technology
April 15, 2004
Gmail and privacy
When the news of Google's new Gmail service broke the evening of March 31st, I pasted a link to the press release in a IRC channel I frequent. I got a bit of grief for pasting a link to what was so obviously an April Fools' joke. Well, by midday on April 2nd it was becoming apparent that this wasn't a joke at all. Business people gave kudos to the company for taking the battle to Yahoo and Microsoft instead of waiting for their core search technology to be challenged, while just about everyone else focused on serious privacy concerns raised by the service. The debate has touched off a number of interesting news stories and blog entries regarding Gmail as well as other emerging technologies at Google. Topix.net provides some interesting background information and opinion, while Kottke weighs in about the future possibilities of a GooOS. More recently, InfoWorld reports that the significant outcry may have caused Google to rethink its approach while (as always) EFF stays on the case with follow-up reports here and here.
Personally, I'm not just worried about the people that become Gmail users, I'm worried about sending those people email. One can certainly opt-out of the worst possibilities, the associating of search history (via cookies) with the contents of messages in your Gmail account, simply don't sign up for the Gmail service. But what about sending email to people with Gmail accounts, knowing that your email is going to be scanned by Google's computers and possibly stored for years on Google's servers? “Well, I will refuse to send email to anyone with an @gmail.com address!” you say. The only problem being that whatever address you are sending to could easily be forwarding to a gmail account. Given the very real probability of 10 million+ people eventually using Gmail… these privacy issues should be of concern to future Gmail users and the general email using public alike.
April 11, 2004
Pair Networks
I recently decided to change my hosting provider to pair Networks. They come highly recommended and should be a solid provider. Thus far their service has been excellent. They have a great web interface and very good online as well as telephone support. If you are in need of hosting I suggest you check out what they have to offer. If you sign up, mention me and maybe I'll get a box of chocolates or something.
Anyway, hopefully the transition will be seamless. Once everything is in order I'll change to new nameservers, so if you notice any connection problems in the next 72 hours it's probably just the new DNS propagating.
August 27, 2003
MIT OpenCourseWare
A recent article in Wired Magazine about the MIT OpenCourseWare program got me very excited. I vaguely remember hearing about this when it was announced about a year ago, but then it slipped somehow to the bottom of my brain's inbox, destined not to resurface until now. Today I spent some time looking through the OCW site and previewing some of the course content and I came away from the experience feeling really enthusiastic about what MIT is doing. From an article published last year in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
MIT's project “is an excellent example of how a leading private university can practice what we call intellectual philanthropy in the world of teaching,” says Toru Iiyoshi, a director of the Knowledge Media Laboratory at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
MIT's OpenCourseWare can be used by everyone from motivated self-learners and self-learning groups to teachers and students at other universities both in the U.S. and abroad. While certainly not a substitute for the experience of attending MIT, this program makes available unique resources from an exceptional pool of teachers and thinkers. I'm already combing the site to decide what course to try first on my own, but perhaps a more powerful use of these materials are organized study groups that can collaborate and work through the course content together in a semi-structured way. From the Wired article:
Ultimately, MIT officials know, OpenCourseWare's success depends on the emergence of online communities to support individual courses. Margulies says MIT is eager to find third parties to create tools that would enable learners or educators to easily organize and manage discussion groups using OpenCourseWare content. “We'd like to see self-managed OpenCourseWare communities,” says Margulies. “Our vision is to have this open source software on the site, as well as information that helps people build a learning community, whether it's in Namibia, Thailand, wherever.”
I don't want to sound like a cheerleader, but that is very cool. This is the stuff of education, of learning, of exploration. This is how we evolve. If our federal and state governments spent more time and money on these kind of initiatives and less time on (insert any number of negative things the current administration in Washington, DC is pursuing here), then we might get someplace as a species. Learning and exploration, communication and collaboration, these are the killer apps of the Internet… MIT's OpenCourseWare is a significant step toward providing important advanced educational resources for free to anyone with access to the Internet. What remains to be seen is what individuals and communities will grow up along side OCW and what they will do with the opportunities it provides.
August 15, 2003
Geek "Collectibles"
Yesterday I visited the albatross that is my storage space, located off of the street formerly known as Army in San Francisco. I was thinking that I MUST clean this space out and stop paying to store crap. Towards that end I was going through a few boxes and discovered the first two issues of Wired magazine… the original issues… purchased from a newstand in Santa Fe, New Mexico almost ten years ago. Just like buried treasure… “These are true geek collectibles,” I said to myself in my blue locker under highway 280. Wrong! Then I came upon a pristine copy of the Mac OS X Public Beta in it's nice folder with manual and support (or lack thereof) documentation… “This box is a goldmine!” I exclaimed. (Well, I didn't really exclaim, but I did think it rather vigorously). Wrong again. So to make a long story short, I still have a locker full of fairly worthless shit hanging around my neck like an albatross, sucking money from my bank account just to keep on existing… but this ancient mariner has had enough… Donate, recycle or perish by the end of August is my new motto. Now where'd my copy of Zork I go? That's gotta be worth some ca-ching.
