I implore anyone who believes in the freedom of speech granted by the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights — or believes that our government should be by and for the people and not by and for a few select corporations, to take a moment and become aware of the heinous legislation being proposed by Congress this month in the form of the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). I say proposed by Congress, but they were certainly proposed by the lobbyists of a very small set of media corporations. Do not be fooled by the money and greed behind the SOPA and PIPA and their ridiculous claims that this legislation is to protect Americans and American jobs from criminals. By any neutral and educated observation, this would do nothing but hurt Americans and American jobs — well, at least for all but the tiny handful who think they can purchase the U.S. government, and have, so far, been quite successful.

This is some of the most stifling legislation against the freedom of speech imaginable, and would easily put us on the same footing as some of the worst regimes in the world. In its current form, these acts would result in a near apocalyptic destruction of the internet as we know it, and would result in a loss of freedom, knowledge, and commerce across the world caused by a very small group of media corporations who only seek to protect their own markets through government intervention.

The threat is real. While you may think it’s “just the internet”, the internet is one of the largest contributors to advancement in knowledge and science, commerce, and political and social reform in the current era of history. Governments in the middle east have been overturned by the power of the internet. Thriving industries and life saving procedures have been formed due to the internet. A free and open internet is essential to the continued growth of society and our nation.

I’ve listed a number of excellent links to detailed information about SOPA and PIPA:

• EFF – PIPA and SOPA
• EFF Blacklist
• Wikipedia on SOPA
• Ars on SOPA
• Google on SOPA and PIPA

As part of the transition, this website will probably be looking a bit different in the near future. I’m also leaning toward ditching comments. I don’t think this is a great travesty as 1) very, very few people actually read my blog — especially when I average about two posts a year) and 2) those very few probably have other great ways to share their thoughts. Also, I’m hoping this project will reinvigorate my desire to post some useful thoughts here!

• Microsoft and the End of Cross-Platform Application Frameworks (again)
• Google OS
• I love this tweet…
• The Dinosaur

Alex Payne has penned a very cogent work on yet another user-experience failure of the mythical first-class cross-platform toolkit / language. I love this comparison:

Imagine a new restaurant that wants to make the most of their burgeoning lunch traffic. They start serving low-quality meat: after all, it’s cheap, plentiful, and requires nothing more than placing a different order with their distributor. For a few weeks, profits are up. But pretty soon, so are customer complaints, and the stars on their Yelp page are rapidly dwindling. The owner doesn’t understand. The meat isn’t great, sure, but it’s perfectly edible, and for a while it seemed like the restaurant was making more money and attracting new customers. What went wrong?

Of course, no matter how times IT departments and businesses flaunt the idea that the Web or Flash or cross-platform widget toolkit is “good enough”, the fact of the matter is:

Do People Really Want Native Apps?

Yes.

Interestingly, the method I’m about to discuss is also valid in Xcode 3, but not as efficient as the method I described in the previous article, as it doesn’t allow for a full document “cleansing” in place (one must select the code to be cleansed first). Before Xcode 4 finds its way to a final release, I imagine we’ll have many other options available to us – including one that will allow us to fully replicate the previous functionality.

The gist of the following method is to use an Automator script that calls uncrustify and attach it to Xcode as Service that shows up in the Services menu. Tony Arnold has created three Automator workflows to provide similar functionality. I really don’t like how all of them work – purely due to the limitations of the method used. For example, Tony’s Uncrustify Current Document mimics the original functionality from my initial article but instead of processing the document live, processes the underlying file, causing some odd state in Xcode and a fairly unpleasant user experience. Therefore, I’ll just discuss how to create the Uncrustify Selected Text variant. If you want, you can just bypass the next paragraph and use Tony’s version, but come back afterwards because I have one more additional tip.

I’ve never really used the Automator before. It’s actually pretty slick. First, open Automator and choose to create a new Service template. This will create a new Services based workflow. You will select text and Xcode as the parameters to the new service workflow. You will drag one Action, Run Shell Script and enter the following as the script:

/usr/local/bin/uncrustify -q -c ~/uncrustify.cfg -l oc

The astute notice this is pretty much the same from the previous article. Save your new workflow to ~/Library/Services/ as Uncrustify Selected Text. Now, when running Xcode, a new option will become available in the Services menu when text is selected in the Xcode editor, allowing you to uncrustify your selection.

Oh, almost forgot the added bonus tip. Previously, we assigned a keyboard shortcut to the uncrustify task. There isn’t a direct method in Automator to assign a shortcut, but we can add it in System Preferences > Keyboard under Keyboard Shortcuts. Select Application Shortcuts and add a shortcut, selecting Xcode as the Application and Uncrustify Selected Text as the Menu Title. Pick your favorite keyboard shortcut, and you’re ready to go!

Interestingly, Apple could maintain a very strong presence in this market without jeopardizing it’s vaunted control. It might even be what Apple is doing in it’s own new NC data center. What if Apple partnered with VMWare to offer a VM only variant of Mac OS X server that could then run on commodity hardware? This would allow for the requisite controlled hardware and driver environment. The Hackintosh community is already doing this anyway on bare metal. The risk isn’t any greater by offering it in this manner if limited only to the more expensive Server variant. Leave enterprise server hardware to the domain experts in those areas, HP, Dell, IBM, and still maintain a presence in that market – and a revenue stream.

Could you imagine a partnership with Dell selling a datacenter of Blades running OS X under VMWare? Sign me up!

I see this not so much as an acceptance of the failure of Silverlight over Flash as the failure of Silverlight / Flash as a cross-platform hybrid platform – I think Apple has won (with HTML5) and Microsoft knows it. I’m not even sure that Microsoft is really that sad about it – they were worried about Flash for the same reasons Apple was. As has been twittered a good deal as of late, did we not learn anything from the complete failure of cross-platform application frameworks in the 90s (particularly Java on the client)? Cross-platform application frameworks are only good for the tools vendors and consultants – not for developers or the consumers. I’ll defend that statement in another blog entry, but I feel like I’ve probably already done that two or three times already in past entries.

HTML5 & the web is the Microsoft answer to cross-platform (funnily enough, it’s Apple’s answer as well) – a market they (nor Apple) could really care less about in the relative scheme of things – it doesn’t directly help their OS or their applications. It’s just a minimum requirement that must be met to have a viable OS. Silverlight (and it’s underlying WPF/.NET underpinnings) is going to be the native app platform for the Windows Phone and likely every other MS platform before it’s over with – which is probably pretty smart – it’s a good platform.

Supporting HTML5 and the web is only required to provide support for the lowest common denominator platform. Innovation isn’t going to take place in the lowest common denominator – it’s going to occur in the targeted platform space with native applications that take full advantage of the underlying platform. Otherwise, you could just give us all Chrome and be done with it, and as I have stated often before, common denominator cross-platform solutions breed mediocre user experiences and commoditize the entire computing experience into a bland, boring space.

UPDATE: Apparently, the automated backups of WordPress that I’ve been making did not include any media assets. The pictures I can recover from the deep recesses of my iPhoto library most likely, but the one sound file of my 15 seconds of fame appears to be lost forever. Alas. This is ironic considering this (more recently augmented with Dropbox). Unfortunately, my web server somehow missed out on all the backup fun.

UPDATE #2: Through the miracle of the internet, I was able to recover another copy of the audio file. Meaningless to everyone but me, but glad I found it!

First off, to get this out of the way, IANAL. That stated, Google’s creation of the Dalvik runtime for Android always reeked of underhandedness if not infringement. It was very clear that they didn’t want to be beholden to Sun and it’s licensing and restrictions surrounding J2ME / J2SE and Java, and attempted to skirt the letter of the law (or the contract / license to be more precise), by creating an alternate “universe” or run-time that just happened to be near perfectly compatible with the Java language and frameworks. Of course, Sun was a weak opponent at the time, and didn’t have the money or the muscle to take on an opponent like Google. I’m sure Sun’s pitiful state of affairs did not go unnoticed by Google in this decision. Who knew that Oracle would acquire the IP and technologies? So, do I think Oracle has the right to go after Google? Absolutely.

Unfortunately, for Java proponents, there is a much greater concern here. I’ve been somewhat critical of Java in the past. I feel entitled – I worked in the language full-time for nearly seven years (Java in my mind is fast on its way to becoming the next Cobol, but that’s really irrelevant to the purposes of this post!) Sun always maintained Java as the benevolent Dictator – or your idiot Uncle who always wore a leisure suit at family reunions – depending on your perspective. Numerous efforts were made to share control and input, but let there be no doubt – Java was under Sun’s control.

