Braintickle: Interface design

Would you pay more tax to get better free software?

2007-05-24T16:59:00.000+01:00

Recently, people have discussed the possibility of providing free internet access for all. After all, part of the state's responsibility is to provide infrastructure such as roads, water pipes, and electrical wiring. Why not software? Would you be prepared to pay more tax for this?

Where to find me...

2007-02-01T22:19:00.000Z

Moved back to WordPress while Blogger was down:

http://braintickle.wordpress.com/

Glimpse of the future of content distribution

2007-01-28T16:15:00.000Z

I've recently been testing a few new programs, specifically, Vienna, Xcast, Zudeo (which, since the download was labelled Azureus 3.0, I assume to be the successor to the latter) and Democracy.

I noticed that they fall along an interesting continuum, where Vienna is a fairly traditional, although nicely executed, newsreader, Xcast is more of a content manager (1), and Democracy - while managing podcasts, screencasts, and locally downloaded video (but not very well) - is really a content distribution tool. Finally, Zudeo makes no shame of its content distribution nature, and features both official and independent films and trailers, rated and ranked by viewers.

(1) Xcast is, and the author sort-of-admits this, somewhat similar to iTunes in its usage, and integrates with it very nicely, really just adding a few nice features to better manage your subscribed casts, and simultaneously manage ordinary RSS without "enclosures" (but I prefer NetNewsWire for this, the only shareware app for OS X so far that I have actually purchased). The quotation marks here indicate that I feel the word is misused in so far as the user is not interested in the cage, but in the animal, and imho it should really be called "inclusion" if anything, c.f. "encased in amber".

State of the virtual machines

2007-01-28T15:52:00.000Z

Looks like the market is being flooded not only with a host of compatibility layers, but increasing number of true virtualisation applications, or rather, hybrids between the two.

To drop some keywords, we have Rosetta, Wine and its various Crossover derivatives, VirtualPC, PearPC, qemu and Q, VirtualBox, Xen, Parallels and VMWare. Clearly a lucrative market.

I have been interested recently in the increase of usability, including true drag and drop in products by Parallels and VMWare (1), free-floating windows (called Coherence in the Parallels product for Mac), and I would like to see the window manager being fully replaced with the native one, which even Parallels does not seem to have managed yet, judging by the screenshots (but it can be done using WindowBlinds in Windows - $19 on top of the $79 for Parallels Desktop; VMWare pricing not known yet). Arguably, there is some benefit in having a slightly different window border style for Windows windows (ha!) in order to identify them quickly (and here).

But I have also been interested in seeing how little people seem to expect in terms of hardware support or clarification thereof. For instance, I've always been dismayed that there was no equivalent of VNC that would also transmit audio. Similarly, with Windows Vista being the first consumer OS going to market with true voice recognition (OS X 10.4 "Tiger" has a matching algorithm that matches up your voice with any of a small number of known commands, useful but not the real McCoy) - the killer feature in my opinion - it is not clear whether this will work in any of the existing virtualisation products!

(1) VMWare, iirc, has yet to release a product with their announced drag and drop functionality, but for Parallels it is available in a beta version, with hints of a release in the very near future; both on the Mac, not sure about other OSes.

List: BitTorrent clients for Mac OS X

2007-01-24T22:58:00.000Z

Delicious:

Different:

Bits on Wheels

Mighty and cross-platform:

Azureus

Few frills:

Added feature, untested:

New laws for new interfaces

2007-01-24T01:30:00.000Z

While tablet PCs are not new - in fact, Acer was recently quoted as saying the tablet PC platform had failed and would not see revival in their lineup - Apple may well be able to establish touchscreens more firmly beyond the stylus. However, Apple also stands to lose one of the most frequently quoted and patent-protected benefits of its interface - the placement of the application menu along the screen edge. With finger-tapping on a screen, there is no longer any special significance to the screen edge, so while Apple has resisted changing its interface even as screens grew larger, conveniently favouring the widescreen format (where the upper edge of the screen would always be a little closer, although plans to make the Mac a movie platform would have also influenced that decision), it may soon find itself on an open playing field. Ladies and gentlemen, it's the season of big buttons. (Oh, and someone calm down the trekkies when they get into Fitts of joy!)

Apple wishlist

2007-01-23T23:25:00.000Z

After a few folks around the net have come up with similar ideas, there is no incentive for me to remain silent, so I'll give a quick run-down of what I would like to see from Apple:

Cinema displays with multi-touch technology and inbuilt cameras. The window of opportunity is small, because purely projector-based technologies are catching up (you've seen the pictures on the web), but seeing that the iPhone has been in development for two and a half years already, I wouldn't rule it out that they have a head start on putting the technology into cinema displays.
Voice recognition in Leopard: Vista has it (can't wait to play with it), so Apple is under pressure. I've no doubt Jobs knows how to beat Microsoft. Remember how he had the Mac talking to him in the keynote where he introduced the Macintosh? I want a repeat run, but for real this time. You just put ELIZA on the other end, and there you go! (I'm sure they can find something that beats ELIZA if they shop around...)
Ultraportable and professional laptop (i.e. in the MacBook Pro line): Apple needs to compete in this segment. First off, some have suggested that this would be a slate. I seriously doubt that this would satisfy the needs of the market; even if voice recognition could be used to enter text (and you'll realise that this is an entirely new challenge that you need to retrain yourself for once you try it), this has privacy and nuisance issues when travelling, which is what an ultraportable is really for. I'd also like to see the battery life compete with Lenovo and Sony.

Oh, and people who say that Apple is under pressure to license Mac OS X to everybody else have a poor understanding of Apple's business model. (Mac OS X is what sells Macs - take a few minutes to convince yourself that this is the case. Apple earn their pennies with hardware sales.) The rumour that OS X could be licensed is as old as that of the Marklar project, and it won't happen until there is a Linux distro that works as nicely with peripherals as OS X, especially in the areas of bluetooth and, to some extent, 802.11 (although power users have this working in combination with kismet). It'll be two years at least.

Phrases that tell you you're wrong

2006-11-19T22:10:00.000Z

If you ever hear yourself saying one of these, it's a good bet you need to reconsider the way you live your life.

Do you know who I am?
I'm not normally like this.
It's all in good humour.

Hmm...

List of GNOME CD burning programs

2006-11-19T21:08:00.000Z

I may have given this list before, but it has once again grown, so here goes...

Bonfire is the new Sauron's ring on the block. The screenshots look good. I wish them well.

Apple, Sony and ultra-portables

2006-10-27T23:24:00.000+01:00

Following initial problems with their Intel laptop line-up, it seems Apple's firmware is settling down and the laptops are ready for productive use. And yet the lower end of the range, the MacBook, fails to impress me - too heavy, short battery life. And no genuinely small model, like the 12" iBook used to be. Or a Sony VAIO TX3. One of which I happen to have just purchased, and boy, does it make me wonder why Apple hasn't approached Sony with either a bid for their laptop division, or an offer to license OS X for their machines. The design would fit within the Apple portfolio perfectly. If Sony have any business sense, they'll take the OS X option for even part of their range - say the TX3 and X505. Admittedly, the X505 strays a little further from Apple's style than the TX3, but it has the slimness and could undoubtedly be given the aluminium/brushed metal finish.

I'm concerned that Steve Jobs' xenophobia might be hindering his achieving great things in the technology sector, as seems to otherwise be his mission. But then, Apple's strategy has always been to re-invent the wheel, especially in software.

On the other hand, it might be Sony still dreaming they'll achieve the firm grip on the technology and entertainment industries that they've always wanted and Apple has now finally achieved. There is so much to learn from Apple: small number of different models, simple price structure, and an appealing, easy to navigate website. Just for starters.

Firefox needs text recovery

2006-08-24T14:14:00.000+01:00

This is the one feature that is sorely missing in an app that several years into its development, remains unstable. How many times have you lost a forum post or email you were composing because Firefox crashed? Sure, you can first compose it in a text editor and then copy it over, but that's not how things are meant to be, is it?

So what we need is what every unstable word processing app now has: document recovery (Vim 6 also has this, in spite of being stable) for text fields. My suggestion would be to present it as a scrapbook, the way clipboard managers usually work.

Apple not embracing Web 2.0?

2006-08-18T16:33:00.000+01:00

While I was originally fascinated with how Apple was using iTunes with its unrivalled Music Store to push sales of its iPod, and simultaneously giving a push to its "Mac" computer hardware brand (which consumer surveys show is preceived as separate from the iPod brand, so the marketing idea was not entirely efficient), it is also interesting to see that Apple is not making any inroads into consumer content creation, other than allowing upload of podcast details onto its Music Store (but again, market research shows low penetration for podcasts). So far, Apple is enticing us with rich media for sale and free download (as in the case of many video podcasts) through Music Store, but Azureus will have content creation abilities that could well take away revenue from Apple, and even youtube.com and Google Video, Apple's other competitors in the rich media avenue. Part of the problem here is that while the quality of Apple's offerings exceeds that of Web 2.0 competitors, entertainment is being commoditised by cheap video hardware, software and free hosting, and there is no doubt that the resolution of freely available video content will catch up with Apple.

However, there are programmes that are inherently onerous to produce, and these will continue to generate revenue. Central to this market are nature documentaries filmed at remote locations. Second best, I would say are documentaries that require intense research, especially into material that is not readily available to the general public (Vatican library?).

At the same time, voices are growing for Apple to develop its other web-based service, .Mac.

I have further, unpublished comments on this topic.

A week of shutdowns

2006-08-18T13:17:00.000+01:00

This week started with me hearing that eBay were changing their pricing structure so that they could charge more on average from their professional sellers. Some sellers then staged a boycott, but, hey, what can you do if you've built your existence on top of somebody else's business who could pull the rug from underneath you, and you'd be flat on your bum? If eBay had no competition, that would be a silly thing to do. However, there's still Amazon and other trading and swapping sites to choose from. It just so happens that eBay is being used by a lot of customers, but the next "disruptive technology" (i.e. a better website) is just around the corner.

This reminded me that some senators in the US are advocating privatisation of their domestic internet (as I understand it). Reeks of corruption and is unlikely to go ahead in my opinion, but it could leave a lot of web businesses stranded if they had to pay considerable amounts to get their data packets through, as some critics fear. May the decision makers listen to Sir Tim.

The conclusion to the story might be that the world works better if at least some basic services are being provided by the (nation) state, such as garbage collection and the internet. It's even possible that the economy would benefit from a tax-funded eBay equivalent.

Understanding the success of Ubuntu

2006-08-17T13:07:00.000+01:00

There seems to be a lot of debate on how Ubuntu was able to solve Debian's usability problems, and whether Ubuntu's success is ultimately a good thing. Take this essay from an apparent Debian fan. What most people fail to fully take in is that Ubuntu is a (self-confessed) dictatorship, whereas Debian's government structure stops just short of anarchy. Strong, visionary leadership simply beats doing things by committee. That's all there is to it.