July 30, 2003
memo to dictionary.com
My second most visited reference site on the internet (the first being Google) has to be dictionary.com. I love the site, and now that I am writing more frequently, it's pretty much essential to making sure my blog entries are not riddled with spelling errors. I also get their “Word of the Day” via my RSS aggregator and that, of course, is all good as well. My only beef with dictionary.com: your site looks ugly. If I have to visit a site multiple times a day, make me happy with some simple elegance (e.g. Google). Maybe Google should buy Dictionary.com… I understand that you Dictionary people need to make a living, and you need your ads and all, but you could still make the house a little more inviting. How about a front page with just a pretty logo and a search box, then pummel me with an elegant ad sidebar on the results page and no top ad banner. I don't know, I'm opinionated, but I'm not a designer, so go hire great one and have at it… because I really love your words…
July 22, 2003
Hydra, baby!
Mr. Coates points out that Mr. Hammersley has pointed out what I am now also pointing out: the most lovely text editor, Hydra has reached version 1.1.1 and now includes live updating HTML previewing. (Yes, exactly, how flipping cool is that?) Answer to my rhetorical question: very. The collaborative editing over Rendezvous feature is icing on the cake. (“icing” is a funny word in print, I just had to look it up on Dictionary.com to make sure I had spelled it correctly).
June 28, 2003
WWDC = PGE (Pure Geek Excitement)
Having returned to the mother's milk of broadband, I watched the WWDC keynote via Quicktime last night and this morning (it was long). The stream quality is excellent, and with all the cool stuff and excitement I felt like I had stepped into the “Geeks Gone Wild” DVD edition. The demo of Expose in Panther and the iSight giveaway seemed to drive the assembled developers into a particular frenzy of geek giddiness.
Seriously though, it was pretty exciting. Safari is maturing rapidly and well. Panther looks very cool, it seems like Mac users will see some speed improvements along with more refining of OS X. Exposé looks really sweet, and a usable PDF viewer is certainly welcome. Some of the other features like Filevault and Font Book are things I have been wanting for awhile… and it's hard to argue with a new Finder, though the whole “Brushed Metal” thing that Apple can't seem to get over is somewhat unfortunate.
and the new Power Mac G5? well, just let me say I may have to get a second job to pay for it but I feel a certain desire for a new G5 box + cinema display. I'm still trying to figure out how a machine with nine fans can be “quiet”… I know they are low rpm and variable but still… in any case, I want.
More viewpoints on WWDC happenings can be found at Hivelogic and Ars Technica. Michael Tsai links up some people's notes and adds his own.
June 17, 2003
Newly Digital
My first computer was a TI-99. I was probably around 13 years old. I don't remember using it for much aside from messing around with writing BASIC programs. I don't remember how, and I am pretty sure it was used… but somehow I got a Commodore 64 and a disk drive around the time I was 14 or so… it was hooked up to a small color TV in my bedroom and I remember spending a lot of time trading and playing games like Archon and Zork. I remember spending hours typing in programs from magazines. I remember going to computer club meetings with mainly older guys that looked like hippies and geeks at the same time. When I got my first modem (300 baud), I was really hooked. I got into the whole BBS thing pretty heavily for a bit. The problem was that all the cool BBS action involved making long distance calls from my fairly rural outpost… and it sure wasn't five cents a minute back in the day. I had to get a job at the local pizza place just to cover a couple particularly large telephone bills.
I kept that computer until I was 16 and discovered girls (or they discovered me). My first girlfriend (Lisa) lived 90 miles away and wanted me to take her to her Junior Prom. I sold my computer to do it. I suppose it was worth it as I'm pretty sure that was my first real kiss, etcetera… though I don't recall the “relationship” lasting too long, I think she had a boyfriend in the Army. My interests drifted away from computers at that point… to girls, cars, music, writing and other things you did in high school in the 80s. I didn't get another computer of my own until a couple years after college… and the rest, as they say, is history.
This entry was written for Adam Kalsey's “Newly Digital” project.
June 14, 2003
learn C in a week?
I've tried to make myself learn a programming language before. When Mac OS X was released, I wanted to learn Cocoa/ObjC. Everything I read at the time suggested that one should start by first learning C… I tried a few books, but it was hard to get into it… now this article, “The Whole of C,” at NSLog and the resultant comments make me think I should really try to do it again… though I am skeptical of claims that the whole of C can be learned in a week, at least by me. And I must admit that I get a bit confused by OO (Object oriented) programming. I think I may need a teacher along with the book…
June 10, 2003
shortwave!