As Sun became weaker and more senile with age, it’s governance of Java also became even more incoherent. To be honest, while Java’s founders and a number of brilliant engineers at Sun managed to build a wonderful language, the strategic and business management of Java from the very beginning was a disaster. It never seemed that Sun ever knew what to do with Java, first pushing it on the client-side, then finding at least a justifiable position on the server-side. Of course, even then, it never provided Sun with a significant competitive advantage over the influx of commodity server vendors and seemed to be more of a distraction than anything else. If not for a number of “angels” – IBM, Oracle, BEA, and the fear of the common “enemy” in Microsoft, Java would have likely fallen into irrelevance long before it reached the ubiquity found today (noticed, it dropped from the #1 spot for the first time in 5 years last month). Interestingly, Oracle, and especially IBM, did know how to leverage Java within their organizations for competitive advantage.

When Oracle acquired Sun, the first thought running through my head is the literal fear that must be running through the minds of those saddled to Java – particularly IBM. While Sun was either a benevolent dictator – or incompetent stooge, they at least maintained a benign, if almost altruistic attitude towards Java. Sun was safe. The past has proven, Oracle is anything but benevolent — ruthless and cutthroat (and very successful) are more appropriate adjectives. Since the acquisition, the Java stalwarts at Sun including the primary inventor himself, James Gosling, have quickly exited the doors of the tall oval buildings in Redwood City (UPDATE: check out James Gosling latest blog entry). Outside of these unnerving departures, Oracle remained relatively mum on their stewardship of the language.

While this lawsuit seems perfectly justifiable, I think it’s definitely clear that this steward has teeth and will treat the technology much more as an asset to be protected and to be profited from than a philanthropic duty to the computing community. Oracle isn’t Sun. They aren’t going to sit idly by while a technology they own profits others with no consequent benefit to themselves. These are interesting days indeed, not only for Google, but IBM and a huge outsourcing community who built their organizations around Java.

No matter, with Microsoft relegated to lame duck, it’s exciting to see someone other than Apple and Google in the technology news these days!

UPDATE: This whole mess made me recall an excellent blog article I read on this very subject almost three years ago; seems almost prophetic now.

Paul Graham wraps up with this utterly awesome paragraph:

“Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That’s why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like “adult supervision.” That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.”

Overall, this was the best WWDC for me yet — although this one was a bit different than past years. First, I realized, this was my 5th WWDC. That’s a bit mind boggling to me actually. It just seems like yesterday I started tinkering with Objective-C and Cocoa and cursing the bizarre syntax filled with brackets. It took at least a year I guess before I fell in love with the expressiveness and self-documentation of Objective-C, to the point where I prefer it now much more than anything else I have to deal with.

Probably the more significant difference from previous years was the near total focus on the newly coined, iOS platform – all things iPhone and iPad (and probably more in the near future). Whereas most of my opportunities at my day job and even in my free time were focused on Mac OS X projects, the last year has slowly seen my desire to play more with the iPhoneOS rise. The release of the iPad has pushed me over the edge (although the iPad pushed me over like a Mack truck hitting me at 100mph). I have no doubt that the iPad is revolutionary to mainstream computing – much of which can be credited to iOS, and to the applications being developed in Objective-C and Cocoa. So, the timing of this years totalitarian focus on iOS caught me at the perfect peak of my interest.

The sessions this year felt very well focused, well organized, and much more helpful than years past. Not that the quality was poor before – I just think the solitary focus greatly increased the cohesiveness and content of the sessions. Better yet, these sessions have been made available within 3 weeks to practically everyone for FREE (versus past years where they cost non-attendees $500+ and generally took multiple-months to release). This is truly awesome. You can’t see everything at WWDC – this year even more so than in the past. Often, the videos are so delayed, their timeliness has passed and they’ve already gone a bit stale. Not so this year. I’ve been filling all my spare time obsessively watching these things – including the sessions I had already attended. They also look great on the iPad.

As far as aprés sessions, I did a couple things different this year. First, I took the pilgrimage to mecca and visited Apple headquarters on Sunday. A couple folks (Jeff LaMarche and Scott Knaster I believe) graciously organized a chartered bus from Moscone down to Cupertino for a small fee. Amazingly, I’ve never been to Apple HQ, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to set foot at Infinite Loop and talk with a bunch of great folks on the way there and back.

Of course, Tommy’s was excellent as usual (I went twice). And I definitely like Anejo better than Reposado (which I guess makes sense). Wholly different this year, I generally avoided the crowded parties and opted for dinners and drinks and such with smaller groups.

The yearly Stump the Experts was excellent as usual, minus some commentary that it might be the last year for the even. I certainly hope not — this would be a travesty and also eradicate one of the last vestiges of history and homage to the Mac, and everything that has come before. Not to mention, it’s just plain fun. In “honor” of my experience a couple years back, I got introduced to the crowd at the start of the show again and given free goodies. It keeps my Stump t-shirt streak alive at three!

For those who weren’t able to attend this year due to the sellout, please make sure to buy your ticket on the 2nd day after they go on sale to insure getting a ticket (2nd day – since I’ll be ordering mine on the first day and I don’t want to take any chances!)

From many years with other languages and editors and IDEs, the concept that this would not only be missing from Xcode, but somewhat difficult to obtain was a bit foreign. Nonetheless, with a bit of Internet research, an external tool called Uncrustify, and some experimenting, I coerced Xcode to do my bidding. Oh, before I get started – the Edit->Format->Re-Indent option in Xcode is worthless, so we’ll just ignore it for this outing.

To note, I tinkered with multiple external formatters and the weak internal xcode formatter before I finally settled with uncrustify. Uncrustify has fairly good Objective-C support, can easily be integrated with xcode as a user script, and provides a centralized formatter for pretty much all languages that xcode natively supports.

First stop, acquire Uncrustify. I built mine from source, but if you want an easier route, it can easily be installed by using MacPorts.

Once you’ve verified that you have a functional version of uncrustify (uncrustify –version at the terminal command prompt should do the trick – I’m currently using 0.55), the next step is to integrate uncrustify’s usage into Xcode. We need to add a custom script, so open up Xcode, head to the Scripts menu (look for the funky little scroll-like icon) and choose Open Scripts Folder. We need to create a new script with the following:


#!/bin/sh
echo -n "%%%{PBXSelection}%%%"
/usr/local/bin/uncrustify -q -c ~/uncrustify.cfg -l oc+
echo -n "%%%{PBXSelection}%%%"


Input will be Entire Document. Directory will be Selection. Output will be Replace Document Contents. Errors will be Merge with Script Output. I set this script to have a key combination action of Shift-Command-P (P for Pretty).

The only thing left to do is to configure uncrustify to format our code in the specific dialect of style that we prefer. This task is actually quite a bit more difficult than expected. Uncrustify uses a very simple but daunting configuration file. My recommendation, take one of the supplied sample configs (ben2.cfg is very good), merge in the objc.cfg sample, and tweak as necessary. Once you’re done, place the configuration file where specified in your script (above, I used ~/uncrustify.cfg). For those interested, I’ve attached my uncrustify.cfg. I’m still tweaking it here and there, so it’s definitely a work in progress, but it does the job for the most part.

Now, any time my cursor is an editor, a simple Shift-Command-P will reformat my code quickly and to my liking. I find myself now often typing code very hastily without regards to style and formatting and following up with a Shift-Command-P to make it nice and readable.

Let’s just leave the actual “rule” from Apple aside for a moment and just speak from a user experience perspective.

First, let’s talk performance… The fact that you can make a good performing app with an intermediary language certainly isn’t proof that it isn’t much more likely to have a performant application that is written in a more native language. I mean, if hardware had not gotten faster, we would all be programming in assembly (or C). Abstractions are great for developers but not great for machines. There is a reason Java and C# haven’t taken over the desktop or game development – and the examples that can be given of the few sparse games in those two languages / platforms doesn’t change the fact that other than casual web games and a few Xbox toys, they aren’t used seriously by professional game studios. With mobile platforms, the hardware is going in the opposite direction from desktop hardware. Not to mention, I’m curious about the incongruities of a cross-compiler from a managed memory model to one that isn’t, but hey – maybe they’ve figured it out.

