Arc v' November 2002

A couple of exceprts from A thanksgiving letter from Michael Moore:

Only about 20% of the American people showed up three weeks ago to vote for a Republican. That's it. Just 20%. And about 19% voted for a Democrat (an amazing number considering how few fights the Democrats put up around the country).

And 61% said, "To hell with all of them!" and refused to show up and vote.

...

Of course, those in charge are thrilled that 61% of the country has given up. That's right where they want us-out of the way! And it is for that reason alone why we must not now throw in the towel. If we sink into a collective state of despair, disgust and disinterest, we are truly doomed. Bush & Company (and this includes the Democrats) are all-too-happy to be left alone to run amok in the candy store... [Michael Moore.com]

I've been absent for an unusually long time. There's been a lot to write about, but family and work responsibilities have kept me occupied. So, here's a few quick links and thoughts:

There's some good reading (as always) in the December 2002 Harper's. The November 2002 issue also has some great articles, particularly about the U.N. Sanctions against Iraq, and leads off its Monthly Index with this: Ratio of Japanese killed in 1945's U.S. atomic-bomb attacks to Iraqi children killed due to U.N. sanctions : 1:3.

I was first made aware of the inhumanity of the ongoing sanctions through a Michael Moore show a couple of years ago, where they sold gas at discount prices with images of Saddam Hussein plastered all over the gas station "Who wants to buy gas from the whacky Iraqi?". Lots of people showed up for the discount gas, and the money was used to smuggle food and supplies into Iraq.

Speaking of Michael Moore, I finally saw Bowling for Columbine this weekend. It was a good film (for however good a film on such a subject can be), but I felt there were a few flaws - namely the exclusion of inner city gun violence. It may be that Moore is pitching his ideas to the masses in the suburbs in hopes that younger people in the suburban high schools will be awakened to these issues. In any case, I recommend seeing the movie. And I also recommend reading this critique on "Moore's urban phobia" from the liberal site/magazine The American Prospect.

On the technical side, there is an interesting page/discussion in the "Zope 3" wiki about Trying to unify workflow concepts, primarily dealing with Activity based Workflows and Entity based Workflows.

K has always fascinated me, partially for its noise factor. This is the first document I've read that's helped me understand the signals in the noise.

A Shallow Introduction to the K Programming Language
About two years ago I was introduced to a programming language that I really didn't like: it didn't have continuations, I didn't see any objects, it had too many operators, it didn't have a large community around it, it was strange and different, and it looked like line noise, like Perl, and I don't like Perl. However, I gave it a try. I had to learn that continuations may not be there, but first-class functions are; it may not have a normal object system, but that is because the language doesn't need it and gets it power by cutting across objects; all the operators are the functions that make up its standard library; it's community may not be large, but it is incredibly intelligent; it only looks strange until you understand its concepts; and well, it will always look like line noise, but you will stop caring because this also make the concise code easier to read. K has since become my language of choice. [Kuro5hin]

I was going to write up my own list of issues I've had with Zope's StructuredText (Classic and NG) implementation, but this document sums it up nicely.

My expectation of software is, to quote Radiohead, "No alarms and no surprises." "Zope" Page Templates live up to that mantra, as does reStructuredText, so far.

Glenn Gould: "Goldberg Variations"
A new box set offers the ingenious 1955 interpretation of Bach's odes to God that turned Gould into a star, and the remarkably different version he recorded in 1981 out of contempt for the former. [Salon]

One response to the "When Interfaces Go Crufty" article is this one by John Gruber. Some of Johns responses are in the same area as mine, so I'll quote liberally.

First, Matthew Thomas writes:

We have the power, in today's computers, to pick a sensible name for a document, and to save it to a person's desktop as soon as she begins typing, just like a piece of paper in real life. We also have the ability to save changes to that document every couple of minutes (or, perhaps, every paragraph) without any user intervention.

And Mr. Gruber responds (after mentioning dislike for automatic behavior in applications):

Even if you don't default to the actual desktop, there's no other default folder location that would be suitable for all new files. I don't save my Perl scripts to the same folder as my grocery list. Nor do I want applications choosing file names for me. If you don't choose the names for your own files, how do you identify them when you try to reopen them later on?

Since reading Mr. Thomas's article, I've examined my own behavior and application usage more closely. And I'm somewhere in the middle of the two viewpoints. And it's not just because I'm a developer and have Python classes that I definitely want to keep separate from my Quicken files, but because there really is room for both.

