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

If there's one thing that I know Jobs would like to have back, it's an Apple computing platform with tightly controlled access for developers. As the Wall Street Journal apparently reports (via AppleInsider): "Jobs has kept 'tight control and directors have rarely challenged him.'" His preferred dev environment is no different. Right now, on the Macintosh, anyone can code up an app and release it without so much as Googling (Binging?) the Apple Human (once User) Interface Guidelines. Heck, even I've released apps for the Mac into the wild. Oh noes!!!

Oh wait, Jobs has gotten that closed development environment, hasn't he? It's the iPod, iPhone, and, increasingly overlapping with the Mac, the iPad:

In February, it was rumored that Hulu, an online streaming video destination for multiple networks, plans to make its videos available without Flash for the iPad platform. Reports then alleged that the Web site could be prepared by the time the iPad launches April 3, though it was said the service would likely be subscription only.

If the iPad only does HTML5/H.264 jive, the fact that this protocol isn't the most popular on the net gives it a leg up on open browsers. That is, if Hulu makes HTML5 pay to play only, thanks to the iPad's effectively closed platform, Hulu has a ready-made, similarly closed/captive market.

* If the iPad did Flash, not only would there be a closed system involved that Apple doesn't control, but there'd be no easy way to differentiate folks using the iPad platform. Goodbye Hulu revenue stream.

*With no Flash, Hulu has a reason to partner/get in bed with/come to the defense of Apple's iPad and to temper its support of Adobe's Flash.

Captive markets are exactly what Jobs likes to have (see the iPhone developer program and the rules for distributing software, where Apple can even, 1984-style, rip programs off of your iPhone retroactively!), at least until he gets to the point that market dominance (digital music) makes it so that captivity works against Apple selling hardware. So once the iPod and the iTunes Music Store dominate digital music, Jobs makes DRM leave the stage precisely to ensure there are no competitors to the gorilla.

But, again, the interesting point here is how Apple is reinventing the Mac. As the iPod stretches out and begins to swallow the Macintosh via the iPhone and now iPad, it's essential to pay attention to the compromises these [at least relatively] closed platforms are making. The iPad will do 50% of what I use my MacBook for and essentially 90% of what I use my iPod touch for (the balance being "fitting my pocket"). But I can't run my Java apps on my iPad, and probably never will, and certainly won't without Jobs' permission.

(Yes, I realize Apple develops and maintains the standard Mac JVM, but there are others that work on OS X. Don't split hairs, please. ;^D)

Labels: browsers, control, DRM, ethics, evil, html, iPad, iphone, ipod, iTunes, online distribution

I think a fellow at Georgetown Law is making the current stink, but let me say why I agree with his proposition that we outlaw laptops in college classrooms.

If you're listening to lecture, your mind wanders. But what does it wander to? Tired enough, wandering might include the awe inspiring doodle, it might include looking out of the window, and it might include taking a gander at those around you. But at the proverbial end of the day, those things don't really compete too strongly with your instructor. At the end of the day, your mind often wanders right back to where it should be, on content from an expert you simply can't get anywhere else.

No matter how romanticized the belief, I believe we still pay to go to college to listen to experts, and experts producing research in fields that relate directly to our stated profession or life goals. You don't pay to watch Facebook. More to the point, you're not paying to watch a talentless schmuck trained (franchised?) to wade through Powerpoints provided by textbook publishers. Class is not meant to be a battle for your attention. Your ability to lend your attention to whatever the professor has to offer should, at this point, be a moot point.

Are there horrible professors whose classes kill you by sucking hours of your life away giving you nothing in return? Yes. Do your research before taking a class. Might all students zone out at some point? Absolutely, they do. The answer is not to provide more attractive options for those wandering minds. Is it useful to put notes into digital format? Heck yes. But you can accomplish that with a Macintosh Portable from 1989.