Trivial patent from Apple

2006-08-17T13:02:00.000+01:00

If someone can explain to me how this patent that Apple is reported to have filed is not invalidated by prior art in the shape of buttons that light up when pressed or released (used in military applications for many decades) and touchscreens, I promise to be most attentive. :)

Office suite disk sizes

2006-08-07T23:28:00.000+01:00

All figures for win32:

Abiword + Gnumeric - 87MB
OpenOffice 2.0 - 203MB
WordPerfect Office X3 Trial - 395MB
MS Office 2003 (including InfoPath and Publisher) - 664MB
MS Office 2007 beta (recommended install) - 1505MB
MS Office 2007 beta (exluding Outlook) - 1448MB
MS Office 2007 beta (excluding InfoPath, Publisher and Visio Viewer) - 1317MB
MS Office 2007 beta (excluding Outlook, InfoPath, Publisher and Visio Viewer) - 1259MB
MS Office 2007 beta (full install) - 1641MB

Unselecting all the templates, clipart, etc. shaves off another 20MB - fairly insignificant! Unselecting everything leaves 751MB, which presumably is composed of shared application libraries - maybe this is the engine that draws the new widgets - ribbon etc.? I just can't help thinking Office 2007 will give an entirely new meaning to bloatware. Someone said in the PC Pro issue that I got the beta from that Microsoft had specified not to include OpenOffice.org on the same CD. The columnist felt that this was a mistake because MS Office would win in a direct comparison of features. In a direct comparison of bloat, OpenOffice.org wins hands down. Note that OpenOffice.org dates back to October 2005, yet still has a smaller footprint than the version of MS Office released in November 2003. I hope I'll have time to check out memory consumption.

Conflict from the OLPC mesh

2006-08-01T10:33:00.000+01:00

The One Laptop Per Child project is receiving much criticism in recent days (also see a waffly article in PC Pro, August 2006 issue). I'm personally concerned about two things.

I just had the first look at the mockups of the Sugar interface on the laptop.org wiki, and many of the screenshots show browser windows displaying Red Hat promotional material - hardly suitable for educating children! I strongly believe these links must be omitted from the final version. Obviously, information is required, but not inundated with PR speak and graphics.

The second concern is about the mesh - this is an idea that I independently had a little while ago, of making direct links between mobile devices to make masts redundant. I imagined this would be useful if using a mobile in the countryside, so long as a chain of capable mobile devices was available trailing back to civilisation, where masts as well as a denser, more reliable mesh would be available. The OLPC project is intending to use this principle to give internet access to their hand-crank recharged laptops. As far as I understand at this point, the mesh goes down when the computer is switched off; trivially, it definitely goes down when the battery runs out. So what if the kids in the next village don't keep their laptops cranked, and you end up losing the link? This can either lead to the mesh collapsing over time (because if I've little hope of getting a link, I won't crank my machine) or to conflict between villages. Not that learning conflict resolution is a bad thing, but this should be addressed by the organisers when the laptops are introduced. If you sell these as a wonder pill, and then the link keeps going down, people will be hugely disappointed and toss these laptops aside. Back to carpet-weaving you go, Chaitanya!

Comment and ratings control

2006-07-30T10:31:00.000+01:00

Many websites, from user forums to commercial sites with ratings systems, have this problem: how to vet the content users are putting on their sites to avoid being involved in libel suits. However, my experience of several forums would suggest that policing structures quickly evolve, whose main means of punishment is intellectual disgracing (often expressed as "RTFM" or "Google is your friend").

I have also wondered whether online shops such as Amazon manipulate their reviews. Again, it seems they don't, in order not to cause such rumours among their customers, although IP-range and cookie based action could circumvent the problem of people checking their own reviews still exist. Note that I am merely pointing out the technical possibility of this - Amazon has enough negative reviews on some items to suggest it's not greasing its wheels.

It does strike me that in some sinister "brave new world" (just read William Gibson), content transmission will be policed by the control freaks hired by forums and other websites to suppress the undesirable. To the best of my layperson knowledge, there is no legal requirement for private companies to give accounts of such content censorship. I do wonder, though, whether Amazon's terms and conditions have anything to say on the matter. Perhaps we should request this.

Online rating systems: better based on cash

2006-07-28T20:10:00.000+01:00

One may wonder why Amazon has various rating systems built in (one is customer reviews, another is "did you find this review helpful?", and finally, there's one for rating sellers), whereas blogger.com and Wikipedia do not. Even eBay has a rudimentary one.

You might also wonder book authors and electronics manufacturers don't spam the amazon rating system somehow. Even Wikipedia gets spammed. In the case of eBay, this is fairly clear: to rate, you have to pay. You could sell your friends stuff and they would up your rating, but you would still have to pay the eBay fee. Similarly for Amazon sellers: without a sale, you don't get to judge the seller.

Basically, the only way to be safe from spam is to force the rater to surrender cash. A possible alternative is to get his credit card details (although any one person may have more than one credit card), and a third alternative is to keep track of IP addresses (with internet cafes and dynamic IPs, this is a weak one, though). Email addresses, obviously, forget it.

Open source, stability and release cycles

2006-07-23T15:01:00.000+01:00

Windows releases every, erm..., six years. Mac OS X releases nearly once a year. Ubuntu Linux releases every half year. Fedora Core is now releasing every seven to nine months.

My experience with both Fedora Core in the first three releases, and Ubuntu up until now, is that system updates break things. The final release has always undergone such thorough testing as to work really well, but it seems that the updates following are sent through relatively unfiltered from the upstream projects, and this is typically where things break. OS X has much less frequent updates, and these are generally better tested, and rarely break things (never for me).

The problem arises as much from the fact that servers need first and foremost to be secure (whereas desktop systems need first and foremost to be useable) as it does from the fact that desktop systems have more complex package dependencies. I hope that the software industry can get to the point where desktop systems need only be upgraded sporadically, and where the upgrades are thoroughly tested. This should be just as possible for Linux to achieve as it evidently is for OS X.

Closed source and reinventing the wheel

2006-07-23T14:41:00.000+01:00

It's not great news to anyone that closed source code leads to permanent reinventing of the wheel. Nonetheless, I am impressed by the number of programs out there, especially on the Mac platform, that all do the same thing in only slightly different ways. There are at least a half dozen each of RSS readers, notebooks (think OneNote), launchers and web browsers for Aqua/Cocoa. I've no doubt there is a lot of innovation going on and that there are advantages to the approach in that it enforces having completely separate projects, each with complete freedom to develop (after all, some basic components, such as html rendering, are usually provided by the OS, meaning developers need merely wrap a GUI around it). However, it does strike me that the creators are often unaware of other people's existing creations. This does not usually happen with open source, as first versions are released early, and newcomers tend to join the fastest-developing projects, so that even competing lead developers sometimes abandon their projects and join their prior rivals. Nonetheless, as we see with jukebox applications, projects periodically replace each other as something better gets developed from scratch (for an example, see how Amarok is taking over from XMMS - with several others waiting in the wing for their chance - or how gnome is replacing KDE as the main Linux distributors' favourite). I have yet to see this approach stifle innovation, although it has to be said that OS X remains the most technologically advanced environment.

Google Earth will not go South

2006-07-17T11:13:00.000+01:00

Anyone ever tried to surf Antarctica using Google Earth? I was disappointed to find that the satellite pictures are apparently organised to converge on the poles, leading to Antarctica being displayed in slices, besides the low resolution. I hope this will be improved.

Listened, not bought

2006-07-17T11:10:00.000+01:00

I've just been reading about the new technology that's supposed to let you download any song that the radio happens to be playing. This is meant to be put into mobile phones and stationary digital radios, and a song would cost 1.25 GBP. The way it's described, it sounds like a client side technology, where the client knows the identity of the song playing on any given station. This would mean your client could continually pick the stations playing your favourite songs at that very moment, without any purchase ever made!

I really hope for their sakes that the inventors implemented this as a server-side technology, otherwise... oh dear!

Laptop makers supporting Linux

2006-07-17T11:06:00.000+01:00

Just as I predicted, PC makers are being driven to increasingly support Linux as the only other notable operating system available to them, Windows, falls behind competitor Mac OS X.

How the distribution of money affects consumer decisions

2006-06-29T18:29:00.000+01:00

I'll just give two examples here:

Speed-dating agencies in the UK charge about £20 per person per evening, where an evening might be attended by around 30 people. To put on an evening of this kind, they need probably less than a handful of their own staff, plus an arrangement with the venue (which is probably easily arranged, since the customers will be buying drinks - the venue is typically a reasonably fashionable bar).

Takings of £600 for an evening clearly outstrip the costs by a wide margin, I imagine in the region of 50-200% margin depending on the exact circumstances. Why are we willing to pay that much? Would you want to attend a meeting whose stated purpose is finding a social and sexual partner knowing they had paid less than 20 quid?

Example number 2. People often pay a premium of up to 100% on the top food brand as opposed to the store brand or an unmarketed "brand". Why? Because the industry leader is rich enough to take measures that ensure the quality of the product and avoid a lawsuit brought by customer. An attempt to build an alternate brand if the first one is tarnished would be unlikely to succeed. A brand that has not spent money on advertising can more easily recover.

I'm sure there are more business opportunities that could be built around these general principles.

Scratchy no sell

2006-06-09T00:21:00.000+01:00

To my mind, the craze to personalise items is a scam by hardware vendors to prevent resale of products. One might wonder whether Apple's scratchy iPod screens fall into the same category.

Speeding up Firefox

2006-06-09T00:08:00.000+01:00

Things to try:

Fasterfox extension - for all platforms
Firefox builds optimised for various Mac platforms - e.g. Firefox 1.5.0.4 builds
Swiftfox - Linux builds for specific AMD and Intel processors

PC upgrades: why little makes a difference

2006-06-02T10:39:00.000+01:00

People may reasonably marvel why they should pay much extra for having an 60GB rather than a 40GB hard drive, or a 2GHz processor rather than 1.8GHz. On the face of it, the price may seem designed for people who want the best, and the abstaining consumer may be proud to be a member of the less easily fooled. However, do consider that your operating system may consume some 10GB of hard disk space, so now you get 50GB rather than 30GB. Sounds better already? The same goes for RAM (memory); it is anticipated that the next Windows version may consume as much as 512MB of memory just to run. So if you bought 2GB total memory rather than 1GB (as a hypothetical future example, these configurations would currently be thought unusually performant *cough*), you'd have 1.5GB free vs. 512MB. Quite a difference, non? You've suddenly gone from factor 2 to factor 3.