1. Applications like personal information managers (at least, Palm Desktop, Microsoft Entourage, and Apple's iCal and Address Book) and personal finance managers like Quicken are all auto-saving applications. In the case of the above mentioned PIM's, one rarely deals with the actual data files. iCal, Address Book, and Entrourage all keep their data off in their own hidden database. You can export data, but you never really open your "Entourage Calendar" - you open the application. Even Quicken (at least on the Mac configurations I've used over the past few years) is this way. I know where my Quicken file is located, but I always launch Quicken itself, and all of my data shows up. Granted, these are all essentially single-document applications (you're always working with the same data set) and curiously enough, tie in to handhelds very directly. And in almost all handhelds, from the Newton to the Palm (and I assume Pocket PC), there's no manual "Save" action for the majority of data managed in them - you turn them on and just start scribbling/typing.
2. As I've said before, OpenDoc offered an interesting solution. For most OpenDoc documents, you started from the file system by opening a piece of "stationary". It's similar to the starting templates in Office and AppleWorks, but at the file system / operating environment level. Opening a stationary document would fire up an OpenDoc shell and place you in an editor for the default document part, and at first save, you'd have to enter a name/place for the document. Windows has the "New" (or is it 'Create'?) file/contextual menu in the Explorer from which you can make not only new folders, but at least some pieces of content. So you could go to "proposals", bring up the "New -> WP Document" (shrug) menu item, and be given a new empty file for a particular application. You name it, open it, and go. I don't use Windows often, so I haven't really seen how well this menu item is suported by third party applications. But it is a nice idea.
3. But, when it comes to big documents and applications, I like the current way of doing things. One reason is that since subscribing to .Mac and using its iDisk, I share some documents (namely a rather large OmniOutliner document) between work and home and sometimes in between. Auto saving would be bad due to iDisk's speed (which is not horrible, but it's definitely not fast like local drives). Another reason, as Mr. Gruber points out, is that life is often full of temporary scratch documents. And there are so many different documents for different purposes that it just doesn't make sense for some situations or fields.

The reason for so much variety could, however, be due to interface cruft. We're running on heavy old operating systems with shiny new interfaces (and sometimes ugly new interfaces). The handhelds, particularly the Newton, had a chance to be actually new, and to approach how the operating system and applications performed in a very different way than the desktop operating systems. On the Newton, you just entered in data in the Notebook and then - optionally - filed it into Folders. You could also route the data (mail/print/fax/beam), or combine it with other Newton applications (entering "dinner with Kate" and clicking "Assist" would make the Newton go "oh! Shedule! Tonight, 8:30, Dinner" and find entries in the address book that match "Kate". Contrast this with a five step "Create New Calendar Entry" wizard.

But again - this is generally in the PIM category of data. It's a curious breed of data.

I'm not sure I want to get involved in the "there should be no 'Quit' command". There are so many applications of varying sizes and purposes out there that I doubt it will go away any time soon. The big case-in-points are the professional applications, from the Office type of applications to the Adobe and Macromedia product families, which are often very large applications, and also the Pro Tools / Final Cut Pro type applications. These applications offer a lot of functionality and people tend to stay in them longer. Adobe GoLive 6.0.x is a very large application, and when I'm using it, I keep it open even if I have no open documents at the moment, just to make it easier to switch to. I'd be very frustrated if I closed a particular window and it caused the whole application to unload itself. In the case of Quicken, there are so many windows that open up and use for control, which one would be the reigning "close this and the whole thing goes" window?

On the other hand, there are the utility applications. Apple's iCal and Address Book both go away when you close the main window. Other smaller apps do the same. This effect is probably completely unnoticed on Windows since the global X app killer button is so ubiquitous, and multi-document apps and single document ones are harder to distinguish.

Cool Site nod: Snow of Butterflies. Good design, nice sounds.

And speaking of good design and nice sounds, Eucci & Co. have wrapped up (finally) production on Nova Express for No Type's Sine Fiction series. Now, as soon as the studio is cleaned up a tiny bit, work can go into production of More Summer Dress Fire, a collection of small live performances harking back to the ELW's Modern Belongs to Us days of gallery/warehouse/alleyway/bunker recordings.

And more still coming soon.

Continuing my thoughts on Interface Cruft (sparked by this paper by Matthew Thomas), this is a quick post about one of the things that "Mac OS X" gets right (or at least - more right than others ";->").

"Mac OS X" is more of a system of compromises than it is a new operating system, due to the challenges of integrating the Unix and Mac OS environments, and due to compromises the NeXT team took to try to make NeXTStep friendly to certain environments (by building on Unix) while putting a nice Object Oriented shell on top of it.

