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SPotD: Shoes (ongoing)
There?s nothing wrong with kids having some weeks of flat time in summer with an empty schedule; they?ll look back on those days fondly. There?s also nothing wrong with the odd soccer or basketball camp. I rather enjoy dropping the boy off at these and watching the other parents, who appear, pre-9-AM on a weekday, in a remarkable variety of apparel and presentations. I caught one of my recent faves for this summer day?s photo.
This woman was dressed for work and I thought her shoes extremely superior; she was fearless striking off across the soft grass in them, too. It seemed poetic justice somehow that she got caught up in shoe maintenance.
SPotD: Lemonade (ongoing)
I?ve been too overloaded to write much or even post pix, but never (it seems) to take pictures, so they?ve been building up. I look at the buildup and discern a theme; herewith the first Summer Picture of the Day; more to come. And what could be more summery than lemonade?
This is at the Liberty Café on Main Street on Vancouver, and a fine place it is for lunch or refreshments, albeit not fast. One of their better offerings is home-made lemonade, which comes in a big plastic pitcher, visible behind the glass.
Some internationalization is called for. This is North American lemonade, which is just lemon juice, ice, sugar, and water; terribly refreshing on a warm day. The word can mean something completely different elsewhere in the world.
Confession: Not much Photointegrity here; this is oozing artificial sparkle and heat, courtesy of Lightroom. I can live with myself.
SPotD: Fireworks (ongoing)
Today?s summer picture is of some of the fireworks after the ball game featured yesterday. They weren?t big-league, but it isn?t a big-league park, so you get to sit pretty close to them.
Before the game I went looking for advice on photographing fireworks and it seems that it?s all a matter of taste, except for one thing: use a tripod. For what it?s worth, these are with the ordinary 40mm prime lens at f8 and using the ?B? setting to keep the shutter open for quite a while. Next time I?ll try shooting with a wider-angle lens.
SPotD: Curtainshadows (ongoing)
We spend a lot of time on our back porch this time of year. Unfortunately, the beautiful plum tree that kept the setting sun from boiling our eyeballs died, and until the replacement gets big enough, we?ve been hoisting bedsheets on the west end of the porch roof at suppertime. Which can make for some interesting shadowplay, as in the Summer Picture for today.
Actually, just this afternoon Lauren ran out of patience and put up a nice thick patterned curtain on real actual hooks.
SPotD: Ball Game (ongoing)
On July first, we celebrated Canada and my son?s birthday by going to the ball game and fireworks. It was a warm, warm evening. The Summer Photo for Today is an outfielder and a scoreboard.
Yeah, the home team got thumped. But the fireworks were pretty good.
RotD: Sombreuil (ongoing)
Today?s rose has a lovely French name and, like many others, lots of associated lore.
I don?t have time to be a rose geek, I just prune ?em and photograph ?em.
RotD: Morning Mist (ongoing)
We planted today?s rose in an awkward corner of the garden and thus had to move it; this summer it?s recovering and only produced one blossom. Pretty pictures are a relief, I hope, in a week that feels like summer?s Horse latitudes.
Tomorrow?s RotD will be the last, and it?s a honey.
Horse LatitudesYeah, I seem to be busy enough; talking to product and research groups internally, Wide Finder moving right along, making progress on mod_atom albeit slow, but it all seems an effort of will, not something that?s pulling me toward the keyboard at all times. Right now the only thing that?s exciting is a couple of big Fortune top-whatever Sun customers I?m talking to about modern Web stuff; the cognitive dissonance between the vigor of the high-tech Twittersphere and what?s actually in BigCo production is invigorating.
Whatever, time?s on my side; I never stay bored long.
On Keyboards (ongoing)
There?s a design flaw in Apple?s current lineup of Mac keyboards; easily fixed though. Obviously, someone like me has a long history and an intense relationship with keyboards.
The FlawRight now, Apple sells two keyboards: larger/wired and smaller/Bluetooth. The larger one includes the useful cluster with arrow keys, page up/down, home/end, ?fn?, and the real ?delete? key. The ?control? key is large, at the lower left, and by some physical-mechanical equivalent of Fitt?s Law, is real easy to get to.