Thinking about CPU speed is slightly more complex, because the benefit depends whether your system usage scales with the clockspeed or not. If you have lots of CPU intensive services running at regular intervals (such as a web server, not unheard of!), you will benefit from having those extra 200MHz extra, although whether you realise this, and are actually more efficient because of it, is up to you to assess. However, personally, choosing between a 1.83GHz and a 2.16GHz CPU, I would always go for the lower end. For many years, chip manufacturers like Intel have worked hard to make us believe that your computer's performance depends crucially on the clockspeed. Experts know that RAM is more important, and stuff their machines full of it. (This is partly the fault of PC sellers, who will invariably package the smallest amount of RAM that will keep the machine going. Currently, this would be 512MB. Even 768MB will give you markedly better performance, and may cost you less than a 100 GBP to upgrade!)

Kaleem Aftab

2006-05-30T19:24:00.000+01:00

Just want to share one of my secret tips with you. I was reading Kaleem Aftab's reviews when he was still writing for The List. Best movie reviews I ever read. He really knows what to appreciate about a film. He writes stuff for the Independent these days, aside of his book, Spike Lee: That's My Story and I'm Sticking To It, and his film projects. Kaleem, let's see more of you! Miss you at The List, it's not been the same and I stopped buying it.

The BBC gave him some "my space" thing with an interface that makes my eyes hurt. Still, some might find it useful...

How many packages does your distro have?

2006-05-30T00:03:00.000+01:00

Data from Wikipedia.

Apple pricing: Mac Mini vs. MacBook

2006-05-29T21:34:00.000+01:00

So an extra £150 (check out the Core Duo Mac Mini) gets you a display, battery, keyboard and touchpad?

Elephant Dreams

2006-05-27T19:37:00.000+01:00

Being a fan of Blender and its community, I've just watched Elephant Dreams. It's like a film with bad acting. Rather reminded me of that other free animation film featuring a cute robot alone in a space station, with some kind of guard robot chasing it. It was really boring.

Elephant Dreams' character animations remind me of the Plumber short film, which was actually rather good, very funny. I just wish that they'd improvised ED with real actors first.

Okay. It sucks. Sorry. Show me some open source that works. Thanks.

OS X needs a meta-window-switching key

2006-05-27T19:22:00.000+01:00

In order to ease the transition of Linux and Windows users to OS X, it really needs an application-agnostic window switching key, different from either Cmd-Tab or Cmd-`, which change either within or between applications, and can be quite limiting to the keyboard-centric user.

Update 30/07/2006: Prayer answered.

Growl, Azureus and other GUI evils

2006-05-27T19:00:00.000+01:00

Some of you may be familiar with the OS X add-on Growl, which displays little messages that programs send in a pop-up window that does not take focus. Other programs, such as Azureus, have this ability built in without using Growl. Windows has had this feature for a long time, so why has Apple never implemented it?

There is a very sensible reason. Remember the icons in the dock that jump up and down when an application needs attention? Rather than throwing a window your way like most Windows applications would, often resulting in text or even passwords being lost or disclosed by typing them into the wrong window that has just popped up, OS X is courteous and kindly asks the user for some of his attention, "when you're ready".

Moreover, it does so in an area of the screen that is usually guaranteed not to be used for any other purpose. Growl, on the other hand, could quite conceivably pop up in an area of the screen that the user is actually performing work in, and prevent the user from executing a mouse action, and break his concentration. Some may intuit that the problem could be alleviated by having Growl messages displayed in a separate window, which would then cause its icon to bob, being more courteous. But this is actually worse than having the original application take such action, because the user couldn't tell at a glance which application was calling him. On the other hand, applications use Growl to display many more messages than they would usually display of their own. So perhaps they should not be displaying these messages at all, since doing so would simply lead to an inflation of messages, and an all-dancing desktop. If that's what we wanted, we'd be using Windows, right?

Google and Amazon?

2006-05-22T19:35:00.000+01:00

If someone can explain to me why Amazon and Google haven't figured out a way to integrate GoogleAds and MarketPlace, please do! It could be so simple:

The customer pays Google not for clicks, but for actual successful sales resulting from clicks. Reciprocally, Google could automatically adjust its advertising so that customers' ads appear on the page for the search results that generate the most revenue for the customer. Finally, Google could reward customers whose clicks result in revenue more often by ranking them at the top of the ads page. I haven't recently followed up the GoogleAd bombs story (you make a bot to click on competitors' ads to relieve them of their money) and whether Google has found a solution for this, but this is a solution that works because you pay per sale, not per click. Hire me? :)

Update 13/06/2006: Well, look what they did. I should stop posting.

Update 30/07/2006: As a sidenote, Froogle already provides seller ratings for some sellers.

Spotlight: Apple's grip on UI goodness is slipping

2006-05-21T01:00:00.000+01:00

Doubtless many of you will have noticed that Spotlight returns results in a window while it's still searching its index. This is a useless and annoying feature, as you could actually try to click one of the items - it is possible - but then end up opening the wrong one because the list has expanded between your first and second clicks. Steve Jobs, I'm losing faith. Thermal paste?

Apple needs to back web-based office apps

2006-05-20T21:32:00.000+01:00

Here I go disagreeing with Robert Cringely again.

He writes in a recent "pulpit" edition that Apple needs to develop their own competitor to Office so Microsoft can no longer boss them around. I had previously commented on Cyberdog's suggestion that Apple had introduced BootCamp to break MS Office's power over OS X.

What Cringely is apparently oblivious to is the existence of web-based office replacements such as Group Office (GPL) and ThinkFree Office (proprietary). ThinkFree in particular constitutes a fairly faithful and fully compatible clone of MS Office. However, when I last checked, it was capable neither of executing VBA macros nor of performing statistical calculations, not to mention having citation functionality that usually comes on the form of EndNote.

Great as Pages and Keynote may be from a user interface and eye candy perspective, if Apple were to invest in one of these web-based office solutions to supplement the missing features, they'd catch Microsoft up in no time, at smaller effort.

Update 28/05/2006: I'm not the only one to find Cringely occasionally flakey. Daniel Eran also has a few chickens to pluck with the controversial man. Let's see if I can take on Eran next ;)

Who's your daddy?

2006-05-17T18:24:00.000+01:00

I'm trying to decide whether this computer is trying to look like this computer or this computer.

MacBook: user-swappable hard disk

2006-05-17T14:11:00.000+01:00

Below the two RAM slots (at the base of the battery cavity) is where you'll find the MacBook's hard disk drive. Without disassembling the notebook, users will be able to quickly removing some protective aluminum shielding and lift the drive out of the computer.

Source: http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1750

MacBook: glossy screen

2006-05-17T11:20:00.000+01:00

Here is the most extensive documentation yet of the drawbacks of the new glossy screen on the MacBook, now also available as an option for the MacBook Pro. Here are some more photos.

MacBook: not for the paranoid?

2006-05-16T16:56:00.000+01:00

For instance, when you’re in a dark room, MacBook turns down the brightness. Just one of the many ways MacBook conserves energy out of the box, optimizing both AC and battery power.

Says the Apple website. Although it is possible that the MacBook has a separate light/dark sensor, I'm guessing they measure brightness using the camera. I hope either this feature or the actual camera itself can actually be switched off. Not everyone wants a Paris Hilton incident in the home. Yes, cover that camera when not in use! Did you know that Flash may be able to access your audio-in? Hah, scary...

MacBook

2006-05-16T15:40:00.001+01:00

So the news is out.

The MacBook, now for sale, has a 13 inch widescreen display (1280 x 800 where I had anticipated closer to Sony's 1366 x 768), a mini-DVI output which requires an inexpensive (15 GBP) adapter for either a DVI or VGA socket on your display. It also features the dual-core CoreDuo processor, from 1.83GHz, where many expected to see a "CoreSolo" for the cheaper end of the range.

The anticipated black finish is only available for the 2GHz 80GB+ model, at an 89 GBP premium! Its budget nature is revealed, however, when considering the weight: The MacBook weighs in at a sizeable 2.36kg, comparing unfavourably, for example, to the superiorly configured Sony VAIO VGN-SZ110B, which weighs only 1.86kg.

We shall have to wait for news on battery life (not expected to diverge from the MacBook Pro), thermal paste, whine and MagSafe. Some people are curious about GPU performance.

The Unix-Windows security debate

2006-05-04T14:46:00.000+01:00

The Windows guys say when OS X becomes common, it will be affected by viruses just as much (the epidemiology standpoint). The Unix guys say, no, because Unix is designed as a multi-user system with restricted user and file permissions from the ground up, so viruses have far fewer avenues for propagation (the system design standpoint).

And then there are userland macro/script viruses, where the unix file permissions don't apply, a problem common to all pluggable applications, especially where the user is a) not asked to consent to execution of a b) digitally signed macro.

That's as much as there is to this debate. Simple, hmm?

Major embarrassment for Apple: thermal paste in MBP

2006-05-01T22:26:00.000+01:00

As nicely illustrated in this forum post, Apple manufacturers have been applying excess amounts of thermal paste to all relevant bits of hardware, hence . Not only has this led to questions whether the MacBook will be similarly affected, besides being the reason why MacBook Pros are not designated "laptops", it has even led to suggestions (pending investigation) that this problem may have afflicted PowerBooks and G5 computers, and that Apple's move to Intel hardware may have been mostly motivated by what has now turned out to be the result of incorrect application of heat paste. Yes, embarrassing!

Computers with Mactel hardware?

2006-04-28T00:44:00.000+01:00

If anyone can explain to me why Mac OS X-compatible hardware budget offerings from third party manufacturers aren't popping up all over the place, I'll be glad to hear it - sure, they couldn't deliver them with OS X pre-installed, or they'd be liable. But there sure must be quite a few customers out there wanting a slice of OS X goodness without the price tag! (Who cares if the customers break the license terms?)

Darwine on Mac OS X

2006-04-25T10:40:00.000+01:00

To join in with speculation by John Martellaro and others (John suggests that Mac OS X could be partly replacing its rumoured virtual machine to run XP, Vista and Linux, with a Darwine implementation for Vista), I would like to point out that Wine is almost feature-complete for XP, so Apple could give Microsoft a quicker death by quenching Vista in its pram - support XP apps via Darwine NOW, and eradicate any developer desire to support Vista (as it will have smaller market share than XP probably forever). If there are no apps that depend on Vista, consumers likely won't want it either!

Steve Ballmer foresaw it when he chanted "developers, developers, developers, developers" - unless developers use the new Vista features, the platform will die because it does not offer considerable user interface improvements in the way that OS X increments do (Exposé, Spotlight, etc.)

Windows XP API in Mac OS X 10.5?

