November 2003 Archives

Sorry about the lack of postings lately. I've been very busy with the two girls, trying to learn Final Cut Express to justify my DV camcorder purchase, and wrestling with a crisis of conscience.

I've been thinking a lot about identity. In the time that I've had this site, I've gotten a lot of compliments about its breadth and depth. People who I knew mostly casually or through my wife have said that they feel like they know me better than they know people they're closer to. My wife left a comment awhile ago suggesting that she likes my blog because she gets to find out stuff about me that I don't normally talk about. A gentleman at another site smeared me as "not a thorough-going man of ideas" based on the site.

The thing is that I've never considered this site to be a good representation of me. Practically every part of this site is a shallow presentation of a small portion of me at a given point in time. My biographical sketch is out of date, my values are but a smattering of my total values and don't even show a hierarchy or change over time, and there are probably fifteen major essays that I haven't converted to HTML yet.

My blogs were designed to make up for those shortcomings, but they've always been an imperfect window into my mind. If I have time to work up an extensive entry, the blogging format is really bad about editing. The pressure to put out an entry a day or an entry every couple days and the poor support for good workflow in the blogging tools means that most entries are rushed out the door, so to speak. I've had entries that took a week to compose, but I always had to keep those in a text file on my desktop in order to not interrupt the daily flow of postings.

So what's a Web-savvy guy to do in this situation? I came up with three choices, naturally:

1. Stop the whole shebang, cease publication
2. Half-ass the whole thing and either publish longer entries less frequently or shorter entries more regularly
3. Whole ass it—don't even think about getting that domain: I own it and wholeass.com—and use some better tools to make it easier to keep current

For most of last week, I was seriously leaning towards option one. Option two didn't appeal to me because the possibility of making my web presence less reflective of my self wasn't going to cut it. Option three scared the dickens out of me because it sounded like a lot of work and, more importantly, a lot of time.

Then came Plone, an open-source, free content management system that is infinitely extensible and eminently customizable. Oh, and entirely web-based. Actually, the software was just a nice idea until I came across very affordable and quality hosting for Plone accounts at Zettai!. They've got a lot of experience hosting Zope and Plone accounts, great pricing, and a very liberal allocation of space, bandwidth, email accounts, subdomains, and domains. My current host is great, but he specializes in ColdFusion, which was my previous favorite development environment. I don't want to burden his servers with a completely new and different environment.

What Plone will buy me is the simplification of document creation, a customizable and powerful workflow engine, and an excellent version control system. Adding new pages is a piece of cake and there are a lot of plug-ins (called products in Plone/Zope parlance) available for free that assist with photo album, discussion fora, and blog setup and maintenance.

Wait, that sounds like a lot of work! Isn't it the holidays and aren't the girls requiring a lot of care and attention? Good observation, Eddie. That's why this ain't going to happen overnight. I'm going to try to have everything ready for the new year, but I can't make any promises. What I can promise is that it's going to look like I took option two for a while longer and then it will seem like I've been operating on no sleep after that. Except I won't have because things will get infinitely easier.

Cool repository of dotfiles for your perusal and downloading. Why make your own .tcshrc when you can start with someone—presumably more adept—else's?

After reading this deposition regarding Michael Jackson, I can't help but be sickened. I can't even enjoy jokes or Top Ten Lists about this pedophile: he's a monster and needs to be kept away from society, no matter what his achievements or success.

For future reference: photo tips.

A new Audi concept car was unveiled at the Frankfurt Auto Show in September: the Audi Le Mans Quattro. The pictures are incredible, as are the amount and variety of smileys used in the discussion forum. Finally, another article on the site examines the effort that went into making this concept car in eleven months.

If you're thinking to yourself that it's a concept car that'll never see the light of day, remember that the Audi TT was once a concept car that was virtually unchanged when it went into production.

A guy has put up a page that allows you to see what your site looks like in Safari. It uses a 400 MHz iMac running Mac OS X 10.3.1 yet it is surprisingly speedy—my requests only took 23 and 25 seconds. It does this through web services, shell scripts, AppleScript, and Python. Wonderful idea, pretty good execution.

I was eating lunch at Baja Fresh today, I had my usual nachos, and a pigeon walked up in its head-bobbing manner. Having an abundance of chips and feeling a beneficence for a fellow living creature—abnormal for me, especially, because I can't stand pigeons and birds in general—I broke up a chip and cast it near. He proceeded to break it further against the sidewalk for easier processing and digestion and I was hooked. I gave him about three full chips over the course of twenty minutes as I alternated between pigeon observation and reading a Python book on my laptop.

