$chromatic++
Nothing to add, really. Maybe another day.
July 21, 2008
QOD
In response to the FSF article on the iPhone, let me point you to the balanced view of Stu Charlton.
Quote of the day:
The OpenMoko counter-argument is "give it time, in the long run, it will win". And look, in a way, I hope so. Using the iPhone is a great case of following Keynes' adage, in the long run, we are all dead., where we optimize for short term gratification at the expense of our future.
July 18, 2008
Subversion 1.5.0
I missed the release of the new 1.5.0 version of Subversion. Its funny, actually. This was somewhere around June (the blog post lacks a proper date), and I didn't see it mentioned on any of the blogs I follow.
Anyway, its out and I was expecting it to see the new merge tracking stuff. One of my gripes with Subversion is that yes, branching is cheap, but the merge part is awful hard to do and puts much of the load into your lap.
From my superficial first look, all I can say is this: what a mess!
I need to read the documentation more thoroughly but it seems full of special cases and workarounds for common scenarios that should just work.
For example, the "Reflective/Cyclic merges" that are mentioned, are the most common ones for me when I'm using feature branches.
I think this phrase is telling:
The only way to truly solve this is to invent a new merge algorithm in Subversion that does not rely simply on revisions
Of course you can think that branches are not good for you, and that they slow you down. I think its a matter of personal organization. Multiple active branches fit my brain and my workflow just fine, and I love to organize stuff with them.
July 16, 2008
TechCrunchIT are a bunch of hypocrites
Really, its disgusting how low you can get.
Here we can see Nik Cubrilovic ranting about how close the iPhone is and all the DRM plague that it brings to our world.
Cool, thats nice, and certainly a valid point of view. It's certainly better written than the usual diatribe we get from the Portuguese open source evangelists.
But take a moment to search the TechCrunchIT site for openmoko. You can just click the last word. None. Not a single article. Now try for iPhone. Yep, 9 articles just this month.
Hypocrites. At least other trolls-for-ad-money don't try to wear the open-source t-shirt.
July 07, 2008
Middle-range Macs
I'm looking for a desktop Mac.
I'm pretty unhappy with the current Apple offering. We have the high-end Mac Pro, starting at 2.499€ (but you can configure a single CPU version for 2.049€, and at the low end, the Mac mini, starting at 499€. In the middle we have the iMac's but those have a built-in screen, and I already have dual 20" Wide displays that I would like to reuse.
I wonder if Apple will ever fill the void between the two head-less versions they have now. I want multiple internal disk-drives (or at least an eSATA connector) because for my main workstation I like to have RAID1, but the only way to get those is a Mac Pro, way to expensive.
There are alternatives, but I would like to avoid the hassle.
July 04, 2008
Free weather report
Its time you realize that the best way to keep your mail service operational is to outsource the SMTP part. I did it last year, kept the IMAP server, moved the SMTP server of to Postini (before the Google buyout) and I must say I'm very happy.
July 02, 2008
Disabled menu items
A bit because of my last post, I couldn't stop noticing a similar trend in software development.
There is a series of posts about disabled menu items. It all started with Joel Spolsky "Don't hide or disable menu items".
That had a strong reaction from Daniel Jaikut (my personal favorite take on this) and John Gruber, amongst others.
I'm not a GUI application developer, but I must say that it just sounds pretty wrong to go into pop-up-hell to solve the problem. Sure, we could use a in-application tool to explain why the menu is disabled, but that should be optional (like the search menu function in Leopard).
Joel assumption is that users are not very smart and need some explicit text dialog boxes to explain things to him. This is of course true for many many users, but software developers should also be concerned with raising the bar of the average user. Sure, its not popular and you might sell fewer copies, but users need to be probed, poked and pushed to be a little smarter.
Road blocks can be challenging and the felling you get when you figure it out why something is grayed out is worth a thousand dummy books. Not because these particular problem was solved, but because the user developed a mental framework on how to tackle the next difficulty.
If you clear the road of all the roadblocks, your users will only know how to drive straight and they will crash on the first curve. If they are used to reason things out, and understand why some menu items are grayed out, you'll end up with a user base capable of making better use of your software, and allows you to write more full-filling software applications.
Make it harder
Right now, in Portugal and in other places like the US, our schools are lowering the bar (making tests easier) to have a higher percentage of students with passing grades.
This is wrong because the only thing that its raising is the bar of mediocrity.
Tests should be hard not because we like failing grades and angry students but because hard tests force students to evolve their reasoning and deductive skills, memory, and a lot other brain activities.
The worst case scenario is not having a poor student fail a passing test, the worst case scenario is having the next generation of bright students not being pushed to their full potential because they slept through their early years, and ended up a lazy brain.
Forget breakthrough advancements in medical, science, math, chemistry, and other areas. It was so easy to fly through the early years, the above-average kids just fell asleep and their capabilities where not exercised when they most needed, in their youth.
You are worried with the growing segment of the population that is growing fat because of bad lifestyle decisions and even worse food choices? That will be nothing if the next generation of leaders is made of average minded people, with poor to zero knowledge of history and culture, not to mention science.
That's my worst fear.