The most interesting piece that has been used from NeXTStep 1.0 up to Mac OS X 10.2 is the use of Packages on the file system. These are objects on the file system that appear as a single item to the higher level operating environment, while they are actually file system directories that are full of smaller objects. The most common examples of this are applications. In Mac OS X's finder, bring up a contextual menu on an Application (especially well written Cocoa applications like OmniOutliner or NetNewsWire Lite) and select "Show Package Contents". A new Finder window will show up, most likely with a single folder titled "Contents". Inside there will be executables (with the ability to hold executables for multiple platforms) and resources (icons, Interface Builder documents) at the very least. But the package can also contain Help Files, PlugIns (which can be managed via the "Show Info" command in the Finder), other frameworks, scripts, and even other applications (OmniOutliner has "OmniGroupCrashCatcher", an application for reporting crashes to the Omni Group).

Essentially, it's a way of doing what the traditional Mac OS did with its resource fork in a manner that's friendlier to traditional file system expectations. It can also be viewed as a way of Object Encapsulation. There's one very clear advantage: since most Mac OS X applications are self contained, they can be freely moved around, shared, whatever. I can use iChat to send a friend a copy of NetNewsWire Lite by just going to the Applications folder, and dragging and dropping the application into the iChat window. Contrast this with Windows, the Linux desktop environments, and the classic Mac OS. The last time I downloaded Mozilla for Mac OS 9, the folder that Mozilla unstuffed to was filled with folders and odd little Mozilla support items, and the Mozilla application was just another icon in the middle of the mess. On Mac OS X, all of that is contained within the executable Mozilla package. If you open up the package contents of Chimera and drill down to the "Contents/MacOS" folder, you'll see all of the Chrome, Components, and Plugins folders. But instead of cluttering up the Finder, it's all contained cleanly within the Chimera package.

This also means that you can (optionally) put the local Applications folder onto the Dock, and have rapid access to all applications, similar to the Applications sub-menu off of the Windows Start Menu. Unlike the Windows start menu, which is essentially the old Program Manager from Windows 3.x, the items in the Applications Menu are the real deal, not some pointer to an executable buried in the messy Program Files directory. This also means that - with a few exceptions - removing an Application is simply a drag to the trash. The few exceptions are applications that are installed which also extend the system (things like iSync, or even iTunes which comes with device drivers). Writing about the Windows start menu, Matthew Thomas writes:

And naturally, rearranging items in this menu is a little bit less obvious than moving around the programs themselves. So, in Windows 98 and later, Microsoft lets you drag and drop items in the menu itself — thereby again breaking the general guideline about being able to cancel a click action by dragging away from it.

This Programs menu is the ultimate in cruft. It is an entire system for categorizing programs, on top of a Windows filesystem hierarchy which theoretically exists for exactly the same purpose. Gnome and KDE, on top of a Unix filesystem hierarchy which is even more obtuse than that of Windows, naturally copy this cruft with great enthusiasm.

So, while "Mac OS X" has made a lot of compromises in order to be friendly with long-running expectations of a user interface, and to be friendly with Unix expectations of file system layout, it does do a lot of things right. There are plenty of sore spots (including interface irregularities between different Apple produced iApps), but there is a pleasant clean feeling to it all. Generally, there are few alarms and few surprises. As "Mac OS X" continues to grow, I imagine that the situation will improve. And, for all of its cruft, the future of Windows has some interesting developments as well.

My next post on this subject will deal with some individual applications on Mac OS X that are taking the right steps away from interface cruft.

Matthew Thomas writes an interesting post titled "When good interfaces go crufty". It's an interesting read and he raises a lot of good points: why we have to manually save (still!); the reasons for the "Quit" command in programs, etc.

That latter one was one of the things that Compound Document Systems like OpenDoc were supposed to save us from. When you opened an OpenDoc document, there was no "File" menu (it was replaced by "Document", at least when using Apple's OpenDoc Framework (ODF)), and there was no "Quit" command. When you wanted to start a new document, you were supposed to find the right stationary to start from. Stationary, in Mac OS terms, represents documents that upon opening are pre-populated, but are flagged as a New Document, so that the first time you did hit "Save" you'd have to choose a new name. The Office Suites (both big ones like Office and small ones like AppleWorks / MS Works) do similar on their startup screens. OpenDoc was significant because it put such functionality basically at the Operating Environment level instead of the Application Level.

Unfortunately, OpenDoc was killed before there was really enough computing power to make it work - it was painfully slow on the Macs that existed at the time. And, even though the paradigm should have been common to people who used the office suites (big and small), it was still really awkward to shift away from the application-centric paradigm.

"And the world has suffered for our silence..."

Windows has been interesting. From the whole "New >" contextual menu item that showed up in Windows 95 where you could create new text, picture, etc, documents to the more recent usage of multitasking to spawn separate instances of Applications for each document that still feel like a single multi-document interface (Internet Explorer on Windows has been like this for a while, Office has gone this way). But MDI on Windows can be just...weird, due to what Windows marks off as an application. It could be that I'm just used to the Mac. But, doing some Zope development on Windows lately, it was hard to figure out when TextPad would spawn a new application instance, and when it would open a text file in the main TextPad window.