There is an excellent new article at Ars Technica on Shortwave Radio and the PC. This is exactly the kind of stuff that I need to avoid… yet another extremely cool thing to experiment with and learn about (good) and spend too much time and money on (bad). Oh well, don't push the river.
June 02, 2003
iTunes 4 != Napster
Recommended reading: John Gruber at Daring Fireball rebuts some of the loud voices (e.g. Cory Doctorow) heard screaming bloody murder like someone took away their candy and socked them in the mouth because Apple decided that it wasn't great to have third party apps hooking into iTunes 4 and creating P2P file sharing (copying).
When I read Doctorow's entry last week I remember thinking he was off-base and I should write a response… thankfully a more disciplined mind like Gruber's took on the task.
May 21, 2003
cool Americans in Paris battle cynicism and write amusingly
Gothamist: Amanda Hesser and Tad Friend On Segways…in Paris! ::: I've been reading Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte but this travel diary is the first thing I have read by her husband, Tad Friend. It turns out they are both charming writers. I love reading things that are smart without being overly self-conscious. There is way too much self-conciousness in the “modern” world.
I also love the idea of three Americans tooling around Paris on Segways … those odd looking but amazing machines. I find the cynicism of many Americans regarding Segways to be more than slightly annoying… I just think they should be available in “colors” … the whole gray thing is way too institutional.
May 18, 2003
sleepy.
I am so damn tired, I sit down for a few minutes after dinner and all the sudden I've been a web potato for two hours… danger, Will Robinson, danger.
I have been itching for a new game recently… the last FPS I really got into was No One Lives Forever 2, a great game… and of course Civilization III rocks my world mightily… but I need something new for a game diversion… suggestions?
April 18, 2003
awesome pdf browser plugin for OS X
it's late and i want to write a new post, but I am too tired to get creative… so chock this up to the practical info/tip category… my friend Ryan turned my on to this great PDF Browser Plugin by Schubert it a few weeks ago and it has given me no end of pleasure. It is for Mac OS X, and works in Camino, Safari, Omniweb 4.5sp7 and possibly others (I haven't checked every OS X browser). It goes without saying that it is slightly bizarre that someone had to write a 3rd party plugin for OS X to display PDFs in web browser windows on the fly… but anyway, this person did and it works really well. If this is old news to everyone but me, please excuse my exuberance… but I was excited.
April 16, 2003
a short review of Apple's 17" Powerbook G4
(disclaimer: these are the informal thoughts of a admittedly picky Mac user)
I've had Apple's newest Powerbook for a few weeks now and I have the following observations:
1. Build quality is excellent… everything fits nicely, no warping or bowing, fittings are nice and flush.
2. the screen is quite nice… not incredible, but quite acceptable for a laptop LCD. With the included calibration tools, or even better, SuperCal, things can be made even better. I have no pixel problems (dead, stuck, etc) on mine, but your mileage may vary.
3. Speed is very good.
4. Heat is not at all extreme and the fan very rarely (as in hardly ever) cranks up to levels high enough to be noticeable.
5. Wireless reception is good and the built-in Bluetooth works well.
6. Speakers are better than average for a laptop.
7. Regarding weight: it is heavy, but not absurdly so… this thing is big compared to a 15” (or a 12” obviously)… it is a portable desktop… I wouldn't buy one if I were commuting daily… still, if you are carrying just the Powerbook and little else in a case like the most excellent (I have one a black one myself) Acme Made, 17” Slim featured here, it is more than doable.
8. the Superdrive is great to have when you need it… DVD playback is excellent… optical drive vibrations are less than in previous models.
9. It runs OS X, OSX is wonderful, thus the AlPB 17” is wonderful (if a=b and b=c, then a=c)
10. Battery life is adequate, but not amazing in real world use… buy extra AC adapters and leave them everywhere you spend any more than a few hours a day…
11. Negative: the only issue I have with this machine is that the processor or graphics chip or something causes a rather medium to high pitched “sizzling” sound that seems to come from right below the keyboard… in a quiet room with no “white noise,” this is annoying… changing the processor speed in the Energy Saver control panel to “Reduced” makes this noise go away… but it also throttles the CPU down to a G4 667 and turns off the L3 cache and that just ain't no fun… I hereby volunteer to be Apple's acoustic tester for all future hardware… I'll do it part-time for 50k and a couple free Macs per year.
Overall: I love this machine… if I could get rid of the sizzling sound it would be the best Mac I have ever owned/used (though I still have a soft spot for the Classic and the Powerbook 160)… with the sizzle it is still the best Mac I have ever owned, but with one annoying aspect…
finis…
your experiences for the 17” Powerbook are welcome in comments or trackback…