2006-04-21T23:48:00.000+01:00

Here goes Cringely again, suggesting that Mac OS X will fully support Windows XP apps natively; what he neglects to mention is that this would totally kill Windows Vista, as it would mean that no software vendor other than MS will develop their apps beyond the API offered by XP (since using Vista-specific features will lose them the Mac OS X installed base, while using only XP features will allow them to stop developing a Mac OS X specific version...).

So here we would have a company that used to sell its hardware because the hardware supported a unique, user-friendly OS that everybody wanted, changing into a company that sells good hardware (I doubt XP apps would be supported in Macish way (menu bar at top etc.) But then Cringely claimed in his previous column that Sony would beat Apple on delivery time, so what's happening here? Is Apple's demise in the wings? Can they survive on the quality of Mail and Preview alone (which I think will not be included in the OS X compatibility kit for Windows)?

The advent of the mount virus

2006-04-18T21:45:00.000+01:00

I had previously wondered whether the large number of Linux-Windows dual boot systems would attract viruses that can propagate between the two operating systems (OS), making a relatively secure OS (e.g. Linux, if up to date with security patches) insecure by association with an insecure OS (e.g. Windows, even if up to date with security patches).

Gartner last week published an advisory stating that Mac OS X is at no additional risk from viruses through dual booting. While it is correct that current Windows viruses cannot infect Mac OS X on a dual boot system, it is also true that there are a lot of open code bases that include a plethora of file system drivers that could be ported to Windows by ambitious virus authors. It is also true that an OS can usually be identified by the file system it's on, for historical reasons not worth going into.

The best advice, as always, is to use your insecure OS (yes, Windows) only on virtual machines.

Update 25/04/2006:
Looks like we may be skipping the dual boot virus stage and heading straight for VM rootkits. This seems to be in line with rumours that Apple's next operating system release will have a virtual machine to run Windows and Linux operating systems as guests, included.

Update 02/05/2006:
Finally someone hears me.

Update 11/10/2006:
Link - link - somewhat related topic

Microsoft and Beagle

2006-04-16T15:49:00.000+01:00

Many within the Linux community have expressed well-justified concerns at building such a crucial desktop tool as a desktop search engine on a technology patented to Microsoft - .NET. It is good to see that the warnings have been heeded, and Beagle is an optional addition to GNOME, which also includes a more traditional, but slower, replacement of most of the functionality.

However, luckily for us, it seems that Microsoft is temporarily preoccupied with figuring out what Apple are up to, and it can be hoped, although should not be assumed, that the Microsoft vs. Mono debate will never resurface.

How Apple can catch up with Linux

2006-04-16T15:38:00.000+01:00

There are two elements missing from Apple's Mac OS X desktop environment that set productivity under Linux apart:

Paste action of middle mouse button (yes, Mighty Mouse is the right direction).
One-click responsiveness of windows not belonging to the currently active application.

Finally, Finder really needs a big update now that encompasses Spotlight functionality (more file info in Spotlight, instant conversion of Spotlight searches to Smart Folders), but I believe this is in the works for Leopard already.

Finally, by making Windows apps run on OS X, or OS X apps on Windows, Apple could grab some of the Windows-entrenched niche markets such as those tied to Windows-bound GIS and CAD applications and traditionally relying heavily on superior workstation processing power.

Landslide towards Apple

2006-04-16T15:20:00.000+01:00

With slim, widescreen machines promised as the "MacBook" replacement of the iBook for May or June according to rumours, possibly in several colours and with DVI-Out connectivity, there will be a landslide of customers towards Apple, unless further hardware problems emerge (a possible source of which could be Apple's inclusion of flash memory, between hard disk and RAM in the sequence of memory elements; there is no precedent for this in any hardware sold by the company). The next release of the operating system, Leopard, will be well placed to steal away further market share, especially if Apple manages to keep the footprint small (an area where Vista is especially vulnerable).

At the other end of Apple's business, there is a risk of losing mp3 player market share unless they can revitalise their range with colourful models to mimic the appeal of the iPod Mini. Note the negative knock-on effect this could have on their iTunes Music Store. France has taken a lead in asking Apple to unlock iTunes for other mp3 player manufacturers, and further countries are likely to follow. In fact, Apple's losing mp3 player market share may force such a move of the company's own accord to keep the store alive. I very much doubt it will come to this, but it is clear that Apple has to continue remaining competitive on price and innovation, especially since in spite of their promotion of podcasting, this has remained a niche market.

How Microsoft can save their ass

2006-04-16T15:06:00.000+01:00

Seeing that Microsoft has been feeling the Linux threat for a while, and that Apple will start eating into its OEM dealers' sales even more heavily once the iBook replacements (aka MacBook) go on sale, how can Microsoft draw back from this two-front battle and vow new customers with superior technical features?

Here are a few suggestions:

expand the shell capabilities (find, grep, easy batch processing etc.)
include an installer/updater interface that allows installing commercial software (similar to iTunes Store; the precedent has been set; customer acceptance could be high if it wasn't Microsoft...) at a button press, including upgrade deals for installed software; that also allows updating all applications to newest version, not just Microsoft ones; that allows downloading/compiling newest FOSS software (Gnumeric, Abiword, Gimp, Gaim, XChat, etc.) at the press of a button (yes, include a compiler free of charge!)
one single version priced at 99 USD to compete with Apple's OS pricing and eliminate customer confusion

Note that all of these points are about the user experience rather than the raw processing ability, whereas many Microsoft innovations due to arrive with Vista address the latter (e.g. WinFS). Also note my upcoming post about Apple.

Photography: perfect picture vs. artistic freedom

2006-04-14T18:51:00.000+01:00

There is a rift running through the photographing community, a rift between amateurs and press photographers on the one hand, who want a picture perfectly sharp, with colours as natural as possible and maximum depth of focus. Others, let's call them the artists, want to control every aspect of their exposure, and may be more open to post-production manipulation. Both, of course, have certain priorities in common. Fast start-up times and high exposure frequencies are on that wishlist.

This rift is not reflected in the current marketing strategies for cameras. Models are not sold separately to the two groups, and cameras come with a plethora of modes, an easy-to-use all-manual one often being absent. And there are other niceties that I can't seem to find - how about, for instance, an SLR camera whose lens automatically opens when you pick it up (or not if you switched off that feature)?

Apple's motivation for BootCamp?

2006-04-12T13:01:00.000+01:00

Different views are being expressed about this. Two that I found interesting:

He did it to finally castrate Redmond's last stranglehold on Apple; to wit, "Office:mac." (sic) No longer would Apple be subject to the MBU's whims, threats, foot-draggings and feigned indifference to gain leverage and force Apple to do its bidding. The impetuous, jealous and child-like Bill Gates made truck-loads of cash peddling the horrendous (but vital to millions because, as Chef Joanna says "it's what everyone else uses") Office to Mac users, but it's not like he needed the money. No, it did something much more entertaining for Bill- it gave him power over Steve. Now, if Microsoft folds up the MBU tents (takes its ball and goes home), who cares? Windows can be run on a Mac, along with Office or any other crappy-but-necessary Windows "proggie."

Source

Robert Cringely has a different take on things. He sees Microsoft as the only immediate beneficiary, but danger is in the wings:

I predict that Apple will settle on 64-bit Intel processors ASAP (with FireWire 800 please), and at that time will announce a product similar to Boot Camp to allow OS X to run on bog-standard 32-bit PC hardware, turning the Boot Camp relationship on its head and trying to sell $99 copies of OS X to 100 million or so Windows owners.

Source

The only other time that I read Cringely, he postulated a merger of Apple and Intel, one that we have yet to see. Also compare with my earlier post on the future development of the operating systems market.

Biggest drawback of web applications: slow load times

2006-04-09T20:11:00.000+01:00

I recently tested some RSS reader websites, and my conclusion is that the response times are not satisfactory for these to replace desktop newsreaders. Bloated code may sometimes be to blame, and anyone who's looked at the output from Apple's iWeb will know what I mean. In one case, I got suspicious and looked more closely; the design did not strike me as overly sophisticated and clearly would be manageable with a small amount of CSS. But here, one humungous chunk of JavaScript gets loaded every time you view a page - 12KB of code that remains the same, and the rest of the page unnecessarily written in DHTML.

The JavaScript could be cached as a separate file by the browser, and the rest should probably be static or cached on the server. In fact, this is a good example of where user event-based caching can be used. Each user has a namespace of urls, which I will call userspace, that he or she can access only after logging in. Hence, these pages can be generated and loaded into cache when the user enters, and purged when he or she logs out, or if the user becomes inactive and there is competition for memory on the server.

But to back away from the technical for a moment, what we are seeing is competition between bandwidth and small footprint of web applications on the one hand [1], and processor speed and application efficiency for desktop applications on the other. It's still a question of time before the web wins out completely, and the browser becomes the operating system.

[1] Don't worry about the servers - they'll be up to scratch if the demand and competition are there (user demand for web services; competition for speed of delivery).

Sidebar design done right

2006-04-08T15:29:00.000+01:00

I'm not usually fond of Microsoft's UI designs, but in the case of MS Office 2003 products, they've outdone themselves. Look at this example of easy navigation between different sidebar options:

Now compare this to how it looks in Firefox:

The search bar is a nice touch and somewhat redeeming feature, but having fast navigation between different sidebar options would be even better!

Update 24/04/2006:
The All-In-One Sidebar Firefox extension looks like a good alternative solution, although I've yet to test whether it will accommodate Document Map, which, to add annoyance, is broken in the current Firefox release (1.5.0.2).

Apple Intel transition: third-party app killer?

2006-03-15T15:49:00.000Z

Digg This!

It is clear that several of the top third party applications on Apple Macs will only run under the Rosetta Stone emulation, which renders them slower on the Mactels than they would be on the G4/G5 being phased out. This would include Microsoft Office (which competes with iWork) and products by Adobe and other graphics specialists (which compete with the "Pro" applications, such as the new Aperture). Interestingly, Apple made sure that other crucial applications, such as Wolfram's Mathematica, were swiftly ported, and helped them do so. I've no doubt that Apple's own applications are already available as Universal Binaries, and will run at native (Intel compiler?) speeds on the Mactels.

Needless to say, Apple would also be doing the open source movement a favour if it contributed to breaking the MS Office lock-in (and note the fact that Mac OS X has allowed creating PDFs from MS Office documents for a long time, whereas in Windows, you needed PDFCreator to do so).

tags:apple, mac, macintosh, ppc, intel, mactel, adobe, x86, mathematica, aperture,apple-intel, apple-intel transition, microsoft, microsoft office, macintel

Apple shipping Windows? I don't think so.