So, on the Mac side, how are things in this area? I don't think that the application -> quit paradigm is going to go away anytime soon, partially because of Cruft. But things are changing. For one thing, due to Mac OS X's memory management, it's not that big of a deal to keep an application running even with no documents open. And many such Applications respond intelligently to the dock - when you click the Finder, IE, Terminal or other apps that are already running with no documents open, you'll get a new window (this behavior is often configurable). It varies between applications, but most of the time the apps do the right thing. When my cable modem was installed and my home iMac was still running Mac OS 9, I watched the serviceman click the running IE icon numerous times, obviously expecting a browser window to pop into view.

I'm cutting off this post here. It's late, I'm fresh home from the bar, but I hope to post more on this soon. It's a topic that interests me. It's interesting contrasting Microsoft's Tablet PC with the designs of the venerable Newton. I think that the Newton was one of the more interesting Operating Systems in recent memory, while Tablet PC is kindof like Mac OS X 10.2 with Ink recognition - basically Windows XP with...handwriting recognition... Nothing dramatically new. But there are interesting designs that are going deeper into the heart of Apple's and Microsoft's offerings that could be indications of where things are going. And again - I'll have to promise to try to get back to this topic very soon.

A couple of weeks ago I (finally) got back into an early to bed, early to rise routine. And now... It's gone again. One reason - MST is a bastard time zone when it comes to cable TV. East coast feeds show up two hours ahead of schedule, and pacific feeds start an hour late. This is nice with my HBO package, since I can catch the east coast feed of the Sopranos at 7:00 instead of 10:00. But it's tough with networks like Comedy Central, where we get the Pacific Feed. That means that The Daily Show doesn't show up here until midnight!.

Granted, this is a small and petty thing to whine about. But it's just another thing I miss about the East Coast. In my heart, I'm still Eastern Standard Tribe.

So now, a day later, the finger pointing has begun. This American Prospect article sums up the democrats debacle rather well:

Which is a pretty fair summation of the Democrats' 2002 campaign. They had no message. They were an opposition party that drew no lines of opposition. They had nothing to say. And on Tuesday, their base responded by staying home in droves.

and

From one end of the country to the other, the Democrats had nothing to say. And the nation will suffer for their silence.

Well, this last statement is a bit extreme. But it does drive the point home. I've been saying for weeks now that "the democrats are dead to me" and "they're spineless". There was no powerful leadership, no powerful rallies (outside of the Wellstone memorial, which which made me proud to camp out on the left...for an evening), nothing. What was there to get excited about? What reason was there to get out and vote if the choice was dumbass v. dumbass? Well, there were the third parties and other independants who sometimes DID offer a good alternative. But overall, in the so-called "key" races, the GOP massively out-campaigned the Democrats by rallying behind a solid (often gut-wrenching) message.

Ugh. Well, the talking heads on the television have caught on, the writers (esp. in the progressive rags) have caught on. Now - will the party?

(TAP article quoted written by Harold Meyerson).

And if anything good came out of today, it's that I now own a copy of Johnny Cash's new The Man Comes Around album. And there's one particular standout - We'll Meet Again, a song many will recognize as being the closer for the movie Dr. Strangelove. This song is just killing me right now.

We'll meet again,
don't know where,
don't know when;
but I know we'll meet again
some sunny day.

This is for you, Red.

If anything good came out of yesterday (besides Jim Matheson's apparent by-the-fingernails win), it's that there's another new Johnny Cash album out on the streets now.

I realized this evening why I felt so queezy about elections today. It wasn't just the choices / decisions. There are some good people worth voting for, there are some good initiatives worth voting for, everything is going to balance itself out some way or another. There will be no overwhelming frightening majority and HOPEFULLY there will be enough moderates on one side or the other to keep The Right in check. ";->"

But it's the media. It's such bullshit. It's pictures, it's not news. It's speculation, it's not news. You can learn as much watching a half hour of the daily show as watching a day of MSNBC/FoxNews/CNN because at least the Daily Show admits they're fake.

Watching CNN say "with just 12% (o.k., so it was 63) of precincts reporting, we give race foo to Greedy McGreedGreed". "Oh, and since they're not giving us their exit poll information, we at CNN/MSNBC/FoxNews have deployed our own pollsters whom we trust oh-so-much more, so you know that we know the results of the democratic process better than anyone".

Away from all of that, HBO's Journeys with George is a fairly interesting documentary. And there's no crawl at the bottom of the screen.