And you know what? It's your fault, and mine. Its our fault because you and I need to get off our asses and do one of two things:
- be more politically active, run for local office, talk about education where ever you go, make it your national number one priority;
- or if you are not inclined to be a politician, make sure your own politicians talk about education. Ask them, prod them, organize groups for higher standards, make your voice heard.
And if a pro-education politician gets elected, support him, defend him, give him cloud cover. Education is not a sexy subject and harsh measures might be required. Having Be aware of what is being done to the future of your kids, help in what you can.
I don't know if I will live to my own expectation on this, I sure hope so. Because this is an example of the right meaning to the word important.
June 28, 2008
OAuth and Google
Excellent news!
Google now supports OAuth on all Goggle Data APIs.
June 27, 2008
A simple file upload?
Yesterday, I tried to upload my usual avatar to my Google Account. If looks like a simple file upload, right? Guess not:
WTF? Couldn't they just fallback to a simple file upload? Is this rocket science?
June 25, 2008
The Pre-Air Season
Every year, around this time, we start seeing pre-air or pilot episodes of shows that might or might not be produced for next season.
This year is no exception and the first round of shows is out there. I've seen some of them and I organized them into categories.
First, I think these are sure winners:
- True Blood (HBO): by Alan Ball (Six Feet Under fame) - vampires are now in the open, as a regular member of our comunity. Bonus points for scoring Anna Paquin;
- Pretty Handsome (Fox): amazing cast (Carrie-Anne Moss and Joseph Fiennes to name just two) for a story about a married father of two who tells his wife that he is a transsexual.
This ones I liked a lot:
- Leverage (TNT/Electric Entertainment): a 5-person Oceans Eleven. Its not a great show, but I had a lot of fun watching. If they manage to keep the pace, it could become great;
- Fringe: excellent FBI-drama, reminds a bit of The X-Files.
Might be worth something category:
- Raising the Bar: written by Steven Bochco. Its a laywers-show, so nothing new but I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt because of Bochco.
Not recommended at all:
- Do Not Disturb (Fox): comedy, soap, in a hotel somewhere. Lots of girls floating around though;
- The Middleman (ABC): I admit, I turned off the TV 4 minutes into it after a big cheesy monster appeared on the scene. It seems to bad to watch. Thread carefully, and if you do find the courage to see it to the end, let me know if its worth it;
- Life on Mars (Fox): not my type, you might like it - american remake of an old BBC series, detective goes back in time after a car accident.
In parallel you also get some summer shows:
- In Plain Sight: casual US Marshals story, about the witness protection program. Its fun, its summer, good value; with Mary McCormack;
- Fear Itself: I'm not a fan of horror or suspense, but I would recommend you watch the first episode at least. Its very very well done, and you might like it.
Thats all for now, have a great Pre-air Season.
June 16, 2008
Progress bars
Yes, progress bars. Those little graphical strips of color or animated graphics that you get to look at while you wait for something to happen in a computer.
Apparently the subject is worth a four page paper by four authors.
Two sad facts:
- I actually find the subject mildly interesting (maybe I should ask her on a date);
- Expect implementations of the Fast Power version in a jQuery/Scriptaculous/insert-fav-JS-UI-lib plugin soon.
The stars huddled together...
... and decided to align just for me.
Last week I had a discussion with a friend. We have a small pet-project growing between us, and I suggested using free accounts at GitHub to collaborate. A couple of days, I got a call asking "But how can I hide the project?". It was mostly a WTF-moment for me. The concept of developing this in a closed environment wouldn't even register with my conscious thought. Eventually I talked about GitHub private repositories and the fact they are a paid-for-feature.
It was a wake up call, I guess. I've started mirroring my personal projects to GitHub some time ago, and I haven't completed any of them. I've recently upgraded my account at GitHub, not because I'll use the private repository feature, but because hosting my free stuff also costs them money (and I like the HTTPS protection everywhere).
At the same time, a online thread developed about programmer insecurity that fits like a glove to this situation. It started with Ben Collins-Sussman and a couple of replies I found interesting:
- Programmer Insecurity;
- Don't Go Dark by Jeff Atwood;
- [Don’t Go Dark, Go Distributed], by Aristotle Pagaltzis: I think Aristotle didn't read Ben original article;
- adding to the “Going Dark” and DVCS debate by Justin Mason: also notices Aristotle might have failed to read Ben's article, and arguments the original anti-dvcs arguments.
The personal experience above, reading through these articles and their comments, and my own "push everything" current frame of mind, all three are having a big discussion inside my head right now.
I don't believe hg is more prone to sharing than git as Ben suggests because its not the tool that makes it happen. Tools are not trend setters, they just make them easier to set. There where a lot of projects very successful and with a lot of developers and collaborators working only with CVS, so git and hg (to name just two) are not magic wands that make your project a success in that department. I believe they will make them easier to collaborate on but that's it.
I've also don't agree with Ben statement that DVCS make going dark easier. Again, its not the tool, its the mentality of the programmer. Sure, the argument that creating a branch and working alone in the dark with git/hg is much easier than Subversion, but this is the first time I see someone sell this as a positive thing. Putting artificial barriers to collaboration is just duct-tape over bad social skills.