It also includes the entirely-useless numeric keypad. All this occupies quite a bit of real-estate.
The smaller one (really a lot smaller) squeezes tiny arrow keys into a corner, has an ultra-miniature ?control? key, gives ?fn? the prized bottom-left-corner position, and entirely omits those other useful keys.
There are several design flaws here. First, people who need an extra numeric keypad really need it, but there?s a huge number of us for whom they?re a waste of precious desktop space. Second, the idea that whether or not you need certain keys is related to whether you want to connect with a wire or not seems spurious. Third, the notion that any outboard keyboard should omit page up/down, home/end, delete, and so on, is just wrong.
So, I want keyboards that can be ordered in either USB and Bluetooth, and either with or without the numeric cluster, but always have the first outboard cluster.
In exchange for this valuable advice to Apple, I?ll expect a nice juicy reward in the mail ASAP. Just like they showered me with gold for detecting and diagnosing the previously-broken list-selection code in Mail.app; well, I had to split the reward with John Gruber.
Is It a Good Keyboard?The current line-up of Apple keyboards isn?t good, it is (the sizing flaw aside) great. The feel is both sensitive and rock-solid and I think I?m typing faster than any time in the last twenty years or so.
Which means I get to do an old-fart keyboard digression.
HistoryGeeks love misty-eyed reminiscing about the great keyboards of yore, with a rough consensus that the original IBM PC?s clackety high-travel product has never since been surpassed. I sure liked that, but if my tactile memory is right, the latest Apples may be better.
But that consensus is wrong anyhow, the IBM PC keyboards might not have been surpassed since, but they never had quite the feel of the old IBM Selectric typewriters.
I remember in particular when I was working on my college newspaper; our single most valuable asset was an IBM ?Justifying Selectric?; you?d bang text into it and it?d buffer it up, a line at a time; when you got to the end of a line it would justify it, let you approve it, and typeset it, justified in a proportional font, onto the galleys.
It was fantastically expensive, thousands and thousands of dollars; this in the early Seventies. Of course, as well as all that magic it was a general-purpose ultra-high-end typewriter and when I needed to crank some work out and got into the flow I could make that thing produce a steady dull roar, running north of 110 words per minute. Like high-precision silk under the fingertips.
I remember one time when it broke and the IBM tech came by, I hung around because I wanted to see how it worked. When he took the cover off I was flabbergasted; the complexity inside was just mind-bending. There were hundreds (at least) of moving parts, some the apparent thickness of a human hair. How the thing ever worked, and how on earth he could repair it when broken, escapes me. It remains the most visually-complex artifact I have ever seen.
Mobility Blues (ongoing)
These days, I?m gloomier and gloomier about the prospects for the mobile Internet; you know, the one you access through the sexy gizmo in your pocket, not the klunky old general-purpose computer on your desk.
We?ve all heard about the glowing future; Jonathan is particularly good at telling it; ?There are more mobile phones sold every day than computers sold every year, etc.? (OK, I?m exaggerating, but that?s the thrust). And indeed there are big parts of the world where a networked computer is in the economic reach of very few, but a cellphone is attainable to many.
The Legacy ProblemWe all know that cellphones have been able to access the Net for years and years. In theory. I?m a heavy Internet user and have carried a phone for a decade or more, and have never seriously used the one on the other. The browsers suck, the programming models suck, and lots of things are intentionally crippled, like my current pretty-good Samsung whose JVM won?t run anything that didn?t come with the phone.
And anyhow, I remember the first time I got a phone advertised as ?having Java?. So I went and got whichever flavor of Mobile Java was current at the time. Quickly discovered that I couldn?t use it to make a phone call on the phone, or pretty much anything except write pretty-but-vapid games. Couldn?t see the point.
?But wait,? you say, ?the iPhone has changed all that!?
The iPhone ProblemYep, iPhone owners do actually use them as general-purpose Net clients. And, for the first time ever, they?re decently programmable in a somewhat-uncrippled way.
