February 28, 2005
Testing bitsplitter's Vagablog tool.
Testing bitsplitter's Vagablog tool.
Yet another PalmOS blog tool.
[I've just fixed the post - yet another tool with no categories and "first five words" subject line.]
Observations on the Hblogger app.
Observations on the Hblogger app. As you can see, Hblogger doesn't really understand MT very well. It uses the first five words of the text as the subject - or maybe that's MT compensating. I can't set the category, which sucks. Image upload is only via FTP, which is disabled on grommit. Sigh....
[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]
This is a test blog
This is a test blog entry using hblogger on my Treo 650.
[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]
February 25, 2005
In San Francisco
As several of my colleagues have reported, we've just concluded the SEC (Sun Engineering Conference) down in Santa Clara. I don't have a lot to add to what they said, except to note that it's nice to attend as a participant rather than an organizer. (I ran a number of similar conferences over the last few years: it's hard work.)
With SEC over, I've shifted hotels, from the Holiday Inn Express in Mountain View to the Hilton in San Francisco. Obviously the Hilton is a much nicer hotel - I have a spectacular view from my window, looking out over the bay towards Oakland - but it's odd that the little $95/night Holiday Inn Express can give me high-speed Internet access for free while the Hilton wants to charge me an arm and a leg.... (And the Hilton's connection feels a bit sluggish - but perhaps that's because of the hundreds of Sun geeks who've just checked in and are getting a much-needed fix of raw TCP/IP.)
Tonight is the opening session of the CEC. If you read blogs.sun.com or PlanetSun, you're going to see lots of blogging from this conference. I shall be here all Saturday and most of Sunday; I'm flying home on the red-eye on Sunday night. Even though I dodged an eight inch snowstorm last night back in Boston, the weatherman is promising more snow and ice for Monday.
February 23, 2005
blogging on my Treo
This is my first attempt to blog using my Treo. The thumb keyboard is ok: the biggest problem is simply navigating around complex CSS-structured pages on a small screen.
February 22, 2005
Fleeing the snow
As yet another coating of snow gets dumped on the Boston area, I have fled to warmer climes - California, as is my wont; Silicon Valley, to be more precise. I shall be down in Santa Clara for a few days, then move up to San Francisco for the CEC conference that a number of my colleagues have blogged about. I return to Boston on the Sunday night red-eye.
A few more or less random observations. First, my ticket today was on US Airways, but the flight was actually a United one - ah, the joys of code sharing. I found myself wondering if I could use United FF miles to upgrade, given that I wasn't actually on a United ticket. Of course that would require that I talk to a human being, and these days things like checkin are handled by robots. (Kiosks plus unskilled baggage handlers.)
The flight was uneventful, but spoilt by the presence of a number of small children who had not yet reached the age at which they have any sense of personal space. I gave up trying to sleep after being elbowed in the ribs by a 6 year old girl for the seventh or eighth time. Her father didn't help: this was clearly a custody transfer trip (it's his ex-wife's turn), and he wanted this to be Quality Time the whole way. His voice droned on all through the flight, reading to his daughter, helping her with math problems, playing games (educational, needless to day), reading again (this time some wretched story-book in which the Fibonacci series played a key role - almost as weird as that TV program "Numbers" last week, where the plot revolved around a failed attempt to prove Riemann's Hypothesis). My nice Bose noise-cancelling headphones do a good job of blocking out the noise of a 757's engines, but they were no match for this dutiful father's insistent voice. And on top of this there was a 4 year old behind me who relieved his obvious boredom by kicking my seat every so often.
Two technical notes. First, I find that I can read both my Sun email and my ISP mail through my Treo. This is very cool; I have only to sort out access to Gmail and I'm all set. I picked up both a case and an SD Card for the Treo today. (Memo: PalmOne asks $99 for a 512MB SD card; Fry's in Santa Clara had a 1GB SD card for $89. A gigabyte cellphone.... /me shakes head in disbelief) Secondly, this is the first trip for many years when I don't have my Mac (iBook or PowerBook); I'm using my Acer Ferrari running Solaris 10. I miss all my blogging tools, not to mention a decent PDF toolset. (I'm not impressed by the Gnome PDF viewer. Font substitution isn't that hard.)
