A couple of quick music items, thanks to Wasatch CD Exchange, a fairly new store here downtown (well within my confined radius that includes home, the office, and the bar):
The sound waved back and forth between two chords, providing a cold and creepy feeling of ship being lost at sea.The excerpt I heard in this weeks copy of The Brain gave me chills. Then again, so too did the trailer for the film Winged Migration.
Some strange (and stupid) news out of Chicago: the mayor has shut down Meigs Field, a really cool small lakefront airport. Apparently there are many aircraft (small aviation only) still there, which are now stranded with no way to even depart and move to more distant pastures.
The mayor cites security concerns. I don't know if the aircraft that can land at Meigs pose any serious threat. While we're all shaking and looking at the sky in fear, someone will come in with a box truck and explosives. Why not shut down the freeway system and roads that come so close to those big downtown buildings, Mayor?
I know security is a serious concern - but consider the fact that DCA stays open with many more targets, proximity to LOTS of closed airspace, and many decently-sized jets landing there. Taking down this neat little airfield smells arbitrary and, well, silly.
I just noticed the release of Hydra 1.0. Hydra is a developer focused text editor. What makes it interesting is that it uses Rendezvous (ZeroConf) to facilitate collaboration on a local network. So, for example, two or more developers can effectively do "pair programming" on the same code from different machines - useful for big laptop development sessions, for example.
This isn't the first product of its kind for Mac OS X. iStorm is another Rendezvous based collaborative document environment. While Hydra is focused more on the developer, iStorm seems targeted more on science/math users, with TeX support and interactive blackboards to go along with the styled text. iStorm also houses its own Chat client (I didn't notice if Hydra sports this feature), allowing conversations to happen outside of the document itself.
This is a pretty interesting application of the Rendezvous technology. While generally limited to local networks, it does allow a small group of people to collaborate very easily in a local environment. Imagine being able to bring in people from outside the company to brainstorm for two days and all being able to work on the same document without having to configure large collaboration servers to allow two important but temporary outside users into the system. Or, with Airport, one could even go to a coffee shop or bar and set up a small computer-to-computer network and collaborate - again without the need for a complex client/server set up. And unlike Wikis or anything else web based, all updates can be monitored in real time.
Google News reported a CNN headline as Rumsfeld, Ridge lobby Congress for money for Iraqi war, terrorism, which may indeed have been the original headline - until people probably saw the same (disturbing) joke I saw. "That's right, Rumsfeld and Ridge are asking for money to conduct terrorism." The CNN page in question now reads Rumsfeld, Ridge lobby Congress for war, anti-terror money. I guess we can still have some fun in that - they're now lobbying congress for war, and for money that can stop a suicide bomb by being thrown at the bomber.
BTW: It looks like Senator Byrd is still one of very few in congress with a spine (even though Byrd has been guilty of pork barrel politics in the past, he's making up for it by standing firm against many of the wilder things this administration seeks):
"We can't afford to give this administration or any other administration a blank check. We didn't give you a blank check when you were secretary of defense in the 1970s and I don't expect to support giving the blank check to any administration."
Some crazy Apple rumors (having nothing to do with Crazy Apple Rumors) have been floating around about why Apple has moved the date of their annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) to June instead of May. One of the stories is that Apple is doing it to coincide with an announcement of PPC 970 based Power Macs. Since I'm too lazy to register with MacRumors to comment, I'll lay down my comments here:
Basically, I don't think this is going to happen, for two reasons:
Of course, I have some rebuttals to my own statements. Apple has been wanting to take more control of their announcements (as mentioned above) so that unfinished technology doesn't cause Apple to deliver a "disappointing keynote" and all the stock and press related activity that results (when the keynote is usually just fine - except the crazy rumored teleportation technology was nowhere in sight!). They may reshape WWDC 2003 into a larger beast. Apple's QuickTime Live event has already been folded in to WWDC. Apple may choose that time to add in some hardware announcements as well (beyond just display price changes). Also, Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) has a lot of crazy rumors and speculation circling around it. A prominent speculation is that it will support 64 bit processors (like the PowerPC 970). With the 970 out there, and with its high (projected) clock speeds, it certainly would be stupid for Apple not to be going for it. It makes more sense than the perennial Intel/AMD speculation, since there would be little (or no) need to support multiple chip architectures (which Mac OS X does support as part of it's NeXT heritage, but users aren't likely to wait for the major software vendors to ship recompiled versions of their software again, after waiting so long for many apps to show up on OS X in the first place). But - it's Apple, and it's under the reign of Jobs, who has proven time and again that anything can happen.
To throw my wild speculations into the mix, I'm hoping to see a slow migration back towards OpenDoc style interoperability. The iLife applications show four separate applications all doing some kind of advanced communication with each other. The next generation of AppleWorks is rumored to be comprised of separate applications instead of a single monolith. One of these applications is apparently named "Document". The Jaguar Address Book, which makes its contact entries available to other applications, could be seen as another sign of things to come (in fact, there are other Address Book applications that offer more functionality while still using/writing to the general Address Book database for use by other apps). And finally, I wouldn't be surprised to see a smarter file system / Finder make its way into Panther. This is all hope, however, I have no real evidence that anything is heading in these directions. Although, there are a couple of interesting entries in the WWDC track listing:
Cocoa Text
The text system has always been one of the central components of Cocoa, but this year it's getting some exciting new features that will make it more useful and powerful than ever. We'll briefly review the architecture of the Cocoa text system, then dive in and show you how to start making use of its new capabilities.
SearchKit: A Powerful Text Indexing and Searching Framework
SearchKit is a powerful C language framework for searching, indexing, and summarizing text. Formerly known as AIAT (the Apple Information Access Toolkit) or by its code name V-Twin, SearchKit is the engine that provides fast content searching in Finder, Address Book, and Mail. Attend this session to learn how you can take advantage of this framework to provide similar functionality and powerful information access capabilities within your Mac OS X application.
Jonathan Freedland writes in the Guardian how "Peaceniks lost the war but changed the shape of battle."
As I and others have stated - dissent and cynicism is very powerful and useful. By demanding the government be more accountable to us about their reasons for war, their methods of war, and so on, may very well make them make better decisions in how they execute their warplans. So yes, we're at war and nothing the public can say now will stop it. But we can at least demand our leaders be accountable to us about why and how.
