I recently attended a talk by Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon.com, where he opened with:

I like to say that I am just a sysadmin for a little bookshop in Seattle.

Some bookshop!

His blog is pretty cool and strongly shows that he’s a really bright computer scientist.

1. The fact that I have two tickets to the New Kids on the Block show at MSG.

   

2. The fact that Congress decided corporate lobbyists with money are more important than our civil liberties by voting for telecom immunity and expansion of domestic spying.

   

   (Though, there is a snuggly bear who tells me it is a good thing. I don’t trust snuggly bears as bears have claws).

3. The fact that Barack Obama, “the harbinger of government change”, reversed his previous stance by voting for the corporate lobbyists with money. He refused to stand up to them and do the right thing, making him no different from any other politician. I would have loved for him to champion support against this bill, I would have settled for his individual vote against it, but I cannot accept his vote for it.
4. The fact that both Senators Schumer and Clinton of New York voted against this telco amnesty bill. At least they had the guts to stand up to the Bush administration.

End result?

Epic fail.

From “Solution, or Mess? A Milk Jug for a Green Earth“:

The redesign of the gallon milk jug, experts say, is an example of the changes likely to play out in the American economy over the next two decades. In an era of soaring global demand and higher costs for energy and materials, virtually every aspect of the economy needs to be re-examined, they say, and many products must be redesigned for greater efficiency.

1. The system is working.
2. I love when things I take for granted are redesigned.
3. I love when things I take for granted are redesigned for efficiency.

My good friend and esteemed colleague has posted his thoughts on “Why I think the iPhone is Important“.¹ He adopts the opinion that “the big advantage Apple has with the iPhone is that they control the entire product, top to bottom.” He compares the iPhone to the Android platform and says, “iPhone >> android => Apple!”

Okay, so that quote was actually me summing up the argument.

I agree with his assessment that the iPhone has a great user experience. Everything is pretty sharp. Its components feel like they belong together. Things just flow.

But it is still a closed platform. One where you cannot publish software without Apple’s acceptance. One where usage of the device outside of Apple’s vision is prohibited. One where the power of a single entity has control over the utility of the platform.

This may be good for “user experience” but is horrible for the user. Is this an acceptable compromise?

If the user is limited in the usefulness of a device, knowingly or not, the user loses. There is no reason for Apple to be authoritarian on this matter. Users deserve a choice to do what they would like with their own devices.

Could you imagine what computing would have been like had Microsoft said, “We will give the masses this platform called Windows, but we will control the vertical stack. We will not allow external innovation. We will not allow other people to be creative, unless that creativity is synergistic with our platform strategy. We will control computers ‘top to bottom’.”

This too might have been good for “user experience.” But, this would have been horrible for the user. (We would be forced to use IE. There would be no such thing as Firefox.) This would have been a very bad thing for personal computing in general. And it could have happened. It did not because market forces did not give Microsoft the gift of inventing the hardware.

This is what Apple is doing with the iPhone.

That Apple created its hardware base does not make it any different. This authoritarian control will be a very bad thing for mobile computing.

I’d agree that Android is flawed for various reasons. It’s hard to program for a device that doesn’t exist. And it’s hard to program for multiple types of devices.

This was one of the downfalls of the Windows CE development back in the early 2000s. Multiple processors, multiple screen sizes, and multiple input methods all made it difficult for a programmer to appeal to a wider audience. Standardization is a powerful thing; Apple has de facto standardized its hardware platform, allowing software developers to be able to predict usage patterns.

This is kind of like the rest of the computer industry: A programmer knows, with some exceptions, that the person using his software will have a screen that is wider than it is tall, have buttons to press to input characters, and have a method to move a cursor around on the screen.

This standardization does not mean that the user has to sacrifice user experience. Nor does it mean the user must sacrifice the freedom of choice. Standardization at lower levels is a very powerful force that pushes developers to creativity. Standardization could have occurred at the hardware level and then Apple could have provided an open interface for alternative operating systems and programs. Apple could have invented the physical parts, but leave the bits in memory to be manipulated by the end user as he or she pleases. Apple could have given their operating system and their software as the default choice, but allowed users to chose otherwise.

