. The Mac Mini that the rumor mill keeps convincingly telling us is going to be trashed? I'll grant that the Cube was overpowered, but then wouldn't we say the same about the MacBook Air? No no, let me be more to the point. It's not about power, but price. The Cube was overpriced. The Mini is not. The Air is overpriced. The MacBook is not. Guess which win? I'll now point out an older Apple design dud: The Duo. There are people who still swear by them, but they flopped. I really like my Libretto 50CT, but that line hasn't stayed successful. I'm not even sure the revived Libretto line is still around. ?? Ultra-tiny works with iPods; it does not seem to fare so well with computers. Awl, heck, I'll email Gruber again and clutter his box. He's been nice enough to reply a few times, which suggests he might read most of em. I'll grant that the Cube was overpowered, but the point isn't power; it's price. Don't limit price to simoleons. posted by ruffin at 2/15/2008 08:41:00 PM |
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| Wednesday, February 13, 2008 | |
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I'm frightened. I'm starting to see the light behind eBooks. I've owned a Rocket eBook for years, but have only used it to avoid printing out free texts from Gutenberg and the like. Until the last couple of weeks, I'd never purchased an eBook. Recently, however, I noticed a few books I wanted were less expensive to grab as eBooks than to pay for used versions shipped to my door. Because I thought it'd be neat to try out eBooks on my old Palm III, I used the Mobipocket format. Let the experiment begin. Mobipocket requires that you input your readers' "PID", a unique identification number, before downloading your books. As long as you have a relatively recent version of the Mobipocket reader, you can enter up to four PIDs, ostensibly for your computers and readers. I've got PIDs for my Palm and Vostro, as there's no Mac version of Mobipocket (though you can still use your Mac to send your book to your Palm, for example). Theoretically, I can't sell my used eBook. Practically speaking, the four PID "limit", though I have to assume it's against the license, means you could share your books with three more concurrent readers who have access to the net, and you could all read the book at the same time. Try that with paper. I also can keep as many backups of my books as I'd like. They're really quite small -- about 500k in this case -- and are easy to store around. The ability to save copies makes it difficult to misplace your eBooks for any considerable amount of time. eBooks also solve two of my biggest paper media issues. I tend to be very careful with my books, even paperbacks, and I don't bend their spines. This makes them difficult to read while, say, eating. With eBooks, there's no issue keeping the "pages" open, nor any chance of screwing up their condition through coffee spills. My second issue with books is lighting, as when I'm reading in bed. Reading on a computer's screen fixes this perfectly. It's also incalculably nice to be able to search a book for text and to copy decently sized portions into an email or other document. Highlighting and annotating in Mobipocket format aren't as flexible as adding manuscript marginalia to a printed book, but are serviceable replacements. My desire for immediate gratification is also much easier to satisfy with a quick download than an often unsuccessful used bookstore run. So far I've used fictionwise,com, which has a pretty good selection, short stories for sale on the cheap, and some wacky discounts for frequent buyers that I can't quite follow but seem to make things even more affordable. I'll continue to worry about eBook readers going out of production, inexorably tying my eBooks to what could become obsolete platforms, but even the old Rocket eBook still finds limited support in the pay-to-read circles. I'll probably continue buying as many used [paper] books as I can find. Still, for those books I know up front I'm reading for fun that remain fairly expensive used, eBooks seem like a pretty danged good alternative. PS -- The aging Palm III isn't, not surprisingly, the best eBook reader. The greyscale screen doesn't provide enough colors to see all of the Mobipocket 4.8 icons, and the measly two megs of memory fill up quickly with applications, leaving scant space for eBook storage that usually grab 500k or more at a time. Still, pdas and even laptops are the sorts of things I believe are going to be what people use to read eBooks, not dedicated eBook machines like the Rocket eBook reader or the Kindle. Once the iPhone SDK comes out, expect it to carry eBooks [if they don't already]. With its touchscreen and beautiful color display, the iPhone would be Mobipocket's perfect host. The application on the Palm works great, allowing one to annotate, highlight, and search intuitively. Best of all, it does the obvious: remember my page. Catch a few pages, turn it off, turn it on a half-hour later and you're right back reading again with no delay. A relatively stock Palm, even without much memory, can carry two decent-sized books in a physical package smaller than all but the smallest paperbacks. Even the tiny Palm III screen is good enough to get lost in a book. I've enjoyed using it as an eBook host, though it should be said Mobipocket's reader application works great on Vista with my widescreen Vostro. posted by ruffin at 2/13/2008 08:44:00 PM |