They still need to fill us in on the Why anyways. Short of imperialism or sincere hope that "democracy will spread like a domino effect throughout the middle east" (which is doubtful), our use of force in this region still remains unaccounted for in light of the global picture.
Whether our leaders care to admit to their imperialistic bend, the world is perceiving us as such. This is a dangerous road, because imperialism and republicanism (as in Roman republic, not G.W. Bush Republican) seldom (if ever) match. Just as America threw off the shackles of the great empire of its day (Britain), and as India and the eastern european countries did the same, so will the world of us if we continue down this dangerous path.
From Pitchfork Media, "Godspeed You! Black Emperor Questioned as Suspected Terrorists, Continue World Tour":
Renowned Canadian nontet Godspeed You! Black Emperor were held for questioning as possible terrorists at an Oklahoma gas station last weekend, while driving from a concert they'd played at Fort Worth, TX's Ridglea Theatre to a show to be held the following Monday at the Blue Note in Columbia, MO. According to Tom Windish, a representative for the band at The Billions Corporation, the band pulled their two vans and white-panel truck, which they use for toting equipment, into an area gas station to refuel. Upon seeing the motley crew of nine musicians, the station's attendant phoned the police, reporting the possibility that the band might be terrorists.The story goes on from there... It's time to break out those Dead Flag Blues.
Gavin Bell gives us a British perspective:
So, Bush has decided to go to war, Iraqis will die regardless of this decision, whether at Saddam Hussein's hands or by US and UK bombs. I just cannot see how this is meant to improve the world situation, how will this create peace in the world. I can see that this is not about Iraqi oil, as there is a small amount of it, that is available now, and it will cost a lot to double capacity. It is not about the honour of the UN, as they are being ignored, so is it about the desire of the last superpower to declare the world order in to two sides for simplicity and American commercial interests ?
Those of us happy to be in old europe can see that the world is more complex than that. George Bush must understand this too. Otherwise who is next, to militarily overthrow every regime the US disagrees with will result in countless wars on most continents in the world, not a prospect many will relish.
[Bell, Gavin "The Inevitable War", 17 Mar 2003, viewed 20 Mar 2003]
While I don't think things will get quite as extreme as that, that's the feeling and the worry that I've had for quite some time myself. A lot of people feel this way, and I really really think it will come back to haunt us. Just like our superpower actions and regime changes gave us this situation today. We (probably) could not have predicted in 1963 and 1968 that our actions would in very short order set up a dictator we'd have to come back and dethrone - but one hopes that we've learned from this history. As bad as war is, it's probably a good thing that we don't rely on the CIA so much anymore for leadership changes in the badlands.
Quaintly, Gavin Bell gave NetNewsWire 5 Stars in Macworld UK - the excellent program I'm using to post this entry. Kudos, Brent!
An interesting discussion has been taking place this week on my earlier (rather emotional) post "The Stench and the Tension".
Coming into the office this morning, a friend down the hall called me in excitedly. "The shock and awe has started!" Shock and awe, shock and awe. We've been hearing these words as the latest buzzphrase of the current action, and it's built up this great expectation of seeing "cool video" like the video that made it out of the gulf last time around. Pardon me for not getting excited about the mass bombing of a city. If war must happen, it should not be celebrated as though it were a movie. Yeah, "it looks cool and things are blowing up." I doubt it would be as much fun if those bombs were coming our way. Lets hope our actions don't bring similar actions back upon us.
Later in the day, I had basically the same discussion with the guy down the hall as I've in the link mentioned above. And it was pretty open on both sides. Yeah, Saddam is bad. Yeah, this war probably would have to happen sooner or later. But did it have to happen under an administration who has pulled out of so many treaties and agreements? Did it really have to happen right now? Couldn't the anniversary of the September 11th attacks have been used to present a plan to the United Nations that proposed to strengthen the ambiguous "War on Terror" to include new United Nation forces and powers that used international strength (instead of just big meetings), knowledge, and community to curb terrorist organizations worldwide, to disarm despots, to charge and try leaders who bring unnecessary suffering to their people (Mugabe, I'm looking at you here. Rwanda, you too!)? If the UN is "weak", Mr. President, why not propose to strengthen it so that it truely is a "United Nations", and not a "United Nations of American Republics" who stand for our way or the highway?
I recognize that I'm not in a position to make such decisions, and I don't envy those who have to make them (those that aren't driven by mad quests for absolute security and hegemony anyways). But I'm glad to be in a country where I can be cynical of our government in hopes to make them accountable for their actions, and in hopes that their actions will be just, even if I don't agree with them.
We have no beer in the office. Even worse: our local beer-buying-place is not exactly open any more. Sigh.
On the plus side, I have a fresh six-pack of Pabst at home. And it's cheap beer night at my primary bar (a night that I haven't taken advantage of as much as I should lately).
Now this is just brilliant. I really have no response to it.
The menu at the Coffee Garden at 900 East and 900 South in Salt Lake City has included a scrumptious selection of quiche for about 10 years.
The recipe calls for four fresh eggs for each quiche.
A Salt Lake County Health Department inspector paid a visit recently and pointed out that research by the Food and Drug Administration indicates that one in four eggs carries salmonella bacterium, so restaurants should never use more than three eggs when preparing quiche.
The manager on duty wondered aloud if simply throwing out three eggs from each dozen and using the remaining nine in four-egg-quiches would serve the same purpose.
The inspector wasn't sure, but she said she would research it.
[Rolly & Wells: Bureaucrat's Math Makes Dizzy Dozen, 11 Oct 2002, viewed 20 Mar 2003
This is the module that I crafted together to add reStructuredText support to our Roundup instance: rounduprest.py. It's based on the rst2ht work by Ollie Rutherfurd, particularly the hthtml.py module. I added in Roundup Designator detection which turns Roundup references (ie - text like issue44) into Hyperlinks.
