Category Archives: Web

One Bad Apple Spoils the Market

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The tech-news side of the Internet is in an uproar because Apple rejected the official Google Voice application for the iPhone and removed other applications that interacted with Google Voice.  I believe that the blocking of the Google Voice application is absurd, probably violates anti-trust laws, and definitely does violate my belief in a neutral Internet (which is that ISPs and wireless carriers should provide a bit-pushing service and nothing more).  However, I think the bigger problem is that Apple has contol over what applications run on the iPhone in the first place.

The fact that mainstream tech media and knowledgeable users have not railed against Apple from the start for this practice is really a shame.  The practice of a device manufacturer controlling the content that can be experienced through their device is not new, but it is definitely not universal.  For example, all major game console manufacturers have a process by which games are approved for the console by the console manufacturer before it can be released.  This, in my opinion, is just as damaging as Apple’s control over iPhone applications.

Some readers may disagree, saying that the device manufacturers have a right to protect their brand by ensuring that sub-par games and applications are not available on their device, guaranteeing a good experience for the user.  My contention is that it is not their place.  Manufacturers of DVD players do not decide which DVDs can be published so that no one ever sees a bad movie on their DVD player.  Web browser manufacturers do not block web sites that use blink tags.  Radio manufacturers do not limit their radios to only tune-in top-40 stations (thank goodness).

I believe that Apple, game console manufacturers, and others could achieve their desired goal of ensuring a good experience on their device by certifying certain applications that have been reviewed, but not blocking un-reviewed applications.  This would work just like the Certified for Windows Vista program that Microsoft offers.  This way, when buying an app for your iPhone or a game for your Wii you could look for an emblem or seal that would let you know that Apple or Nintendo had reviewed the game and that they recommend it.  But, you would of course still be free to install any app or play any game that you wanted because, you know, the device is yours.  Another option, employed by Linux distributors and carried over to the embedded device space by Nokia on their N770, N800, and N810 Internet tablets is to have a standard repository from which applications can be downloaded that have been verified and reviewed by the distributor or manufacturer.  In addition to the standard repository they allow other software repositories to be added and queried as well.  So, by default any user that doesn’t know or care would only be using certified applications.  But, with a little configuration change they could be running software from other sources, certified by other people, and enjoying applications that otherwise would not be available to them.

To wrap this thing up I just want to repeat that the issue is not with Apple blocking a Google Voice application, but with Apple having that control over your device.  There are alternative models that would let Apple achieve their goal of quality applications without giving them unchecked control over your device.  Apple does not have to like the solution.  We need to give them no choice by making the consuming public aware of the situation.  Maybe this Google Voice uproar will reach enough people so that they’re at least familiar with the problem.  Unfortunately, the slickness of the iPhone will probably continue to win people over, regardless of the limitations.  We should not be okay with this.

Some People Agree with Me

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It’s not easy being the angry son-of-a-bitch that my coworkers claim I am. It is a rarity that anyone sides with me when I get into one of my rants. I suppose that might be because agreeing with me will likely only lengthen the time that I bitch about something. But regardless of the reason it’s difficult to go on complaining when no one agrees with you. Well, I found a post by someone who is very respected in the technology community who actually whole-heartedly agrees with something that I have said. Tim Bray, one of the original editors of the XML specification (amongst many other accomplishments), recently wrote about his dislike for the word ‘solution’. To quote his post (which is so short that this quote is like half his post), “This is so freaking retarded, can there be a living human being who believes anyone will be more willing to drop the $450 on their box because it’s described as a ‘storage solution’?” That is pretty much my argument as well. When I read something that describes a product as a ‘solution’ I feel like someone is trying to push feces down my throat. When someone uses the word ‘solution’ I assume that they either think that I am a total idiot or that their product fills no real purpose and thus can only be labelled with the word ‘solution’. Everything is a solution. I wouldn’t use the word ‘solution’ to describe a product because I wouldn’t want a potential customer to think that I consider them an idiot, and I would rather explain the exact purpose my product serves instead of making it look like it serves no exact purpose at all.