But programmer insecurity is a fact, not fiction, and it must be dealt with properly, or we risk antagonizing a lot of them. Funny that Ben says that hg is more share-friendly be default. We could argue that git is more protective of each collaborator insecurity because they get to choose which branchs are sharable-quality, they don't automatically share every branch, and so, the programmer is free to fail in his topic branches and push only is trunk/master branch with the cleaned up work.
I've also read over those articles that the rebase feature of git is destructive and allows one to hide our bad code. Well, I want my code reviewers to have a good understanding of the feature I'm sending them, and sometimes, my reasoning is best explained by a sequence of three patches and not the nine it took me to get there. Having said that, I would like very much the ability to duplicate a branch and rebase in a single operation, to keep my personal path to the final set of patches intact, as a parallel branch. Knowing how you got to your three commits is very helpful sometimes.
And speaking of git missing features, I like to have lots of branches, and I would prefer not to delete them when I don't need them anymore. I would love to have a branch annotate feature, to write a small text associated with which branch: why it was created, what was it trying to achieve. I should be able to hide those branches, not delete them. This could be done at hosting sites like GitHub though, with a motto: GutHub, where your old branches go to sleep.
Bottom line is: tools don't make decisions for a programmer. They don't turn a project in a community success or failure. They only make the process harder or easier. Code sharing, open-source collaboration, it will always be a people-problem, requiring social skills.
Update: fixed links, thanks Nuno.
June 13, 2008
A docking station
When I get to the office every morning, I need to plug all my external cables stuff.
My laptop ends up looking like this:
I wonder if Apple could make a Laptop with a connector for a docking station. I think their version of the concept is called "Second Mac at the Office".
June 01, 2008
Me
I must say, if Apple snatches the me.com domain for its new .Mac service, I would be impressed. Its a very cool domain name, simple, very Jobs'like.
May 31, 2008
Snapz Pro X a bit to eager?
Run this:
sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys 'Snapz Pro X'
Does your copy checks the Preferences and License File every two seconds? Sheeeshh...
(tested on Tiger by the way, not sure if it work on Leopard)
May 30, 2008
git email workflow
I personally was never on the receiving end of a email-based git workflow so I don't know how hard it is to use git to track all the incoming patches and the status of each one.
I much prefer the workflow based around pull-requests, and the GitHub interface for them is extremely nice. Today, as I stood in the shower (it was a shower day, yes, and my best ideas usually hit me under running water) I started to think about a Web interface to manage email-based workflow's. This is a brain dump. I've tried to make it consistent, but I'm not sure I've succeeded.
I'll use GitHub as a target of this feature set, although I don't know how well it would integrate with their view of the world. The fact is that this system could be implemented with a local tool with a web interface and a POP3 client just for personal management of patch queues.
GitHub would provide one or mode email addresses associated with each project. These email addresses are basically treated as patch queues.
Collaborators would send patches by email (using the git-send-email command) to one of the queues. The system would track each patch individually having a state (new, under discussion, rejected, accepted, integrated, for example), and a discussion thread using the same comment system that commits have today. Each patch would be given a patch ID, basically the URL of the patch in this system.
Authenticated users could also add Signed-off-by: headers to each patch.
Patch authors could resend patch sets or individual patches. They could also include a Replace-Patch: header that would automatically link the two patches in the same discussion.
The queue administrator can also group patches into sets, both with the help of the patches Subject lines, or in a ad-hoc manner.
Each patch and each set has an HTTP URL that would return a mailbox formated to pipe directly into git-am. Only accepted patches should be included in the generated mailbox. Optionally, a Patch-Id: header could be added for future tracking.
Applying the a patch or patch set would be as simple as
wget URL-of-patch-or-patch-set -o temp.mailbox
git-am temp.mailbox
If this takes off, we could even patch git-am to accept URLs...
Alternatively, we could write a porcelain tool that would do:
- record the HEAD ref;
- fetch the mailbox URL;
- call git-am with the mailbox file;
- scan the log since the recorded ref. For all applied patches, signal GitHub that the patch was integrated.
The system could also use GPG to streamline some workflow's. For example, given a GPG white-list or a "trusted" signature (this one is more complicated because you would need to have the private key at GitHub), we could limit queues only to GPG-signed patches, or auto-accept them on the general submission queue.
Anyway, this is a brain dump. I don't use the mail workflow so I don't know how important this would be. I like this idea a lot.
May 27, 2008
Will 10.5.3 win me over?
For the first time since 10.1.x, I didn't upgrade to the latest Mac OS X with the .1 release. Usually I wait for a .1 and "nuke and pave" my Mac, but this time, after almost 8 months after the 10.5.0 release, I'm still running 10.4, and reasonably happy with it.
Sure, there is software out there that I would like to try but requires 10.5, only its nothing that I totally depend on, so 10.4 is still perfectly usable for me.
But 10.5.3 should be here soon, and with almost 220 fixes, it might be the stable release that the more conservative of us were waiting for.
As usual, I'll wait a week or two after 10.5.3 to make the jump, but I think I will finally unwrap the Leopard DVD sitting on my desk.
git usage vs operating system
A small meaningless statistic (but interesting nonetheless) about the split of operating systems and git usage on github.
I admit that the second place was a surprise to me. In a good way.
April 17, 2008
I'm going to be sick...
I've been a bit under the weather this week. Something inside not quite right, nothing major.