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| Thursday, February 07, 2008 | |
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Gruber on DRM free music, Amazon, and iTunes: If your music doesnโt play on iPods, it isnโt going to sell. And so if (a) you refuse to sell music downloads without DRM; and (b) no other DRM system other than Appleโs is compatible with iPods; then weโre left with a situation where the only successful store is going to be iTunes. What Universal and EMI now seem to have learned, at long last, is that (b) is completely under Appleโs control; only (a) โ the labelsโ own willingness to allow their music to be sold without DRM โ is under their control. Danged if Gruber doesn't get it right again. Your choices are Apple styled DRM or DRMless music at this point. Appleโs FairPlay DRM isnโt (at least primarily) some sort of lock-in scheme to force people to buy iPods; FairPlay was a requirement stipulated by the labels This statement requires some consideration. Why the heck is Apple for DRM-less music? Is it because they figured out well ahead of the game what Gruber only just discovered, that your choices are either FairPlay or DRM-free music? The open letter from Jobs supporting DRM free music would then just be an attempt to save face. Why allow the record companies to position DRM free music as the alternative to Apple? Why not make the idea to create a DRM free option yours as well? There's got to be some goodwill gained from taking what looks like the moral high ground of DRM free music, even if it's only a PR-motivated business decision. EMI is already selling DRM-free music through iTunes, as the only label from the big four participating in Appleโs iTunes Plus. Universal, on the other hand, isnโt selling DRM-free music through iTunes. If you want DRM-free music from Universal, you can only get it at Amazon. Now I gotta admit, I really like what Universal is doing. Gruber says that Universal's selling DRM free music at Amazon and not on iTunes is "particularly hardline โ if not outright spiteful." Well, I think Gruber just spent this entire post arguing that Universal is doing exactly what the market suggests that they should. Amazon is the company to build an online store that will work as well as iTunes. And we now know that DRM free is the only alternative to Apple's DRM. How can Universal do its best to steer some business Amazon's way -- or, rather, away from iTunes? (Strange how we don't call it the iTMS or iTunes Music Store much any more. The application is now about selling music? Even if you turn the ministore off, I guess iTunes == store for Apple these days. Our smart playlist creation options haven't really gotten much better lately, as one example of how the playback functionality hasn't really improved in obvious ways.) Again, if you want to grow competition to Apple's majority position, how do you give Amazon's store some sort of competitive advantage? You sure as heck can't go subscription model; that's been tried and failed over and over. You've got just one choice -- as long as FairPlay-only is an option at Apple, you go exclusively with (b) on iTunes and let the competitors get (a). All other things equal, DRM free is better, isn't it? Keeping DRM free "not Apple" is the only barginning chip the music companies have, so why isn't it just business for Universal to flex that small muscle? It'll come as no surprise that I think DRM free is a lot better. I usually check Amazon first when buying music now. I was already dropping by to see used CD prices before buying from iTunes to see if I could save a buck or four, even with shipping. Now I buy my digital music downloads there in case I ever want to leave my iPod behind. Coby makes mp3 players for about $10, for heaven's sake. It's not about piracy. It's about player choice. Heck, Apple could go belly up any second now. (Okay, that's obviously a lie, but if the stock keeps dropping like it has in the last month and a half they won't make it to summer.) More serious for me is the inability to play AAC on my car's mp3 disc player. That stinks. I'm too lazy to burn protected AAC to CD, rip to mp3, and replace the AAC files. It's all about barriers to entry, my friends. The only kicker? Well, even Amazon is smart enough to seamlessly add your music to iTunes by default once it's downloaded. They're not dumb enough to think they could create their own iTunes clone and go in for the absolute kill. The winner and champ is as it's always been... PS -- "โMP3โ is a concise way of saying โDRM-freeโ." Man, what FUD. I hate the mp3 format in theory. What could ogg do to get a little play? posted by ruffin at 2/07/2008 09:00:00 PM |