February 21, 2005
On creating software that people want to use...
I stumbled across this piece in Jamie Zawinski's blog pointing off to a longer article entitled Groupware Bad. He discusses the history of collaboration and calendaring software, and why it sucks. (There are a bunch of really interesting responses on the blog; see also here.) Direct and to the point (and, apparently, widely linked). Money quote:
If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy. When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter, [and] nobody would ever work on it unless they were getting paid to, because it's just fundamentally not interesting to individuals.
So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software). [It's] about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.
(Linked from Many-to-Many, which is fascinating in its own right.)
February 19, 2005
PS on the Treo 650
After getting my Treo 650, I found that I couldn't access any data (GPRS) services - mail, messaging, web surfing, etc. This was odd, since the folks at the Cingular store had sold me a data plan to accompany my chosen voice plan. I spent several hours last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on the phone to Cingular [thank heavens for phone headsets - at least I could get on with my work while I was on hold], discussing why my data services weren't working. Everyone I talked to assured me that they had the situation in hand, were working on it, would resolve it shortly....
On Thursday I finally got to talk to a Data Services Specialist. He immediately told me that the reason for my problem was simple: I'd been sold the wrong plan. I'd been offered a choice between an unlimited data plan ($29.99/mo) and a limited plan ($19.99/mo); feeling cheap, I'd chosen the latter. The DSS told me that neither of these plans would support the Treo; I needed a $29.99 $39.99 "PDA Plan", which included unlimited data and some other stuff. Sigh. Several hours later (and a power cycle), I was in business.
At first I cynically thought that this was just a trick to get me into an unlimited data plan, but after watching the Blazer web browser doing its thing for a while I realized that it made sense. Unlike WAP browsers optimized for minimal feeds, this is a full-blown HTTP(S) browser. I can open my home page and suck down a quarter of a meg in a few seconds; clearly I would blow through any limited data plan in a couple of days. (Of course this doesn't explain why a Cingular salesperson sold me an unusable plan, and why customer support failed to identify the problem for three days.)
The great news is that the email client supplied by Palm supports full SSL-secured IMAP and SMTP, which means I can access my Sun email through our "Edgemail" gateway. This is going to be phenomenally useful....
[NOTE CORRECTION TO PLAN PRICE]
February 17, 2005
HHGTTG trailer and business opportunity
Amazon.com is showing the trailer for the forthcoming film of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As is usual with such things, the trailer has a manic feel and seems to focus on special effects, but there are quite a few elements which I can't place at all in the story. I'll reserve judgment. (What the hell; I know I'll go to see it, but I have an anticipatory pain in the diodes all down my left side.)
Speaking of HHGTTG, I see they've just published a Deluxe 25th Anniversary Edition of the book. Now I think that this is a wasted opportunity. Some maker of PDAs should have taken the cue from Apple's U2 Edition iPod, and produced a HHGTTG PDA, with preloaded multimedia Guide and Encyclopedia Galactica applications, e-books of Douglas Adams works, MP3s of the radio show, etc., etc. Naturally there would be a flip-down (peril-sensitive?) screen protector with the immortal words "Don't Panic". Maybe PalmOne could produce an SD card for their PDAs....
Salon on Iain Banks and "The Algebraist"
Salon's Andrew Leonard has a nice interview with Iain Banks today. Among other things, Banks explains why it's taking so long to get The Algebraist published in the US - he's switched publishers (again), and is working with a small outfit called Night Shade Books in San Francisco.
Checking their website, I see that they are also publishing Banks' The State of the Art, including a $45 limited edition, signed by the author, with "material not in the trade edition". Good grief! Are books going the same way as music CDs? At least I can tell exactly what the difference is between two different CDs - an extra track, or a video clip, or something. How do I know whether the added material in The State of the Art justifies replacing my existing paperback copy? I guess that a True Fan wouldn't worry about such things....
February 15, 2005
What's on YOUR bookmarks bar?