Update: Now rounduprest.py can take in an argument of 'roundup_class_names' that can be used to differentiate Roundup designators from regular text that happens to match the expression ('issue42' versus 'v2')
Good experiences continue to abound in our use of the (still young and growing) Roundup issue tracker. I've added a couple of new major object types: Projects and Documents. Projects are a way to tie a collection of issues (and now documents) together under one object that houses its own set of data. Documents are a way for us to move our scatterings of notes that have populated FOUR previous systems (not to mention the never-finished mega-project-and-contact-manager I was working on) into a single place that's stripped down, fast, but still usable. Wiki's have been too haphazard, and we've had some serious speed issues with Plone and even the old Zope Tracker on the same box we're running Roundup on. It's a testament to Ka-Ping Yee's design, and Richard Jones' execution of those designs, that Roundup has proven to be so flexible.
Sigh... There were some good documents in the Software Carpentry Archives that don't seem to be available any more. Even the wayback machine is having issues finding them.
I'm sure this is already spreading like wildfire, but Al Gore has joined Apple's Board of Directors. Feel free to make your own jokes about wooden iMacs. :)
BIN LADEN WANTS YOU! To invade Iraq, as TomPaine.com reminds us in this reprise of their justly-praised op-ad .[Via TAPPED]
An interesting find on PyPI: PyDBC 0.2 "Contracts for Python 2.2+". PyDBC creates a new metaclass that can be used to handle preconditions, postconditions, and invariants.
From Salon: "People looking for the answer to the big question -- Why on earth did she stay? -- may well keep in mind that Utah, for better and for worse, is not the rest of America."
So sadly true. But my rent is cheap, and the snow is (finally) good. Too bad the liquor laws here are so royally smegged up. sigh. I was missing the East, but am a little leery of running into this.
It was bound to happen sometime: "A conservative alternative to Ben and Jerry's". Featuring "I hate the French vanilla", "Nutty Environmentalist", and "Iraqi Road". Oh, and "Smaller GovernMINT".
Is that the same smaller governMINT that gives you the "unstoppable deficit runs"?
I don't know if this is a long-term change, or just an effect of the network going into war-mode, but CNBC is currently showing "CNBC World" instead of doing their regular reruns of their evening shows to balance out the east and west coast feeds. Right now they're on CNBC Europe, and it's almost as good as having BBC World (which my package does not have). It's much better than "Kudlow and Cramer" (one of the most obnoxious pair-of-barking-head shows). So, here's hoping this continues. CNBC is actually a bearable network (most of the time), but it's terrible that it goes into infomercial mode on the weekends, while MSNBC is wasting almost as much air as the infomercials.
Nicely, the one of the local NPR providers does carry BBC World Service throughout the night, so I can be lulled to sleep by those intoxicating British voices and brain twisting sport scores. :)
Now if only Fox News could replace their barking head programming with... Oh hell, just about anything. O'Reilly was entertaining for about a week, but now I just want to punch the guy.
I remember the day the iMac launched. Apple's web site, except for the Support section, was replaced with a single page saying "Pro. Go. Whoa.", and the subtext of "Don't miss what will happen here today". The day was significant in a couple of ways. First, it was the unveiling of the four-box plan: Apple's computer lines would be pared down to four categories - a laptop and desktop line for consumers, and one for professionals. Just a couple of years previous, Apple had up to 40 different models. One of Amelio's big plans was to pare that down, and he at least had halfed the models by the time he was ousted. I think this plan was what really saved Apple. They had a plan that proved to the world that they were actually focused. This all came after many of the other shakeups that had happened during and after Amelio left, which included the end of Apple Research Labs, the Newton, and other distractions. Apple's pretty much stuck to this plan since, with their only major gaffe being the Power Mac Cube, which didn't fit so neatly into the four-box strategy. (The strategy's gotten a bit bigger since then, with the XServe and iPods now sitting at different ends of the spectrum).
And then there was the iMac. "Whoa" was right. It was exactly what I had been wanting (although I wouldn't actually own one myself until the DV editions perfected the concept). At the time, I wanted a computer that was simple and self contained that would be like an appliance, useful for web browsing, chatting, etc. There were plenty of "NC" concepts floating around at the time, and I was even considering getting one of the larger-class Windows CE devices, but suddenly here was a full featured computer at a reasonable price that pretty much met all my requirements, and more. It was a well timed knockout. The iMac DV series improved many of the outstanding issues of the original iMacs (better speakers, firewire, etc), and I've happily had one at home for the past three years, and have had very few issues with it (except for the 13 Gb hard drive which once seemed so big no longer satisfies me - and there aren't even any mp3's on this box!)
It's a little surprising to see them go away (almost) completely. I think Apple could just as well price them at $300 and dump them over the next few months.
Europe's leading anti-war nations lash out against the decision by the US and UK to go to war against Iraq unless Saddam Hussein quits. [BBC News]
I just finished reading "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders" by Jim Carlton. As I mentioned earlier, Amelio's book about his time at Apple is very interesting to me. As well as anything that covers the turnaround that happened between 1997 and now. It's not that Apple's doing extremely well, but considering their problems in the mid-1990's, the new Apple's a champ - one that can suffer minor debacles like the Power Mac Cube and come out relatively unscathed. One that finally delivered (still extremely late) a viable new Macintosh operating system that kept a high degree of backward compatibility while (hopefully) paving the way for some exciting new developments. One that returns to the hopes of the Object Oriented Operating System concepts that were all the rage in the early to mid 1990's, but with a degree more maturity and humility (well, as humble as Aqua can be). It's amusing to read the epilogue of Carlton's book, which covers the time between Amelio's exit and Jobs' taking on the mantle of "interim CEO". The future seemed so grim that few believed Apple could stand on its own at that point. Carlton did make some great calls for what the next CEO, whomever that would be, would have to do. The one that stands out the most is his saying that the R and D budget would have to be significantly curtailed. In fact - just all out cut down. I remember the day that Apple Research Labs went away, and all the cool things within it scattered (Squeak, MCF (later to become RDF), Dylan, etc). I knew even back then that it was a good idea - as cool as Squeak was, it was never going to deliver financial results for Apple.
I've also just become a fan of Amazon's zShops and other such sellers, as I'm trying to get my hands on the one actually published book about Copland, published in August 1996 (the same month that Copland was cancelled in favor of a piecemeal plan that delivered the every-six-month strategy that kept Mac OS 7.6 - 9.x development alive). There are some other OpenDoc books that I'm curious to pick up for the right price (ie: around $5) to see how compound document component development was taught at that time. I had always been leery of Amazon's "Used and New From ..." links, but they're proving to be quite useful.