On another note, I’ve been thinking a lot about culture and how much the overall situation really sucks right now. We’re in a quagmire of legality and lawsuits that basically puts a sleeper hold on our culture and allows record companies to own practically everything that is recorded. I wish I had more time to expand on this topic, but if you want to understand how I feel, give this panel discussion with Lawrence Lessig and Jeff Tweety a listen. Brandon describes it as the “shadier side of online piracy” and I can’t disagree more. I believe that what Jeff Tweety and Lawrence Lessig are talking about has very little to do with online piracy and it certainly doesn’t “tell you it’s not so bad”. Lawrence Lessig actually attacks people who pirate music and other content because it muddies the argument. The worldwide discussion about this should not be about online piracy because the cost of music and the availability of it isn’t really the problem. The problem that I see is that the wrong people end up owning copyrights that last nearly forever and it isn’t very easy to build on past art. I personally have stopped downloading music that is not licensed in a way that makes doing so legal. This decision was not an easy one and it is something that everyone has to decide for themselves. I don’t want to push my ideas on anyone. However, while I am actually buying CDs now, I’m also very much in favor of artists using things like the creative commons to license their work in a way that makes the most sense for them both financially and creatively.

I wish I had more time to expand on my ideas. I’m sure I will at some point. But, Nak got tickets to yet another Mets game today and we’re leaving in just a little bit. I took 2 pictures last night that are available on my flickr account. Nak had a great quote last night. After we both finished eating footlong chili dogs he said, “I felt like a porn star eating that thing”. Classic.

Create like it’s 1790

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Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford University. He chairs the Creative Commons Project and is on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for the Public Domain. He has also written three books about culture, technology, and the laws that tend to mess them up. In short, he has done many things to try and keep our culture from being owned by giant media companies. There is a flash movie/presentation thing available that I think everyone who is interested in the creation of culture and technology should see. The audio of the flash movie is Lessig giving a talk at the 2002 O’Reilly Open Source Convention. The video of the flash movie is a recreation of the slides that he showed during the talk. The state of patents and over-zealous copyrights is something that I am very concerned about. Really, I think it is something that everyone has a vested interest in (it is our culture after all). So, take ten minutes and watch the flash movie. Some more information and material relating to the talk is also available.

So, instead of just telling people how much I like the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and what they’re doing, I decided I should actually do something to help. So, I just donated $100 to the EFF. Now I actually feel like I’m part of the solution. It’s not enough to just sit around and rely on other people to take care of things that are important to you.

Updated to WordPress 1.5

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I updated the version of WordPress that I use to manage this site. The update process went fairly smoothly. There were a few bumps in the road because I had customized the look of my site a whole bunch, but it was fairly trivial to fix and only took around 10 minutes. This new version has a bunch of neat new features that I’m sure I’ll enjoy playing with. Hopefully these features will make it a little easier for me to avoid comment spam. Every 3 or 4 days I get hit with a piece of comment spam for every post I’ve done so far. Most of them get marked for moderation, but then I have to log in and delete each one. This verison of WordPress should make that a little bit easier.

Novell’s Hula Project looks pretty promising. I’m tempted to install it just to poke it for a bit. Honestly, if it had been released a week ago, I would probably already be using it as my mail server because I redid my mail server just last week. Apparently Jamie Zawinski, of Netscape and Mozilla fame, warned Nat Friedman about slapping Hula with the ‘Groupware’ label. Instead he offered the following advice, “Your ‘use case’ should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?” That whole post is really pretty entertaining.

I’m actually going to try and install The Hurd in the next few days. I really don’t expect much from it, but that’s the point. It’ll be interesting to see an operating system in such an early stage of development. I mean, The Hurd has been 20 years in the making and it still doesn’t do much of anything. In fact, they very recently ripped out large chunks of it and started over. That’ll probably add another 20 years to the development time. I hope I’m alive to see version 1.0. Ha!

Dave and Caesar

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My brother bought himself this giant Julius Caesar head. As if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, he had it on lay-a-way for a few days. I can’t handle him sometimes. I told him that he makes my life more and more like the Napolean Dynamite movie all of the time.

I finally bought a pro account over at Flickr. I’m really impressed by Flickr. They’ve taken a fresh look at photo management and web applications in general and it shows. Maybe we’ll get to do stuff like that at work in the next iteration of the interface, which should come out like 2 years from now. I wish things could move from the idea phase into the completed phase quicker than they do.

I’ve finally squared away my email situation. Let it be known that mbox is too slow for really anything. I’m now using maildir to store my mail on my new server and everything is much nicer. Oh yeah – fuck sendmail too. What good is a program if you can’t tell it what you want it to do. Someone needs to rethink how that thing interfaces with the user. Yeah – I’m saying that user interface matters even when the only interface is a configuration file. I always felt like one configuration file was going to be just about as easy or hard to use as any other. That was before I tried configuring sendmail. I’m now using postfix to deliver my mail into a maildir directory and dovecot to make it available through IMAP. Oh, and all of my mail traffic now runs over SSL. I know, it’s a little too geeky. It’s even geekier that getting it to work made my whole day.