I've been doing a lot of OS installations recently (Solaris, various kinds of Linux, even WinXP), and I'm gradually coming to realize that the shift from "preparing a system" to "using a system" comes after I've populated the Bookmarks toolbar of the browser (Safari or Firefox) with my favourite links. While there are usually a couple of system-specific things, the basic pattern is constant:
- Basics: My Yahoo, Gmail, my ISP webmail, Amazon, Sun's internal portal
- News: BBC, Salon, National Weather Service, and the Register and Inquirer
- Blogging: my blog, its admin page, and Planet Sun
- Fun: User Friendly, Doonesbury, Dilbert
- Academic: the Tufts Blackboard portal
Obviously that lot won't fit without some data compression; each link is just a favicon plus a couple of characters: "Y!", "UF", and so forth.
February 13, 2005
Book notes: Death of an Ordinary Man
During my day trip on Friday I was reading Glen Duncan's Death of an Ordinary Man. I was drawn to it by the review in last week's New York Times, and found it totally mesmerizing. The story is simple: the disembodied spirit of a man who has just died floats above his funeral, and follows the mourners to his wake, privy to the thoughts of (almost) all, repeatedly drawn into vortices of memory. He gradually realizes that he's in this state in order to understand how and why he died. But to achieve this, he needs to understand how he lived. An unvarnished post-mortem examination of the minutiae of life: of relationships, family, children, love, passion, and loss. I find myself thinking back over the story: I think that I'll have to re-read it, soon, to revisit some of the (appropriately) ambiguous passages with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Highly recommended, though not for the emotionally fragile (or the prudish).
Treo 650
As I blogged a couple of days ago, my experiment with a "back to basics" cellphone didn't work out. 
So today I stopped by the Cingular store at Coolidge Corner to replace the Motorola V551 with a Treo 650. Herewith a few comments, observations, complaints.
- First and foremost, it's a PalmOS device. Over the years I've owned various Palm Pilot and Handspring devices, but none recently. (All of my devices had Dragonball chips, which dates them.) The Treo felt instantly familiar.
- It feels like a nice phone, though I've only made and received a few calls; I haven't really explored it yet. The address book only contains the few entries I'd stored on the SIM card in the V551. I haven't yet figured out how to juggle the info in the PalmOS Contacts app and the SIM. Similarly I haven't tried voice or speed dialling.
- Synchronization with the Mac went just fine, first with the supplied USB cable, and then via Bluetooth. The Palm Desktop is a bit prettier than I remember it, but it's not what I'm planning to rely on. I want to sync with the OS X apps - iCal, Address Book, iPhoto, and so forth. So...
- I bought a copy of MarkSpace's Missing Sync, a vastly superior synchronization solution. Speaking of which...
- Missing Sync supports the mounting of the Treo's SD card on the Mac desktop, making it easy to export a bunch of MP3 files from iTunes or grab a video clip from the Treo. SD card? What SD card? Hmmm... I had read several stories about how Palm was going to include a free 64MB SD card with every Treo 650, because of the bad publicity they got over the device's limited storage. (They changed the memory management model, so that storage of small objects became much less efficient.) I guess their embarrassment was short-lived, because no SD card was provided with my unit. Oh well, 512MB cards are getting pretty cheap....
- Another cool feature of Missing Sync is Internet Sharing: connecting to the Internet from the PalmOS device through your computer. Of course this would bypass Cingular's (revenue-generating) network, so I was disappointed, but not really surprised, to find that the Cingular-supplied Treo 650 was restricted: you couldn't create an Internet Connection profile other than the predefined Cingular GPRS set-up. Shucks....
Overall, I'm delighted with the unit. It's pretty much what I imagined as the perfect hand-held device a few years ago. I guess my expectations will always run ahead of my budget; I'd like to see more memory, 802.11, and a better camera. But the screen is gorgeous, the keyboard is really easy to work with, and the fit and finish is superb.
February 12, 2005
Exhausted
Just got back from a day trip. Up at 4, head over to Logan, fly BOS-BWI on an American Eagle RJ, get rental car, drive to office park near DC for meeting. Then drive 90 miles up I-95 to Wilmington for another meeting. Drive from Wilmington to PHL, make good time, successfully switch to an earlier flight, eat, fly PHL-BOS on a US Air A320, and home by 10.
Driving up I-95 between DC and Philadelphia, I saw at least 25-30 state troopers from three different states, busy pulling people over. What's going on? If I saw that many Massachusetts State Police cruisers in one day, it would be because I'd driven past a police funeral...