As for user experience, Gruber nailed it. The Kindle application is a very good example of the problem with many cross-platform libraries…. I’ve never seen an application for the Mac written in a language / library other than Objective-C / Cocoa that felt right – and that includes applications written in the Apple approved C / Carbon libraries (which are slowly being deprecated)… If MonoTouch is that good at traversing the paradigms between .NET and Cocoa, that’s damn impressive, but I don’t believe it… The problem is, that on every other platform, interface incongruities are just the norm – expected, so cross-platform libraries are not abhorred as greatly – the users aren’t as discerning. On the Mac and it’s derivatives, consistency of behavior and user experience are tightly defined. I haven’t seen people getting up in arms about the HIG (human interface guidelines). Did you know that you can be rejected from the app store from not complying with the HIG? Now, most would say that’s just more Apple restrictive behavior, but it’s not – it’s protecting the user experience and the platform. Obviously, most didn’t see the HIG requirements as offensive though, although these new requirements are truly enforcing the same thing.

Again, languages and frameworks are not difficult for any experienced developer to pick up. For most programmers, the basics of Objective-C and Cocoa can easily be picked up in days… proficiency can be attained in a couple weeks. Once proficient, why would you choose the targeted platform over another? .NET is a bit a richer than Cocoa, but certainly not worth forsaking the native platform, the tools, the documentation, etc. provided? Flash has no real benefits for a traditionally trained programmer.

As an aside, I think Mono outside of Novell is pretty much dead anyway. I can’t imagine it will ever make major inroads outside of certain niches – folks who need to develop for Linux but have a lot of .NET experience. Many couldn’t be doing Mono right now if they weren’t also Novell partners. Microsoft’s threats have gone a long way in making corporate lawyers nervous, and it’s only through the negotiated protections offered by the Novell / Microsoft partnership that have allowed some to move forward.

As much as everyone has belabored this iPhone OS issue, the rancor towards Microsoft and their general destruction of C# and .NET has never reached similar fervor. The real reason Microsoft has stifled these technologies is often applied to Apple – an anti-competitive bent of protectionism. I don’t deny – I’m sure there is a significant element of this in Apple’s intentions as well – but at least they have a pretty good logical and conceivably more benevolent reason as well.

Even Icaza said it:

“The most important part is that Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant thread of patent infringement that they have cast on the ecosystem. Unlike the Java world that is blossoming with dozens of vibrant Java virtual machine implementations, the .NET world has suffered by this meme spread by Ballmer that they would come after people that do not license patents from them.”

Of course, Google is our angel – savior from the capitalistic bastards facing us in Cupertino and Redmond. If anyone thinks Google is any more noble and less evil, keep dreaming. Why aren’t they releasing all their new apps for platforms other than Android? Why did they buy AdMobile (which they knew would be a problem with the SEC) in a move to block Apple from acquiring it? To think that Google is any different is naiveté at its extreme.

In the end, I would rather the new iPhone/iPad platform be more open – or at least have more than one pathway to sale and deployment. But, the raucous rancor and fervor exhibited over the last week is nothing but hypocrisy. Bitter hypocrisy…

The future is now, and I have seen, nay, caressed it.

Ok, I wax dramatic. It’s some freaking glass, silicon and metal – a small computer with a 9″ screen. This isn’t a technological miracle – this is not some technical innovation that breaks all new barriers of speed, power or even size. What has been brought into this world is a design – albeit an incredible design, that breaks the mold of current end-user computing. After spending a half-day marveling at this device, all I can say is that it truly is a new way of approaching the end-user computing experience, and in every way I have experienced, a vastly superior one.

As of today, 95% of all end-user computing tasks, and probably 100% of most folks typical computer needs, are met with this single device. Not only met, but improved in ways I thought unlikely. This is the first real computer that my parents will ever own that will perform magical incantations of computing without getting in the way. This will be the only computer they will ever need (well, they both will need their own, actually). Amazingly, very few tasks are yet unattainable through this device, and most are external hardware related. Other than software development and some multimedia content creation, I can see even myself almost completely satisfied with this single device. I have no doubt a wave of innovation will appear as the masses explore the capabilities and potential of this device.

No doubt, the iPad has a laundry list of needed improvements and years of maturation, but even in this initial release, it exceeds any and all expectations that I had conceived. It needs a camera (maybe two). It needs some form of 3rd-party application multitasking. It needs better integrated cloud synchronization of data. It would be really swell if the homogeneous application conduit was more open and equitable. Most of the flaws will be fixed, functionality will be amended and increased, and the last vestiges of end-user computing yet attainable by today’s iPad will fall with it, leaving the era of personal computing changed forever.

Even though the “closed-ness” of the iPad (and iPhone) frustrates me, it’s more because I know that the computer world is making a dramatic change that’s no longer focused on me – the geek – and more on everyone else – “normal” folk, where open = complexity and advanced training. Apple has finally made the transition of offering a computer that *is* as easy and approachable as the TV or the standard appliance. This is the future of computing. Not that the open desktop and laptop of today will go away, but they will be relegated to the tinkerers and geeks – which will inevitably mean smaller markets, fewer choices, etc.

The one thing that I haven’t seen anyone comment on greatly is Apple’s recent North Carolina datacenter. I had an aha moment last night. Combine iPad with the cloud, and you have the future of computing for the “common man”. A continuously connected device that is always with you that always has access to your datastore sitting on the future me.com cloud services. It makes sense. Back ups, local storage – it’s not the realm of normals. You can’t make it easy enough. It works great for me, but it never will for my parents – or 90% of the folks out there. The future for the bulk of the population is a device like the iPad along with cloud storage. They can have the entire experience they really want from a computing device without all the mess. Saddens me somewhat, but Frasier is right – partially because the normals will no longer have to rely on me to make the magic work.

This isn’t the technology world I want to live in, but that’s ok. I’ve just gotten accustomed to living in a world where the only way to play the technology game is to be a tinkerer, a geek. That’s coming to an end — it was inevitable — and in the end, that’s a good thing.

This article in Fortune comes to nearly the same conclusion as well. Of course, one of the more interesting and likely valid points brought up by the author bares some concern – viruses are dead. The new hawtness in depraved and mischievous computer vectors are Trojans and spyware, which rely more on the fallibility of the human user than the failings of the operating system itself. Software can assist the user in making smart decisions, but stepping too far into this realm ends up creating a stifling user experience (i.e. warning boxes everywhere, confirmation dialogs that don’t really protect anything, or systems so restricted that they lose most of their usefulness). In the end, after having a secure and robust OS, the next most important step is a knowledgeable and wary user.

Unfortunately, I think this attitude has hindered broader acceptance and success. I’ve blogged before about Apple’s abysmal customer support, maintenance and repair policies – or lack of them (see previous rant). Limiting customers to a single avenue of hardware repair that can take days and weeks, including long waits at a retail store, is just reprehensible – especially if you expect to sell to businesses.

The iPhone app store is another good example of this arrogance. Marco Arment at Marco.org has an excellent blog post about Apple’s indifference to the issues developers are currently facing.

This arrogance and disregard for customers and developers will lead to Apple’s downfall if not corrected. It may be slow. It may be years. But it will happen. You can’t treat your partners and your customers this way forever – even with superior products.

On a side note, I’m sure Chrome will run well on those netbooks that everyone is returning after realizing that they are nothing more than really bad web browsing calculators (and yes, I have used one). It has all the limitations of my iPhone AND my laptop with the benefits of neither. It’s the worst of both worlds.

For some reason, this news just really bums me out. Web apps are the dregs of computing. The lowest common denominator. We should be moving in a different direction. Using the web as the distributor of information head-ended by native applications that can take full advantage of the hardware and resources available to the end-user – i.e. web services. The answer is not to try to cram more crap through a browser (i.e. HTML5, Silverlight, Flash, Java applets, etc).

This is why I use a Mac. User experience. Thoughtful design. Great applications – both those provided by Apple with iLife and the OS as well as those from third-party developers who care about the user experience and quality. No matter how much functionality you add, you can only do so much with a browser. Not to mention, you have to fight long and hard as a developer to attain every inch. I did web apps for over five years – it sucks. You work your butt off to build an application that can never attain the level of quality, fit, and finish that is the goal of every good developer. It’s depressing. Your handicapped from the get-go.

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail.” Abraham Maslow

Not to knock some incredible work that people have done on the web (I mean, look at the .me Mail app – it’s amazing, but I wouldn’t in a million years choose it over its native counterpart). But no matter what examples you may have of amazing web sites, it’s not the norm, nor is it easy to accomplish. The browser wasn’t meant for this. We’ve bastardized it as the platform for all app delivery (or at least Google has). Please, let the insanity stop! This is not the world I want to live (develop) in!