2006-02-22T14:18:00.000Z

I've had to smile myself repeated times when people on IRC and elsewhere came up with hypotheses about why Apple would switch to Windows. This is not going to happen for both strategic and technical reasons.

Mac OS X has been the major selling point of Apple hardware for years. "PC" hardware used to be what Apple made most of its money on. Mac OS X came with iTunes pre-loaded. This encouraged people to buy an iPod. Windows users saw it on their friends and strangers in the street, wanted it, got iTunes to run it. Normal users do not go installing software themselves without good reason, i.e. very few would have installed iTunes were it not for the iPod. And guess what? Apple business has since shifted to the iTunes Music Store. So basically, Mac OS X drives the vast bulk of Apple's business directly or indirectly.

So much for the strategic, more of the technical. Mac OS X appeals to completely non-technical users through its intuitive interface. It also appeals to very technical users due to its Unix (or specifically, BSD) base. Due to various graphics accelerations, including CoreImage, Mac OS X is a far better OS to be running on graphics workbenches than is Microsoft Windows XP. Even though Adobe will be running a little more slowly on the new Intel Macs until 2007, the date it is thought they will release native Intel-OS X versions (binaries), I don't think there's a chance in hell that Apple will be abandoning their powerful graphics engines, and ship a less versatile OS like Windows Vista (yes, the shell has improved, but a lot of legacy tools won't have been ported yet, e.g. expect, screen, tee).

What many people don't realise is that most of the hardware Apple build into their machines is also available to other hardware makers; Apple need to still beware of being overtaken by one of the smaller companies operating in that space.

A much better way to run Windows apps on Mac is VirtualPC. It costs about the same as a native Windows install. And Darwine is waiting in the wings.

tags:apple, mac, macintosh, ppc, intel, mactel, x86, apple-intel, microsoft, macintel, windows, microsoft windows, windows vista, microsoft windows vista

Dream merger: Logitech, Apple and Dyson

2006-02-19T02:06:00.000Z

Three great technology companies that make extensive use of plastics in their products. Three leaders on ergonomics and usability. Wouldn't it be great?

Joking aside, Steve Jobs once commented in an interview about how he got absorbed in choosing a washing machine and how all sorts of household devices still fascinate and bother him for being so badly made. Well, guess what? Dyson make washing machines*. No, I'm not going to try and sell this one to you. You're too clever to buy it. Apple are not planning to take over Dyson. And James Dyson wouldn't be bought. He's a housemade man.

But Logitech? Nah, I couldn't point at Apple and say, "look what crappy mice they make!" 'Cause they'd be making Logitech ones.

* (and many other things, including vacuum cleaners)

Update 12/04/2006: The washing machine passage of the Jobs interview can be found here.

Eye tracking for window focus

2006-02-10T19:06:00.000Z

What would help me so much right now is an eye-tracking device that gave focus to the window I was currently looking at. Random, but significant thoughts... One for the wishlist!

Codewiki

2006-01-31T14:56:00.000Z

It just struck me that wikis are ideally suited to editing code, as each function name can be a link to the definition of that function, making code browsing a snap. Would be a trivial mediawiki extension. If you know of any code wiki, please let me know, too! I also suspect that some IDEs have this functionality?

GUI to queue and edit jobs to be done over ssh

2006-01-27T20:11:00.000Z

Had the idea for an app that allows you to:

list jobs you want done over ssh (no point running more than one job at a time on single-cpu machines)
enable editing the cmdline arguments of each job before it is submitted
allow pasting or even drag-and-drop of jobs (e.g. between different machines) into the queue
allow reordering jobs

tags:ssh, secure shell, gui, graphical user interface

P2P RSS network

2006-01-27T07:14:00.000Z

Have you ever been annoyed that when you subscribe to a new RSS feed, there may be only 10 articles available? Granted, this problem is addressed by some of the online RSS readers out there (I've posted before), but it might just be interesting to have the html content distributed by a P2P network. I believe this would significantly speed up loading of html pages for those feeds that use html. If you know of any such effort, please let me know!

tags:p2p, rss, peer-to-peer

Reinstalling Linux: a checklist

2006-01-26T02:35:00.000Z

I thought it would be nice for people to have a checklist of what they need to back up before installing a different Linux flavour.

/etc - system configuration
/home - your files and configurations
/boot/grub/menu.lst or grub.conf
/var/httpd - only if you're running web services and using the global directory; on some distributions, this is not placed in /var (e.g. in Arch it's in /home/httpd)
do a mysqldump if you're using mysql; similarly for any other relational database
dump your package list - sometimes this is done by reading file names from /var/cache/pkg or similar after cleaning out old package files; some package managers will output a list (something like dpkg --get-selections on Debian and derivatives)

Remote desktop client with zoom

2006-01-23T16:42:00.000Z

Wouldn't it be great to have a remote desktop (e.g. VNC) client that compensated for different desktop sizes by means of zoom? Libraries for such zooming exist in Mac OS X, GNOME and KDE, even Windows! Even better if the server supported it. If there is a way to do this, let me know!

Update 07/05/2006:
krdc has this feature.

Linux repository classification schemes

2006-01-13T11:56:00.000Z

Originally, I was going to write this as an extended paper with a detailed review of how the ten main Linux distributions organise their software into repositories. However, I don't seem to have the time to do so, and will provide a brief overview here instead.

This is relevant to developing tools that allow comparisons of repositories, e.g. comparison of software availability (how many software packages are available; how quickly are new versions released, how current are the current versions, how many versions are released in a given time - three sides of a triangle; other comparisons might take into account stability and other criteria), such as whohas.

In any case, there are three main ways to classify repositories:

Maturity
Providence
Function

The classic example of repositories organised by maturity would be Debian, which at any given time has three branches which may be more or less distinct (there is a graph of the relationship over time somewhere on the web...) A peculiarity - indeed, a feature - of Debian is that one can almost freely mix packages from different repositories; so while one may be running a stable kernel, one could have an "unstable" version (the quality of unstable aka. still in development software is actually fairly high in Debian) of Mozilla-based (and -dependent) products. Many distributions (except source-based and advanced binary-based ones (Arch Linux)) occur as distinct releases in the wild, but Debian is the only one in which mixing repositories is common enough practice to actually work (in terms of documentation and being taken into account in development, if marginally).

A classic example of a providence-based repository classification is given by Fedora, which is now distributed as Core and Extras. Another common classification, especially used by RPM-based distros (for no technical reason as far as I know), is "Contrib", sometimes called Community.

Arch Linux has a hybrid of these two, in that Current correspond to Core, Extra and Community are self-explanatory providence-based contrasts, but there are aso Testing and Unstable repositories, which are code-maturity classifications and mostly contain packages that would otherwise be found in Core. To make things entirely confusing, there is a repository Unsupported, to which users can contribute buildscripts, so it is actually a fourth kind of classification, which I might phrase as binary-source-buildscript. Note that distributions will provide either source or buildscripts, but not both separately.

But to return to the original big three, the most prominent example of a functional classification would be Slackware, which classifies packages into base, latex, gnome etc.; however, these are not strictly repositories in that they would be separately specified in a package manager config file. Again, many hybrids exist - in Arch Linux, we also find an underlying functional classification into "categories", which resemble those in Slackware: x11, system, network, gnome etc.

Being aware of the different classification schemes used, one can get the full benefit of tools such as whohas.

Does Wikipedia change the rules of language evolution?

2006-01-08T17:29:00.000Z

I happened upon this example today:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Williams_revolution
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:George_C._Williams

It is argued that the term "Williams evolution" was coined either on wikipedia or in newsgroups. I find the wikipedia hypothesis quite plausible.

Picture this:

Some editor of, say, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_evolutionary_thought writes something like, "George C. Williams' book led to a small revolution [...]"
Over time, this becomes "George C. Williams' revolution", then "Williams' revolution"; someone thinks the apostrophe superfluous and the next person feels there should be something written about this "Williams revolution", so puts the infamous [[]] around it.
Finally, someone budges and writes a stub about it.
Meanwhile, the term "Williams revolution" has started being used in other articles because it's a more handy moniker than "advent of the gene-centric view of evolution". By now, putting it in [[]] is completely uncontroversial, because an article has already been written about it. So it appears on every imaginable page, ranging from "Scientific skepticism" over "Evolutionary theory and the political left" through to "The Vicar of Bray" (I am NOT kidding you!)
Eventually, someone feels that Williams may be being given undue credit and does some research. All Google hits point to wikipedia, including those from scholar.google.com. Web of Science doesn't return a single hit. One contributor claims having heard the term on a newsgroup, but this is hardly evidence of common usage. Various people including myself check their textbooks and the books of Dawkins who are now suddenly being credited with having invented the term. Nothing. Nada. Puzzlingly, the German wikipedia mentions the term in spite of not having an entry about it.
Due to lack of opposition, it is decided that it is not Wikipedia's business to have the power to coin useful phrases crediting someone who should not solely be credited.
Someone works their arse off for an afternoon to eliminate all trace of the Williams revolution.

If you know of similar events, please let me know - this topic has only just begun to get interesting!

Visual secrecy: viewing angles et des autres animaux

2005-12-20T18:31:00.000Z

Here are some ideas how you can prevent other people from reading your notes as you write them:

Write your notes in 3D, so that only people with appropriate 3D visors will be able to read.
Wear data visors that leave part of your visual field free to follow the lecturer; have your notes transmitted encrypted to the visor.
Use a laptop with very limited viewing angles.

Feel free to implement any of the former two and let me know when you succeed!

Linux/BSD utility: importing settings from remote $HOME

2005-12-19T11:22:00.000Z

I'm just following and participating in a discussion about the desirable extent of customisation here that was caused by Linus' recommending the use of KDE.

What is sorely needed is a simple tool that will allow a user to connect to his home machine by ssh-entunneled ftp and just press a button for importing all his settings. Otherwise any extent of customisation will aggravate the user as soon as he has to work on a different machine.

Xen and the desktop of tomorrow

2005-11-26T00:39:00.000Z

Tomorrow's computing world will be dominated by servers hosting multiple different OS's as virtual machines, to which users log on by protocols such as VNC from their local thin client terminals, which are no more than a bit of RAM, flash memory, a marginal CPU and display and input peripherals.

I predict that in less than five year's time, the preferred practice for booting a computer will be by Linuxbios -> GNU/Linux -> Xen -> Virtual OSs; this will happen on a central server with parallel 64 bit CPUs and large amounts of RAM. By using virtualisation technology, the conflict over which OS is being used is avoided - users will be able to switch between Linux, Windows, and possibly Mac OS X (or Free implementations of Mac OS X) guest OSs effortlessly, as a pool of virtual OSs will be available for users to sign on to. Multiple users could log on to the same OS instance, or a new instance be created for each user; advanced users could request root-jail type sessions, for instance. It is clear that Linux with Xen will be the host OS of choice, since this combination has the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).

