Mr. David Hepworth , of the lovely Word Magazine (I subscribe !), a usually reliable, and always interesting cultural commentator just blogged a piece about the reactions to the untimely passing of ex-Apple CEO Steve Jobs . I think his assessment of Mr Jobs' cultural impact is wrong. I was going to present my reaction in place on his blog, although it did seem to grow a little too long for the commentary section, and I subsequently found out that his blogger site seems to be set up disallow comments from people who aren't logged in to a Google account, which I object to, somewhat dogmatically. So I decided to post my piece here, and link back to his , which is more in keeping with my own views about how the Web ought to run.
I don't disagree fundamentally with the tone of the piece. I do share his unease over the now seemingly mandatory broadcast grief marathons that accompany any death in the public eye, and I find an unpleasant hint of infantile narcissim in the fetish relationship between the user and product celebrated with the mass parades of public Apple evangelists and their iDevices, which might be a cousin to the sentiments he expresses about toys and proportional responses.
This attempt to sum up Mr. Jobs as a super-skilled marketer I think underestimates the scale, and perhaps also the nature of Mr. Jobs' contributions, some of which are subtle, many of which may look obvious, but usually only by hindsight. Even if his role was solely as a provoker, and curator of works; and I doubt it was, the truth is rarely that neat - he seems to have his fingerprints near the genesis of a string of transformational products, which do seem to fulfill the cliche of yes, changing the world.
Start at the beginning: His role in realising the portable microcomputer as a packaged appliance, something like a food processor, that people could be taught to directly integrate into their homes and offices. The Apple II barnstormed this market. I am not so sure as most other commentators that this idea was an obvious, archetypal product simply waiting to happen. Putting computers in your house, I think, is a fundamentally odd idea, albeit one that we have now fully naturalised. In 1976 it must have been almost schizophrenic.
Refining this idea into the Macintosh and Lisa, a specifically pioneering further insight was that a then unusual square pixel bitmapped display would better lend itself to curve plotting. This gave us the WYSIWYG relationship between the graphical computer and the laser printer , computer typography and thereby re-shaped the primary means of production for print and graphics.
The post-Apple "wilderness years" are particularly interesting. At NeXT they pioneered software controlled automated computer assembly and production, I've heard it said maybe a decade ahead of everyone else. I think they made a lot of mistakes, but I also think these lessons learned were invaluable later on. More significantly, the NeXT system software placed an elegant emphasis on "object-oriented programming", carefully enveloping the tedious nuts and bolts of interfacing with electrical computer hardware with well chosen software 'components'; tidy abstractions that lead to a system that was significantly easier to port to new hardware configurations, and simultaneously could be more-easily programmed at a higher level, without resorting to so much specialist understanding of specific hardware.
The significance of the work at NeXT will not be fully realised until later in his career, but as an intriguing footnote, it is on a NeXT workstation that a British scientist called Tim Berners-Lee develops some applications and protocols he calls the "World Wide Web". Mr Berners-Lee is on the record noting that the unique NeXT development tools allowed him to easily connect abstract layers to form useful application prototypes in the space of a couple of months.
Steve's other business during those years was Pixar . You don't have to study the history of cinema over the last two decades too hard to detect just how fundamentally Pixar shaped mainstream family movie making.
Then he returns to Apple and begins that now over-documented turnaround from prodigal son and failing company, to pin-up CEO and spectacular media and financial success. It's worth pointing out that the portablility of the NeXT system software allows them to insinuate it into Macintosh entirely. Next the iPod, and then we get iTunes, and the 'iTunes Store'. And then the same elegant software evolves to pocket phones, where the relative ease of programming buoys up the freshly invented 'App market'. And a finely edged production control builds an on-demand production, supply and retail operation that is the envy of the rest of the industry.