Maybe computing is now like Wal-Mart or mass-produced plasticky crap that always breaks after two weeks. Lowest common denominator, cheap, thoughtless. Native applications, innovation and thoughtful design are relegated to the antique dealers and the rare specialty shops of craftsman made products – sequestered to the incredibly small minority of people who seem to care or haven’t been brainwashed in expecting so much less from their computing experience.

UPDATE: Someone in the mainstream press apparently agrees. I had over 200 visitors to this site in an hour after a link to this page found it’s way to the linkback section of the original Google Blog article. Interestingly, I had no comments. Either my post really really sucked, or everyone generally agreed and didn’t have anything to comment about. Probably a little of both.

Head in the sand, dying technology, idiot comment of the day by National Association of Broadcasters guy:

“This is good for music,” said Dennis Wharton, the executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters. “It sets a rate where artists will receive royalities for the music they produce.”

Wharton said although these “pureplay” Webcasts are popular, he doesn’t see this decision affecting local radio stations. He said the 235,000,000 people who listen to the radio every day will probably stick with it. “It’s hard to beat a free and local option,” he said.

This year at WWDC, I was once again looking forward to Stump the Experts – the event that gave me my 15 seconds. I wasn’t planning on trying to identify any music this year. Everyone has the technology now, and I knew that if Fred Huxham and Mark “The Red” Harlan – the masterminds of this event were going to continue with the music identification tradition, it wouldn’t be recognizable by any published methods. I had my time in the sun. I was looking forward to meeting Mark again after his comments on this blog about the event last year. He even promised me a copy of his book on Texas Hold’em (which I’ll be reading on the plane ride back home).

I was a bit taken aback when at the beginning of Stump this year, I was invited onto the stage to sit with Apple Experts in front of a couple thousand people where the previous years events were retold and I was congratulated for “breaking” a part of the Stump. It was an amazing honor, and I thank Fred and Mark for extending my 15 seconds for a few more.

It amazes me how many times I’ve overheard people at the conference this year retelling the story of “that guy at the Stump”. Now that I spend more of my time managing developers and working with finance and business development, I have little opportunity to extend my geek cred with programming projects. Sure glad that I spent some of my spare time on that little skunkworks development project – it has definitely paid back in spades. It also reminds me why I started programming computers back on an Atari 800XL some thirty odd years ago – the thrill of creation and seeing a piece of code deliver its magic…

NOTE: If you happen to have any photos of the beginning of Stump this year, please let me know. I really would like to have a photograph of myself up on the stage!

UPDATE: More #googlefail articles: PC/Mac World and this amazing graph of the “Great Googelapse”.

Once again, the people in-between the content and the consumers are facing extinction and are doing everything they can to stop it. They are no longer necessary – like the appendix – a vestigial artifact of a past age. The Internet has made them irrelevant. Like any cornered animal fighting for its life, its willing to do about anything to survive… be it nasty DRM or attempts to past protective and draconian legislation – usually at the expense of both the consumer and the content provider. Fortunately, these attempts generally only prolong the inevitable death and rarely disrupt it completely.

That strategy really has been working for the music industry (not). People don’t want to steal content. They just want to be treated fairly and respected in exchange for their purchase. Look how successful Amazon and iTunes have been – selling non-DRMed content in a way that meets the needs of the customer.

Wake up “content providers” – before we start finding different providers of our content – be it music, TV, movies, or anything else.

The best thing to happen to the technical book reader (and to me) is O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online. Basically, depending on a graduated cost scale, you can pay anywhere from $10 bucks to $43 a month, allowing you to virtually “check-out” from 5 to an unlimited number of books respectively from O’Reilly’s huge library. A virtual book can be perused in its entirety online. We’re not just talking O’Reilly books – they have Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, Que, Sams, Microsoft Press, Cisco Press, IBM Press, and many others – over 6,500 books. These books are high-quality and include all the imagery, samples, files, and everything else that comes with the actual physical version of the book. Depending on your plan, you can even convert some of the chapters (or entire books) to PDF for further archival or offline reference as part of your monthly fee. While mostly technical in nature, many business books are also available. Not only can you check out and read these books, you can search the text of their entire library. You have a PostgreSQL problem? Search Safari and pull up the book.

Right now I have 105 books checked out, ranging from a half-dozen Adobe Photoshop books to a few C++ tomes to Objective-C design patterns to Unicode to the latest books on iPhone development. Unlike print books, when the next edition comes out, I don’t have to pay $45 to get it. I just check out the latest edition to my virtual bookshelf.

I’ve only bought a few print variants over the last couple years. Generally, these are classics or references that are going to be sitting on my desk more often than not. Even then, I still have the virtual version on my virtual bookshelf as well for easy searching and browsing from wherever I may be. Oh yeah, it works great on my iPhone as well. Yes, I’ve read my books online from the comfort of my bed.

If you invest in one tool for your personal technical self-edification, I highly recommend O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online.

Getting an object lesson in why relying on web apps can be a bad idea.

So true… so true…

But, the real travesty… a laptop with non-serviceable battery? Are you kidding me? I don’t care if it is supposed to last for 1000 charges and 3+ years! It’s supposed to last 3x current batteries. I’ve had some current batteries only last 3-6 months. Going to meetings twice a day, I may have 3 charge cycles a day – that would be less than a year. What do you do when it’s dead? It sounds like you have to exchange your laptop for a new one. Even if it is depot-replaceable part, you’re going to be out a computer for some period of time… not to mention going through the frustrating technical support process that Apple has foisted upon us.

Apologizing in advance, but this is rant worthy… Apple support is HORRIBLE for equipment repair and service. I grimace every time I have a failure because I know it means — signing up for an appointment at the Genius Bar, generally during an inopportune time, fighting crowds at the mall to get to the Apple store, waiting an hour or more with a bunch of other pissed off and frustrated customers because they’re behind and understaffed, then having a Genius ask me a bunch of questions like I’m an idiot then tell me that he’ll have to send it off for repair and I’ll get it back in a few days (which often ends up being a week). I don’t know if it’s just bad luck or what, but I’ve had to do this with almost every laptop both my wife and I have owned from Apple and one desktop. With practically every “real” PC vendor, I’ll have a repair or replacement in 24 hours and I don’t have to go anywhere (and that’s not BS. That is the type of service I received when I purchased Dell). I would even pay a premium for that service (even though I feel like I’m already paying a premium for Apple hardware and the laughable AppleCare). If Apple had real service plans or reasonable exchange programs, then the thought of a non-customer serviceable battery might not be that bad.

I (usually) really like Apple hardware, but it’s frustrating as a Mac user to wish that Dell sold equipment with Mac OS X on it… (or Dell sold Apple equipment with Dell’s service plan). It’s even more frustrating when you’re trying to push Mac OS X in the enterprise… How do you think the above flies with IT departments? It doesn’t. Apple’s response? You need to have your IT staff certified as Apple techs so you can order / warehouse replacement parts and do the repairs yourself. What do we do? Keep spare laptops on hand and have a constant train of repairs going back to an Apple Service Center (that is not an Apple store, so you can drop it off and pick it up a week later without a scheduled appointment and wasting a half hour with a Genius).

Ridiculous. How I hope Apple wakes up to the needs of professionals, enterprise users, and normal everyday people who don’t want to be treated like cattle… By the way, of all the time I’ve spent in an Apple store (which is quite a bit) – including Apple Stores in London, San Francisco, Atlanta, etc, I’ve never seen someone leaving a Genius Bar satisfied. Never. Never. I’ve never left a Genius Bar satisfied. I’ve never spoken to someone who has left a Genius Bar satisfied. I always see displays of frustration. I always see unhappy, upset customers (not to say that all customers are nice / happy people). No matter, nice, knowledgeable Genius Bar folks don’t make up for the fact that this process is broken and is more fitted to broken B&W TVs in the 1960s than modern, expensive computers – nearly boutique computers. Aren’t Apple Computers the BMWs or Mercedes of the computer world? Not by the way they treat their customers in respect to hardware repair.

Rant over… Guess I’ll be heading to the Apple Store soon to pick up my iLife / iWork…

Update: The battery is “supposedly” replaceable by an Apple service center for $179. The price is fine, although it better be a 5 minute Genius Bar appt. The big question now – it appears that the memory and hard drive are not user-serviceable either, meaning your stuck buying memory from Apple (at 6x the current price everywhere else) and not able to flip in and out hard drives as you like – which I find indispensable on my new Macbook Pro. These are huge steps backward if true. Still trying to find out…

Update 2: …representatives who Ars spoke with on the Macworld Expo floor went with an “anywhere between one or two hours, up to a week.” Still no word on memory and HD.