Users will work at thin client terminals that have no more than a small amount of RAM and flash memory - no more than is needed to hold the kernel and sufficient graphics routines for a minimal VNC client; there will be a display and reasonably powerful video card, and fundamental audio hardware. Such hardware is already typical of today's thin clients. Linux, due to its virtues in embedded applications, is likely to be the foundation of such a thin client set-up.

As more services get transferred to the web - such as office applications in the guise of ThinkFree Office and GroupOffice; photo albums on Flickr; email services at Yahoo and Google, etc.; the browser will increasingly be the user's window to the world, and classical desktops will be displaced by the browser as the graphical user interface; tabbed and extensible browsers such as Firefox will gain in marketshare, but be themselves displaced by derivative projects that eliminate the "application" behaviour of the browser and implement the browser as the exclusive GUI to which the user signs on.

This presents a somewhat alternative scenario, in which the vast majority of virtual OS sessions hosted by the server would be a simple browser OS, allowing legacy hardware to drive the server and clients, with the labour-intensive services bought in from external service providers such as Yahoo and Google.

The niche for commercial desktop software is vanishing, then, with the advent of standards-compliant, Free browsing environments, that through high-level language-written web applications (in JavaScript and Java on the client, and Python, Perl and PHP, with an sql variant, on the server) achieve all of today's and tomorrow's objectives. Key to the success of this new way to using computers is the elimination of file traffic through the user's machine through sensible cross-integration of different web services and service providers with each other.

Technorati tag proliferation

2005-11-18T02:44:00.000Z

Technorati (possibly along with other tag-based websites) urgently needs to address the problem of tag proliferation. I don't think it is justified to have "cell phone", "cellphone", "cellphones", "cell phones", "mobile phone" and "mobile phones" as separate tags. See wikipedia and its "redirected from" feature!

Technorati tags:technorati, tags, tag (see?)

Mobile phone networks by P2P

2005-11-18T01:36:00.000Z

About a year ago, I was at a conference (nothing to do with IT, actually) and jotted down some notes that I've just found.

There are two problems with mobile phones:

reception is not possible when too far from a mast
emittance is often high and suspected of causing brain damage or dysfunction

Both problems can be alleviated to at least some extent by having phones forward other phone's calls. In principle, in large cities, it should be possible to make within-city calls without ever using a mast, because there is a continuous and dense net of phones throughout the city that can pass on the call. There are other people who understand more about routing methods than I do, but I'll just take it as given that a call can reach its destination by this method. In fact, I heard a physics talk by Neil F. Johnson, in which he alluded to the optimal way for satellites to compete for transmission of a signal. I don't remember the details of his talk, and don't have time to look them up.

One of the main challenges in routing is how to ensure a) that the signal is passed on, and b) that it travels by a single route (i.e. does not fork). It is easier for now to think of a single data packet, such as a text message, travelling in one direction only (we'll pretend it doesn't send a "received" signal back; afaik this is a recent feature anyway).

One thing that helps is for a phone to be aware of other phones in its environment and haggle with these phones over how many milliseconds it should wait before passing on a signal it has just caught. This is necessary to prevent forking and overdubbing (again, this may not be a problem with current mobile phone data protocols, but I know nothing about mobile phone signal transmission).

It also needs to memorise the ID of all packets it has recently sent and not transmit them again when they come back to it (inevitable if all phones emit with the same signal strength). However, there may be other routing approaches that yield the same results.

A phone may also want to haggle for a larger delay if it has recently transmitted large amounts of data, to save battery life.

Further complications arise from phones that are switched off while data is in transit or while they are sitting on a computed route (it makes sense to first find the route and then send the data over it).

I'll also quickly admit that, as usual, some other people had the same idea at around the same time. It is a rather obvious idea, but it does surprise that it took so long... I'd like to learn how their protocol works. We've had walkie-talkies for so long, why did they ever think of putting base stations in?

tags:mobile phone, mobile phones, cellphone, cellphones, cell phone, cell phones, p2p, peer network, peer to peer, routing, networks, cooperation

Sending calendar items over email

2005-11-17T22:41:00.000Z

As far as I know, there is no standard format for sending calendar items over email. Such email items could be immediately put in the calendar without much effort on the user's part (at worst, clicking a "Yes" button). I could allow certain people's calendar submissions to be automatically allowed into my calendar ("Always" button). Granted, this requires a mechanisms such as PGP/GPG to establish authenticity of emails, otherwise one is vulnerable to "calendar bombs".

The same could be done for addressbook items.

tags:calendar,address book,email

Auto-reply interface priorities

2005-11-17T15:13:00.000Z

Many current auto-reply setup interfaces don't have the following invaluable features:

Setting start and end dates (most now have this)
Displaying a big warning in the client to indicate that auto-reply is active
Setting a threshold to prevent replying to list emails; for instance, if the email is received by more than 10 ppl, do not send the reply; also, if it is received by addressees *@lists.*, do not reply.

Would be really easy to implement.

tags:auto-reply,autoreply

Intel and Apple

2005-11-15T00:49:00.000Z

Finally, since a visitor to this site, rich, challenged me to find more reasons why the pears will turn sour for Apple (pun and reference to FOSS projects intended), I'm at it again.

Some critics have argued that had Apple put more effort into optimisation of ppc compilers, they would not have had to abandon the architecture. The PowerPC architecture, of course, will survive on the merits of its floating point registers, and GNU/Linux will likely be the most popular operating system for it.

As for Apple's switch to Intel hardware: Mac OS X is Apple's greatest asset, but the business model has always been "want the OS, buy the computer". Whether or not the current reports of such achievements are truthful, Mac OS X will be hacked to run on ordinary x86 hardware.

However, there are benefits from the move. I have been wondering what the next generation Mac OS will be like, and it's clear that Apple could now at any point choose to switch to a different kernel, such as Linux (which also exists for PPC), opensolaris (which does not) or more exotic plants, such as DragonflyBSD.

One thing is clear. Whatever they do, they're stuck with POSIX compliance as a minimum.

The OS wars are coming to a computer near you. And this time, MS-DOS is going to lose.

tags:apple,mac,macintosh, ppc, intel,opensolaris,linux,pearpc,x86

Remote access to Mac OS X through osxvnc

2005-11-11T21:59:00.000Z

At long last, I can now access my Mac OS X desktop remotely from Linux at home. The installation of osxvnc on the desktop and tightvnc on the laptop was trivially easy - much recommended!

If you're going to do this, choose a window manager on the client side that will support full screen mode, and change the keybindings of the window manager to something other than the default, so you can use the default bindings on the host. In my case, I found that the Alt key mapped to Apple's Cmd (command) key, and the Meta (aka Windows) key to Apple's Alt. Ctrl was as expected.

Tags: vnc, remote desktop, keybindings, key bindings

High impact blogging

2005-11-06T02:00:00.000Z

There are a lot of blogs out there - how do you stand out? Some people, no doubt, are making money from Google Adwords et al., so how to be one of them?

Well, the first lesson, as always is, if you want something from people, you've got to give them something they want. Think hard about the content of your site - is it useful for the viewer? So far, so trivial.

The second obvious point is that you need to give people a chance to find your site. That's what this article is about - a basic outline of how I'm currently trying to promote my blog. [1]

The first rule in the modern world is that you need to include tags as you're writing the blog. Think of these as the analogues of keywords in the old world of simple, single html pages. I suspect that some blogging engines have a separate field for entering tags - can anyone confirm this?

You can further promote your blog by offering helpful advice in forums related to your blog subject, and have your blog url in your signature. This also ensures that web crawlers can find your blog. A similar and similarly important strategy is to link to other relevant blogs and websites from your blog. This gets you listed on "what links here" lists! Perversely, linking to popular blogs may just get you more hits, although they may also be less specific.

You'll also want to open an account on each of the online newsfeed aggregator and social bookmarking sites listed in my previous post, and add your blog or even, in the latter case, individual blog posts with appropriate tags. Especially that last strategy ensure that your blog entries will come up when people search for appropriate combinations of tags.

Technorati also allows you to alert them to new blog posts on your claimed blogs by "pinging" them [2]. I'd really like to see some data on the effectiveness of this.

I'll just close by saying that I am aware of ways to abuse this system, but will refrain from expanding on them here. Keep it fun for everyone - your gains, if any, would be ephemeral!

[1] Not to give the wrong impression - my actual objective is to attract the right sorts of viewers to my site and make an impact with my writing; I don't yet care about the advertising revenue - as you'll be able to tell from the absence, at the time of this writing, of any advertising on the site!

[2] Ping originally is a utility that allows you to test if you can reach a given server (technically, the question actually is whether the response packets make it back to you; the response is "pong").

Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Blog, technology, Internet, RSS, Weblogs, tags, Web/Tech, tagging, newsfeed, newsfeeds, feeds, Syndication, aggregation

Wild, wild world of blogging

2005-11-06T01:15:00.000Z

If you're obsessive like me about choosing the best sites for managing your blogs and subscriptions, you may find this list a useful starting point:

Blog hosts
Blogger.com
LiveJournal
WordPress
Blogware
TypePad
blog.com
Blog-City

Blog rolls aka RSS Readers
Bloglines
Rojo
FeedBurner
NewsGator
Google Reader
Feedster
NewsIsFree

Tag engines
del.icio.us
Spurl.net
Furl.net

In a class of its own
Technorati

Image hosting
Flickr
Buzznet
Deviantart

Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Blog, technology, Internet, RSS, Weblogs, tags, Web/Tech, tagging, newsfeed, newsfeeds, feeds, Syndication, aggregation

One more thing?

2005-10-13T19:33:00.000+01:00

After complaining about how Apple are driving the depreciation of value in their iPods by releasing too frequently, here's my commentary on their recent keynote:

The remote control is a very good example of Jef Raskin style interface design. Well done!
Who's going to buy music and videos when you have podcasts and movie trailers?
Your line-up has never looked this good? What's so great about a black and a white model? Give us some decent colour - what happened to black and red?
Amazon has had customer reviews for years - what took you so long? (To repeat that phrase used in relation to Apple's switch to the x86 architecture. Do I see a pattern of late adoptism here?)
Where's the productivity?
You didn't quote Mossberg on the scratchability of your iPods, did you?
Well done for dropping the eMac - I believe it no longer fits in the line-up (using Jobs jargon).
Congratulations on your taste of music - I've been following Wynton's music for years!

Now, I won't comment on the two major versions of iTunes within 5 weeks of each other, as the marketing strategy behind it, and the numbering scheme, seems straightforward to me.

In any case, hope you get better soon, Steve! (Healthwise, that is.)