I'm not a professional writer as Mr. Hepworth is. I hope I don't read like I'm elegising him mawkishly like some Princess Di or Jade Goody for the "Facebook generation", or lionising him in super-human terms as though he's some over-egged digital Da Vinci, or Newton. I never met him. I'm not laying flowers anywhere. I'm sure that a huge part of his success was through fortunate timing, and developing good taste and keeping good company, but this is surely true of many whom history accounts amongst the Great, perhaps even of most. What a C.V. though!
These things are not a competition you can score, and yet I don't think most Word Magazine readers would rush to disagree with the suggestion that Steve's musical idols like Dylan or the Beatles "changed the world". I'm comfortable suggesting that to a subsequent generation, with it's own new media of choice, Steven P. Jobs influenced and changed the world to an arguably similar degree.
For the benefit of anyone else who missed the memo, Pulitzer Prize winning stripper, Berkely Breathed is back in the funny pages with a syndicated Sunday slot. Set back in Bloom County , with a mostly familar cast, with the mildest focus shift to centralising around the escapades of the titular waterfowl. It's readable online at Salon.com , although sadly there's not a feed, so you may need to schedule a reminder of your own.
Economic tailspin, leg-warmers, tired, bloated government set on self-destruct, jingo-tastic US presidential campaign underway, and Bill The Cat! The 80s are most definitely back.
Since moving to Rochester a couple of weeks ago, I'm enjoying the commute into the city on the high speed train . Every morning we wait a minute or two at the perplexingly named Stratford International for a Eurostar to overtake us. Stratford is a weird conglomeration of pylons and glass astride a raw concrete gash. I like the way it looks.
While revisiting this, I took the opportunity to re-implement it, aiming to fix a few of it's faults, most specifically the terrible performance. I decided to use Python this time around, chiefly because of the existence of appscript , an apple event bridge with a nice syntax. Python's object and sequence semantics are a slightly better fit with AppleScript's data models, and appscript should be a more optimal solution than Mac::Glue for sending lots of messages iteratively.
I've also improved the actual command recipe, using 'duplicate' rather than 'add' to build the playlist seems more efficient. Also the overhead of having to periodically build glue modules with the ' gluemac ' tool is removed. Sadly appscript isn't shipped with OS X, but installing it ( at least on Leopard ), is as simple as ' sudo easy_install appscript '.
The concept behind the tool is the same : use a nominated playlist to synchronise the albums with the iPod, and pick a random set of albums from buckets organised by album rating. Currently it's set to shuffle in 10 '2 star' albums, 20 'three star' albums, and 30 'four star' albums, selected from a 'just music' smart playlist that filters the master library, removing all spoken word, and podcasts and other miscellany from the pool.
Here's the source . I'm far less experienced at python than I am perl, so I wouldn't claim it was a particularly idiomatic solution. It does run many times more quickly than the perl / Mac::Glue solution, taking a minute or so, rather than the best part of an hour. I would put all the performance gains down to the AppleEvents bridge , appscript interface, and using more efficient apple event set operations, rather than iterating over individual data.
Surprisingly Sensible : Obviously, there's a book to flog, and he's making an attempt at a Jamie , but I found plenty to nod at in this Guardian piece.
Some advice for when you're debugging code using the whizz-bang, illustrated debugger in XCode 3, and suddenly find that none of your breakpoints are triggered. XCode forgets all your breakpoints! Even plain breaks at line numbers disappear when you hit "Go". You may have some, or even all, of the following symptoms.
The little blue indicators in source view just turn yellow (for 'pending') when the debugger loads your executable, and never go blue again.
The tickbox for 'Use' in the debugger breakpoint list view, turns to a dash for half-checked.
Attempts to set symbolic breakpoints which used to match multiple symbols don't match any symbols.
"break info" in the gdb console doesn't list anything.
If you're anything like me, you might be muttering loudly by this point, and perhaps banging things. Cleaning the entire project, and rebuilding all the dependencies doesn't seem to help. Nonetheless there may yet be hope! In my case, setting the debugging option 'Load symbols lazily' to off, magically fixed things again. This setting is found in the IDE preference pane - XCode -> Preferences -> Debugging .