All monocultures are dangerous
In Internetnews.com, Dan Ravicher, executive director of the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) is quoted as saying: "Open source is not about having five different operating systems, it's about everyone working together to create one rock-solid operating system."
Wrong. The last "one rock solid operating system" was OS/360. Dan is suffering from a grievous lack of imagination. This is like Pamela at Groklaw, saying "The FOSS community needs to face the world with a united face", and earlier "when [Sun] say 'the Open Source community'... they don't mean Linux. When I say 'Open Source community,' I do."
Open source is about collaboration. It's about groups (plural) coming together to work on stuff, and sharing the results. It's not a cult, not a political movement, not a utopian (i.e. unrealistic) dream. Above all, it cannot be about monoculture: one technology, one group with one leader, one license, one goal. All monocultures are dangerous: Microsoft Windows, Monsanto's 'Terminator' seeds, and influenza vaccine - even Linux if "true believers" have their way. I want more OSS operating systems, not fewer. I wish Palm would release BeOS to the world. (Yes, I know about OpenBeOS. I want the original.) I wish HP would post the full source of VMS for all to use. Competition is good. It's good for engineering. It's good for customers.
(For better coverage of these issues, check out Simon's blog.)
February 10, 2005
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
El Reg just reported a major cross-platform flaw in 30 of Symantec's security products, including Norton AntiVirus 2004, corporate anti-virus apps and Brightmail spam filters. Of course the root cause is a system architecture which is so broken that it requires the use of antivirus software that is so tightly integrated that it becomes a potential source of compromise.
I've always thought that I understood the history - or at least the mythology - of how this came about. Cutler and crew knew (from their VMS days) how to make NT secure, but chip support, backward compatibility and performance "optimizations" did them in. They could have used Win31/DOS VMs to cope with the legacy crud, but it wouldn't have been fast enough. We're all living with the results today (even if we don't run Windows.)
I wonder how close this mythology is to reality....
February 09, 2005
Remedial English 101
This seems to be an accurate transcript of Bush's recent town-hall meeting in Florida where he went to sell his "fix" for the nonexistent Social Security crisis. Please read it carefully. Don't just glance at it, roll your eyes, and go on to the next blog. If you pay taxes in the US, this guy works for you:
WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: I don't really understand. How is it the new [Social Security] plan is going to fix that problem?
BUSH: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.
-- President G. W. Bush, Tampa, Florida, Feb. 4, 2005
More on cellphones
As I noted earlier, I replaced my old Nokia 3650 with a Motorola V551. I thought hoped that the inability to sync with my Mac via Bluetooth wouldn't be a big deal. I was wrong. I tried syncing using a friend's USB cable, and it was a hit-and-miss affair. Furthermore I couldn't transfer photos, video clips or data between the two. I guess Motorola and Cingular want to force me to use billable air time and bandwidth to move stuff around.
The other thing I realized is that I've gone off flip phones. Over the years I've had both fixed and flip units, and I guess I forgot how inconvenient it can be to flip open a phone one-handed. If I was planning to use my headset all the time, a flip might be OK, but I'm not. Oh, well. Cingular has a 30 day no-questions return policy, so I'll probably trade the V551 in for a Treo 650 some time in the next few days.
100% Hume
Thought for the day:
"Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous."
David Hume, 1739
Tempo
It feels as if I've been blogging less recently; one of my friends/readers in England said that "I can fully understand why your blog is no longer a mainly daily occurrence." (He also recommended that I go out and get a copy of the new CD by Spock's Beard, Octane. I did try, Paul, but Tower didn't have it. Neither does iTunes. sigh...)
In any case, there are three things that have slowed my blogging. First is the Philosopy of Mind course I'm taking at Tufts. I've already talked about that; suffice it to say that I'm having a blast, and spending a lot of time reading. I guess I could post book reviews here, but then people would know how much dosh I've forked over to Amazon.com.