But after seeing the stupid internal Microsoft Vista SP1 video, I feel the need to rush to the bathroom and throw up. I don't believe that anybody really expect this sort of "inspirational" video to pump up your sales team, do they? It's like the monkey dance all over again.
I'm a fan of Bruce Springsteen (I was a very impressionable teenager in the 80's, so sue me) and I fell that some sort of lawsuit is in order here.
April 16, 2008
iCal birthday calendar
iCal has an option to extract birthday dates from the Address Book and create a calendar.
Maybe I'm missing something but given that there seems to be no way to set a default alarm on those items (like 1 day before or on the day itself), isn't this a very stupid feature? I mean, I don't live inside my iCal, it might work for people who do, but I don't.
I guess I need to publish the calendar to some service that lets me add the alarms... Oh well...
April 12, 2008
Rethinking CPAN
Andy Lester wrote an article a couple of days back about rethinking the CPAN interface. The key part of the argument is:
We don't want to "make CPAN easier to search." What we're really trying to do is help with the selection process. We want to help the user find and select the best tool for the job
I though a bit about this and my own CPAN usage over the years. I've started with Perl around 91 or 92 so I've used it a bit.
I don't know the answer for this one, but I would start with the Perl module version of the iusethis site: each person could select the list of modules that they use.
This first approach would start shuffling modules to the top.
You could then ask each person to classify why are they using the module. This is the hard part because you would need to come up with a classification scheme, like the one we still have for CPAN module, actually. It will never be perfect but I prefer to have 10 or 20 common things like "Parsing XML", or "Sending MIME email" than nothing.
An optional improvement would be to have a 4 or 5 level rank, inside your own module list, to allow you to say that, DBI is much more important than CPAN::Mini.
Another layer would be some sort of social angle. This is not to make the site look hype and fresh, but to help find new modules. I could watch a couple of persons I trust and see what are the modules they are using and the most recently added. Instead of looking through 50+ modules updates per day, I just see a filtered list of potential targets.
A final twist - a aging digg-like system: I can "This saved my bacon today"-vote on any module, but my vote would only be counted for a month, giving rise the the Bacon Savers list.
But as always, you need a carrot to make all those perl programmers compile their module list. There are two immediate carrots that I can see:
- selective CPAN announcements: if a module on your list gets an update, you would get a notification (daily email, weekly email, or personalized RSS feed);
- a automatic Bundle module, or Task module to install all your modules: I would not upload all this modules to CPAN, but we could create a perl script that downloads my Bundle or Task and calls the classic
cpanto do the heavy lifting.
Anyhow, this are my €.02 to the conversation.
April 11, 2008
chromatic vs GitHub
I usually like chromatic articles about language design and his work in Perl6. As an example, just yesterday he committed a 20% improvement on the Rakudo build time.
But last week, he wrote the following about GitHub:
A centralized repository for a distributed version control system! Why didn't I think of that?
I think that he is way off base on this one.
Distributed version control systems are not incompatible with a centralized repository. You can use them with a centralized repository and most projects will still keep a central point for coordination of releases. In the Linux kernel project, for example, that central point is Linus tree.
The difference between a centralized VCS like Subversion and a DVCS is that you are not forced to use a centralized repository, and if there is one, its just a social decision, not a technical one.
I certainly agree that almost any project will want a "central" repository in the sense that you want to have one canonical default source base that people think of as the "primary" source base.
But that should not be a technical distinction, it should be a social one, if you see what I mean. The reason? Quite often, certain groups would know that there is a primary archive, but for various reasons would want to ignore that knowledge: [cut]
But even for smaller projects, the usual and recommended setup is:
- you clone from the agreed upon central repository: if you are starting a new project, congratulations, you are it. Just
git inita directory somewhere; - you create branches to work on features;
- as they stabilize, you merge them into the master branch;
- you publish your repository somewhere for others to see your work;
- other fetch and merge from this public repository to their own repos;
- those others also keep a public repository somewhere.
Basically, you work on your own local repositories, you keep a public version of this repository somewhere online, and others pull from this one. Usually, unless you are on the same LAN you don't pull directly from each other private repos. You can do it sure, but its just not common, mostly because people usually work behind firewalls or NATs.
So GitHub (and Gitorius, and repo.or.cz) is a place to have the public versions of your repos.
And a very good one at that.
VDSL
Eh:
To get a sense of just how expensive even such a limited fiber rollout can be, consider than telecom provider KPN in the Netherlands will expand from 1,350 local exchanges to around 28,000 in order to launch VDSL service. That's a lot of trench digging and cable laying to bring the fiber further into the neighborhood, making this a nontrivial upgrade.
Thats what I call an upgrade... 26k new POPs. I still remember all the trouble it gave the ISP I worked at in 98' to upgrade from 10 to 50 POPs.
oh, the fun.
Freebase
Some friends complain that I talk a lot about Git, so to even out a bit, I'll talk about my current favorite Website.
Yes, amongst all the sites I know or visited, there is one that takes the title "Current favorite", in the singular form.
Its Freebase. Its a Wikipedia with a decent database schema. You can query it in much richer ways, like "Directors of $10M+ companies who have starred in movies" (the query for this can be seen on the left, as "Show this query in MQL"), or "Graduates of Stanford born since 1960 who are board members of companies".