That is, until a smaller bird, a sparrow perhaps, discovered the buffet. This bird had the audacity to scoop a large piece right out from in front of the pigeon, who was dutifully busting it up. The bird—a third the size of the pigeon—then flew away some distance to share the bounty with an avian friend. I was a little pissed at this thievery so I stepped up the pigeon's allocation. The bird's friend then swooped over to steal the new offering. WTF!

This has renewed my disdain for pigeons, specifically, and birds, in general. What kind of creature lets another much less powerful creature take away its food? If I were that pigeon, there'd be some sparrow bits in the offerings I left on car windshields.

The best business idea I ever had was grand in scope, beautiful if executed properly, and could have revolutionized the IT industry. I had it about two years ago and it was one of those eureka-in-the-shower moments that I sometimes have. It was basically what Robert X. Cringely calls hive computing.

My idea was to use desktop computers for serving web pages. Uh huh, snooze. In other words, I wanted to create some software (or cause some software to be created, more likely) that would allow an average desktop computer to handle a Web request and serve it back using its spare computing cycles in between real work. This distributed network could combine to handle all the requests for a company's Web site, its intranet, or its extranet. In other words, getting rid of the expensive servers—the so-called "big iron." Most Fortune 500 companies have thousands and thousands of desktop computers and several hundred servers of various persuasions. A lot of those desktop computers are spread across the nation and the world. Through geoserving, requests could also be handled by the most appropriate—read: nearest in proximity—computers.

It was a revolutionary idea. It still is. The problem that caused me to abandon it—aside from some rather vehement naysayers—was the sheer enormity of the idea. Serving up static HTML pages would be a walk in the park; dynamic ones pose a little bit more of a problem. There's so many different app servers that would have to be made to be distributed and the whole communication issue was a tough nut, as well. Moreover, there's security issues, routing problems, and customer acceptance.

If anyone reading this wants to tackle the problem, let me know and I'll sign off whatever rights I may possess by law. I've moved on, but it's still an intriguing idea and the grid computing industry has improved considerably. I'll also happily share my notes that I prepared in a frenzy of brainstorming.

This article about Wal-Mart is incredible. I knew that the retailing giant rode its suppliers hard—witness the RFID mandate and deadline—but I didn't really grok the squeeze they put on them. I don't fault them for it: after all, the loss of an American job to a foreign company means that more money is being made by the American company and that money doesn't just disappear. Plus, the reduced costs mean reduced expenditures by consumers, which means that you can do more with less. And Wal-Mart has certainly been at the forefront of that!

Sure, there's a certain nostalgia for small Mom-and-Pop businesses. There was a nostalgia for small farmers as well, but that's pretty much passed as consumers enjoy the bounty of agribusiness. Wal-Mart is essentially saying to the American consumerate: resistance is futile. Those same people are obviously spending quite a bit at Wal-Mart since the $250 billion in sales has to come from somewhere.

[UPDATE: My friend Larry (who apparently doesn't like using the comments function I provide. *ahem*) said what I should have said except that I rushed this entry during my lunch hour:

Now, if Vlasic wanted to avoid the "distortion" of every aspect of its operations it could just say, "Hmm...well, no thanks, we don't want to sell pickles at that price because our brand is more imporant." Yes, they'd lose the whole Walmart account, but that's the nature of the thing. It was hardly Walmart putting pressure on Vlasic. It was Vlasic putting pressure on itself to expand via Walmart, even if it meant cannabalizing their other sales and eroding their margins in a way that was ultimately self-defeating. It was a strategy. If they really wanted an exclusive brand they could stay away completely from big box stores and sell pickles for five times the price from organic cucumbers and whatnot.

Anyway, I understand that it sucks to work with a customer who is so demanding that it's almost not worth doing business; or to get oneself into a position to compete for that business that you'll then fail if you turn off the spigot down the road. It's a very upsetting circumstance, but Walmart is nonetheless an unmitigated good—and it's alleged bad behavior is a key component of why it's good.

]

Now this is a first! I just received a Nigerian spam email—you know, the one from some African who needs you to help him get $15 million out of the country—through the contact page on this site.

That means that some spammer visited my site and entered the scam into a form instead of getting my email address from the image. That's strange. I wonder if it's become automated or if some actual human being did that.