Tags:Apple,Mac,imac,Macintosh,front row,iTunes,iPod,podcast,podcasts,video podcasting,podcasting,video ipod,ipod 5g,Jef Raskin,Wynton Marsalis

GNOME 3 vs. KDE 4 - sensible workflows

2005-10-08T17:54:00.000+01:00

Mockups for KDE 4 and GNOME 3 (scroll down to the pictures) - looking fairly alike? Which is no bad thing. ;)

Well, I can't say it enough times: there are clear relationships between different data types, especially multimedia, and these need to be taken into account in interface design. An example of this is my Mugar project (interface description at the bottom of page).

What I mean is, slideshows want music, phone calls want to go into the address book, photos may want to have character recognition performed on them, text messages may want to be forwarded as emails, spreadsheets may want to be converted to databases, and address book entries may want to be emailed to colleagues.

So you'd identify the sensible interactions of your datatypes, and implement these in the interface. It looks like GNOME and KDE are beginning to learn this. Also, if anyone can tell me what this strategy is called, do please let me know!

Like I've probably said before, this is what I think Apple are up to with their Automator. Once they've found out what users are actually doing, they'll concentrate on those workflows in their GUI design.

Technorati tags: GNOME, KDE, gui, Linux, Desktop, Usability

Ideas for Website Baker

2005-10-01T17:43:00.000+01:00

This is a post for Ryan Djurovich, the developer of Website Baker, one of the most user-friendly web content management systems (CMS) out there.

So here are the first few suggestions I have for the next version (v3):

in the navigation menu browser on the admin interface, remember which submenus were open and keep them open unless closed by the user
implement syndication (RSS)
make links update themselves automatically when a section is moved up or down the navigation menu hierarchy, or when media are moved between folders
make sure all main templates are W3C conformant so that people who enter html manually can check that it's correct without being inundated with error messages actually caused by the template
have an option to have the main menu horizontal and the submenus vertical - there are probably templates that allow this already
the wysiwyg html code generation needs some work - I can't remember the specifics of the problems I had, and for me they're easy to resolve using the raw html interface, but not for other people... Maybe it's still useful for me to mention it.

Reply all for marked list

2005-10-01T10:15:00.000+01:00

cross-posting from mozillazine:

Would be really nice if I could mark a number of emails, and send a new message to all senders (and optionally other recipients). By marking I mean the normal process of selecting mails with shift and mouse cursor or cursor keys.

The situation I envisage is when you've just sent out some instance of mass communication (a press release, say), and ten people get back to you with the same question. Select those emails, click "send to all", write, send off - simple? I think so. And useful. It's very Apple, but they haven't come up with it yet!

You could even give people the option to save the list into their address book after they send the mail, similar to the way that Yahoo mail always asks.

tags:email,mozilla,email client,thunderbird,thunderbird extension,feature request

Name change: interface design

2005-09-29T20:03:00.000+01:00

As my posts have recently concentrated more and more towards interface design, I've changed the title of the blog to reflect this. I'll be moving my population genetics posts over from here to another blog soon. I may also be merging my other blog, brainspark.blogspot.com, with this one.

I'll be announcing changes here.

Apple overdoing it

2005-09-29T18:31:00.000+01:00

When Steve Jobs recently introduced the iPod nano, my first reaction was, "Oh my God, they're killing their own business." The iPod nano is an unreasonable proposition:

The device is too small to comfortably control - certainly not with your thumb!
The screen is too small to view photos - why bother making it colour?
Enough has been said about the scratching, which, unfortunately, holds for the iPod photo as well.

On the other hand, the iPod minis have just reached cult status and will probably undercut the nano sales.
What is most critical is that Apple have released too many products in too short a time - the mini, the shuffle, the nano (which also competes in the shuffle niche), and the phone - they're wearing out their customers, who will eventually become annoyed that they can't own the most recent thing for long enough before it stops being the most recent thing. The only thing that's keeping the iPod above the competition is the iTunes integration, same as with their computers and the operating system. However, the OS will eventually be hacked to run on other vendors' PCs, and as podcasts (which are also supported by a number of other programs) rise above bought music in importance, and internet radio services such as Pandora, LaunchCast and AudioScrobbler become important, iTunes, too, will no longer push sales of the hardware.

Edit: Ladies and gentlemen - I proclaim it official. Hot on the heels of the iPod nano scratches (and I thought my iPod colour was bad!), we have this report of Apple charging extortionate license fees. May the iPod rest in peace.

Interface design: the window title bar

2005-09-23T11:14:00.000+01:00

Wow! Having installed the Windows version of iTunes 5 yesterday, I now have the second example (the other one being RealPlayer) of how the title bar and menu bar should be integrated for more efficient use of screen real estate and better usability. Others please follow! It makes sense. (Damn, I regret never writing down and publishing that recommendation way back then...)

tags:interface design,usability,itunes,realplayer,real player,title bar, menu bar, window bar, window title,window name

Why do we have menus?

2005-09-20T01:32:00.000+01:00

We have menus in our user interfaces for two principal reasons:

Because screens used to be smaller so that not all of a program's functions could be shown at a time.
To reduce visual clutter.

As we started having a little more space, we started having toolbars, but some user interfaces, such as that of Blender, are deemed overwhelming in the amount of functionality that they provide at one glance.
The impression I get is that there is no silver bullet in interface design: toolbars can be useful, but icons are not always clear to decipher - Apple, for instance, introduced the "Show all" button with text in their System Preferences dialogue, apparently because this is easier to understand than any symbol they could come up with.

tags:interface design,menu bar,usability

Debian-based = desktop focus?

2005-09-01T20:33:00.000+01:00

These days, a lot of people seem to be talking about MEPIS, Ubuntu, Xandros, Progeny, Linspire and Libranet, all of them Debian-based, and all of them thought of as more user-friendly than the original Debian*, or most other Linux distributions out there, for that matter. Bruce Perens was going to pull off the same trick, but it seems his more business-oriented UserLinux was ill-fated.

I've heard good things about MEPIS and Xandros - I hope that the new efforts to create strong standards within Debian will pay off in terms of interoperability and ability of users to easily change from one distro to another. For anyone wanting to get real work done, this is a very important efficiency question.

* Lycoris is the counter-example, being based on Caldera and having recently been acquired by Mandriva, the merger of Mandrake and Connectiva. (It seems, without me having any specific knowledge, that Mandrake started buying lots of companies after they barely survived at the mercy of customer donations. I find that to be slightly dubious business practice.)

tags:linux, distributions, user-friendly, user friendly, userfriendly, desktop,debian, Ubuntu, xandros, linspire, libranet, mepis, progeny linux, userlinux

Free end user privacy and anonymity tools

2005-08-31T22:15:00.000+01:00

I've recently become interested in lightening my electronic footprint. In that line, I'll give you a quick list of the programs I've been playing with.

Instant messaging: For real anonymity, you want the gaim-otr Plugin. Adium already has OTR in it. OTR stands for off the record, and offers the highest privacy you could have in an online conversation, including most significantly, deniability - the other person can provide no subsequent proof that you said what you said. That's what I call privacy! A number of *nix distributions provide a package of gaim-otr, so you can just install it, namely Arch, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo, NetBSD and linuxpackages.net for Slackware. If you didn't know, you can easily check package availability using the whohas tool.
Note that the current version of OTR has a flaw in it, but this will be fixed soon.

Browsing: The typical approach to make browsing untrackable is to use the tor proxy, which is actually an encryption and redirection technology, which allows traffic to be bounced through a series of onion servers, so that traffic appears to come from one of those servers rather than the user. Privoxy is a front-end to the tor client, and provides some further privacy filtering. A good summary and installation instructions for Firefox on Windows (Linux, for one, is very similar) can be found here. You can also use tor as a proxy for other internet services, such as IRC - the article describes how.
I think the fact that tor is an anagram of otr is accidental, but I'm not sure what tor stands for - something onion routing? Tor, again, is available for quite a few *nixes, namely Arch, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Source Mage Linux, as well as Mac OS X through DarwinPorts.
There was at one point a LiveCD by the name of Privacy Knoppix, and I read somewhere (but can't find it, please let me know!) about a distribution of portable Firefox with Privoxy and tor - incredible amounts of privacy for internet café usage!

Email: Now, this is an old one, and most of you will know that the way to be safe is with Thunderbird, Enigmail and GPG (or gnupg, as packages are sometimes named). You'll find plenty of instructions by googling for those keywords. I could only find packages for enigmail in Debian and FreeBSD - I suspect this may be due to it having another package name; gnupg, however, is ubiquitous.

What a Tiger wants

2005-08-25T21:59:00.000+01:00

Just playing around with my new machine (iMac G5 20 inch, 2GHz) and OS. Here's a list of things you will probably want to install if you're in the same situation:

Adium
Cyberduck
Firefox (with extensions Document Map, AniDisable, Flashblock, textareatools; Enhanced Bookmark Search does not seem stable, unfortunately)
iTunes Monitor
Quicksilver
Skype
X-Chat Aqua

Unix heads will want to get Fink, which I found to be superior to DarwinPorts, but that's just my particular mileage. I also like Audio Recorder.

You'll also want to switch off auto-installing of Dashboard things (security vulnerability! find it in Safari settings), make Firefox your default browser (ironically, this is also done in Safari settings), get rid of the Dashboard icon, (more to follow...)

You may also want to get the following video players:
MPlayer OS X 2
VLC
Windows Media Player

I don't know what the deal is with RealPlayer at the moment - I don't seem to need it...

These not-strictly-necessary-but-currently-more-compliant messengers (Adium actually supports both protocols):
ICQ
Microsoft Messenger

Document repositories in an online classroom

2005-08-09T23:45:00.000+01:00

This is the kind of thing I keep talking and thinking about:

Claroline (ClassRoom online) is a collaborative learning environment that allows teachers or educational institutions to create and administer courses through the Web. The system provides group management, forums, document repositories, a calendar, chat, assignment areas, links, and user profile administration in a single, highly integrated package. It has been translated into 28 languages.

Emphasis mine. By the sounds of it, version control could really make this particular project into a killer app. I'm sure if you sifted through freshmeat, opensourceCMS, the CMS matrix and OngETC long enough, you'd find something that matches the criteria.

Portable devices: lack of consolidation

2005-08-03T23:13:00.000+01:00

Even five years ago, things were simple: you had PDAs, you had mobile phones, you had digital cameras and you had mp3 players. Synchronisation, if any, was always with a PC and by USB. Storage media were mostly supposed to stay inside the device. There was no particularly useable or affordable web access outdoors.