Lately a couple of articles on their blog caught my eye (in reverse chronological order):
- Visualizing corporate America: how to turn the information inside Freebase into a roadmap of corporate interests;
- Full data dumps are now available: not only they have the data, but they share it too;
- 3.26 million: how many entries and where are they coming from.
If you want a quick tour, checkout a recent Freebase screencast.
After that, check out the cool toys^H^Hols other people have written using Freebase.
Recommended.
Twittering
I admit: I still don't see what is all the fuss about Twitter.
Twitter is like a selective (your followers only) shout command of old Moo's, but it seems to me to be a drain on productivity. If you think IM can be bad, well, you haven't seen nothing yet.
But I'm still there trying to get it. I wonder if there is really something to get at all.
For now, I cut my following list to about 30 people who are either close friends, or with whom I work constantly. I've also included a couple of so-called-A-list-bloggers that I read. This and going to the settings page and disabling the @ messages cut down the twittering to an acceptable level.
Lets see how this works out for me.
March 29, 2008
In case you are wondering...
... why BitTorrent is so popular:
Starting Transmission now, should be here in 15 minutes, I guess.
March 20, 2008
$%&#$% Music labels
So, a couple of days ago Alicia Keys did a concert in Portugal, and Radio Comercial is always playing what I assume to be her major hit, No one. I got curious about the rest of her music so I decided to buy one album to see if I like it.
So I clicky-click to the iTunes store only to be greeted by this:
Now, this is not some obscure artist. Radios are playing her songs constantly around here, and she just gave a big concert, and the music is not available for purchase? WTF?
So choices:
- drag my ass to some music store and buy the CD and contribute to the growing pile of carbon-based things I have no use for after I rip the CD into iTunes;
- download a eco-friendly MP3 from some site online.
The problem is that I won't to the first because I don't want a dead-weight CD, and I really don't like the second choice.
Stupid labels who still haven't a freacking clue about how to operate in a global economy. Just lost a good sale today.
March 19, 2008
Elections 2008
I've been following the Democrat primaries with a particular interest. The weight of super-delegates and the delegate count, and how low can the democratic party can go if their candidate in the end is the one with less delegates.
I'm not pro-Obama, nor pro-Clinton. My opinion doesn't count either.
But if it did, I think that the latest Obama speech in Pennsylvania would force me to choose. I haven't seen such a good speed in a long time (and I'm the strange kind of person that actually likes to listen to speeches, when properly delivered).
So, after listening to the 40 minute speech, here's me hoping to see a Obama Democratic candidate to the White House.
Israel response to the US
Great response of Israel to US about copyright laws. Choice quote:
Israel objects that it is under no obligation to implement such a system, and notes that it chose the current arrangement for a reason. "A 'takedown' system which operates on the basis of a mere allegation of infringement would be an invitation to censorship and abuse of process," it says in the filing. "It is not the role of the ISP or Host to become a policeman of content. Requiring such would effectively bring the Internet to a halt."
March 07, 2008
More limitations
The limitations slide that Jobs presented yesterday is of course incomplete. You would not expect it to have the full set of limitations.
In the next weeks, people will go over the documentation and find some more. I'll try and keep a list of the ones that are relevant to me, in order of importance:
- third-party applications cannot run in the background (link via Gruber): this is most unfortunate to those of us who are thinking "XMPP client, XMPP client". I hope this is only a temporary restriction, or that a specific certification program is setup up to gain the right of running in the background;
- a temporary limitation, but a big one. The last line of the iPhone SDK readme: "Interface Builder is not yet included in this beta of the iPhone SDK";
- "Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished or private APIs": not a restriction by itself, but is interesting to have this in the License Agreement. I think this will mostly be used as "If you mess up, know that we can go out and get you, legally" (article, via gruber).
iPhone SDK
I suppose that one of the words we can use to describe the iPhone SDK is sexy.
I played a bit with Cocoa a couple of years back so I haven't followed to improvements of XCode. I hear João Pavão complaining about all the bugs but thats about it.
So while watching yesterdays event stream, and while I was looking at the game that the Apple dude wrote in (cof, cof) "two weeks", and all the nice tools, my though was: do the other mobile environments have such a sexy SDK, with such good tools?
The SDK seems better than expected, even for developers who just want to give away your apps. The integration with maps, the photo and pictures, it all seems to fit well. And it all works with both the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
The games we saw yesterday, and the fact that you have all that accelerometer stuff built-in makes the iPhone a potential mobile Wii, and I think we will see amazing games for this. I think Nintendo is considering adding a accelerometer to the DS as soon as possible after seeing this. We know (looking at sales of the Wii) that the new controller is the best thing out there (I own a Wii, and my four-years old is starting to be able to control it with precision, scary), so games on the iPhone, its going to he huge.
All this seems like another leap forward for Apple. I mean, competitors like Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, really, do they have the entire package that Apple is offering for download today (err, strike that, maybe tomorrow, the developer site is slashdotted)? And something that you can run on your iPhone and iPod touch today with the beta release of the firmware? My magic ball says: definitively not.