[UPDATE: Apparently, the spammer was referred to me by my comment over at CamWorld and came from the netblock "207.50.228.xxx" which doesn't resolve. Interesting. Do I ban the IPs? As an isolated incident, I suppose that I'll let it pass.]

MacJournal 2.5, by Dan Schimpf Software, is now out. The award-winning freeware has gotten significantly better since it now can post entries to Blogger, export to XML, export to HTML with user-designed templates, and can accept virtually any type of image, URL, mp3, or whatever in its text-entry field. This is what distinguishes Mac OS X software from Windows: even the freeware is well-designed and usable.

25 Questions of Science, with answers (or at least thoughtful essays explaining the questions).

For future reference: setting up multiple Internet Explorers on one Windows box. This is the reason why I never installed IE6 on my boxes and I'm glad to see that it's no longer valid.

Na na na na na,
Na na na na,
Hey, Hey, Hey
Goodbye!

For my future reference: NUnit templates for VisualStudio .NET makes adding NUnit classes a breeze. Will definitely need this later.

James Lileks offers an very good review of The Matrix Revolutions as well as a dissection of Harry Knowles' vapid review.

Back before there were CDs, there were records. Wait, those were the LPs (Long Plays). Before that there were the 45s. And before that were the 78s. Before that were the wax cylinders, but you don't hear too much about that.

Here's 701 78s in RealAudio format, music from 1924 to 1946 in genres you've probably never heard about. If you like this, there's also Dismuke's Virtual Talking Machine, Ed Ward's Old Time Fiddle Site, 1001tunes.com, and tinfoil.com for those wax cylinder recordings you never knew you wanted.

Sometimes you just want the oldest school possible.

Still printing out your digital pictures like a sucker? Wal-Mart offers digital photography printing for 29¢ per 4" by 6" print. You bring in a CD or your flash memory card, select the pictures you want to print (or print them all like we did), and they're ready in an hour. They print them on Fuji Film paper and the quality is as good as a conventional photograph. I think printing out a digital picture yourself probably costs more than that in paper and ink, easily.

I just finished watching the episode of Inside the Actor's Studio featuring the cast of The Simpsons. It was incredible to see the actors who voice the various characters. I've seen them all in different roles over the years, so I knew exactly who did what. But there's something eerie and disconcerting about seeing Nancy Cartwright doing Bart Simpson and Nelson Muntz. Even Sandi agreed.

John Siracusa has done it again with his new review of Panther over at ArsTechnica. In this thorough review, Siracusa grinds his usual metadata ax but details things not covered elsewhere:

• Panther automatically defrags files under 20MB on open.
• Panther automatically moves frequently-accessed files to the faster parts of your hard drive for easier caching.
• Exposé is a lot richer of a feature than looking at all the windows at once: you can do drag and drop as well as use the arrow keys to navigate.
• FreeBSD has implemented a feature called "kqueue" that implements a polling substitute at the kernel level thus obviating the latency that polling creates.
• Apple's taken a courageous (insofar as marketing can be deemed courageous) leap in not continuing the faux-fur motif established in Jaguar.

There's lots, lots more in his review to enjoy. I recommend it highly.

[UPDATE (11/12/03): Matt Gemmell has more interesting (and obscure) Panther features over at his blog.]

For my future reference, GooseQuill and GooseQuill WriterWare. These are fascinating ideas, but I'm not so sure about their implementations. I wish they'd put up some screenshots to give me an idea of how this is such a sight better than a conventional word processor.

John Daly's a Tasmanian dedicated to getting a balanced view of global warming. The site has an, um, interesting design, but yields volumes of intriguing information once—and if—you can get past it. I haven't had time to thoroughly review it yet, but I'll update this entry when I do.

Ken Bereskin is finally updating his blog about neat features in Panther. He hasn't updated much this year after his self-announced goal of featuring all 150 new features of Jaguar, the last major release of Mac OS X. He's been going at it since October and November's looking pretty good, too.

If you're reading this within half an hour of posting (it's 5:53PM here in Phoenix), you might want to check out It Happened Here on Turner Classic Movies. It's a WWII movie based on the premise that the Nazis beat the Allies and it depicts life in postbellum England. I've never seen it, so I can't exactly recommend it. I am, however, going to TiVo it and watch it later. It reminds me of a book I read as a young adult entitled SS-GB that had much the same premise.