David Limbaugh writes today in support of fascism. I mean patriotism. I mean, really, fascism.
No, Alan [Colmes], protesting against America is not "very pro-American." Being pro-America is pro-American. Defending one's right to protest is celebrating America's freedoms. But the act of dissing America while exercising those freedoms is not pro-American. [Limbaugh, David, "Dissent does not Equal Patriotism", Town Hall, 15 Mar 2003, viewed 17 Mar 2003]Oh that's just brilliant. "Being pro-America is pro-American". Whew! Glad we got that one cleared up! This country started as a form of dissent against a king and country whose laws and taxes we did not agree with. So, was that not pro-American? Our constitution, especially the bill of rights, afford the citizens the power to call their government into check if the citizens do not agree with the actions their government is taking. Unfortunately, the government is so encamped in its silly two party system to effectively deliver any true power to its citizens to enable change, and a bunch of spineless politicians more focused on keeping themselves in power than in truly voicing the concerns of their constituents.
"You have the right of free speech and protest, so long as you say what the government wants you to say." That's not the America we fight for. David Limbaugh also says:
And it's not patriotic for antiwar types to try to censor the unmistakably patriotic song of country star Darryl Worley about 9/11, "Have You Forgotten?"But it is patriotic to ban the Dixie Chicks for voicing their dislike of the President and his current policies? "Yes, because he makes the trains run on time."
David does conclude his piece with the following:
By no means are all those opposed to war against Iraq being unreasonable. But those extreme leftist antiwar protestors are different. They have every right to belittle this nation as it prepares for war, but they shouldn't expect to be exalted for it.No, they shouldn't be. But neither should be those who wage this war that many feel to be unjust. Just because Bush is leading us into war does not make him exempt from criticism and dislike among his own citizens.
As a word of warning, this post errs on the side of dithyrambic. There's a lot of tension building up everywhere, and this is where I've started to finally boil over.
"remarkably sensible blueprint" has already shown up now in five newspapers at the time of this writing. What is this from? Nothing more than the latest canned letters from the GOP to their zombies to send in as letters to the editors disguised under the concept of opinion.
Speaking of the GOP, I'm now deciding it's time to just start calling them fascists. Why not? They're calling the Dixie Chicks "Communists" for saying they're ashamed George Bush is from Texas. Here's a little beauty from good ol' boy Rush:
I've changed my mind on this boycott stuff. Don't buy the music of the Dixie Chicks. To heck with them - to heck with all these people who rise to great heights thanks to the freedom and opportunity in the United States, then join those who hate us overseas in denying that same freedom to the people of Iraq. Band member Natalie Maines said at a performance in London: "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." ["Boycott the Shameful Dixie Chicks", Rush Limbaugh]It's a bit of a brain twister at times, until you remember that he's not impeding on their right to criticize or even dislike the President. But it's the attitude that's frightening. The "You're with us or you're against us" cry from Charlie Daniels echoes similar sentiments. And some of the AM talk radio spew that I've heard lately is that "if you're not out there waving a flag and jumping up and down with joy at every show of our military might, you're the enemy", when in fact many of our enemies coerce their people into watching big parades showing how great and strong their military is. Government supplied phrase books for helping you speak North Korean are often filled with delicious phrases "look how strong and beautiful this country is! Imagine how much better it would be if America got their asses out of here so that Korea can be united!". Everyone is expected to tow that line. So to hear these radio "personalities" (also from the same fascist cloning factory - there, I said it again!) basically vomiting the same propaganda with incendiary underfire (that little undercurrent you can feel saying "if they're not with us, go beat those little peace loving communists up!") makes me really wonder what it is we're fighting for. While our government and the bill of rights give us an amazing amount of freedom, you can feel this great undercurrent swelling in this country of these old dogs marching with this old guard that's in power (a guard that even George H. W. Bush didn't fully agree with) trying desperately to hold on to that power in fear of real progress. The continuing marches for true democratization of access challenges their power and their wealth, so they lock themselves up in their own cells of secret societies and old-boy networks which thrive to this day to keep themselves entrenched. Now they have far too strong of a grip on things, while the progressives that try to fight the good fight are left with little support as many of our supposed liberals buckle under the tide with their weak spines.
One claim that I loved recently was that "Homeland security works great! We haven't had a single terrorist attack since September 11th!" (a Fox News anchor made this claim - not these exact words - on Bill Maher's new show recently). Well, guess what? In the ten years between the first World Trade Center bombing and now, there have been exactly two large scale terrorist attacks, and only one of them came from the outside world. There were many plans and attempts - on the Holland Tunnel, on Bridges, plans for New Years 2000 attacks - that were all thwarted. And they were thwarted without the stomach wrenching Patriot Act. Yes, a big huge and terrible terrible terrible attack got through the nets. But thinking that the fact there have been no new attacks on American soil is a product of these continued acts and resolutions passed by our government that threaten our very liberties in the name of safety (and well all remember what Benjamin Franklin said) reminds me of this (always prescient) bit of satirical comedy:
“There’s not a single bear in sight—the ‘Bear Patrol’ is working like a charm”.As Tom Tomorrow once said: "Satire cannot keep up with reality these days, and it's pretty disturbing."
“That’s specious reasoning,” Lisa retorts.
“Thanks, honey,” Homer says to her, adoringly.
“According to your logic,” she says, picking up a stone from their lawn, “this rock keeps tigers away”.
“Hmmm. How does it work?”
“It doesn’t.”
“How so?” Homer asks further.
“It’s just a rock,” she says. “But I don’t see a tiger, anywhere.”
“Lisa,” concludes Homer, while pulling out his wallet, “I want to buy your rock.”
["Much Apu About Nothing", The Simpsons, episode 0723]
Ultimately, the time has come for more progressives to start barking back at all of these barking heads. And, if necessary, leave a bite wound here or there. Or maybe we could let them have their way for a few years to get the country in the state that they want it, then revolt, and ultimately participate in a good old fashioned Mussolini Head Kick!
