House of the rising Moonglum

I really like the idea that some clever cryptographic trick can ensure our privacy, but I’m afraid that Microsoft’s new technology won’t do the trick. The article points out the obvious reasons why companies don’t actually want you to have privacy (they want to be able to have a continuing relationship with their customers) however there is an interesting technical reason why this won’t work.

The fact of the matter is, most people have very obvious usage patterns that can be tracked across login sessions. In order to get useful information out of a transaction, the vendor doesn’t need to actually know your private details. If they know that “computer A” bought x, y, and z products, then they have a pretty good model of who the user of “computer A” is, even without having a name and address. Then the next time “computer A” logs in to do some shopping at their web site, the vendor can splash the appropriate ads across the screen. I think the real trick here is the ability to fund transactions without giving actual funding source information to the vendor. They will still know who you have as your credit card vendor of course, but at least they won’t be storing your card number on their server to have it stolen. And this is what the Microsoft technical information mostly talks about, but everything I have read on the web is talking about “privacy”, which seems like it will kill it for all the wrong reasons.

So, apple just came out with a new toy and a lot of people have been asking me my opinion of it. In particular, they have been citing a number of reviews that claim to know what it is all about. Many reviews are complaining about what it isn’t rather than focusing on what it is. People are complaining about the fact that it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles and that it is missing features you need to work.

Basically the main complaints I have heard are “it’s not an iPhone” and “it’s not a laptop”. Yes, that is true. If you want to work at the corner coffee shop, you still need a laptop. If you want the internet anywhere, you still need an iPhone. However, if you want the internet in your living room, then this is for you. This is the real way to surf. You don’t need a keyboard to surf. You don’t need 3G access in your living room. You don’t need a camera or multi tasking or any of those things. You do need a pretty powerful CPU, which is provided. And if you are really spending some time on the net, instead of just looking something up, you need a big screen. Which the iPad has. This is the internet on your coffee table.

Will it kill the kindle? Perhaps, but that is not the point. Will it replace laptops? No, it is not a device to get work done on, though you can do a little if you need to. (The one exception to that might be giving slide presentations, but I really think that a laptop is still a better platform for that.) And finally, the iPhone is the perfect form factor for a phone, so I have no idea why people think that this would even try to replace that. The best review I saw called it the beginning of “casual computing”. That seems correct to me.

Long term, probably the most interesting sign of the future is actually the chip inside it. An independent retailer designing their own chip? I have no idea where that is going to lead.

This is awesome. iFixit just released all their (awesome IMO) manuals as open source. Now we all have free access to this incredible resource. I have used them for years, and only last year got rid of my Pismo, thanks to their manuals. That thing have every single items except for the case replaced or repaired, up to and including the display and inverter. Given that I work in the industry I probably hold on to my tech too long, but it does make me feel like I am at least doing a small part for the planet, not junking it up with more rapid upgrade cycles.

In honor of GeoCities shutting down xkcd redesigned their web site. It is like a horrible, bleeding eye, walk down memory lane. Absolutely wonderful. From the broken image links, to the horrible arrow buttons; scrolling text to the blinking (actually not… some things have improved over the years). Ridiculous precision on the page hits. Random bits of CGI sprayed over the page.

So horribly wrongly wonderful.

Useful tip for Chicago residents: start dialing 1 + ten numbers.

We are getting a new overlay area code in the 773 (and surrounding) areas. This means that starting November 9th, we all need to dial 1 + area code + phone number for ALL phone calls, even if they are still in the same area code that your number is.

Hey all. You may or may not have seen the video that Microsoft put out that gives you tips for hosting your own Windows 7 party.

Suffice it to say, it is horrible. I mean I love technology, and in fact salivate over new operating systems, but the notion of having an operating system party just bothers me. And even worse, with those people. Fortunately “Windows 7″ was just code. With some minor modifications we know what the part is really about.

Oh my.

Wow. They actually posted the answers in public as well. I was not expecting that. I don’t think that this will get the FCC off their back, or make the people who are mad at them happy. But in general it makes me happy, because it indicates a willingness to talk about the process at the store, and acknowledges that they are forging new ground here and can be making mistakes. This gives me hope that they will actually be able to learn from their mistakes.

OMG, looking through a brief description of Grand Central in Snow Leopard (that is: the multi-core programming tools provided by apple in the next generation of Mac OS X), their description of the implementation of work units (they call them blocks) makes it appear as if they are closures.

“What’s really powerful about blocks is that they enable you to wrap much more complex functions—as well as their arguments and data—in a way that can be easily passed around in a program, much as a variable can be easily referenced and passed.”

Sounds like a closure, no? Too cool. Anyone need a mac programmer?