(Honestly, the single most useful item for a college instructor would be the ability to limit students' network access. You could easily serve a class website without giving students full Internet access, and turn back on the phat pipe when you needed them to perform research in-class. The wide-open WiFi found in universities today is ill-conceived.)

What concerns me is the war of attention. If students can use laptops, then the answer, often, is to use technology like those the students consume to win back their attention. Fight facebook with facebook, you know? How can we make class interesting and informative? Make it as or more interesting than what's available via WiFi! Show YouTube in class not because it fits, but because it's YouTube! That's a wrong-headed idea.

As more technology enters the classroom expressly to keep "this next generation" glued to their topics, colleges increasingly become mules for the corporations pushing tech. As more technology enters the classroom, more non-tenured, publisher and industry trained faculty find jobs teaching "service learning" courses that are more vocational than research based. Sure they pad the university's bottom line, but they don't share research because they're (relatively to tenure track professors) not really doing research!

The emphasis should not be on how to introduce more consumption into the classroom, but how to push on-site training back onto the site. This limits the scope of universities considerably, but such a change in stated orientation would also free universities back up to cleanly pursue what they, ostensibly, were supposed to be pursuing all along.

When did education become less about sharing and performing research and more about vocation and consumption? More importantly, and beyond simply following the money, why was the compromise to introduce tech for tech's sake made in the first place? Who said that laptops with WiFi in classrooms would necessarily be a boon? What were the course-specific reasons for that system? The US has a capacity fetish (see the FCC representative on the NewsHour this week arguing that more spectrum needs to go to wireless broadband simply on the basis of the US not losing the lead in wireless, as if that alone could argue for such a massive communal give-away), and it's about time the motivations behind implementations of this fetish were properly interrogated and deconstructed.

(Sorry, kinda lapsed into pseudo-acad speak there at the end.)

Labels: acad, hats of money

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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Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Interface Races -- Can you obsolete an interface? Forget the arms race, in software we get the great interface race (via AppleInsider): The Ribbon feature has proven controversial, with Microsoft's supporters hailing it as the future of user interfaces, and its critics arguing that the move is simply an arbitrary change intended to derail any familiarity with (and therefore potential for competition from) its free OpenOffice doppelg�nger. [emph mine] I wonder how accurate that is. I've been teaching composition for a while, and did notice that Word on the university computers sports a much different interface than the 2000, 2004, and 98 [sic] that I'm using myself. It's a little disorienting, but not a big switch once you've used it for a while. And most of the keyboard shortcuts I've learned (Alt-F-A for Save As) still seem to work. So I wonder how much of this new interface is to ensure Word looks like it isn't OpenOffice. That is, I seriously doubt the interface of OpenOffice is going to make the same jump; that seems, from an engineering point of view, at least, like a complete misuse of resources. AppleInsider's report of a conspiracy theory around the ribbon makes some sense if there's an easy mental upgrade from older versions of Word or OpenOffice users to the new Word, but not the other way around. Can that be done? Is Microsoft that clever, really? Labels: interface, microsoft, OSS, Word posted by ruffin at 3/30/2010 09:22:00 AM