By the way - what's next? Do we have to start calling "Chinese Take-out" "Freedom Take-out"? How many people in the house are eating "Freedom Fries" and still driving their Mercedes, I wonder? Stupid stupid stupid. Oh, and watch out for that evil Natalie Maines! Those Dixie Chicks endanger us all! And if you believe that, I have a high ranking government seat AND a war profiteering board seat to sell you. Shit. I guess I'm going to be boycotted now.
And a further by-the-way: I love this country. I've descended from blood that spilt for it. But even my Grandpa, who served in the Pacific theater in World War II, was ready to move us all to Canada if war with Iraq happened (sadly, we lost him this past October - I still miss you Red!). There's just something about the concept of the United States invading someone else because they might do something bad that does NOT sit right with me. This war is obviously not about human rights (as bad as Iraq is, there are many worse countries), this is not joining an interminable conflict with many dead on both sides as an effort to close it, this is not even our own classic holy war against Communism. And I'm not one who believes that this is all about the oil either (but there ARE a lot of high ranking officials who would happen to benefit from the oil). And this is not an act against an invading army (neither on our soil nor an ally's soil). This preemptive strategy does not sit well in my stomach. And it's not helping the war on terror any: our post-war record in Afghanistan leaves much to be desired. Following that record, I have no great hopes for any great success in post-war Iraq (especially considering that our last regime change in the region paved the way for this one), and so many of the other puppet regimes we've helped set up over the years have worked out almost as well. So what the fuck are we doing there? Let the inspections work and spare the lives of Americans, Iraqis, and people world wide who may suffer from war's repercussions. I have sent my letter in to Mr. Bush and others with a long personal statement reflecting my voice in this matter. Because, hell, if the GOP's going to come up with clever little editorials for people to send into their paper, why can't I sign onto a mass statement that I don't agree with the direction this country is taking? I did add on a rather long personal section to the letter. Will it make a difference? I doubt it. The big wheels keep on turning regardless. But something has to be done to stand out from all of these flag wavers who give more time to mob mentality than to individual thought.
Stopping by AVSIM today I came across the following news. It's sad to lose a developer and enthusiast like Richard, but it's truly better for him to be away from the pains of cancer. For those unaware, Richard Harvey was lead programmer on the excellent Fly! / Fly!2k / Fly! II flight simulators for both Mac OS and Windows.
It is with deep regret that AVSIM announces the passing of Richard Harvey. We have been notified by Rich's wife Tara, that Rich passed away today from his long and hard fought battle against cancer. Rich's latest battle and his passing was the conclusion to many earlier bouts with cancer that had seen Rich in and out of hospitals for the last four plus years. We think the best testament to Rich can be found in is his own words...
"When you get news of my death, please consider it a joyous occasion. I will be in a much better place. I will be free of pain and suffering forever. I will never have to endure another needle, knife, procedure, nausea, side-effects, or pain again.". And he then said; "Think HAPPY -- be HAPPY. If that is too much to ask, then I'll change the word HAPPY to POSITIVE. That's the flow of feeling I want rolling through my soul as I depart this earth from each of you, is absolute POSITIVE energy. Don't stall on me, I have to soar!"
And soar you will our friend. Your contributions have been immeasurable, your friendship beyond value, and we will truly miss you Rich. Until we cross the threshold together again, soar on dear friend.
In today's New York Times, Roger Morris writes of the last major regime change program held in Iraq, backed by the United States and Britain (and opposed by France and Germany) under John F Kennedy back in 1963. This "regime change" was our first introduction to the 25 year old Saddam Hussein and the Baath party, whom the CIA had chosen as its instrument in said Regime Change. I can't wait for things to go even more right this time (with many of the same people who served with Reagan in giving military aid to Saddam in the 80's).
In 1963 Britain and Israel backed American intervention in Iraq, while other United States allies — chiefly France and Germany — resisted. But without significant opposition within the government, Kennedy, like President Bush today, pressed on. In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshaled opponents of the Iraqi regime. Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States armed Kurdish insurgents. The C.I.A.'s "Health Alteration Committee," as it was tactfully called, sent Kassem a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief, though the potentially lethal gift either failed to work or never reached its victim. ["A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making", Roger Morris, New York Times, 14 Mar 2003]
While walking home tonight, I was listening to Azure Ray on my iPod, right as I was passing Borders. Being very enamored with this beautiful band from Athens, I was wondering if they had a new album out, and if Borders would (by chance) have it. So, purely on a whim, I went in and happily enough, there it was.
While there, I decided to stop by the software design portion of the computer section because I like looking at pretty graphs, where I came across Component Software by Clemens Szyperski, with contributions by Dominik Gruntz and Stephan Murer. I only got a glance through it, but I was fairly impressed with what I saw. It looks to be a good higher level complement to the dense Component Based Software Engineering: Putting the Pieces Together. Of primary interest is Part II, a range of chapters covering the foundations of components, including "Aspects of scale and granularity", "Patterns, frameworks, architectures", and even a chapter on how to avoid inheritance.
While I haven't looked at the book in depth enough yet, I recommend it for Zope 2 developers interested in what the Zope 3 Component Architecture will end up meaning to them. Zope 2 has a lot of great things going for it, but it has a lot of issues as well. The Component Architecture makes for a more flexible system wherein configuration of components, views, relationships, event handlers, services, and whatnot give much much much more power for customization. This book looks like it gives broad coverage to all of the topics, as well as how popular implementations work and what they've managed to accomplish. It could give good insight on how to architect software for use with Zope 2 today that can fit into the Zope 3 mold of tomorrow.
The following is one of my favorite passages from World of Ends
Perhaps companies that think they can force us to listen to their messages — their banners, their interruptive graphic crawls over the pages we're trying to read — will realize that our ability to flit from site to site is built into the Web’s architecture. They might as well just put up banners that say "Hi! We don't understand the Internet. Oh, and, by the way, we hate you." ["World of Ends" Searls and Weinberger. 10 Mar 2003]Too true, too true, and too true. Another virtue of being on a non-Windows platform is that the degree of annoying in-page advertising is substantially lower. And with pop-up blocks in place, the web's generally a pretty good place to be. But step away from all of that, and it all comes across as a shock. It's pretty hard to read the weather with little purple pills crawling around blocking all of the temperature and forecast information. How far are we from the omnipresent highly personalized-and-everywhere advertising seen in films like Minority Report?