As for the limitations, the two that caught my attention where porn and VoIP over EDGE. The last one was predictable, as a protection to their revenue stream from the carrier deals. But porn, I was surprised. Sure, they don't want to piss off prude consumers, but mobile porn? In a gorgeous screen like that? Dude, iPod XXX series for sure!
The deal to distribute apps ($99 setup, as a "don't waste our time"-fee, and 30% of the price we set for the app) is something I cannot judge. I've never developed for the mobile platform so I don't know how much it cost developers to distributed applications for say, RIM, or Nokia. But on the other hand, no other mobile device producer has the reach of iTunes and the new App Store. Sure, as Rui says often, Apple and the iPhone are a spec in the windshield of Nokia globally, but the ecosystem that Apple is creating is something out of level 18 of Spore.
And jailbreak? sure, the next version will allow you to install applications without the App Store. Thats the logical step for them, to build an alternative distribution channel (I was going to say competitor, but really, it doesn't stand a chance as competitor, but as an alternative, it could be very good). But even so, it will not be worth it for most users, I think.
And me, I have one application I want to write that affects my standard of living. It ties with a e-learning site I operate. The thing is, I'm still running 10.4 on my Macbook and I don't want to change right now, and the SDK is 10.5.2-only. So what is a person to do?
(those iMacs really look cool, and my birthday is coming... hmms... the lower end model is "just" $1100...)
iPhone enterprise features
Nothing more to add, just linking to Fake Steve. Sure, its the extreme position on the Apple fan boy club, but then, there is also a grain of truth in there.
Oh, and yes, it runs on the iPod Touch also. Everything presented yesterday also works with the iPod Touch except stuff that depends on the particular characteristics of the iPhone hardware, as any reasonable person would expect.
And yes, you have to pay for it again. Why? The official response as far as I can tell boils down to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, but I would like to hear a definitive explanation about this. We all get updates to the iPod, the Apple TV, the Airport Extreme, and other devices by Apple for free, so why not for the iPod Touch?
On a roll
While searching the the link for the SDK post of Fake Steve, I read the previous posts just for kicks. The one about Sarah Lacy just got me laughing out loud. Choice quote:
See, there's just these two things you notice about Sarah right away when you meet her. They're right there in front of you, just staring at you, and you can't look away from them and you find yourself watching them roll from side to side and getting hypnotized by them and just agreeing with anything she says.
March 06, 2008
Doing Acid
A quick post to point you to some Acid3 test results. The thing that got my attention is that IE 5.5 has a better score than IE6 and IE7.
Strange.
Also, a piece be the Webkit team (currently leading the score with an impressive 90%) telling us how did they get there and why those numbers should be taken lightly. The sense I got from reading that article is that Webkit will reach 100% real soon.
IE8
IE8 Beta 1 hit the streets yesterday, and it is good. A much needed improvement over IE7.
My favorite feature: WebSlices.
Pity they are not hAtom-compliant though. One can only hope they improve on this in a future beta.
Open AIM
The Open AIM effort is a welcome step by AOL. But is it in the right direction?
If you are thinking about writing a XMPP Transport/Gateway using these specs, you should read carefully the Terms and Conditions page. There are two issues I can see:
- most of the required "compensations" listed (Ads, Buddy Info, Expressions, AIM start page or AIM toolbar) are very difficult if not impossible to do in a server-side scenario;
- the mandatory ad usage above 100.000 users could be a problem for some of you.
And if you though these could be worked around, then let me point you to the "Are there any restrictions on what I can build?" FAQ entry in the General section so that your hopes go bye-bye:
Although we have removed many restrictions on usage and development, we still do not permit developers to build Open AIM applications that are interoperable with other IM networks. (Multi-headed applications are now allowed). Please refer to the Developers License Agreement for additional details.
So no, you cannot write a AIM transport with this.
So yes, our best hope is still that the XMPP client-to-server gateway that AOL was playing with sees the light of day.
And yes, in an ideal world it would be a server-to-server gateway, but I think it takes a lot of little steps to get there.
This Open AIM is just not one of those steps.
March 05, 2008
Paranoia sets in
I did a quick read over the article from The Wall Street Journal about the Apple shareholder meeting. I was mostly interested in any iPhone SDK tidbits.
But the following paragraph about Flash support caught my attention:
As Jobs put it Tuesday during the company's annual shareholder meeting, Apple's iPhone, with all its cutting-edge mobile Internet trickery, needs something much better than the current Flash player that Adobe makes for cellphones. The Flash Player option that fits the bill is made for devices like laptops that are larger than the iPhone; as a consequence, it performs too slowly on the iPhone, he said.
Emphasis mine.
I don't know if those are Jobs exact words. If they are, there is a lot of meaning and future directions we can extract from the choice of words. Is Apple preparing a Silverlight-style maneuver, with a Flash-like language? Or are they writing their own Flash player?
In the end, I think its just a curious choice of words, without any second meanings. But the mind did wander a bit for a while.
March 04, 2008
Tim Bray on OOXML
Tim Bray has been writing about the entire OOXML standardization process recently. Tonight he posted a very nice summary of all the major issues he sees with the OOXML format and with the process itself.
Recommended reading.
Fez
Ok, I need to get my hands on this Fez game. Such a beautiful design and concept.