But there?s a little problem and a big problem. The little problem is that I don?t wanna learn Objective-C and I don?t wanna learn a whole new UI framework. I acknowledge that lots of smart people think Objective-C and Cocoa are both wonderful, and quite likely they?re right. I don?t care. I?m lazy; I know enough languages and enough frameworks. You?re free to disapprove, but there are a whole lot of people like me out there.
The big problem is this: I don?t wanna be a sharecropper on Massa Steve?s plantation. I don?t want to write code for a platform where there?s someone else who gets to decide whether I get to play and what I?m allowed to sell, and who can flip my you?re-out-of-business-switch any time it furthers their business goals. PragDave?s experience is hardly a confidence-builder. Call me paranoid if you will, but I just ain?t going there. No way, nohow.
Granted, the device is slick and has massive consumer pull, and maybe we?ll end up with a situation where the only way to be relevant in the mobile-apps space is as an Apple sharecropper. That?s not the future I want, but maybe it?s the one we?ll get.
The Android ProblemI guess it?s a little impolitic for a Sun person to say this, but I really like Android, at the conceptual level. It seems more modern in its feel than the other mobile SDKs I?ve looked at, and the amount of new stuff I?m going to have to learn is much less, and the platform has no intrinsic lock-in that I can spot.
On the other hand, it seems like there?s not much there there; haven?t seen much in the way of updates or hardware or movement, and there seems little transparency about what?s happening behind the scenes. And Android doesn?t address the dysfunctional business model that has crippled mainstream as Net clients, to date. More on that below.
The JavaFX Mobile ProblemIt?s easy to like the JavaFX Mobile idea. It?s just Java SE only with access to the whole device, so you can use the phone as a phone, and with a layer on top to make it easier to program. In principle there?s no reason I couldn?t actually write my app in JRuby or Jython or some such. It?s probably got the least lock-in potential of any of the mobile-future options.
The problem is that it isn?t here yet. A year ago, my feeling was that maybe they?d started too late. Given the whole industry?s lack of progress since then, and the generally dismal outlook, I think there?s still a window of opportunity if FX Mobile ships before too long and turns out well.
The Business ProblemI?m on the record here and here and here; many of my commenters disagree with me, but they?re wrong. Until we get network operators who are willing to open their networks, and a business model that makes access affordable while incenting operators to encourage its use, all the shiny SDKs and glitzy pocket-jewels in the world aren?t going to come close to realizing the true potential of the mobile Net.
LAMP, Rearranged (ongoing)
It started innocently enough; someone mailed the internal bloggers? list saying ?We?ve got this Beyond LAMP article on SDN, might be good blog fodder.? Which constituted an opportunity for geeks to have fun with acronyms.
That was yesterday, and they?re still coming. Let?s assume that ?L? always stands for Linux, ?A? for Apache, ?M? for MySQL, and ?P? for PHP (or Perl or Python).
AcronymKey SAMPSolaris MARSRails, Solaris MAPSSolaris SPAMSolaris WIMPWindows, IIS DAMNDirectX, ActiveX, .NET WIMNWindows, IIS, .NET (pronounced ?women?) SINSQL Server, IIS, .NETI bet you can think of some more.
It?s Called AtomPub (ongoing)
Recently, I was asked for feedback on some technology being built inside Sun which was said to rely on ?Atom Pub/Sub?. In related confusing news, more than one big company has talked about ?Rolling out APP?. Branding matters. So we took it up on the Atom Protocol mailing list and, for what it?s worth, the community of implementors has agreed that we?re all going to refer to the protocol specified in RFC 5023 as ?AtomPub? and nothing else. Please co-operate.
Next, we need a logo. Might Google or Microsoft, who are taking the lead in rolling out AtomPub-based services, be willing to dedicate some design talent to a candidate or two? Do any indie hackers with graphics skills want to play?
Good Morning (ongoing)
I like mornings. Especially bright ones on foot in the city. People are up and about for a reason; it?s easy to believe the world is on the whole is a well-organized purposeful kind of place.
I smile particularly when I walk past a restaurant or other storefront and they?re outside washing the big windows. Glass in a city gets cruddy fast, and the window-washers are a daily battalion of shock troops in our doomed but admirable struggle against entropy generally. People who ten hours later pause hungrily by the windowgleam to consider the menu, they never think about the minion in the morning light with the bucket and rubber blade on a pole.