I’ve noticed with regularity that I end my Wired reading sessions feeling somewhat dirty – almost like I had been perusing some plastic-wrapped pornographic skin-mag from the top-shelf of the local Kroger (which I would never do of course). Today, while breaking from my winter reading sprint, I decided to catch up on the two Wired magazines gathering dust on my desk.

It was while reading a sardonic reflection of a modern “Great Depression” where futuresque bums roam the streets with their Guitar Hero axes and find rest in trashed Aeron chairs that it hit me. Wired is written by a bunch of smug, arrogant asshats who think they are better than everyone else (no, I’m really *not* talking about myself here) – and cater to those who wish to feel better of themselves by reading said self-professed elitism of thought. I thought maybe this was purely a response to one very snobbish piece, but after reading the pretentious responses to some customer feedback and reading a number of other articles in the same light, my conclusions were confirmed. Even though the topics that Wired covers are (sometimes) relevant, and often portray views that I may (sometimes) agree with,they approach these topics in such a high-browed, arrogant manner that it’s almost impossible to be able to trust or feel good about anything you are reading.

In the end, real nerds don’t need thick paper, fancy graphics, and lots of conceited pomposity to be happy about ourselves. We already know how awesome we are! …and for whomever supplied the subscription – thanks, but next year I’ll take Horticulture. Plants tend not to be terribly haughty…

First book down on my Fortnight of Reading Fun. So which did I pick first? Well, I cheated a bit – I had already started Getting Things Done a couple months back on a trip to Philly and was already nearly halfway through.

I’m not a big fan of the self-help book genre – especially those of the “business executive” variety. Fortunately, I’ve heard so many personal positive accounts of the GTD craze that I figured I should at least take a gander – and I’m glad I did. Where many of these types of books just repackage common sense with a bunch of buzzwords and horribly overused clichés, David Allen seemed to avoid this hackneyed approach (although a few of the sidebars are pretty heavy in the tired-speech department) and presented a pretty excellent approach to personal organizational management.

For those who don’t know me well, I’m a typical OCD-crazed organizational freak. I like lists. I like spreadsheets. I like organization. What I found most interesting is that about 75% of the book are things which I’ve learned on my own accord over the last ten or twenty years through extensive refinement of what I found that worked. In other words, if David Allen had provided me this book when I got out of high school almost twenty years ago, I would have been way ahead of the game. Most importantly, this book has given me the final “pieces” of the puzzle that I believe will finally get me as close as humanly possible to organizational nirvana.

So, first book well recommended. While you will likely read a good bit of this and go “duh”, I think it’s comprehensive approach and the attention to details to “Getting Things Done” can be quite life-changing. Considering the number of web sites, software, classes and everything else emblazoned with the GTD meme, I guess I’m not the only one!

Thinking the Corporation is my next action item…

First, if you’re more familiar with Unix filesystems, HFS+, while a decent journaled filesystem, allows for some oddities that don’t exist much elsewhere. Some of these are peculiar to the Mac (like resource forks and file locks), while others are actually Unix / Linux wide but are very new so not supported very widely (like all the new file and security attributes). The concern is this – if you use rsync to backup or move files from a Mac to a Linux box (or vice versa) or to another Mac box for that matter, if your version of rsync doesn’t have support for these features, what you’ll end up with might be garbage. Resource forks are not widely used, but do show up in some places that could cause problems for backups – like in iTunes, iPhoto, and some preferences / settings bundles. If you munge the forks, these files will be total trash.

Apple, knowing how powerful rsync was, decided awhile back to extend rsync to support these features. Unfortunately, their version generally sucks and isn’t updated often. It supports most of the features of HFS+ but not all, and has a number of annoying bugs. Fortunately, as time has gone on, most of the features needed for HFS+ (and many of the newer filesystems) have been added to the main trunk of rsync – including resource forks. The latest version, 3.0.6, is actually one of only a few ways to truly backup or archive an HFS+ filesystem (or many of the newer non-Mac filesystems for that matter) without dropping any of the attributes or filesystem metadata. While this is probably more than you want to know, their are a number of test suites that verify syncing and duplication applications to verify that every type of attribute is copied correctly. Currently, on the mac, the only two live methods that pass all tests are rsync 3.0.6 (not the one that comes with the Mac) or SuperDuper! DiskUtil / asr (that comes with the Mac) will do it, but the volume must be unmounted.

So… if you want to use rsync, the first thing you need to do is go download MacPorts (from macports.org) [If you don't already have this on your Mac, may the Unix console gods strike you down]. Download, install, fire up a console, type “sudo port”, put in your password, then wait for the ports prompt. Type “install rysnc”. It will now download and compile the latest version of rsync onto your system. MacPorts installs everything into /opt/local/bin. The original rsync is in /usr/local/bin. Unless you set your path properly, you won’t know which one your getting. Confirm with a “which rsync” – which will tell you which one you are running. Or, type in the full path (yuck) — or delete the one in /usr/bin (probably not advised)…

So now you have the right rsync. BUT, you can’t just type rsync and get appropriate behavior. You must pass it the appropriate syntactic magic.

For Mac / HFS+ volumes, you need the a number of extra parameters to convey all the appropriate properties (check the man page for the details.. some of them are very important, some less so) – so here is an example:

/opt/local/bin/rsync –rsync-path=/opt/local/bin/rsync -aNHAXvz –force-change –fileflags –delete /Users/rich/ archer:~/backup/

The -avz are standard and not specific… the -NHAX and –fileflags are the really important needed flags. Also, if you are syncing to another Mac, the –rsync-path makes sure that the other side has the new rsync as well, otherwise it might try to use Apple’s old and busted rsync. To Unix boxen, that will be unnecessary – but you definitely need to make sure that the other side has a modern rsync – or you will get errors about the other side not supporting some of the modern flags.

Have fun, rsync safely, and feel free to ask me questions if you have any…

Nary a word had been mentioned in the mainstream national media. Even our local news (which I abhor and rarely watch) mentioned much about the situation. About a week after Ike, the local stations finally broached the subject, acknowledging only that we had panic buying based on a baseless rumor of gas shortages. The press seemed ignorant to the fact that the shortages had already been occurring for over a week (since shortly after Ike), and the only panic that was occurring was the fear of not being able to get to work or to wherever it is that people go. The news even quoted the governor as saying that the pipeline from Houston to Nashville was now operating at near full capacity and three barges of gasoline were arriving in Nashville within hours. Needless to say, the situation didn’t get any better for at least another week. Even then, gas was not and still is not plentiful. The only thing that seemed to be consistent was the complete lack of information, or rather, the seemingly abundant misinformation.

It wasn’t until last week when the shortages spread to Atlanta and Charlotte did it seem to capture much attention nationally. While the situation has eased somewhat here in Nashville, supply is still quite erratic, and the shortages seem to be snaking their way from southwest to northeast.

Fortune magazine finally posted one of the first reasonable (if not a bit frightening) assessments of the situation. In summary, we’re living on the very edge of the gasoline capacity available and our entire fuel refining and delivery systems are very fragile. In other words, the situation could easily get worse before it gets better, and may not return to a reasonable stasis for quite some time. People generally don’t like price gouging, but I’m fairly certain that the anti-gouging laws have only made this problem significantly worse by not allowing the supply / demand curves to come into balance with artificially depressed prices.

No matter, it’s all a bit frightening, and leads credence to the urgency in which we must address our reliance on oil (and all other non-renewable energy sources).

This was unfortunately predictable. Matter of fact, I talked about it in a couple blog posts – and a lot more often with friends and coworkers. The day I read the developer program agreement, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could turn over so much control in their livelihood to Apple – but the risk / reward looked good, so most overlooked it. I mean, I drank the Kool-Aid too, but I knew it was inevitable. Most everyone lamented the terms of the developer agreements quietly, but what can you do when you have such an incredible platform and opportunity staring you in the face. I think most hoped that Apple would be a beneficial steward. So much for that idea. Apple has gotten worse for sure (NDA, app rejections, etc), but the groundwork was laid out the day it was announced and the developer agreement was disclosed.

Fortunately, the more “mainstream” technology press is starting to get wind of it, and along with the Android release, might force Apple to back off a bit. We’ll see. I love the iPhone both as a device I rely upon every day as well as a development platform. I would much rather see the iPhone continue to grow than have to look at the upcoming inferior (in my opinion) but more “open” (even if debatable) platform espoused by Google. Of course, I have no doubt that Google could make the Android a highly appealing platform if they aren’t derailed by the mobile phone industry or the current hardware OEMs.