Really, take the 5 minutes it takes to watch the video. It starts normally, but less than a minute into the video, your jaw will drop.
update: the Fez author website.
Hiveminder IMAP access
Ok, this is very cool. Best Practical announced yesterday that they now support IMAP access to your task list in Hiveminder, including the most common operations.
They are so getting my money now.
February 27, 2008
IPv4
So IPv4 address space is running out.
Again.
There is a ARIN proposal to auction IPv4 space to the highest bidder. Although the proposal is not totally insane, I find it much more interesting to think about a future world, past the depletion of IPv4 address space.
fade in, a alley, with our character walking in the center, entering and exiting zones of light from old-style lamp posts.
suddenly a call from a darken door frame
(dealer) hey you, wanna buy a nice IPv4 address?
(hero) what?
(dealer) yeah, fresh stuff, right of the DHCP server. Long lease time, guarantee.
(hero) no thanks
(dealer) what's the matter, already had your fix today? Too much porntube already?
(hero) no, I just don't need it.
(dealer) oh, I see, rich mommy gave you a nice block of /48 IPv6 for christmas. You rich bastards are all the same.
My apologies to all of those who do screen play writing for a living.
Security report for RedHat 4
Excellent report about the Risk to users of the RedHat Enterprise Linux 4.
This is not an endorsement of RedHat by itself. I cannot do that due to the lousy commercial department. But I wish other vendors where so up-front with this information.
Oh, and in case you where wondering, I'm a happy CentOS user.
February 22, 2008
MS-OSS: yeah, sure
I've commented this in a couple of blogs, so I though I just write it here once.
The Microsoft announcement about opening up some of their stuff is an interesting read, but nothing else. The licensing terms are incompatible with the GPL (both version 2 and 3), so this is more a PR stunt than anything real.
Let's keep the eyes on the ball, and ignore the fat lady flashing body parts.
February 19, 2008
Snap
In the past I toyed with the idea of sending HTML pages, including forms, via email, as the basis of a workflow system.
I never did anything with it because the target people all use Outlook and HTML support was always spotty, and with the latest version seems to be even worse.
Today I found out about Snap.
Snap delivers HTML forms for workflow purposes, but using RSS feeds. Your news reader becomes your task inbox. There is a demo available to see this in action.
I must admit that my head is buzzing with places where I really can use this. I see no reason not to do it in lots of places, and if I can get a decent windows-based RSS reader with HTML support (maybe FeedDemon, I'll have to check it out), then this has a lot of potential.
Also I can see other tools adopting this really fast. A "actions" feed for Trac tickets? Or Bugzilla bugs? Your personal todo manager?
Possibilities...
February 17, 2008
iPod Touch and NewsGator Mobile
So the wife bought a iPod Touch a couple of days ago, and I helped her set it up and make it play nice with the Vista laptop she uses.
I tried the interface and it really is very cool.
But it wasn't until last night that it really hit me how good it is.
I was playing around with this and I remembered that NetNewsWire syncs with NewsGator and that they have a online mobile interface. So I though lets try this and see how it goes.
I was able to access http://m.newsgator.com/ without problems, and after checking my password, I was able to login just fine.
The first impression was not good. I got a blank page, without any information on what to do next.
It turns out that you have to enable the list of feeds you want to see on the mobile edition in the main site. I think this is great because I can tailor the feeds I want to read on the mobile site, but a single text message saying "You haven't selected any feeds for this device. Use the main web interface to select the feeds you want to read here" or something to that effect would be most welcome for first time users.
So after a quick trip to the web interface and setting all feeds to show on the mobile interface, I was back and with my unread items nice and tidy.
A second pet-peave: I keep my groups ordered manually on NetNewsWire, but the order of the groups is not synced to NewsGator.
I spend the most part of an hour going through my feeds, reading some entries, and switching between portrait and landscape modes, just enjoying the experience.
All I can say is this: its the best experience I have had with an online portable device.
I won't buy one. Its not the correct iPod for me. If I buy a new iPod it will be the Classic model for sure.
But I'll definitively buy the 3G iPhone when that shows up.
Even with Celso constantly teasing me, I shall resist the temptation, and wait for the 3G version.
February 16, 2008
Software patents
An interesting article about software patents by Philip Greenspun.
Two quotes stand out to me. The opening shot (which you get to read it yourself), and further down this one:
I was asked "Why didn't you patent this yourself, if you developed it first?" My reply was "It only took me an hour to build; if I went down to the patent office after every hour of programming, I wouldn't get very much done."
I can relate to this. At least once, I coded something at some job that 10 years later was covered by some stupid software patent.
February 15, 2008
Smoking
In Private equity firm pours $100 million into SCO money pit:
"We saw a tremendous investment opportunity in SCO and its vast range of products and services, including many new innovations ready or soon to be ready to be released into the marketplace," Norris said in a statement.
I want a big pile of the same stuff SNCP is smoking.
February 13, 2008
Live Yahoo!
Ok, Live Yahoo! is awesome.
It took me literally 3 clicks to have a multi-user video conference going.
Pretty please, with sugar on top?
I've been using ecto since I started writting this mis-mash of notes. It's good enough and doesn't get in the way. I know where everything is and I don't get lost.
With all the publicity about MarsEdit, I downloaded the latest version and tried it out.