And if they?re washing the windows in front, in the back you know they?re chopping and peeling and mixing and baking.
Driving can be good too (well, unless you?re going east) but it could be better. I like all kinds of music but when it?s morning and I?m behind the wheel of a car, all I want to hear is rock & roll, hard fast and loud. I could put a CD in but it?d be nice to be surprised. Sadly, the rock stations don?t play much music in the commute window, that?s their prime slot for ads and then they seem to think the people in cars want airhead DJ banter, mostly.
Hmph, this is a big-government country with an intrusive broadcast regulator that oversees radio formats. Clearly they?re doing something wrong. I?m a taxpayer and I want some damn enforcement; compulsory morning rock & roll please.
Ephemeral Aggregators (ongoing)
I?m thinking that The ascendancy of Hacker News & the gentrification of geek news communities, by Rabble, is, in its quiet way, one of the most important think pieces I?ve read in quite a while. It?s pretty clear that online aggregations of individual contributions are occupying a bigger and bigger slice of the spectrum of useful information sources. And also clear that this new landscape isn?t stable, but steadily shifting underfoot.
First off, I?d recommend reading the comments on the ?Gentrification? essay along with it. Like the a couple of the contributors, I think the pattern of conversational flow is accurately described, but am uncomfortable with the use of ?gentrification?.
Here are my take-aways, the first couple lifted more or less directly from the essay:
Success as an aggregator is ephemeral.
The pressure of the SEO slime is continuous and unrelenting; a significant evolutionary force on whatever it is online communities are becoming.
The effect of individual burn-out is maybe understated. Consider Slashdot; one reason it has less traffic these days is that the editorial quality filters are pathetic compared to back then; the regime where CmdrTaco and friends had the wheel and just instinctively knew the wheat from the chaff was probably just not sustainable.
The value of following a few carefully-selected primary sources and keen-eyed individual observers just can?t be overstated. The right selection of blog and Twitter feeds can put you in a situation where you?ve already seen most of the good bits of today?s Reddit or equivalent. Yeah, it takes a little more time than just dropping by an aggregator. Whether this is a good trade-off depends on what your job is.
It should be painfully obvious that these lessons probably apply to news loci outside the technology ghetto; today?s hot news fora for politics or sex or knitting are just as vulnerable to online traffic?s fickle flow patterns.
Atomic Monday (ongoing)
Herewith some evidence, for the general tech public, that Atompub is a big deal, and for the Atomistas, some interesting developments.
It?s an Atompub FutureLet?s see; Microsoft is using Atompub for... well, everything, pretty much. Google has been for a while, and that?s now leveraging Salesforce.com. Oh, and the Kool Erlang Kids are getting into the act: Atom-PubSub module for ejabberd (Hmm, I dislike ?Atom PubSub? and all its orthographic variations). And then there are things like AtomServer.
The Right Amount of Cloud Lock-InBut here?s the real reason. We seem to have consensus that the future is cloudy. My #1 gripe with the cloud-computing infrastructure I?ve seen out there is that it all seems to come with some degree of lock-in.
The only appropriate amount of lock-in, to build a cloud-centric future, is zero.
It seems to me that Steve O?Grady really hit the nail on the head with Question for Cloud Campers: The Cloud and Standards. Now it?s quite possible that my obvious bias as one of Atom?s fond parents is showing here, but it seems to me that the Atom format provides a nice clean zero-lock-in way of getting information out of the cloud, and Atompub an equivalently safe way in.
Now let?s move on to some Atom-technology news stories.
Atom-MultipartTo post an image (or any other bit-blob) with Atompub, you HTTP-POST it; the server stores it and creates a synthetic Atom entry for metadata about it. Then if you want to update the metadata, you have to PUT that. So Joe Gregorio, based on his work at Google, is proposing ?atom-multipart?; the idea is use pack up your bit-blob and an Atom entry full of metadata, and push ?em at the server in a MIME multipart package.
Everyone seems to like the idea, the Atom-protocol mailing list is chewing it over, the IETF seems to think it?s appropriate for the standards track, and I?ve volunteered to be the consensus referee (which is probably poetic justice since I?m obviously going to have to implement the sucker in mod_atom).