I sit here typing this post on a Apple MacBook Pro running Linux 2.6.24 in a text editor whose source code I can download and change. Apple created the physical parts but I own the information. Does this use of their hardware design harm Apple or Apple’s brand in any way?

No. It allows them to have another happy customer, while all of the customers who choose the default on their systems being happy as well. This is how it could be on the iPhone.

Give people the choice. Never think that a closed platform is an advantage.

Recently, Jeremy Clarkson began a segment on Top Gear about the new Ferrari Scuderia with, “Do you know what’s wrong with Ferrari at the moment? They’re nerdy. It’s all about the plumbing and the wiring and the computer systems. When I drive a Ferrari, I want it to be all about passion. And excitement.”

Then he drives it. He ended the segment with, “I cannot tell you how happy it makes me feel to be driving a proper Ferrari again.”

A flashy user interface, cohesive user experience, and an open platform are not mutually exclusive goals..

1. As in any post that ends in “Shabowza,” it is very intellectually deep and only fit for the philosopher-king. [↩]

Really, I found most of these useful last week. But then I got my GPT and my partition table hopelessly out of sync and had to spend my weekend rebuilding my laptop, instead of getting my DB2 administration foo on. I’ve revisited almost all of them and found some new ones.

• The authoritative reference on Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro is just a life-saver. My ubuntu experience would be so much more hell without its existence.

• Using Mutt with Gmail (the minimal way) gives a copy-and-pasteable few lines on how to use Mutt with Gmail over IMAP. Easy to remember, but easier to look up and forget. Most of the other references are with fetchmail. The only thing I would add is to include other IMAP folders as mailboxes:

  mailboxes ="INBOX"
mailboxes ="[Gmail]/Sent Mail”
mailboxes =”[Gmail]/Drafts”
mailboxes =”[Gmail]/Spam”
mailboxes =”[Gmail]/All Mail”


• The official Mutt & GPG Notes.
• myopenid gives free domain-customized openids. My openid is now http://eric.ericgar.com. Watch out.
• This post on CPU scaling reminded me how to root-enable some CPU tools to allow me to easily scale my processor speeds
• The Lifehacker post detailing how to minimize Firefox 3’s toolbar. Do it. You’ll feel less constrained. It’s a new world.
• Recovering from a failed LOAD operation in DB2 LUA. Enough said.
• An overview of the Completely Fair Scheduler in Linux and why I probably won’t use it ever.
• Doug, who pointed out there exists an Ubuntu package for mutt with some really useful patches that vanilla mutt doesn’t roll with. It saved me probably a good 45 minutes of patching mutt myself out of the source.

Remember kids: 64-bit web browsing in Linux currently sucks. Avoid it. Since I doubt you have over 4GB of RAM: Do the right thing. Go 32-bit.

Update: Here’s a screenshot of my ff menubar:

From ITV’s pre-show promo for their Formula One racing coverage:

Dude, easy on the makeup.

and said, “Hi. My friend really likes you.”

I’m sad I wasn’t instantly reminded of this:

I was trying to find out why the Daily News included a Perl variable in their headline:

———–

From a registration page somewhere:

I love to be contacted! Thanks for asking!

———–

My internet told me so:

(I wonder if that will actually be useful to anyone).

From the software that came with our Probability & Statistics book:

Somudro links to two extremely well written articles about the lost culture of pidgets, “A Review of Pidget Sexual Culture” and “Pidgets: A Historical Overview” (both PDFs). Well worth the read.

From somudro.info:

Anthropologists believe that in ancient Africa the most common form of currency was the “pidget.” Pidgets were in fact an enslaved race of short and stout people, resembling a cross between pygmies and malformed midgets… But how did such a cruel societal modus operandi arise? Was it effective as an economic system? And what was life like for a member of this noble yet ill-fated race? These questions will be examined in the series of articles that follow.