As hinted in my last post, we've recently spent a week away. Visiting with Judi and Jonathan in Normandy in their ongoing barn conversion, failing to construct a goat-shed, appreciating unusual motor vehicles, hanging in a yurt, eating great food, drinking French beer, enjoying good company, and marvelling in some simply astonishing weather.
As a warm up to the main event, we spent the afternoon clay shooting courtesy of Avago entertainments. My nerves, already twisted by a long minibus drive, the rented bus an antique with a hundred and fifty thousand on the clock, the driver a first-timer, who kept commenting that he found the vehicle strange to drive as it had no brakes, I was feeling rather jumpy about spending the rest of the day discharging firearms. Luckily, just as we pulled up at the venue, I discovered my fears were all misplaced. We would, in fact, be laser shooting.
Effectively it is laser tag. The 'guns' are real deactivated shotguns, equipped with an infra-red sensor and transmitter. They communicate with the CPU in the scoreboard unit via a wireless network. The 'clays' are in fact miniature frisbees,covered with reflective stickers. You flick a switch to load your gun with two 'rounds', and if the gun receives a reflection back when you pull the trigger, it records a hit. The base unit plays sampled sound effects in sync to represent rounds fired and breaking clays, in the case of a hit. A small LED within the gun's sight flashes red or green to indicate a failure or success immediately after each shot.
It's a more effective system than I'd have predicted, and thus surprisingly good fun. The guns come across as accurate, and the full weight reinforces your suspension of disbelief. I found a real sense of development, in that I managed to improve measurably as the day wore on, and I accumulated practice, although I was suddenly, shockingly poor at the game where you had to pick up your gun from the floor, sight and fire while the clay was in flight. The event was well run, with a considered graduation of difficulty moving up from practice rounds, through to scoring, with enough changes in setting and rules to keep interest keen all the way through to the end of the session, where points were tallied, and the top scorers compete in a final shoot-off. I missed the cut, mostly due to the aforementioned speed round. Overall it's an absorbing afternoon's entertainment, and good value. I'd recommend it if you're looking for something to do with an appropriately sized group for around half a day or so.
Some time in 1997 I decided to get a modem for my home computer and try and get back on the internet. I hadn't really been online for a couple of years by this point. I'd spent a good 60% of the time I was supposed to be at university exploring the net, at approximately the same time the world-wide-web was being invented. Subsequently, a few of the offices I'd done contract work in were high-tech enough to have an internet pipe, but the majority were not, and by 1997 I was a year or two into the embryonic stages of what I then imagined to be a high-flying enterprise IT career. There were are few dial-up terminals in the office, but they were proper walled-garden , pretend the web isn't happening, CompuServe accounts, and I mostly ignored them.
By the time 1997 came around, the internet was seriously encroaching upon the real world. URLs on product billboards, mainstream magazine articles, entirely dedicated consumer magazines, even. Java hype was everywhere in the trade media, and was getting a further boost up from the growing sense of discomfort about the disproportionate amount of influence Microsoft now wielded over the PC industry. I was pretty grumpy about Windows by this point. I'd cheerfully embraced it's third generation, as a standard way to build what were for the time fairly advanced interfaces for DOS, with a built-in graphical toolkit, and I was making my living building client/server applications for businesses, using a 4GL called ' Gupta SQLWindows ', and a smattering of C and Visual Basic. The IDEs and the Win16 API were probably rudimentary, but I didn't know much better, and it was the closest thing to NEXTSTEP I'd found in a professional context. Then came Windows95, which promoted itself from a graphical shell for DOS, to a full-blown OS, which I found tremendously exciting until I'd worked with it for six months. All my tools and APIs were now yesterday's thing, and this new shiny Windows came with ridiculously inflated hardware requirements, and was frustratingly unstable. The joke term " Blue Screen Of Death " started to grate with familiarity. I grew insufferably contemptuous of Microsoft and everything it stood for.