Ugh. I spent an hour today trying to convince a programmer that version control is a good idea. He had a number of counter arguments, and has me somewhat convinced that he actually is using a version control system. One that involves filename changing and copying files individually from one computer to another. It is unclear to me that he ever understood the advantages of automating that all. But at least he left saying he’ll “think about it”.

Accountability. Trivial change lists. Trivial distribution. Rollback. Remote backup. Remove the fear of rapid development.

What am I forgetting?

Much though I love the new White House web site, the thing that really tickles me is that passes the W3C XHTML validator. That is actually somewhat difficult to do.

Ha, I just discovered that I was the only one able to post comments for about a month here. Sorry about that. Feel free to comment away. Of course everyone who used to read this blog reads twitter or Facebook now instead. Twitter is ok, since I can get an rss feed off of it, but Facebook doesn’t seem to have one. Seriously people, no RSS feed? That is so 90s. Heck I want category based RSS feeds. Waaay too many really active people linked to me for me to be able to keep track of all that. Of course it does mean that the LJ load is lower and easier to keep up with.

So, to celebrate comments being open again, I pose a question: which methods do you use to keep up with friends, and how often do you check them.

Consecutive runs of an application with differing results.

“Group and run” in IntelliJ always gives my results in alphabetical order. There is no particular reason that it should, and it not doing that has no negative consequences. In my two years of using it, it has just always exhibited this behavior. Until right now. This concerns me somewhat. I prefer to rely on the stability of my operations.

I remember the first time I thought about stability of operations what when working on a computer game with Alain. We had something that needed to be random (I have no memory of what). I wrote the code but when Alain was testing it, he was always using the same data. Imagine my shock. Aaah the joys of using pseudo random number generators for the first time. It’s a computer. Same numbers in, same (”random” sequence of) numbers out. If not, then something else is going on under the hood.

Too busy to look into it now though since it doesn’t actually impact the work.

One of the things that the iPhone was initially supposed to do was change the way that cell phone purchasing was done. In particular, instead of sticking around for forever in the phone store, dealing with surly salesmen, you would buy the device, head home, and register and pick a plan in the privacy of your own home. The reason Apple was able to get away with this unbelievable invasion of AT&T’s personal space was by offering them exclusive rights to the phone in the US. That worked out great for a while, but the other side of that is that since AT&T has this long contract, they can start demanding things after a while. Too much grey market of their subsidized iPhones you see. So it was with some trepidation that I went to the AT&T store to purchase my iPhone today.

I couldn’t have had a better or more satisfying purchase experience. The staff was well trained, knowledgeable and excited about the product they were selling. They took my name and (once they heard I was switching from another network) saw us right away. I stated that 10 years ago I left AT&T and swore never to return. They asked what my issues were, helped pick a plan that would avoid those issues going forward, and brought out the store manager who gave me his card and told me to call him if I had any problems at all. In particular apparently over the course of the past year AT&T has been giving more empowerment to the individual employees to deal with specific customer complaints. Apparently working with Apple has taught them something about customer satisfaction.

So that initial impression made me much happier. Then it turns out that the employee I was working with was previously a Sprint employee. I said that I really liked my current sprint plan. He agreed that AT&T didn’t have exactly the same plan, but showed me how he could build a very similar plan. In fact it was (with the exception of SMS messages, and the tier-ing of overages) exactly the same plan. Not only that, but he knew exactly what needed to be done to get the phone numbers transferred over with no fuss no muss. He did all the leg work all we had to do was chat with him about the pros and cons of different plans. Then he asked who my and my wife’s employers were. Turns out they give a 15% discount on the monthly plans for teachers!!!

So to sum up, after being jerked around by Sprint for the past year and totally fearing dealing with AT&T, I not only have two iPhones (one for me and one for my wife) for less that one would have cost me a year ago, my new monthly plan actually costs LESS than the one that I had with Sprint that I was totally happy with. Now the only thing I have to do is be careful of not going over on minutes for the first couple months so I can bank some roll over minutes. I went from not really wanting to be an AT&T customer to being a totally satisfied customer in about a half an hour. That AT&T customer service rep totally earned his (hopefully large) commission.

Now I need to build a special iPhone version of this blog.

“No no dude, you need to listen for the paper.” My wife schooling me on how to unjam the printer when I missed the paper falling out. It turns out I am married to the printer whisperer.

What I want to know is why the town couldn’t simply pay TDS to build and maintain the local interconnect, but maintain ownership. In this way TDS still gets that last mile business, but the town can force the ability to interconnect and choose through that last mile. Obviously TDSneeds to protect its investment through lawsuits, but if the town paid for that investment instead, that seems like a much easier way at administering choice. Ever since AT&T won the right to keep competitors off their last mile network I have really come around to thinking that data access really is a utility style service. Run a fiber to every house and lease it out to service providers: cable, phone and internet. No need for trucks to come to your house, and certainly no need for new wires to be run. I wonder if it would be possible for single blocks to build out as a co-op? Ultra high bandwidth loop through the alley with an interconnect at the corner that any service provider can access? This is similar to how a condo works, only no more infighting for pole space and service access.