The movie brings up the topic of alternate history, an apparently rich subset of history that has virtually no academic standing. It's almost like the rotisserie league of history and has thrived quite well on the Web and in Usenet.

Thoughts on Longhorn: I agree with most of them. Aero/Avalon seems like Apple's Quartz and Quartz Extreme, both of which are nice but not revolutionary. They make the windows look nicer, PDF composition trivial, and offload to the third-party video cards. You don't hear Apple trumpeting the Quartz Extreme revolution.

WinFS is intriguing because it's basically moving the file system to a database. BeOS did that and I liked the idea of real-time, super fast searching of text. Every time I hear about WinFS, though, it seems to consist of more and more Semantic Web hype. Semantic Web is nice and all, but it requires a lot of upkeep. Most users will never use it because the payoff is pretty abstract and long-range. I consider myself above average in willingness to include metadata—I add in acronym tags to these blog postings and title my iPhoto pictures—but I hardly ever put metadata in Word documents and I can't imagine telling my file system more about my voluminous documents than a file name.

I especially liked his point about the requirement to use .NET managed code. Apple provides two major frameworks in which to program Mac OS X applications and is pretty agnostic about which is better. I would wager that Microsoft will learn from Apple's example and still allow unmanaged code. They'll probably end up doing it through a hack, though, because their Trusted Computing Initiative ostensibly precludes the use of unmanaged code.

Microsoft seems to be following their normal pattern of vaporware pronouncements that don't quite make it to the final product. I also read somewhere that .Net My Web Services will be making an appearance in Longhorn, as will Palladium. Uh huh, methinks there won't be any long lines 'round midnight on some distant 2007 day.

[UPDATE (11/9/03): More on WinFS.]

[UPDATE (11/12/03): A Microsoftie perspective on WinFS; I hope they're right about the ease of metadata entry because, as Tim Bray said, "there's no such thing as cheap metadata."]

I've been using IMDB for as long as I've been using the Internet. I just recently noticed that when you view an actor's page the birth date and place of birth are both linked! I don't know if it's always been linked like that, but it's really neat and handy.

Want to see the people born in metro Phoenix who are currently acting, writing, producing, or directing movies or television shows? I've done the leg work for you: Phoenix, Scottsdale, Glendale, Tempe, Mesa, Cave Creek, Peoria, Avondale, Litchfield Park, Sun City, Gilbert, Chandler, Apache Junction, Tolleson, Carefree, Buckeye, Fountain Hills, Goodyear, New River, El Mirage, Paradise Valley, Queen Creek, Youngtown, and Surprise.

Sandi and I decided a couple of days ago to purchase a new iBook G4 before her educator discount (worth $100) ended. This machine is awesome! I got the 1 GHz, 60GB hard drive, 256MB of RAM (with 512MB more arriving any day now), ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 card with 32MB DDR RAM (easily the best video card I've ever had), and a decent 14.1" screen. I, of course, sprung for an AirPort Extreme card.

It's funny—in a sad sort of way—but this machine is half the price of my PowerBook, which is now wiped and in Sandi's hands, but has double the clock speed, three times the disk space, and four times the video RAM. I know all about Moore's Law, but it's still striking to me.

Why didn't I go PowerBook? The price was much higher and the performance wasn't much better. I think I made a very good choice. This iBook G4 is whisper quiet: I've never heard the fan! The heat level on the bottom is pretty decent. And the AirPort reception! Oh baby! Previously, I could only get three bars in certain areas of my house and had to generally content myself with one to two bars. This iBook gets three bars everywhere in the house. I had always heard that reception was better, but I didn't believe it could be this good.

As I mentioned before, I wiped Thor—my old PowerBook G4—and installed Panther fresh and clean since Sandi doesn't like all the stuff that I can't do without. Before doing so, I copied everything over to Whitey, my new iBook. I tried a number of different means to effect this humongous transfer (at least 15GB of data!) and the results I found were quite instructive:

• FireWire is the only way to go for such a transfer. I transferred all that data in about an hour (with all the clicking and the dragging and the flaven).
• Ethernet was second best. I used a crossover cable to go between my two 10/100 connection points. It was going to take about 10 hours to do the transfer. I don't know why it was going to take so long, but I wasn't about to find out how accurate the estimate was.
• 802.11b estimated so many hours that I hit the cancel button as fast as I could.