Meta-CRUDJust to review: an Atompub implementation lets you create, retrieve, update, and delete (CRUD) Web Resources. So, suppose you think of publications as Web Resources, wouldn?t Atompub be a candidate for the CRUD job? Now, this is all getting more than a little bit meta, but the idea is so obvious that everybody is doing it. In fact, I?m doing it myself in mod_atom, since my original idea (to create a new publication, edit the Apache config file) is, well, really lousy.
I thought ?If everyone?s doing this, maybe we should standardize it, and then authors of Atompub test suites (like me) could build portable tests?. So I raised the issue on the mailing list and well, it?s complicated.
Just by way of reminder: Atompub starts with a Service Document, which contains one or more named Workspaces, which contain Collections, which are what you actually POST to in order to start up the CRUD process.
So the meta-idea is simple; have a collection that when you POST to it, creates a new publication. What could be simpler? Well, it turns out that there are three obvious choices you could take as to what happens when you POST to one of these meta-collections:
Create a new Service Doc, with Workspaces and collections.
Create a new Workspace in the current Service Doc.
Create a new collection in the current Workspace.
There are implementors out there doing all three of these things; mod_atom does #1. We just don?t have enough experience yet to decide which (if any) of ?em deserve standardization. Oh well.
(Last) RotD: Lucky Sunset (ongoing)
The last rose of the day is a ?Royal Sunset? in the sunset, A lucky shot, another small instance of good fortune in what?s been (so far) an unreasonably lucky life.
Well perhaps not sunset exactly, but after supper last Sunday, a narrow shaft of slanting sun illuminated the blossom and not much around it. I had the 21mm wide-angle on but there wasn?t time to fiddle with lenses, I just threw the camera on all-auto and pointed and shot. Lucky, I said.
Lucky, You Say?In spades. My family is mostly free of both insanity and cancer and we mostly like each other, all of which puts us in a small minority of families. I drifted through life without working very hard at anything until I stumbled into work that I loved and have been well-paid for it. My kids are tractable and healthy. I live in a nice part of a nice city. I get to travel to interesting places and meet interesting people. I get along well with my wife of twelve years. I get to tell stories to the world, and some people like them.
And sometimes a sunbeam catches a rose when there?s a camera handy.
There isn?t a day that goes by that I don?t shake my head in amazement at how well things have worked out so far. If I were a character in a play by Sophocles the outlook would be grim.
Which Tools? (ongoing)
Wow, this one touched a nerve. Some guys here at Sun were arguing about which bug trackers and SCM tools were currently da bombiest, and they decided to ask the world. Hasn?t received hardly any publicity yet, and already over 200 responses. Join in, and pass the word; Here is the survey and here are the results.
The Shambling WS-Undead (ongoing)
I?ll try to play this straight. It seems that a posse of industry titans (IBM, Oracle, CA, and EMC) want a W3C working group to standardize WS-Transfer, WS-ResourceTransfer, WS-Enumeration and WS-MetadataExchange. Because, as they say, ?There is still some work to be done?, and ?Accessing data about a resource through Web services is an area of the Web services architecture that has yet to be fully realized.? I guess that if you really do want to implement HTTP on top of the SOAP stack on top of HTTP, these are clearly the Right Vendors For The Job. There is, however, real danger in this move, as outlined by Mark Nottingham in The WS-Empire Strikes Back... feebly.
It?s Slow (ongoing)
The Penguinistas like to brag about how GNU/Linux runs just fine on low-rent hardware, by contrast with competitors like Vista that need the latest gleaming iron to be useful. And they have a point; but only up to a point. I can testify from personal experience that an elderly 333-MHz Dell with a recent Debian totally sucks wind when you run WordPress. And the real point is, it ain?t operating systems that bog your computer down, it?s apps.
Cargo Carriers (ongoing)
It?s not obvious why the attachment of baskets to bicycles should be gender-related, but in fact one observes that 100% of the bicycles with baskets on the front handlebars are ridden by women. In fact I find the effect feminine and charming, but I suspect that?s because of the riders.