No matter, the next months in the smartphone sector will be quite exciting. Let’s just hope that Apple can stray from the anti-consumer behavior so typical of big corporations in America lately and “Think Different”.

What a steaming pile. So much for openness. Android was supposed to herald freedom to the consumer – freedom from carrier lock-in, freedom from hardware and software lock-in, freedom from all forms of anti-consumer pro-corporation ass-hattery. Yet, I’m forced to use Google, forced to use proprietary accessories (no headphone jack), forced to use T-Mobile, forced to use YouTube for any video, forced to use a completely locked-down Bluetooth. Some of these will hopefully be remedied by 3rd-party software developers. Many can not.

What a crock. To resort to the well-worn cliché, EPIC FAIL.

While it’s probably unfair for me to judge the relative merits of the Bachelor’s degree, I haven’t found myself limited in any manner in performing the daily activities of my chosen occupation. As a matter of fact, I think it could be systematically proven that I’ve excelled past many / most college-degreed folk. It’s not necessarily because they have a degree that I’ve passed them, it’s more that a degree was unnecessary to excel due to other extenuating factors and educational opportunities.

Unfortunately, as a society, we’ve correlated success in life and likely financial success itself with college. Even the Wall Street Journal had an op-ed on universality of college. CNN / Money Magazine just did a piece on the cost of college and whether it’s worth it.

Many people are just not best served by a college degree. Forcing everyone through this path is an injustice to to all those better served by other alternatives. Today, society and high schools preach that success is served by going to college, and failure to do so is a failure in life which will lead to failure fiscally. Choosing other paths means your either too stupid, too poor, or too lazy to go to college. This is just wrong.

College degrees are often not the best way to prepare an individual for work in a field. Many of todays jobs and skillsets are best learned through more vocational-based education and working in the field. Many if not most of those college trained in non-professional degree programs end up working outside of their chosen educational field anyway. The only thing the paper proves is that one could muster the minimum level of stamina necessary to attend 15 classes a week and pass a few tests.

Also, the concept of post-secondary education should be revisited for the changing world we live in. The WSJ recommended certificate programs among others as ways to earn accreditation in a field. Mentoring and apprenticeships have long proven to be one of the best ways to become adeptly trained in an occupation.

For many, college is nothing more than an extension of adolescence – a five-year social experience that delays the responsibility of adulthood. Why does education require such? Why should we expect our parents or our government to pay for these “life experiences”. It’s reckless and inappropriate.

All this stated, I’m not dismissing college as ill-suited for everyone or worthless by any stretch. It’s truly up to the individual and the needs of said individual. Many professional oriented degrees are critical and fiscally rewarding and only available through rigorous college-study. Many of the non-occupational oriented degrees are still enlightening and provide a continuation of our culture, our scientific advances, and history and should be supported. Even so, the “college experience” as it exists today seems wasteful – I imagine that like all things, colleges could use improvement. Unfortunately, this aspect is unlikely to change – too much money is involved and a legacy has been established.

On a personal level, I am not averse to actually completing the first leg of college myself. Partially due to arrogance and youth, I’ve generally felt that I know more than the professors when it comes to Computer Science. I’ve been programming since I was 10 and studying books on programming, algorithms, and software development lifecycle since not long after that. When looking at college, I’ve always wanted to learn about sometehing other than computers, but unfortunately, little has ever been able to hold my interest and attention long enough to formulate a degree.

Ah well, maybe after I retire…

If I had my choice, I probably would never own anything but Honda. Unfortunately, Honda hasn’t been keeping up with the Hybrid bandwagon which I’m keenly interested in (I also am a fan of AWD, which is missing across Honda’s lines). The Prius is an amazing (if ugly) car. I just can’t stand Toyota. It’s kinda like a sports team thing. Not totally rational, just the way I feel. But considering the options and Honda’s recent deficiencies in the Hybrid market, I was afraid I was going to have to stray from my favored brand.

I’ve been pretty confident that Honda knows of this deficiency and has been trying to work it out. Sure enough, CNN Money just published an article about the new Honda Insight – a complete overhaul of the first pure-hybrid car in America. For a Hybrid, it actually looks pretty good.

Now if it only was AWD, did 0-60 sub 5 seconds, had the clutch / manual transmission and handling characteristics of an S2000, and still got 50+ mpg, I would be in heaven. (Actually, the Honda CR-Z concept looks like it might be getting close).

More information available at the Honda website.

The summary of said article states that the USPTO is ruling that unless a patent has a physical manifestation in the physical realm (and a computer itself isn’t enough), it is generally unpatentable. That pretty much rules out software patents and every form of process patents. No more Google patents. No more Amazon patents. No more Microsoft patents. A lot of IBM patents, bye-bye.

To be honest, I think if this comes to fruition, we may see a whole new era of innovation in the software development field. This may be counterintuitive to some, but I wholeheartedly believe that current software patents have done significantly more to stifle innovation and the progression of software than it has strengthened corporate investment and involvement (as I’ve blogged about in the past). Look forward to seeing how this all plays out…

Unfortunately, in most highly skilled positions (like software engineers), the only people who usually need said rules are the lowest performers anyway – those who should probably be fired. The high performers don’t need to be reminded of the lowest common denominator expectations. Insultingly low-bar rules would likely just stifle creativity and lower morale. So if you just fired the poor performers, why do you need the rules at all?

So in reality, rules in high-performance environments are actually just a crutch of a weak manager or company management philosophy. A manager who would rather dish out a low bar threshold of behavior than actually managing his employees to a much higher standard does not a high performance company make. This management method is generally caused by a management staff who is either unskilled or undertrained, powerhungry and trying to demand unearned respect, lazy, or just incapable of making hard decisions with hiring and firing. In my experience, it’s often a little of each. Not to say it’s easy either. I’ve admittedly fallen to each of these failings. Managing people is hard, and falling back into the staid methods of the past is easy – but that doesn’t make it right.

The “old-school” philosophy of management seems to favor the 200-page book of rules. If you have a rule for every circumstance and situation, the manager doesn’t have much to manage do they? A manager becomes nothing more than a rule enforcer. Since your bar for performance is your monstrous book of rules, the minimum required to keep your job is the rule book itself. In these situations, your entire organization’s level of productivity will migrate to the standard of the rules, which is usually the minimum level of performance expected or hoped for.

These organizations usually end up stacked with mediocre performing staff and even poorer management. Why? The high-performers who find themselves in such an organization will usually realize it very quickly – stupid, arcane rules and incredibly poor performing peers that can never be fired. Yeah, a high performer is going to want to stick around for that – they’ll be looking for something better faster than you can say… I don’t know, whatever you feel like saying… These folks usually end up pulling a ton of other staff on their coattails until they can’t take it anymore. Since the rest of the staff are meeting the incredibly low standards of the “rules” and the management is too scared / lazy / unqualified to actually manage, they never get fired – and these poor performers will certainly never leave such a dreamy position of their own accord.

So, get rid of the rules. But what about the poor performers? Again, do not make more rules, just learn to manage them. If they don’t respond to management, FIRE THEM. Or better yet, DO NOT HIRE THEM in the first place. Hiring practices at most organizations are a joke. Of course, the worst breed of manager, the respect-demanding low-bar managers are looking more for a worshipper or yes-man than a high-performer anyway, enabling the self-perpetuating pattern of piss-poor performance. So fire those managers too…

And if you work at one of these organizations, either decide to live the dream of mediocrity, fire your company, or better yet, try to plant the seed of change. If that doesn’t work out, there are always plenty of others out there who are looking for high-achievers. Look for the progressive ones… the ones who judge by achievement rather than attire, by deeds rather than paper diplomas, and respect rather than rules and draconic lifestyle demands.

This seems to be supported by the continuing hysteria surrounding everything iPhone. I intended to upgrade to the new iPhone 3G. Understanding that the supply was a bit constrained and demand was intense, I figured I would give it a couple weeks before making my attempt. I’ve been watching the iPhone inventory at my local Apple store from Apple’s website. Each day generally showed stock, so I figured it was a pretty safe bet to head down this morning. Knowing that even without the iPhone craze that my local Apple store can be packed with people at about any time of the day, I decided it would be best to show up at opening time – 8am.