Thursday, March 25, 2010
The iPad's inherent DRM If there's one thing that I know Jobs would like to have back, it's an Apple computing platform with tightly controlled access for developers. As the Wall Street Journal apparently reports (via AppleInsider): "Jobs has kept 'tight control and directors have rarely challenged him.'" His preferred dev environment is no different. Right now, on the Macintosh, anyone can code up an app and release it without so much as Googling (Binging?) the Apple Human (once User) Interface Guidelines. Heck, even I've released apps for the Mac into the wild. Oh noes!!! Oh wait, Jobs has gotten that closed development environment, hasn't he? It's the iPod, iPhone, and, increasingly overlapping with the Mac, the iPad: In February, it was rumored that Hulu, an online streaming video destination for multiple networks, plans to make its videos available without Flash for the iPad platform. Reports then alleged that the Web site could be prepared by the time the iPad launches April 3, though it was said the service would likely be subscription only. If the iPad only does HTML5/H.264 jive, the fact that this protocol isn't the most popular on the net gives it a leg up on open browsers. That is, if Hulu makes HTML5 pay to play only, thanks to the iPad's effectively closed platform, Hulu has a ready-made, similarly closed/captive market. * If the iPad did Flash, not only would there be a closed system involved that Apple doesn't control, but there'd be no easy way to differentiate folks using the iPad platform. Goodbye Hulu revenue stream. With no Flash, Hulu has a reason to partner/get in bed with/come to the defense of Apple's iPad and to temper its support of Adobe's Flash. Captive markets are exactly what Jobs likes to have (see the iPhone developer program and the rules for distributing software, where Apple can even, 1984-style, rip programs off of your iPhone retroactively!), at least until he gets to the point that market dominance (digital music) makes it so that captivity works against Apple selling hardware*. So once the iPod and the iTunes Music Store dominate digital music, Jobs makes DRM leave the stage precisely to ensure there are no competitors to the gorilla. But, again, the interesting point here is how Apple is reinventing the Mac. As the iPod stretches out and begins to swallow the Macintosh via the iPhone and now iPad, it's essential to pay attention to the compromises these [at least relatively] closed platforms are making. The iPad will do 50% of what I use my MacBook for and essentially 90% of what I use my iPod touch for (the balance being "fitting my pocket"). But I can't run my Java apps on my iPad, and probably never will, and certainly won't without Jobs' permission. (Yes, I realize Apple develops and maintains the standard Mac JVM, but there are others that work on OS X. Don't split hairs, please. ;^D) Labels: browsers, control, DRM, ethics, evil, html, iPad, iphone, ipod, iTunes, online distribution posted by ruffin at 3/25/2010 10:01:00 AM

Thursday, March 18, 2010
Finally forked over for VIm After using VIm for years as my primary professional text editor for web development and programming, I finally made a donation to ICCF Holland for ole Bram. The next day, I received a very nice email thank you in reply. Even if (and I assume so) it's a computer generated email, the note was appreciated. The only application I've paid for in my current at-home development suite (and I've paid for it twice! OS 9 and now X) is Transmit, a rock solid ftp client for OS X that does an excellent job syncing edits in VIm to web servers. It's been well worth the $30 I spent, and is a much better solution than Filezilla or whatever that Duck app is that I've tried on OS X several times. (Can't say I care a whit for Coda, though. Perhaps if they integrated VIm in the same way...) In the past, I've shelled out for Ultra-Edit, Visual SourceSafe, and the VB 6 IDE, though the last two at greatly reduced prices during (legitimate) promotions. I suppose you could include OSes, but that's pushing it. Pretty sure I would have bought those either way. ;^) Soon, I'll shell out for Versions, an OS X svn client that was nearly as intuitive as Visual SourceSafe, something I can't say for any other svn client I've tried. Version control is a key tool in any developer's bag of tricks, and in the long run the $53 I'll spend there will unfortunately pay for itself a few times -- unfortunate because if you're benefitting from version control it's because you would've lost edits without it. /me guilty Otherwise, when doing PHP/MySQL work, all I need is MAMP, which is being supported once again and kicks the doors off of XAMMP, at least on OS X. That's free. For Java, I'm still using Eclipse. Free. And for VB.NET the Express version plus sharpDevelop are just enough to get me by. Both free. So after pulling down as much as I have coding, it was about time to pay up for VIm. If Bram M. wants to send that cash on to Uganda, more power to him. I'm nearly embarrassed to admit I read through much of their literature before donating. I sure didn't ask Panic (the Transmit people) where they were putting their cash before I sent it. I hope the VIm money is headed to Kibaale, but seriously, that's up to Bram. It's a great app, and I'm happy he's helped keep the app up. Labels: ethics, F/free, hats of money, shareware, vim posted by ruffin at 3/18/2010 03:57:00 PM

Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Laptops in college not good I think a fellow at Georgetown Law is making the current stink, but let me say why I agree with his proposition that we outlaw laptops in college classrooms. If you're listening to lecture, your mind wanders. But what does it wander to? Tired enough, wandering might include the awe inspiring doodle, it might include looking out of the window, and it might include taking a gander at those around you. But at the proverbial end of the day, those things don't really compete too strongly with your instructor. At the end of the day, your mind often wanders right back to where it should be, on content from an expert you simply can't get anywhere else. No matter how romanticized the belief, I believe we still pay to go to college to listen to experts, and experts producing research in fields that relate directly to our stated profession or life goals. You don't pay to watch Facebook. More to the point, you're not paying to watch a talentless schmuck trained (franchised?) to wade through Powerpoints provided by textbook publishers. Class is not meant to be a battle for your attention. Your ability to lend your attention to whatever the professor has to offer should, at this point, be a moot point. Are there horrible professors whose classes kill you by sucking hours of your life away giving you nothing in return? Yes. Do your research before taking a class. Might all students zone out at some point? Absolutely, they do. The answer is not to provide more attractive options for those wandering minds. Is it useful to put notes into digital format? Heck yes. But you can accomplish that with a Macintosh Portable from 1989. (Honestly, the single most useful item for a college instructor would be the ability to limit students' network access. You could easily serve a class website without giving students full Internet access, and turn back on the phat pipe when you needed them to perform research in-class. The wide-open WiFi found in universities today is ill-conceived.) What concerns me is the war of attention. If students can use laptops, then the answer, often, is to use technology like those the students consume to win back their attention. Fight facebook with facebook, you know? How can we make class interesting and informative? Make it as or more interesting than what's available via WiFi! Show YouTube in class not because it fits, but because it's YouTube! That's a wrong-headed idea. As more technology enters the classroom expressly to keep "this next generation" glued to their topics, colleges increasingly become mules for the corporations pushing tech. As more technology enters the classroom, more non-tenured, publisher and industry trained faculty find jobs teaching "service learning" courses that are more vocational than research based. Sure they pad the university's bottom line, but they don't share research because they're (relatively to tenure track professors) not really doing research! The emphasis should not be on how to introduce more consumption into the classroom, but how to push on-site training back onto the site. This limits the scope of universities considerably, but such a change in stated orientation would also free universities back up to cleanly pursue what they, ostensibly, were supposed to be pursuing all along. When did education become less about sharing and performing research and more about vocation and consumption? More importantly, and beyond simply following the money, why was the compromise to introduce tech for tech's sake made in the first place? Who said that laptops with WiFi in classrooms would necessarily be a boon? What were the course-specific reasons for that system? The US has a capacity fetish (see the FCC representative on the NewsHour this week arguing that more spectrum needs to go to wireless broadband simply on the basis of the US not losing the lead in wireless, as if that alone could argue for such a massive communal give-away), and it's about time the motivations behind implementations of this fetish were properly interrogated and deconstructed. (Sorry, kinda lapsed into pseudo-acad speak there at the end.) Labels: acad, hats of money posted by ruffin at 3/17/2010 01:38:00 PM

Tuesday, March 16, 2010
find and remove with UNIX I'm fairly confident I've blogged this at least once before, but here it is again, this time with a `code` label so that I won't have to look for it again. `find com/ -iname "*.scc" -exec rm {} \;` That'll remove all the Visual SourceSafe scc files in the com directory and below. Why I can't commit this stuff to memory, I don't know. I use about five commands on the terminal in OS X more than twice a year. You wouldn't think it'd be that difficult to remember them. Labels: code, problem solved posted by ruffin at 3/16/2010 12:25:00 PM

Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Visual evidence of the WaPo's digital editors? From a comment posted on the Washington Post's online publication of Lisa de Moraes' "Once again, Cameron draws a crowd to Oscar telecast": whatdidusay wrote: This is the stupidest article ever. There is no factual reason for the title of the article and no way of knowing if more people watched because of Avatar. 3/9/2010 8:48:54 AM Recommend (0) This seems to potentially be some evidence that online databases are editing the Washington Post and that the readers are noticing. Maybe. posted by ruffin at 3/09/2010 09:22:00 AM

Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Silly NYT rabbits, information wants to be free From AppleInsider \| WSJ has pre-release iPad kept 'under padlock and key' by Apple: How much to charge for content on the iPad and other devices remains a point of contention. While reports have suggested that Times executives cannot agree whether to charge $10 per month or closer to $30 per month, the Journal began charging users of its iPhone application late last year. Murdoch has previously said that News Corp. intends to charge for all of its online news sites, noting that 'quality journalism is not cheap.' A coworker once told me (luckily in a story about a third coworker) that, "A mistake on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine." Same sort of reasoning seems to apply here. That good journalism is costly doesn't make it worth more to me. Let me be blunt: I'm not paying $10 a month to access the NYT on a mobile device. I love the NYT, and consider it, on some level, to be the national register. I'd gladly pay $15 a month to receive the Sunday edition printed and delivered to my door if I was within an area with delivery. But on an iPad? Forget it. I believe newspapers are going to have to learn to recut their information. I have no idea the best way to do it. I would have thought the current advertisement driven version would have to do (and I've enjoyed the interactive Apple dual-ad advertisements in particular; not all advertisement is bad). To sum this ramble, I think it'd be smarter to figure out how to get the most money out of an ad-supported, open publication model, and then determine how much information that medium/genre/style of publication supports. I'm occasionally tempted to argue against the operation of the open market in specific situations -- there are things which the market has not yet been able to price accurately, and things for which I don't believe accurate prices can be found -- but this is a clear example of where I'm all for it. I believe the Times et al will find that Pay to Play is going to taunt them a second time. Labels: ads, control, copyright, DRM, iPad, market, news, nyt, online distribution posted by ruffin at 3/03/2010 05:50:00 PM

Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Help help, I'm being oppressed From Handshoe Mouse a Good Ergonomic Option at lowendmac.com: There are are six different variations [of the Horseshoe Mouse] offered, with hand sizes (left and right) corresponding to hands measured from the tip of the ring finger to the wrist crease in large (210 mm or 8.25'), medium (190 mm or 7.5'), and small sizes (170 mm or 6.75'). Left-hand sizes are manufactured on demand and cost up to four times the price of right-hand versions. (emph mine) Sheesh. Guess it's a good thing I can switchhit with the mouse. Had a coworker once who started getting carpel in her mouse hand, so she switched hands and was starting to get it in the left as well. I've managed to keep the pain in a single hand, and wonder if I wouldn't benefit from something fancy like the horseshoe mouse. Ergonomic keyboards help the tendons in my forearms noticeably. Can't imagine how badly I'll feel at 70. posted by ruffin at 3/02/2010 09:04:00 PM

Monday, March 01, 2010
More designed defects: The New Mac Mini From Mac Rumors: AppleInsider reports that Apple is preparing to introduce HDMI connectivity into some its new Macs later this year, bringing increased compatibility with home theater systems as well as the ability to deliver both video and audio over a single cable. I'll try to write this without complaining about my MacBook's defective trackpad. Ooops. Fail. You might note the "Consumer Advisory Warning" I've, as of this writing, still have as a banner to my site, which explains how the MacBook includes DRM in its display ports. I haven't had the same issues with my MacBook as the ones in the Ars Technica piece the FSF cites, as I've been able to watch DVDs on my monitor (iirc; I should double check), but the addition of HDMI to Mac Minis means the same issue will be cropping up with more frequency. What sorts of stuff won't a Mini hooked up to your HDTV be able to display? Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like an order of magnitude more people will be catching warning dialogs saying that they can't watch something they've purchased than those who will be prevented from recording or showing those items on unauthorized screens. This doesn't by itself make DRM of visuals wrong, but it does make me reconsider what's being managed. posted by ruffin at 3/01/2010 05:33:00 PM

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