The second thing is seasonal. Maybe it was the flu that clobbered me at the beginning of January, but this winter has really been a physically draining experience. One big snowstorm after another... and we have another one heading our way on Thursday. Enough - I'm ready for spring, stupid rodents notwithstanding. *
The third thing that is taking up my time is my new laptop, an Acer Ferrari 3400. It's got an AMD Athlon 64 CPU, so that it can run Sun's new OS, Solaris 10 in 64-bit mode. It's a great way to get hands-on experience with the features of Solaris 10, expecially Dtrace and Zones Containers, but right now I'm spending most of my time on installation and configuration issues. I'd originally planned to set up a triple-boot configuration, with Solaris, JDS/Linux, and Windows XP, but I soon realized that (1) I was going to need plenty of disk space for the stuff I wanted to do, and (2) I didn't really need any OS other than Solaris. So I've been (re) learning more about disk partitioning than I ever wanted to know...
Regular readers will know that I'm a hard-core Mac user, and that's not changing in the foreseeable future. I believe in using the right tool for the right job, and at this point my little 12" PowerBook is the right tool for much of what I do. There's a really smart bunch of people in Sun (including a great team in Beijing) working to prove me wrong, and I'm backing them 110%. And I'll stay on the bleeding edge with them, and do as much as I can to test, test, test.
---
* In case you haven't seen it, this joke is making the rounds:
"Today is Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address. As Air America Radio pointed out, it is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication and the other involves a groundhog."
February 07, 2005
If you want to be an historian...
In Salon today, Charles Taylor reviews Deborah Lipstadt's new book History on Trial, her account of the libel case brought against her by the Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer David Irving. Taylor is particularly interested in the way that some historians continued to support Irving even after his fraud and mendacity had been laid bare for all to see. Money quote:
What seems to bother Irving's defenders is the very notion of professional and intellectual accountability. Running into Lipstadt after the trial, [British historian, Donald Cameron Watt] said to her, 'None of us could have withstood that kind of scrutiny.' In a column for the Evening Standard, he said, 'Show me one historian who has not broken out into a cold sweat at the thought of undergoing similar treatment.' What Lipstadt was perhaps too polite to say to Watt was that any historian who wishes to be worthy of the title had damn well better be able to withstand that kind of scrutiny.
February 06, 2005
Dissonance
There's science: a method of learning about the physical universe by applying the principles of the scientific method, which includes making empirical observations, proposing hypotheses to explain those observations, and testing those hypotheses in valid and reliable ways; also refers to the organized body of knowledge that results from scientific study.
And then there's Kansas, as reported in the Guardian today: But the largest applause of the evening was reserved for a silver-haired gentleman in a navy blue blazer. "I have a question: if man comes from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? Why do you waste time teaching something in science class that is not scientific?" he thundered.
(Woodrow Wilson had it right, a mere 83 years ago: "...of course, like every other man of intelligence and education, I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should still be raised.)
February 04, 2005
The Cuddly Menace
Take one saccharine-sweet children's book entitled "My Little Golden Book About God." Replace bland text with the horrifying truth. The result: The Cuddly Menace. Please keep beverages away from your keyboard while reading. (This means you, Alec.)
(Via Boing Boing.)
February 02, 2005
Word of the day: resile
I was reading a story in the Guardian about the British government's reaction to the latest IRA announcement*, and I read: "No 10 has never resiled from its view that the IRA was involved in the bank robbery"
resiled?! What's this? Is the Grauniad** up to its old tricks? Apparently not: to resile is, inter alia, "to abjure: formally reject or disavow a formerly held belief, usually under pressure". Dates back to 1520-1530, from the French resilir and before that the Latin resilire, to spring back. Same root as resilient. And I'd never seen it before. Neat.
* The IRA is throwing a hissy fit because it was caught robbing banks, so it's withdrawing its commitment to decommission its weapons. Makes perfect sense....?
** I think it was Private Eye that dubbed the Guardian "the Grauniad" on account of its frequent typos.
February 01, 2005
Trackback blogspam
This morning, starting just after midnight Eastern, somebody started spraying trackback pings at my blog - about 150 so far, still going. A few weeks ago, while tweaking the template for the front page, I'd added a list of the last five trackbacks. I just got rid of that, so now (as far as I can see) there's no trace of the spammer's sites or addresses anywhere on geoffarnold.com. Hopefully this will persuade the bots to ignore me as an unprofitable target.....
[UPDATE: 2/3/05] Another burst of 50-60 pings this morning (on top of the 250 in this current plague) provoked me into doing what I should have done all along: install Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist. It was amazingly easy. No excuses.....