As my recent long winded posts have already proven, I've fallen in love with the Lisa Office System. I'm absolutely blown away by it. For years I had thought that the Lisa's operating system was pretty much the same as the Mac OS that followed, but with a slightly different look. But now I realize how different it was and why it cost what it did, and it's really too bad they couldn't have done it for the Macintosh price.
Anyways, I've found a couple of other similarities between the Lisa and Mac OS X:
This Applecare document may fix the battery problem I (and others) have run into with iBooks and PowerBooks. Apparently the power manager circuit can get cranky and needs resetting. I'm about to try it. The downside is: my iBook (which I use a lot lately) will loose it's precious 73 day uptime.
Followup: The fix seems to have worked. Considering this lovely machine is about two years old, it's probably time to get a new battery anyways. Without the problem (where the battery goes to 0% with little or no warning), I still get an estimated hour - hour and ten minutes use. That's not too bad for a two year old battery, I think. The time is made worse by the machine having sat around unused for a few months, plugged in and always charged. The quest for the perfect battery is far from over...
Followup 2: Up for 47 minutes now without AC Power. I think my problem's definitely fixed, which means I can take my iBook out on the balcony again without fear!
I had looked for this page a while back and finally found it again: Lisa GUI Prototypes shows the story of the Apple desktop from the first prototypes of 1979 to the announcement of "Aqua" for Mac OS X in 2000. It was around October 1980 when the Lisa started looking like what we know today. Interesting things in this document are a couple of things that showed up in Mac OS X:
Another page documents an early form of Sleep:
Lisa has a soft power switch. When 'off' Lisa is actually in a low power mode. Press the power button while the computer is running the Lisa Office System program suite and Lisa saves all documents and shuts down. Press it again and Lisa boots back up and reopens all documents precisely as they were before the computer was turned off.[Apple Lisa Features]And also more details on the stationery feature, which even affected creation of folders in this document centric system:
There is no "New Folder" option in Lisa's File/Print menu. Instead, double clicking on the "Empty Folders" icon will create a new folder in the directory of the "Empty Folders" icon, which can then be placed wherever one wants.
Seeing the "Put Away" menu item in Lisa reminded me of a classic Mac OS feature that I imagine was rarely used, and does not exist in Mac OS X. The desktop in classic Mac OS was a magical place. It was meant to be like your normal desktop - you'd put documents or folders on there for a brief time for easier access to them and then put them away in their proper place when done. So if you had a folder nested deep in your hard drive named "Projects" and in there you had "My Current Project" as a folder, you could drag "My Current Project" to the desktop for easier access, and the Mac would remember its original location. What this meant was that when done, you could use the menu item "Put Away", and it would be filed back into the "Projects" folder nestled somewhere deep in your hard drive. In theory, this should have helped people keep their desktops clean. In practice, I don't think too many people knew it was there or what it could be used for.
There were some downsides to the desktop being a mystical place, however. Once you started having multiple volumes in your machine, dragging an item to the desktop kept that item associated with the volume it came from. When disks were disconnected or ejected, certain items would disappear. But it's a common thing to think "I need this file from this floppy, so I'll put it on my desktop and then eject.", only to have the file disappear when the floppy was ejected. Furthermore, using Mac OS "naive" applications that didn't understand the desktop could make finding items difficult - since the actual "desktop folder" containing the items was usually hidden. Mac OS X takes the route of making the desktop a folder in your home directory. It's still very easy to get to in open/save dialog boxes. And putting anything on your desktop is an actual "Move" operation, and in the case of moving from another volume, it's a "Copy" (Mac OS X lets you know this by changing the cursor to include the "+" symbol used to denote a copy when dragging a file to your desktop), so that putting something on your desktop from a mounted server, a removable drive, or whatever, means that removing that drive won't mean the sudden disappearance of a file. One thing is lost in this system though, and that's the "Put Away" action. There are times, however, where you want easy access to a particular file (like a project plan or folder) for a limited time, and then to put it away. This is where the Document side of the dock comes in, and I've found it quite useful myself. Drag a document to the dock, and you've got a shortcut to it right there. If the document is already open, you're taken right to it. If it isn't, then it's launched. I've found this very handy for tracking outliner documents used to track thoughts and to-dos for various projects. And since you can pick up a document's icon from the title bar of its window, you can place it on the dock without having to dig through the finder to get it again after saving it. And while there's no put-away action for the dock, removing an item is just a pick up and drag off - *Poof!*. Making aliases on the desktop work too, or even in "Favorites", although cleaning these up always require trips to the trash.Putting shortcuts on the dock seem to be the closest to the original desktop behavior.
Thanks to Matthew Thomas' excellent dissection of a bad confirmation dialog, I came across a link to The GUI Gallery. It's a great look back at some old UI's, as well as new. It's made me even more interested about the Lisa Office System. The Lisa Office System was far more powerful than most versions of the Mac OS that proceeded it, and has some interesting features that bear reminiscence to an OpenDoc powered Mac OS or to Mac OS X (in some ways).
For example: Documents are created by "tearing" a piece of "paper" off of a "stationery pad". That is, double-clicking the stationery icon creates a new document icon. There are also no "applications", only "tools" that must be present for you to work with the documents.
This kind of user interface eliminates the need to start applications directly and the need to "save as".
The stationery metaphor is extended to all applications on the Lisa, even LisaTerminal. The "LisaTerminal Paper" in this case represents a connection configuration file. Interestingly the Win9x HyperTerminal kind of does this but you must start the program directly to create a new connection.
Other LisaOS terminology that differs from most GUIs:
Set Aside - Minimize the window to an icon on the desktop.
Put Away - Close the window and, if necessary, save any changes.
Duplicate - Copy a file.
Housekeeping - Disk management options.
Pictorial view - icon view.
[Nathan Lineback, "Lisa Office System", viewed Feb 8 2003]
Some small things of interest are the Set Aside / Put Away actions. Looking at the animated gif of Lisa Write menus, the actual menu entries are "Save and Put Away" and "Save and Continue". "Set Aside" is interesting, and seems similar to the minimization effects on current UI's. The verbiage seems more familiar to physical desktop use, as you may set aside your calculator or the current chart you're drawing to clear up space for a moment.