I also applied a patch to office bocce that Jeff sent me. It abstracts all of the database calls so that we can use other database engines besides just sqlite. It seems to work really well. I plan on connecting it to PEAR::DB and thus be able to use a zillion databases. Alright, it’s 2am and I’m beat. I think I geeked out enough for one day.

Flickr

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Brandon

This is Brandon right before I showed him this flickr thing.

I was playing around at the Creative Commons site and there was a link to this Flickr site. I started playing around with it and it is pretty freaking cool. At the lowest level it is a place to upload a bunch of pictures and share them for all to see. But, it’s much more than that. Right now I have it set up so that I can send pictures from my camera phone to a special email address that posts them to my blog. It uses the subject of the email as the blog’s title and the body of the email as the description of the picture. That’s what I did for this post, then I editted it to add all of this text. Besides all of that, the interface to the thing is freaking amazing. I’m sure there are a few ideas we can get from this system to use at work. It’s just very friendly and well organized. All of these features are free. It seems like the real limiting aspect of the free version is that you can only upload 10MB per month and can only really have 100 pictures up there at a time. The pay version allows 1GB of uploads per month and an unlimited number of photos. It’s kind of expensive at ~$40 per year, but I guess in the end it is only a few bucks a month. I figure I’ll play with it and see if I use it at all and then decide if I want to pay for it. But, check it out. It’s refreshing to see a website that is so easy to use and yet offers a lot of pretty advanced features. I dig it.

Fighting with Microsoft Technologies

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I got home this morning and noticed that my house had been covered in toilet paper. My brother is on the volleyball team at his high school, and we’re pretty sure it was the girl’s volleyball team that did it. They did a pretty good job, and my brother is going to have some cleaning up to do later on today.
We didn’t have a very good day with Microsoft technologies at work yesterday. Mike spent most of the day fighting with the update for Microsoft Office that fixes a hole in their JPEG rendering library thing. I understand their wanting to make sure that you purchased the copy of Office by having you put the Office CD in your drive during updates, but that is terribly inconvenient. First off, if you’re going to do that, it has to work all of the time. One of the machines in our office still doesn’t have the update because we couldn’t convince the updater that we actually own the copy of Office that was on the laptop. Of course we do, and still had the CD to prove it, but the updater wasn’t convinced. Besides, how many people really have all of the CDs that they’ve ever used to install software? We have an entire filing cabinet devoted to this stuff, but I don’t think that is common practice. It’s probably better to let users of pirated copies get the updates than to put your real customers through all of the hassle of finding their old CDs, having that only occasionally work, and wasting a whole lot of someone’s day updating all of the machines in the office. I also had a run in with Internet Explorer. I guess that isn’t much news. Sometimes I feel like my job is just to get neat things to work in Internet Explorer. I spend a lot of time doing it. It might take me 1 hour to get something to work in Firefox, then I have to spend 3 hours trying to get IE to do the same damn thing. We ended up with something pretty neat, so I’m happy. But, it did require a little bit of hackery to convince IE that it could do what I wanted. Luckily, Firefox’s numbers are up. The market share is either 8% or 15% depending on where you hear it from, but everyone is reporting that IEs market share is down and Firefox’s is up. So, if you haven’t switched your browser over to firefox yet, stop wasting your time on the web and get it now.

Overhaul of Markdrago.com

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I found myself feeling both bored and motivated, and decided to finish the (re-) design of markdrago.com. I changed the color scheme to something I like, but not something that I thought I would choose. Jamie helped pick out the colors. I actually took the picture on the top of the page after a rather large snow storm when I was at school. I am very impressed with wordpress. It really does making keeping a blog more fun. I’m dead tired right now. My brother had his 17th birthday party today. It’s pretty weird to be the older brother of someone who is getting so old. I’m going to be giving a talk at LILUG this Tuesday about wireless on Linux. This talk’s success is still very up in the air. I have only been using wireless on Linux for a few weeks, and I know there will be people in the audience who are more familiar with it than I am, but it will be fun none the less. I left my laptop on during the ride over to Jamie’s house today. I was running kismet and tried to pick up as many wireless signals as I could on my way over. I found 3 networks, 2 of which were encrypted. I probably could’ve gotten access from the unencrypted one. It’s a real shame that it is so easy to leave a wireless access point unsecured, and so hard for a person of average computer skills to secure one. Hopefully that gets resolved in the near future. Anyway, like I said, I’m exhausted. Goodnight.

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