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| Tuesday, February 05, 2008 | |
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Some of the Me-Generation (or whatever cheesy phrase you want to use for "kids these days") attitude comes, I think, from a lack of neighborhood interaction. I've got some experience in this arena now, and where I used to hang out with every kid on my street, kids aren't wandering around the neighborhoods like they used to. Parents are expected to police their own kids in ways that used to be done by the neighborhood as well, and it takes a much larger commitment to have someone visit down the street. That is, if the parent doesn't feel like visiting, the kids are stuck at home. Often they're stuck in the home. This lack breadth in social interaction has to have some influence on kids' self-concept. It skews interactions to specific, specialized activities -- school (thank heavens; the school lunchroom & playground seem the last bastions of open social interaction for young'uns), soccer (where everyone plays soccer), dance (where, well, everyone dances), etc) -- each one excepting school with its own clear register of success and hierarchy. Without truly free play, where the players are selected not by shared interest but simple geography (though, admittedly, everything geography still tends to include: race, class, etc), kids lack the chance to see many people excel according to registers of their own, on the fly making. People are allowed to shine in ways that nobody could anticipate. I'm reminded here a little, perhaps non-intuitively, of a This American Life show I heard recently called Notes on Camp. I don't quite worship TAL like some do, but despite it's rather limited geographic and cultural range of viewpoints [sic], it's a well done show largely because of its comfort with dealing with stories where people lose or, when they win, they win in ways that are more poetic and cerebral than they are absolute, conventional "wins." In Notes on Camp, you hear of a place where kids still lose and lose mightily and, if you buy into the argument presented, really enjoy losing whether they admit it in so many words or not. It's not just endearing to lose, but losing builds community and character. Why would camp, a place seemingly full of rules, work like this when dance and soccer don't? Simple enough: Camp provides more kid to kid interactions with less supervision than those other arenas. And if you've worked at camp, you know the supervision tends to be looser than at home. It's closer to, well, closer to parenting in those years when camp was formed. TAL talks a good deal about the genesis of the camp movement in that show, linked above. Some of the values shared by people who revered a certain stereotyped native American also included looser child governance or, better put, shared child governance. And it's at the center of a camp's profitability to play up tradition, which, like a downtown Charleston frozen in time by money-starvation lucked into its "quaint" feel today, codifies those older values in its system. I'm not saying that in neighborhood free play that everyone wins, but, rather, without the trophy-for-all structure from the "adults" of pay-to-play activities, everyone loses. Without the fake rules enforced by companies looking to support Me Generation, kids feel loss. They learn that they can't always get what they want, and that, at times, other kids -- more charismatic kids, stronger kids -- do. Still, in my traditional suburban neighborhood, though I occasionally see a few packs on bikes, you're really not likely to bump into a wandering kid the way you could not thirty years previous. Combined with the new expectations (for better or worse) of parents to carefully monitor their own kids at all times (again, not necessarily a bad idea), there are simply fewer opportunities for kids to learn how the world structured directly by human nature tends to work. Note: I updated a tag on this, and blogger promptly changed the publication date. I'm not sure when it was originally posted, so this date is purely a guess. Dang it, Blogger. Why can't I search up my own posts on Google's cache? posted by ruffin at 2/05/2008 10:01:00 AM |
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