The Lisa also looks like it actually could multitask. Unlike Mac OS versions 1-6, where only one application could run at a time (unless Multifinder was used), the desktop and other applications could run side by side in the Lisa. This also leads to an interesting difference between the Lisa UI and the Macintosh UI - windows on the Lisa include an icon in the corner detailing what the window is (hard drive, calculator, Lisa Write document, etc), an effect used in Windows. Mac OS 8 brought this feature back to the Mac, somewhat, and with some cool side effects (that actually showed up earlier in the NeXTStep UI) in that the icon in the title bar of a TextEdit document, or the folder in a Finder window title bar, is a live object that can be picked up and dragged.
The most interesting piece of the Lisa Office System, to me, is the use of stationery. As I've mentioned before, this was a big feature of OpenDoc. When you use Microsoft Office, AppleWorks, or many other large applications these days, they all have some sort of "templates" or starting point option, like a business letter or resumé. Stationery Pads are the same concept, except that they exist at the file system / operating environment level instead of at the application level. Stationery Pads showed up in the Mac OS in System 7 ("Blue"). Marking a file as a stationery pad means that when you open the file, it launches like any other file and shows up already filled out in the application/editor of choice. Unlike opening a normal file, the "this is a new file" flag is set, and the first time that you hit "Save", you're prompted to save it as a new file. Since OpenDoc, and the Lisa Office System (by the looks of it), didn't have the concept of "New" in its editors (since in OpenDoc there is, by default, no application to decide what "new" is), you'd have to start from a stationery pad. Instead of launching an application like Keynote and selecting "New" to start a new presentation, you'd use a stationery pad object of "Blank Presentation" (or maybe "Sales Presentation") to start one from the Finder itself. I think that while OpenDoc's stationery pads would prompt for a "Save As" dialog box upon first save off of a stationery pad, in the Lisa Office System you would select a stationery and use the menu item "Tear Off Stationery" to create a new file/object of that type. What does this mean? It means that there is no need for "Open" or "Save As" dialog boxes, a problem mentioned by Matthew Thomas in his post "When good interfaces go crufty" (interestingly, this long running cruft appears to be a result of the technical shortcomings of the original Mac OS, which could only run one application at a time). Interestingly, Stationery Pads still exist in Mac OS X and their behavior is different than in "Blue" (Mac OS 7-9) and closer to that of the Lisa Office System. If you mark an item as a Stationery Pad in Mac OS X, then when you double click to open it, the Finder makes a copy (called "Copy of whatever") and opens that file.
While we're all used to the current way of doing things, and in some cases I heavily prefer it (ie - when dealing with large behemoth applications such as Adobe GoLive, or when firing up BBEdit or OmniOutliner to do quick scratchpad type actions that I don't want to save), I wonder how different things would be if the Lisa operating system could have run on the original Macintosh's. Would everyone else that came along after the Mac OS have offered "Open / Save As" dialogs? Would there have been a "Quit" menu item? Would OpenDoc have survived? OpenDoc, especially, was right there. Maybe the parts couldn't be embedded, but the paradigm was entrenched in the Lisa. Files were the first class citizens, not applications. In fact, the Lisa didn't even call them Applications, but "Tools". Tools helped you work with files, much like OpenDoc's "Part Editors" existed to help edit parts of a document.
I wonder where, in this model, tools like NetNewsWire or web browsers would fit? Would a web browser be treated more like a Desk Accessory, like many of the Brushed Metal apps in Mac OS X seem to be? And if that's the case, is the choice of a Brushed Metal UI for Safari actually right? It definitely makes me wonder.
And nothing would make me happier than to see a sneaky rebirth of OpenDoc show up in Mac OS 10.3. I doubt it will happen. But I'm increasingly convinced that the OpenDoc / Lisa Office System way is right for many many things. And I think computers would be better if either idea had actually taken hold.
If GAP uses the Pizzicato Five rendition of the 59th Bridge Song, they'll have my membership and loyalty for.. well, if not for life, then for quite some time.
A sake martini? Oh yeah, it's heavenly.
At least it will be, until I have to wake up tomorrow.
Well this should be a good day form Mac browsing. There's a leaked v64 build of Safari (which includes tabbed browsing, and from first glance seems to solve the bizarre connectivity issue I was having), and Camino 0.7.
Followup: Safari v64 completely chokes on the Industrie Toulouse style sheet, whereas v51 handles it fine. v64 handles Chris' site fine though. Hmmm. I wonder what I've got going wrong.
Followup followup: Bringing the stylesheet into BBEdit 6.5 and having BBEdit automatically reformat it seemed to do the trick.
Followup followup followup: I still have the connectivity issues to Roundup. :(
For the first time in a long time, I'm actually reading a book. It's not that I watch too much television instead, but I usually have a hard enough time keeping up with The New Yorker and Harper's. I'm not sure now if I'll even keep my subscription to The New Yorker, but maybe I'll augment Harper's with another monthly and try to get back to books. There are many on my list to read. Right now, it's "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders" by Jim Carlton that's sitting next to me, waiting for me to put down the iBook (funnily enough) and get back into it. The writing is very jumpy, but maybe I've just gotten too used to magazine articles and essays. The story, however, is a great one. I hadn't realized how strong (and strange) of a figure Gasseé was in his own right. I'm hurrying to get through this one so I can get on to Amelio's book, "On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple". I remember reading an interview with Amelio a few years ago, after he was ousted, in which he described Apple as being like a high school or college. He said that there was no real respect for authority among the engineers - they all had their cool projects and would basically do what they wanted. Carlton's book, at the point I'm at now, seems to be stating the same thing. What's interesting is how they were able to get away with it for so long because of, well, the Apple mentality that was often taken by the upper executives. It's like their line was "We'll cleverly invent our way through this!", hoping that the extravagent R and D budgets would yield the next big breakthrough like the original Mac OS. A lot of cool things came out of Apple Research Labs, such as Squeak, Dylan, and MCF (which would eventually become RDF). Contrast these projects though with Jobs' line "We'll innovate our way through this", and the Apple of today which tries to keep on tight deadlines (they don't always stick, and Mac OS X took a long time to get here, but by showing up it beats out all previous Apple attempts) and release software and hardware that actually does things for people. The old feeling of academia is gone. The new Apple doesn't always deliver greatness, but they do deliver. And they have given us a great platform to build and work on (finally). Going back to Classic on the rare occasions that I do makes me wonder if I'd still be putting up with all of its issues today. In any case, Apple's history is a fun read. And I'm now going to get back to it.