As I walked into what I expected to be an empty mall, I was faced with a long outstretched line. It followed the length of one “leg” of the mall. My shock subdued by the early hour, I fell into my place in line and waited to see what would happen next. Cheerful (for 8am) Apple employees walked up and down the line handing out water and giving out information. Apparently, this is a daily occurrence. After about 20 minutes, a particular Apple employee could be seen handing out tickets – which I come to find out, are vouchers for an iPhone. When the tickets run out, the stock that the store has that day is gone.

It’s at this point (and after some discussion with a couple of the young, overly cheerful Apple employees) that I discover that they are receiving daily shipments which sell out each morning. The tickets run out before they get to me and I’m left empty handed. While none of the happy people will tell me how many they’ve been getting (other than – “I had a good stack of cards when I started the line and now I have none”), I would guess that about 50 people received iPhone 3Gs today. Wow. It’s been almost a month since this thing became available and people are STILL lining up every morning at 8am to get one. Some of the people in line mention that this isn’t their first attempt. Wow.

I wouldn’t even consider upgrading except that I find myself becoming more reliant on the device each and every day. With the release of iPhone OS v2 and support for 3rd party applications, the usefulness of the device can be expanded on a daily basis by a legion of eager developers (for which I wouldn’t mind joining myself). I mean, my employer owns the technology behind one of the Top 10 free applications on the iPhone App Store currently. I even used said technology with an app I built for great fun and amazing geek glory. Each week I look forward to seeing what gems might show up on the iPhone App Store.

Not that this device and its life support of telephone carrier (AT&T here in the US) and creator (Apple) and 3rd parties is without blemish. I don’t like AT&T. I don’t know many who do, but we don’t have much choice. Apple seems a bit bent on being an over-protective parent as well. The restrictions and draconian methods which it deals with the press, 3rd party developers, and even its customers can be a bit frustrating. Also, the whole iPhone V1 activation process was a dream. The current activation process is a nightmare. I’m not sure who’s to blame for this, but it doesn’t really matter – the customer experience has been totally destroyed.

Even so, its hard not to love this little thing, and its apparent that many are willing to overlook these qualms, as will I. The only question now is when I’ll be back in line again.

When I first started blogging, I created two blogs – one for my political thoughts and edgy rants, and one for my more “normal” thoughts – this one. When I decided to merge the two, I removed most of the more “edgy” rants and political pieces. One of these rants was on dress codes and formal work attire. Needless to say, I was a bit critical of companies (and those within said companies) who thought that a tie or suit was required. The gist of my rant was that those who judge or expect to be judged by their business dress are not those whom I wish to associate with.

Not that I have an issue with someone who enjoys dressing up (crazy people do exist) – I mean, dressing up for a special event can be fun I guess. But for most, a suit (or a tie, or even “business casual”) represents a level of respect that is demanded or expected. Many “old-schoolers” consider that the lack of a suit demands less respect. They judge based on what you wear. This, to me, is perverse. Not only do I not want to demand respect from something so superficial as my clothing, I don’t wish to impress said folk who demand it in this form.

Any respect that I may receive should be earned through deeds, not by my clothing. Anyone shallow enough to require such clothing to even allow the opportunity to be respected is someone for which I could care less if I had their respect. Unfortunately, I still have to feed my family, so sometimes you have to do whatever it takes – but that doesn’t mean I like it or can do much more than feign respect for those who require it.

Ultimately, in many companies, archaic dress codes engender more disdain than respect. Those who implement these policies are generally more concerned with perception than performance, and it’s likely a sign of a company that’s not only not progressive, but one which is on a path to obsolescence. The brightest and best don’t want to be judged by their shell – and won’t stand for a company which measures them by such a standard.

As I have mentioned previously, this week has found me at the excellent Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) – my 3rd year attending said event. Wednesday nights are traditionally filled with the Apple Design Awards where the years most extraordinary development efforts are rewarded. Following the awards is a 16 year tradition known as “Stump the Experts“. For an hour or so, a large audience of nearly a thousand folks trade questions and such with a panel of Apple employees – the experts. Prizes are awarded (usually t-shirts) for correct answers. Anything goes to divine the answers – Internet, Wikipedia, Google, books, source code, etc.

A traditional aspect of this event is six or so songs picked by the hosts, Fred Huxham and Mark Harlan, are played while the session is getting setup between the awards and the Stump the Experts. These songs are often fairly obscure. The audience can try to guess these songs for t-shirts as well.

While eating dinner with a number of WWDC attendees prior to these two events, I attempted to show off a little creation I have been toying with for my iPhone that exercises the services of my day job (Landmark Digital) – an ad hoc audio recognition application. It was suggested that I use my little app to determine the songs being played. Amazingly, the app got 6 of the 7 songs. I queued up in line for the microphone to give my answers.

At this point, realize that I’m in a room with a bunch of excellent developers and a stage filled with thirty or so long-time Apple employees. When I was called upon, I stated that I had six of the seven songs but I wasn’t sure if it was fair, since “my iPhone told me what they were”. The response from the hosts was something like this: “That’s fine – it’s not like you recorded it on your iPhone and it told you what they were”. My response was, “well, actually, I did”. In short, at this point, the crowd went wild, the hosts walked to the back of the stage to pick up the grand prize (Adobe CS3 – about $1500 in software), and I was floating on cloud 9. Mark Harlan shook my hand and complimented me from the stage in a way which was very inspiring. It was an almost out of body experience – especially since I was participating in witty banter in front of a thousand people (not part of my standard biological makeup) and using some of the technology that I helped implement and receiving kudos from my peers.

What a blast. I’m not sure if that was my 15 seconds of fame, but if it was, it was really cool.

UPDATE: Found the audio of my moment in the spotlight!!!

Instead of maintaining a centralized repository that includes all the history and each developer checking out and developing on a simple “working copy”, the distributed system allows each participant to maintain a complete and individual copy of both the entire history as well as a working copy. Working offline or “away” from the central repository is no longer an issue. Sharing and merging code becomes a distributed – almost peer-to-peer affair.

In actuality, for personal projects, this makes a heap of a lot more sense. It’s much more lightweight and amenable to the way most indie developers or small development teams work. As has been shown recently with the Linux kernel and others, it can also work well for immensely large projects as well. Also, CVS and SVN have some historical idiosyncracies that can be a bit annoying (like littering .svn directories all over the place).

Linus of Linux kernel fame has his weight behind Git. Canonical of Ubuntu fame has inspired and built Bazaar. Some guy name Matt wrote Mercurial. So far, Mercurial and Git seem to have the most mind share. Each has its own pros and cons, but overall, they are generally all quite similar.

I have yet to pick my variant. Right now I’m leaning toward Mercurial – primarily because 1) I think Linus Torvalds is an elitist jerk and Git is the least documented and complex of the three and 2) Bazaar seems to be a bit behind the other two in acceptance. My biggest roadblock right now is that I was just starting to get accustomed to using the SCM support with SVN in Xcode – and Xcode doesn’t support any of these new fangled version control systems yet.

Any thoughts about these three new contenders? Or is distributed revision control just a fad?

With my recent WoW retirement and lack of discernible distractions from work, I’ve tried to spend more time looking at other games (those with endings) to twiddle away my time and relieve stress. I went ahead and purchased On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. It was entertaining – although the combat model gets a bit repetitive and dull after a while. The humor of course is top-notch. Overall, probably about 6 hours (I’m guessing) of total play-time. Decent for a $19.99 game.

With my first completion of a game since pre-WoW days under my belt, I’ve started to broaden my scope wider. We have Oblivion for the PS3 – unfortunately, I just have a hard time playing a console unless it’s something that feels “right” playing on a console. For me, that’s sports, racers, and platform style games (i.e. Mario, Metroid, etc). Seems like everyone plays shooters on consoles now – I just can’t get it. No matter how good you are, you aren’t going to beat an even moderate keyboard / mouse player. Trying to do so is just frustrating madness when I know how much better I could be playing with a computer. For adventure, RTS, RP, or practically any other genre, I don’t even consider there to be a choice – computers all the way. Maybe I’m just old school.

Sure, Wii Sports and Wii Fit are fun. With a group of people, it’s an absolute blast. I can’t WAIT for Gran Toursimo 5 (not the Prologue demo for $40). I mean, I would buy a PS3 just for that game (actually, I kinda did). No matter, I really don’t have any games for the Wii or PS3 calling me at the moment. Plus, it’s hooked up to our single shared TV. Yes, we have one TV. Yes, I like it that way. Yes, wife & son get first priority due to my one TV luddite rule.