Although its much more polished than Ecto2, I didn't find any compeling reasons to re-learn a new tool. I loved the Cmd-Shift-D to post (I use that with Mail.app) but that's about it.
The MarsEdit author has been writing about the upcoming WYSIWYG editor, but given that I write all my post in Markdown, I really don't care that much.
But there is a feature that would make me switch in a heartbeat.
After I write a article, I go through it and link certain phrases or words. But some words are usually linked to the same place. For example, Rui, Nuno and pfig, are always linked to http://the.taoofmac.com/, http://nunonunes.org/, and http://pfig.livejournal.com/, respectively. The same treatment would be used for phrases like for example Daring Fireball, or I'm felling lucky.
So if the application learned about this associations and presented me with the option to link, it would save me a lot of time. One thing I would need is an option to link just the first occurrence of a word, but apart from that policy-thingie, it would be lovely.
I wonder if the ecto 3 plugin system allows for this kind of thing...
WordPress, king of the community
I can only say that with all these security problems WordPress is having (releases 2.3.3, 2.3.2, and 2.3.1), it truly is the best choice to build a community site: everybody will be able to edit your pages.
Flash vs iPhone
This whole "Flash on the iPhone eminent"-rumors is weird.
Given that Flash now supports H.264 as a video codec, maybe iPhone supporting Flash is just that: Apple will support Flash video if the codec used is H.264.
If YouTube starts encoding the videos as H264 (maybe as an option at first given that Flash with H.264 support is probably still in the single digits market share), then this makes total sense for Apple to support. Even the original rumor article mentions that YouTube had to convert some of their catalog to H.264 to support Apple TV and the iPhone.
Anyway, back to work.
February 08, 2008
Stallman on copyright
Richard Stallman wrote an article entitled "Freedom - or Copyright". Its an interesting read.
Two paragraphs stand out to me:
When computer networks provide an easy anonymous method for sending someone a small amount of money, without a credit card, it will be easy to set up a much better system to support the arts. When you view a work, there will be a button you can press saying “Click here to send the artist one dollar”. Wouldn't you press it, at least once a week?
This is fine and logical but what should the arts do until the computer networks offer such methods? Asking the people who stand most to loose to trust the users to do the right thing? Do we really believe it will happen?
To make copyright fit the network age, we should legalize the noncommercial copying and sharing of all published works, and prohibit DRM. But until we win this battle, you must protect yourself: don't buy any products with DRM unless you personally have the means to break the DRM and make copies.
(emphasis mine)
So, for example, given that we can bypass Apple FairPlay, both in legal (burn and rip) and illegal ways, its ok to buy their stuff? I was surprised by the "unless" twist on the last phrase, really. I did not expect this from Stallman. I didn't expect to agree with him at all, but on this last phrase, we are soul mates.
The first fix is free
Google launched Google Apps Team Edition.
In a nutshell, users of an organization can setup a Team, with all the goodies of Google Apps for Domains, using only a valid email address. no need to bother the IT administrator...
Smart, very smart. Get the users addicted, and have them push for the stuff internally, a "upgrade" to the bussiness package (watch the video at the Google Talkabout blog, and pay close attention to the last 30", starting at 1:54").
My concern is the Google Talk integration. You can use the Google Talk server with those email addresses, but you'll loose XMPP federation, because the required SRV records will not point to the Google Talk servers.
Also, I wonder what happens if a @example.com user starts using this. Now that one user @example.com is using the GTalk network, will internal routing of the GTalk network assume that the entire domain is local or this per address? So if a user with an email address @simplicidade.org uses this, will it sink all connectivity between my domain and the Google Talk network?
This needs to be checked further...
(thanks to fabieuse for pointing this out in the comments, even if I didn't get all the implications at first)
February 07, 2008
Software Update is dumb
I'm updating two Macs via Software Update in the same network and they share four downloads between them.
Why do they need to download the new versions from Apple? I mean, they could just find each other and swap.
This isn't rocket science, at least not in a system that has Bonjour built in.
And its not as this would be terrible security-wyse: all the updates are signed by Apple and Software Update will refuse to install them if the signature doesn't check.
Oh well, maybe in the next cat.
February 04, 2008
Microsoft + Yahoo
A semi-random sample of anagrams of "Microsoft Yahoo":
- Tory fiasco homo;
- Mafioso Torch Yo;
- Chaos Fit Room Yo;
- Fiasco Hot Roomy;
- Yahoo For Sitcom;
- Fiasco Oh My Root;
- Chaos Firm Too Yo.
February 03, 2008
Android
A nice article by Bill de hÓra about Android and other Telco/Webco musings. My favorite quote:
If you had to pick a company that "gets all this", it's Amazon - which is why Redmonk James is right - someone should buy them before they turn into the 21st Century's answer to General Electric.
I don't like to post links without my personal comment, but I'll make and exception for this one.
Y$
44.6B is a lot of cash, and they didn't even need to go to the bank. That's nice.
Google is the big winner here, me thinks. Yahoo proves that they could not solve their problems, and Microsoft admits that they cannot leverage the brains they have on the payroll (I believe Microsoft to be second best in terms of brain-per-sq-feet, only to be bested by IBM) to produce a viable product in the search wars.
The value proposed is too big