I had completely forgotten about its existence, but Apple's developer site still has back issues of Develop, Apple's technical/developer journal. There are lots of cool articles about OpenDoc and other things. Hmmm. I wonder if there's anything about Pink?
My experience with the Roundup issue tracker continues to be largely positive. With a total of two primary users, and one ancillary user, we're up to 63 issues and 193 messages running on the very basic DBM back end, after three weeks of usage. Those numbers are high considering (again) the two primary users, and the fact that Tracker and CMF Collector on the same box were downright painful to use. Even Plone has major speed issues on that box. Roundup is still delightfully fast. We've done a few simple customizations, and I continue to be impressed with its flexibility. Taking some cues from the Fresco project's Roundup instance, I've added in some new classes to group issues together under a Project. I've also added in some simple color coding to the 'status' column of our tabular views, which is useful on the Project view - if everything is green, we're good to go. Simple things, but with so much going on right now it's nice to finally have a place to go to keep tabs on what's going on and what's coming up.
Dave Hyatt, now one of the core developer's on Apple's Safari web browser, has posted an excellent read about tabbed browsing - covering various user interface issues and different virtues and problems that exist with all current implementations.
When I use Safari (which lately has only been at home - Safari v60 has some weird network bugs that make it difficult to use with many dynamic sites and servers, it seems. I've stuck with the previous beta (v52) on my iBook and iMac), I don't miss tabbed browsing. But, due to the Safari v60 issues I just mentioned, I've gone back to using Chimera (and am looking forward to using Camino 0.7 tomorrow) at work, and have fallen into the land of tabs again. Usually, I have our issue tracker open in one tab, the Zope management screens for whatever project I'm working on at the moment in another. Rarely do I use other tabs now, although sometimes I keep a Zope Error Log reporter tab close at hand (in Safari, I usually keep a minimized dock window for this purpose).
One thing that I have noticed since going back to tabs is that there are problems with the UI. I'm used to using command-tilde to cycle through open windows in Mac applications. Sometimes, I cycle through my Chimera windows rapidly looking for my Zope Management screens and wonder why I'm not seeing it. Only after a couple of cycles do I realize that it's in one of the windows, but in another tab then the one being shown. So it's command-tilde to switch windows once or twice, and then the command-shift-[ (or command-{ ) to switch tabs when I land in the right window. It's a mild annoyance, but it's happening to me a lot lately.
Which is why I think Dave's post about various tabbed browsing implementations is such an interesting read. Tabs are handy, but their UI can be awkward. So, I remain on the fence now. If tabs show up in Safari (and the issues that I've reported to Apple, especially about v60) get addressed, I'll use them. If the few bugs with Safari get fixed and it stays lean, easy, and fast even without tabs, I'll use it without.
News.com covers the latest Windows Longhorn leak, giving a lot of attention to the WinFS, aka Windows Future Storage. (Curiously enough, I wrote a rough Zope - Object Relational layer proposal a few years ago called Future Storage). While it's certainly not new ground (nothing already tried by BFS), it does seem to represent the realization of a dream Microsof has had for a long long time - the so-called object file system. OFS was a big piece of Cairo, part of the family of cool operating system dreams that were floating around in the early to mid nineties as the name for a significantly new version of Windows NT. I was reading a collection of old BYTE articles the other night (November 1996) talking about the next generation operating systems coming down the pipe: the 64 bit Unixes, Apple's ill-fated Copland, and Cairo.
The interesting thing was that at the time, with both Copland and Cairo long overschedule, both Apple and Microsoft had switched to a piecemeal release strategy. Pieces of Copland had already appeared in System 7.5 (the Open Transport networking system) with plans for other components to find their way into System 7.x as Copland approached. Microsoft spun Cairo away from "the next big thing", and instead the plan was that Cairo features would slowly find their way into Windows NT. Of the big Cairo technologies, some have already found their way out, but the Object File System has been the elusive one. It will be interesting to see how the new WinFS actually plays out.
It's interesting to see how much the world has changed since then. Rhapsody wasn't even a blip in Apple's eye. Taligent still had some hope in it yet. PowerPC's were outperforming Intel chips, and Java Chips seemed like the next hardware wave. Real OpenDoc parts were coming out. Now.. Well, the internet exploded, Linux exploded, Nashville (Microsoft's plans to integrate IE into the Windows UI) did happen, Copland was axed, Steve Jobs changed the face of Apple completely, Taligent's dead, and Java chips are nowhere to be found (near as I can tell).
But Paul's cautionary articles are very much to the point. Even as the Zope development community is pushing the envelope with version 3, most JPPs don't know what version 2 can do. His mission is to help them break the ice. More power to you, Paul. [Jon Udell]
Something I hope (and doubt) I'll have time to do in the near future is the ability to document my experiences writing a totally custom Zope 2 based application for a customer written with a Zope 3 "Component Architecture" mentality. We were contracted to do a Project Approver project that I initially thought would be a good match for the CMF, but speed issues and budget issues (deprogramming the CMF down to the minimal requirements allowed by the customer's latest budget would have taken too long) required going a different route. And we wanted to stay away from SQL storage requirements. But doing Zope 2 "products" is known to be a difficult process sometimes. What we came up with, however, is a simple system where the content classes, like many CMF and Zope 3 classes, were very simple and responsible for their jobs only - no ZMI weaves, no disk based Page Templates or DTML (for better or worse). The project was done on schedule, even though the customer threw a major requirements change in our face at our first milestone meeting. So what we have is a flexible and extensible object oriented architecture where data we would traditionally put into a relational database is in the object database, where we ultimately have more control over the data. And we have a base that should be able to move over to Zope 3 easily. And again, I hope to have time to write this up in the near future. It could help the so-called JPP, particularly those who come from more of an object background (Servlets, etc) than a scripting-language-in-html-plus-sql background (PHP, etc), see how to make flexible persistent business objects in Zope 2 in a way that should help them move to Zope 3.