Nowadays, you have a head-spinning multitude of removable storage devices; you have various weird and wonderful attempts to unify the PDA and phone, you have camera phones and all intermediates between a PDA and notebook laptop. Everyone wants internet access through mobile networks, and everyone wants to be an mp3 player, even the USB sticks. Not to forget the games consoles that want to be more (anyone remember the Sega handheld games console that doubled as a TV?)

So where's the real innovation, where is the consolidation?

It's easy enough to come up with a concept for an ideal device, and I did so some time ago. But it seems to be incredibly hard for the large tech companies to integrate the technologies into one device in a sensible and user-friendly way. Notable exceptions are gizmondo and the Archos AV. I suspect that the technology companies' lack of confidence in users' abilities is a major part of the problem. Do technology leaders need to look for new methods for developing software that does exactly what the majority of potential users expect?

By the way, I'll probably be up for hire in about a year's time. ;)

The distribution homies

2005-08-03T23:07:00.000+01:00

Linux seems to draw a lot of people who want to do specific things, like, say, video editing or bioinformatics. All too often, such groups of people go off and start their own distribution that does only one thing, but does that one thing well. This is a fruitful way to proceed if the issue is porting Linux to new hardware. I myself have been known to propose a dedicated distribution for laptops (and if I were to make the same argument again today, would doubtless include tablet PCs). But making a whole new distribution just because you mostly just need, say, the music editing tools, strikes me as counterproductive. Entrat autopackage, which allows people to define dependency relationships and build instructions in a distribution-independent way - using tools such as this, people could use any standard Debian, Slackware or Fedora base and put their own tools on top, without becoming incompatible with major package repositories.

So if what you're trying to achieve with Linux does not depend crucially on some very specific kernel patching, why not put your own distro aside and contribute to one of the big community-driven Linux projects, like Debian, Fedora or Gentoo?

tags:linux, distributions, autopackage, repository, repositories, packaging tools, software packages

opinion: Firefox and the e-conomy

2005-08-03T13:10:00.000+01:00

(This post is a year older than its post date here, so keep that in mind when reading!)

Since starting to use Firefox, my Windows has stopped getting corrupted. IE is now used merely to access windowsupdate.com, and suddenly, I feel safe. Happy to do my online banking. Happy to shop at amazon, buy tickets for transport and entertainment online. In this way, Firefox is indirectly better leveraging the potential of the web economy. Dot com bubble, where art thou?

There is one more step for me to go: from buying real-world goods online to buying virtual goods, online. I imagine that my events magazine could allow me to subscribe, at a small extra cost over what I already pay for the mag, to an online database of movie reviews. Maybe my Linux magazine will do the same. I don't want to subscribe to the mag, because not every issue interests me that much. But not having to keep boxes of old magazines around in case I need some information would be well worth a small investment.

In the same way, I am already paying for internet radio that came bundled with my broadband connection. And happily so. What else is there that I could become convinced is actually useful for me? Who else is going to reassure me that they are not spying on me, merely providing a transparent service that I feel in control of?

Currently, there is a reluctance on the part of the content providers to invest in such web databases, interfaces and new subscription models. After all, not all users may think like me. But they could. And once they start doing so, the web economy will be running smoothly once again. And Firefox is the key.

Original post published on Jan Fri 21st 2005:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=205381

Edit: What has been missing from the publication model so far is to allow customers to mirror content locally, so that if they unsubscribe from a magazine, they keep their past copies. This is particularly important in scientific publishing, where published articles retain their importance for at least several decades after publication. Unfortunately, this is especially poorly understood in science, and it has been hard for me to communicate the importance of local mirrors to library staff and boards at my institution.

The evolution of the web

2005-08-03T12:54:00.000+01:00

What Tim O'Reilly saw many moons ago is now becoming clear even to me. The web is going to take over; the browser will be our window to the world.

In that line, let me revise what I said about tabbing and browsers in a previous post here. What is actually happening is that the tabs are becoming the windows, as the browser increasingly is going to become the window manager. As Bloglines is taking over from desktop news aggregators, other web-based applications (take GroupOffice as an example) will take over from other desktop applications. Web services such as Flickr will take over from local photo management suites. What I said about the browser turning into the operating system was spot on: this will happen. From the perspective of the browser alone, the change is seamless. If you take other applications into account, the migration may be a bit bumpy. I would predict that any desktop environment that smoothly integrated access to web services such as Flickr, Blogs and data storage on Yahoo or simple ftp hosting services, with local applications for file manipulation, such as office and image manipulation software, will do extremely well, even financially.

Curiously, this is what .Mac should have done - I can only guess that its platform dependence made it unattractive, a disadvantage that has been Apple's deliberate bane for a long time.

And hence my post about version control for the desktop, with the link to an article about keeping all your settings in version control on the web.

What Microsoft have never understood...

2005-08-03T12:51:00.000+01:00

...is that they have the power to grow or shrink the economy in which they operate. Sell overpriced products, cease to innovate, and you shrink your economy.

This may be why Apple is doing so well. People who use Apple keep getting richer. (No, I have no data for this, let me know if you find some!)

Package lists

2005-08-03T11:49:00.000+01:00

All distributions must have package lists that are publicly accessible on the web without downloading iso images.

You must tell your customers what's inside the box - don't expect technically literate people to get interested in your distribution if you don't give them this information. And let's face it, it's the technically literate users you're after, as they're going to be more helpful with bug reports, and are more likely to end up helping with the development of your software!

Domain vs. IP: the future of bookmarks

2005-08-02T17:47:00.000+01:00

Since several cases have come to my attention recently of domain registration being borked up by a provider, or due to some threat of legal action, as in this case, I will reiterate my suggestion, originally made on May Sat 7th 2005:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1463579
of saving IP addresses with bookmarks, in addition to domain names, so that when domain registration is discontinued for some website for some reason, the website can still be reached through its IP address (assuming that this has remained the same).

Necessary for this is some mechanism for the user to indicate that the website he was redirected to by a bookmark was not the one he intended to visit, and hence try the IP instead. I suggested to give the user a button in the status bar, maybe labelled "IP", that shows up when he's used a bookmark. The user can then decide whether the page that showed up is the one he was looking for, and failing that, can press the IP button to get to the IP address of the original server (plus the rest of the URL, i.e. the path on the server and/or parameters for php, perl or other (database) scripts).

This will lead to IP-hogging as a new phenomenon, but we're no worse off than we were before, as long as domain is given precedence over IP.

Complete browser history

2005-08-02T17:41:00.000+01:00

A common problem with browsing context is that when you go back one page and forward to a different page, you lose the previous branch of the tree you were on:

1) index.html <- about.html
2) index.html -| [snip] about.html
-> contact.html

I can think of three possible solutions:

1) Weaving: under this rule, the above move would imply a history of
index.html -> about.html -> index.html -> contact.html
Problem 1: with larger jumps, it moves recently accessed pages back quite a bit in the history.
Problem 2: the chain grows forward by quite a bit as you go back and then onto a new branch.

2) A nested history interface, where each accessed url is like a folder, containing any pages that you accessed by following a hyperlink in the former. Typing a url in the top bar puts you back in the "root" directory, as does accessing a bookmark.
Problem: The hierarchies thus created are very deep and are difficult to represent graphically.

3) The banana throw: Only pages not immediately adjacent in the chain get appended to the head of the chain upon being visited.
Problem: the historical context in which pages were visited is not preserved.

The original post was made on Apr Fri 8th 2005:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1373879

A discourse on GUI layers

2005-08-02T17:07:00.000+01:00

Over the last few years, we've seen the Mozilla family of browers [1] evolve into feature-rich, usability-oriented browsers, especially with the new concepts of tabs and extensions, the latter allowing, amongst other things, new side pane applications.

This differs markedly from the traditional "one app, one function" mantra of the Unix community, although there are parallels with the history of the editor Emacs, which some say is now an operating system in itself. (Someone is bound to remark that Firefox is not primarily a Unix application, neither one with a strong Unix history, but - read again - I wasn't saying that!)

From a Linux perspective, it may seem like a mistake to embark on including tab functionality within the application rather than contributing to existing window manager projects that allow tabbing. Will the Linux community thus come to suffer from a Windows legacy in Firefox?

Secondly, the idea of side panes can also seem short-sighted under the same considerations. While some side panes provide functionality that is clearly part of the browser, others do not, and other parts of Firefox that could fall under the side pane paradigm are not implemented in that way: for instance, the download window.

A compromise would be to rebuild the framework such that the user could decide whether a given app should run in the sidebar or an external window. However, the main browser window menu does not interact with sidebar content except to determine what should be shown in the sidebar. Hence, the sidebar could always be a separate window that the window manager could be instructed to always place next to the browser. The simplest way to deal with switching between different sidebar views, e.g. history and bookmarks, would be to simply spawn a new window. Hence, different sidebar windows could be shown as tabbed.

I conclude that having "Downloads" as a separate window is a step in the right direction, and that this should be applied to all extensions. The focus must then be on contributing to a window manager that supports the above features. The one I am thinking of is Ion [2]; there may be others with similar features.

The fundamental problem is that there are three layers: virtual desktops, windows and elements within windows (e.g. sidebar vs. main pane), and this affects the generality of Alt+Tab, leaving aside for a moment the question whether we really need three layers anyway.

Multi-window apps like the Gimp (before version 2.0) are difficult to manage in some existing tabbed window managers because there is no one-to-one mapping of processes to windows. In addition to this, it must be possible to identify the function of a process (e.g. download window vs. main window) - I'm not sure what the functionality sysfs provides in this regard. (I should check whether there is one-to-one mapping in KDE, although process names are even less helpful there!)

So let's go back to the question, how do users use the outermost layer, the ability to have several desktops? To (a) group apps by current activity, (b) have less clutter over the desktop (minimising windows has a similar effect, although the effect varies according to how your taskbar is set up, if any) and perhaps originally, to (c) always have one virtual desktop where one actually had access to the files represented on the desktop. Now, compare this to what Exposé can do:
1) group windows by apps (c.f. (a))
2) unclutter windows (c.f. (b))
3) provide a clear view of the desktop (c.f. (c))

So window handling in Mac OS X makes a huge amount of sense, although typically, Mac OS X apps have only a single kind of window, and the use of sidebars is favoured. Note also that Safari includes tabs, so even Mac OS X certainly still deviates from a purist ideal.

[1] Mozilla, Firefox, Epiphany, Galeon, Camino, ...
[2] http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/intro.html

My original posts on this were made on and after Jul Wed 6th 2005:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1585763
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=340583
http://www.linuxforen.de/forums/showthread.php?t=188370 (in German)

tags:interface design, usability, gui, sidebar, exposé, expose, mac os x,mac osx, macosx, windowing system, tabs, virtual desktop

iArsey

2005-08-02T12:33:00.000+01:00

If anybody's looking for a name for their next IRC client, how about iArsey?