If you don't know how to enable FireWire transfers, Mac OS X Hints has got you covered.

[UPDATE (11/10/03): 640MB is much, much better!]

[UPDATE (11/12/03): It's also got incredible battery life compared to my PowerBook G4. I haven't had this computer plugged in since 3 PM or so—it's 7:30 PM right now—and I've still got one and a half hours of battery time left. Granted, I haven't been using the computer straight through but it was only asleep for about half an hour to forty-five minutes. I've heard estimates of six hour battery lives on these things and you can color me impressed, that's for sure.]

Good article about fifteen trends in logo design.

I just found an amazing JPEG to ASCII converter. Here's one of my favorite pictures of me in text. Wicked cool!

What if Steve Ballmer did an iPod commercial?

Dave Winer recently posted a link to his rant about Google News not including weblogs in its news crawl. He posted the exact text of Google's rejection email—presumably one that he received when he tried to submit one of his sites. Like he usually does on the Berkman Center blogs that he hosts, he opened up comments so that readers could comment on his opinion. The comments section is available to engender discussion and foster community. In fact, the sidebar on the page discusses how educators are "using blogs to help students express themselves and learn from each other."

For those of you who don't know who Dave Winer is (and that's probably nearly everyone who's not an active blogger), he's the owner of UserLand Software, maker of a popular (though waning in popularity) weblog creation tool called Radio among other things. He's also quite famous for a number of other reasons, most of which involve his passive-aggressive temperament and abrasive personality. He regularly posts abusive and offensive comments on his weblog, only to retract or redact them when he realizes just how rude they are (or when people tell him, I don't know which).

I could go on and on about his personality defects (like linking big words he uses to the definitions at dictionary.com so that we simpletons—or non-power info mavens—might be able to follow the postings), but that's not the issue at this point.

In the comments section of this particular post, he said, "Basically we asked a question, Doc and I and a few others. That's all. You can't infer anything from that other than we were curious to know the answer to the question." I made a comment that stated this posturing of his was complete BS because the motivation behind assailing Google was pretty transparent. The whole anti-Google attitude began when Google bought a competitor of his, Blogger, instead of buying his company. It's no secret that he had lost interest in his company and things would have been much easier if he had been able to sell out to a powerhouse like Google. Subsequent anti-Google remarks came about when Userland stopped showing up as the #1 hit on a Google search on RSS, when Radio didn't show up in Google Directory like he thought it should have, and when a Google search for "weblogs" didn't have weblogs.com as the first result. I then stated my rationale for why I think Google chose to not use weblogs as news sources for Google News.

He then stated that I was making this personal without adding anything substantive, a clear sidestep of my statement of opinion that was longer than my personal slam. I replied in a new comment that he was ignoring my point. Later today, I went back to see if anyone had added anything to the discussion and discovered that my comments and his were gone, stricken from the record. I thought it was odd, but not completely unsurprising. Dave's quite volatile about criticism, bordering on paranoia. But I wasn't going to let this censorship go unstated:

Huh. I guess he can't take a little heat. Dave's all about people discussing things, levelling criticism, and exchanging ideas—unless they start attacking his motivations and biases. I was merely pointing out that he was not as disinterested as he pretended to be. Then it's ban time, apparently.

I've got to say: Emerson, he ain't.

Quirks mode is the Mozilla term for non-standard markup. QuirksMode.org is a great repository about the differences between browsers in rendering HTML and CSS.

I've got to tell you raising two little girls aged 4 and 16 days is a whole lot of work! I thought that I'd be able to keep up this blog thing even with the two of them, but it's harder than I thought. Do this mean that the inimitable Bill Brown is taking a hiatus? Is he going to quit blogging entirely?

What's with the third degree? I've just been freakin' busy. As the Apple Turns took a who-knows-how-many-weeks break after having just one kid. I was even able to squeeze out an entry in the midst of my announced blogging vacation.

The reason why I haven't posted an update here or on Found on the Web is because I just haven't been doing much surfing. Holding a baby in one arm while trying to type with the other (or even a toe when you're trying to feed said baby) just doesn't work as well as you'd think. As I type, Kimberly is now nestled between my legs, sleeping soundly. I've been catching up on work email—172 new messages in my inbox and several thousand squirreled away in folders by diligent rules—and updating a few applications (including a security update from Apple).

She's squirming around now like she's tired of the clack-clacking of the keyboard. In other words, computing time is over. Such is the life of a parent.