And John Gruber points out a fairly egregious translation error. This is why I am always skeptical of reportage of events that happened in another language. I sometimes wonder if a big part of the problem in the Middle East isn’t the difference between what is said by the same person in different languages.

XKCD once again comes to the rescue with a clear and concise explanation of the problem. First of all the company felt the need to change their name because the old one had been so tarnished. And they really expect us to trust them with our votes? And yes the analogy really is a good one. Something has gone horribly awry if a virus can get on your voting machine.

People often ask me computer questions. One question that I regularly get is “do I need to upgrade my computer?” I personally like to keep computers around for a while, and due to upgrades and whatnot probably hold on to them longer than others in my field. (Though perhaps about as long as non computer types.) Thus my general advice is that a computer should last for about 5 years. Do I eat my own dog food?

Classic II 1991, upgraded once with (10 MB RAM) and once (80 MB HD). (It still runs and has all the original packaging. Anyone want it?) That lasted for 4 years until I got my Power Mac 7500 in 1995. That was one of the most expandable (Mac) machines ever (ram twice, a graphics card, a processor upgrade, and probably something else that I am forgetting) and got me all the way to my first “real” programming job lasting 5 years. Although I did keep using it as a gaming, desktop, and server(!) machine for another three years. It was eventually replace by the Pismo in 2000. That was another awesome and expandable machine, but by this point my care and feeding of macs skills had improved, so it might not actually be all that expandable. In any case it holds a special place because it transitioned me from OS 9 to OS X, which was a beautiful thing. Also it let me surf in the living room which was a nice ability to have when working from home. In any case, it eventually got a little long in the tooth for doing some of the work I was doing (what do you mean you can’t do interactive SVG rendering development on a laptop??) and I got a Dual G5 tower in 2005. This machine (that I am writing on now) absolutely screams. And it still does. The graphics card is a bit out of date at this point, but less than you would think, and any apps that are vector unit aware will blow the pants off of anything else out there still. The main problem is that somewhere between there and now Apple decided to switch over to the crufty (but regularly upgraded) Intel chipset.

So what does all this introspection have to do with anything? Well two items really. First is makes me realize that I’ve only been using this desktop machine for well on three years, and I really have no right to get one of those laptops that I have been drooling over. The one problem is, I don’t have the ability to upgrade this machine like I should since the chipset changed over. No swapping out processors for me. (Ram and disk I could do though…)

The other item is that I am not as cool as I think I am about using older machines. Holy crap! He is using a 13 year old computer and asking advice on how to hook a network computer up to it! That is making me want to break out with the old 7500 and boot it up as a server again. I wonder if YDL is still around?

Wil Shipley, programmer of awesomeness like Delicious Library had a recent post about a truly impressive crasher and data loss bug. The article is worth it in and of itself, however, the real beauty of this article is in his opinion of computer science PhD students.

These are, in my opinion, probably from computer science PhD students who believe in a perfect world of provable programming and the Easter Bunny. Here in the realm of actually making money, if running your program causes a user’s computer to crash, she doesn’t care if it’s Apple’s “fault” — she’s going to post all over the interwebs that your program sucks, and ask you for her money back. Now, since you’re not a PhD student, you like money, so this is bad.

This is SO TRUE. This is everything that was wrong with grad school wrapped up into one nice little nugget.

Also, the article has a pretty good analysis of how to diagnose and treat software bugs. Triage, backup, reproduce, before even looking at code. (Admittedly I normally reproduce in unit tests, but that is generally before looking at the suspect code.)

The announcement that wasn’t on Monday was that 10.6 is going to be coming out sometime next year. The reason they didn’t make a major announcement about it was that it isn’t going to actually have any new features. Apple is planning on going back over what they currently have and consolidating and pruning and improving. (The name is very clever, since it will basically have the same customer facing feature set as Leopard (aka 10.5) they are calling it Snow Leopard.)

For the non programmers who read my meow posts, cleaning up old code is absolutely critical. There are so many instances where the second time you write something it is about a million times better than the first. So doing an entire release cycle with no new user facing features is just about the best thing you can do with an OS.

My guess is that 10.6 will be by far and away the best OS Apple has ever made if they are able to stick to their plan. Of course, there will be some new features. Some API internals that will make the life of developers better, but hopefully they will be able to keep those to the minimum needed to really give the developers time to work on improving the existing code base. It is simply a focus on quality that you normally don’t see in software, where the constant drumbeat is for new and flashier features.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, if they are able to not shove a bunch of extra features in it, and how much they will charge for something that, while wildly improved over the previous version, doesn’t show any new features to the end user.