So the search continues. This is a great blog entry about why it’s good to be a gamer on the Mac in 2008. I agree with all of his selections, although two of the five have been available on the PC for quite some time. I mean, even the most lukewarm computer gamer has to be excited about Spore and Starcraft II. These are two of the most hyped games that I can remember in some time – and both seem to be focusing in on release and appear to be on track to matching at least some if not all of the expectations. Unfortunately, only one of these games (the Windows port of NWN2) is even available yet. That doesn’t help me much right now. This inevitably leads to the frustrating state of Mac vs. Windows PC gaming.

I hate Windows. I would prefer to never see it again. I made this nearly a reality by completely switching from Windows PCs to Mac almost five years ago. That said, there have been quite a few games that I actually regret not having a PC to play. The list is not long but definitely includes some historically important games (important for followers and connosieurs of electronic gaming).

My short list:

• Orange Box (Half-life 2 and it’s children)
  
• Call of Duty 4
  
• Far Cry (and the upcoming Far Cry 2)
  
• Crysis
  
• Bioshock
  
• Supreme Commander
  
• Company of Heroes
  
• Oblivion
  
• Company of Heroes
  
• Mass Effect

I’ve been wanting a Mac Pro for sometime. The Macbook Pro laptop handles WoW decently (although I have to point a 5″ fan on it to keep it from overheating and shutting down spontaneously). No matter, it’s definitely not a game machine. I have no desire of buying or building another Windows based PC. That ship has sailed. Never again.

For my wife: Please stop reading this paragraph NOW and skip to next paragraph.
The Mac Pro with the right setup can be a potent game machine. Not only for Mac games but with dual-booting (I know, sacrilege), can play Windows games equally well. I mean, doors would be wide open for pretty much anything I wanted to throw at it – including the games listed above. Obviously, this is the answer to my gaming woes!

For my wife: Please start reading here. The Mac Pro with the right setup can be a potent development machine. I’ll be able to seriously decrease compile times as well as speed through video encodings and Photoshop work. I’ll be so much more productive and increase my future earning potential!!!

Wonder if she’ll buy it? Both my argument as well as the Mac Pro… Unlikely. Oh well, heading to WWDC next week… maybe I’ll have some inspiration and find a fun coding project to keep me busy. Or maybe they’ll give all attendees a new shiny Mac Pro to take home – probably more likely than convincing my wife I need a Mac Pro!

Some of my current favorites… (Please note, some of these are of a more “mature” nature i.e. language / violence, for the squeamish…)

• We all hate DRM…
• Real women vs virtual?
• My Wii Fit experience as well…
• I’m not the only one battling WoW addiction!
• Airline rules…
• Forum etiquette…
• Twisted… (and who knew?)
• Violence…
• George Lucas Hating…

Still slowly perusing a bits of the archive every day – thousands of these exist – almost all are quite humorous… My wife has already rolled her eyes and dismissed my enjoyment of these as some odd psychosis. You know, that might be a good theme for one of these strips?

Oh, I forgot to mention – they’ve built a game loosely around the two main characters of the comic strip – On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. The demo is pretty humorous and it’s getting great reviews. I think I’m going to ante-up the $19.95 for the full game.

1. If you expose your computers ssh port to the wild west of the Internet, you should harden (i.e. protect) it from attack
2. if you wanted to use rsync in an automated backup script between machines, you would need to setup public / private key authentication instead of pure password authentication

These two things are actually somewhat related, so I’ll tackle them both in one place. This article definitely requires some command-line fu (In other words, Dad, you don’t have to click the Continue Reading link if you don’t feel like it… no offense intended, really…)

Secure Shell or SSH is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged over a secure channel between two computers

Many (the 2 people other than my Dad who reads this blog) may already use SSH on a daily basis, so I won’t go into much detail. Here is the review: ssh allows you to log into and/or run commands on other computers in a secure and encrypted manner. There. Done with review. When you ssh into another computer, you obviously need to authenticate with the remote computer. Generally, people are pretty familiar with the whole username and password thing. The only problem with this is that it’s fairly insecure. It’s fairly open to brute force attacks. A much more secure method is one using public and private computer generated keys. There are some good books on that topic, so I won’t discuss how it works – just how to make it work on your Mac.

By using keys (and not allowing username / password authentication), your computer is inherently more secure. It is pretty much impossible to fake a cryptographical key (where it’s very easy to guess a password). The added benefit is that you no longer have to type in a username and password (although you can add an additional password that secures your keys if you would like – a password for your password so to speak). To use my scripting backup solution, you can’t be getting an interactive prompt to enter your password when rsync’ing (which uses ssh) – therefore you must use keys.

So our first step to hardening our ssh and enabling our backup scripts is to generate an ssh key “pair” and associate them with our account. From the terminal, type:

ssh-keygen -t dsa

You can take all of the defaults by pressing return three times. This will generate two files in your /Users/yourname/.ssh directory – an id_dsa and an id_dsa.pub. The id_dsa file is basically your private key or password – keep it safe. The id_dsa.pub is like a door lock. You place that on systems you wish to access with your private key. By placing it in your home folder’s .ssh directory on other systems, when you ssh into that box, your private key will be placed in the public door lock, and if they match, you’re granted access. So, put the pub key wherever you want, but be VERY careful where you place your key. To note, ssh is very picky about the file / directory permissions of the .ssh folder and its contents. It’s best to chmod it with 700 (read / write to owner only):

chmod -R 700 ~/.ssh

Now that we’ve got that working, we need to configure our ssh server daemon not to allow password based

authentication – stopping the most vulnerable brute force attacks. To do this, you must have root permissions to edit /etc/sshd_config – the configuration file for the SSH daemon. I would certainly make a backup copy of this file. Move forward gingerly and carefully.

You must uncomment (if commented) and set the following fields as stated:

PermitRootLogin n
PasswordAuthentication no
PermitEmptyPasswords no
ChallengeResponseAuthentication no

Now, unless you have already placed your “public lock” on the system, you cannot ssh to this box. You can verify this by trying to ssh to the box from an account or computer that doesn’t have a prestaged public/private key.

While obfuscation is never a reliable security method, there is no harm hiding your goods from the casual script-kiddie. In this vein, my next suggestion is moving your ssh from the default port of 22 to another unused port. Most attackers go after the standard ports. They are looking for low hanging fruit. It’s like a burglar passing by your house to go the next one because he has high bushes to hide behind. It doesn’t stop anyone, but it will reduce the amount of attention you may get.

To move the port your ssh daemon responds to request on requires a little tinkering with launchd. Since 10.4, the mechanism for launching sshd changed from using xinetd to launchd. This dramatically changed how sshd is launched, what ports are listened to, etc. Logically, you would think you could just edit /etc/sshd_config and be done with it. Sorry, but it’s not that easy. sshd_config is read on launch of sshd, but launchd launches sshd when the appropriate port is “tickled.” Here’s the deal. launchd has an “on-demand” mode, where services that need to be launched upon being “tickled” on a particular port are launched. In /System/Library/LaunchDaemons is a file called ssh.plist which defines the on-demand configuration for sshd.

In general, in most on-demand plists for launchd, a key can be found called SockServiceName. In the ssh.plist file, this is defined as follows:

<key>SockServiceName</key>
<string>ssh</string>

No, it doesn’t list a port number; it lists a service name that is looked up by the getAddrInfo() function call. This, in turn, looks up the service in the /etc/services file. This file has been key to a long-raging debate on the proper way to change the port that sshd listens too.

However, you can easily just add an entry to /etc/services such as ssh2, pointing to a second port (or using an existing services entry that isn’t being listened too), then modify the ssh.plist file to use that entry for SockServiceName. By doing so, sshd will only listen to that port, yet leaving ssh client activity unaffected. So, in my case, I added the following to /etc/services:

  ssh10022              10022/ud
ssh10022              10022/tcp

Next I modified my /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh.plist, changing the SockServiceName lines from what’s shown above to this:

<key>SockServiceName</key>
<string>ssh10022</string>

If you want to listen to both ports, leave the SockServicesName alone and add the following to the Sockets dictionary section:

<key>Alternate Listeners</key>
<dict>
<key>SockServiceName</key>
<string>ssh10022</string>
</dict>

This can be useful if you block port 22 at your router, then port forward (or just plain open) some other port to your machine for ssh access. Machines inside can still access the machine through port 22, but those outside can access through the alternate port only. Note that you will need to refresh launchd for these changes to take effect. A reboot is the surest way (but using launchctl to load the script seems to work fine if you didn’t add a new services entry). Also, make sure to open the firewall port on the Mac OS X firewall if you are running it.

Hope some of these tips prove useful and stay secure!