At home I'd been running a linux system for a year or two. Linux had grown up fast since I'd first encountered it as a barely installable joke UNIX passed around the office one day on a handful of floppies. I'd spent a day installing it on a COMPAQ laptop then, and quickly judged it to be no competition for SCO . It improved and spread rapidly, and within a couple of years I was sufficiently inspired by reports to acquire a cheap PC clone and install, break, reinstall a succession of linux distributions, starting initially with a Slackware 2.something from a magazine coverdisc ( Computer Shopper , I suspect). Now I had a religion; I'd periodically switch distributions, usually from a CD/Book bundle in the bargain bucket of the local waterstones, sometimes from a CD set ordered by mail. No net connection at home at all. Well, hardly anyone did, and there weren't yet any flat-rate or free dial-up systems.
By 1997 though, I felt I was ready. I bought a discounted 33.6 external modem, subscribed to an ISP that sounded platform neutral, and didn't rely on bundling DOS or Windows software dialers (Direct Connection, as was), and spent a surprisingly effortless afternoon figuring out how to connect my little linux system to the internet. This seems like it ought to have been a frustrating process, given that this was RedHat 2.x or whatever I was running by this point, and I had no internet to search for help, and no local experts to ask, but I seem to remember it being fairly trivial to set up and script a PPP connection. I think the first thing I downloaded was Netscape Navigator. Or maybe Doom. I remember setting up an offline USENET server, and then feeling my way around the web, hungry for more linux information. I would download any interesting software source code bundle I could find, and try and build it. I periodically toasted my linux box this way, inexpertly installing new homebuilt versions of libc or XFree86 with little attention to package management or change control, and not much more appreciation for the software build process. Outside of USENET the linux web community seemed disjointed. Little islands of conflicting information, often hanging off university home pages.
One day I found this amazing sort of crowd maintained combination of a news feed and a bulletin board, already populated with a peer group almost custom-fit for me. I think I can remember how I found it. I was using a little desk applet for the Afterstep window manager called asmodem that let me toggle my modem. I was very big on customising my desktop then. I looked up the author's home page , to see if there were any good links to other AS wharf applets. One of the links to there was to this other place. I remember I spent a couple of hours there, browsing around what passed for the archives. It wasn't just linux and X, there were other nerd-friendly topics. I don't remember much about the content. I remember being engrossed, and following stories and commentary back and forth, drinking in content. Unluckily I didn't make a bookmark, and a couple of days later I realised I couldn't remember what the site was called.
I think it took me as much as a couple of weeks to find it again. It had a stupidly hard to remember URL. http://slashdot.org/ . I re-visited it frequently. It had a clever page construction, where the updates floated to the top, like a reverse INBOX. It aggregated interesting content, seemingly focused around linux, and GNU and other cool Free software like this new nuclear-mega-awk scripting language called Perl , and other nerdly content about movies, and sci-fi, and super-computers, and spaceships and BeOS . Stories were posted, usually based around a couple of links with commentary, and the users could add their own discussion in a threaded hierarchy, unmoderated, uncensored and even fully anonymously. I quickly became a compulsive visitor. Soon it was the first site I'd load after dialling up to the net.
The anarchic commenting community sort of worked. You'd recognise the same usernames in discussions. Actually, I'd recognise sigs before names. Most of the discussion was lucid and informative. I'd usually get as much from links in the comments as I would from the submission or editorial. Even the trolls seemed funny and community-minded. It had a sense of culture, of community. First Post! Duplicate submissions on the front page, Hot grits down your pants, The naked and petrified guy, Mae Ling Mak , Natalie Portman, the caveman user I'm struggling to recall the name of (urk?), In Soviet Russia, a Beowulf cluster, and all the rest. Memes, I suppose, but we didn't really call them that much then. The 'slashdot effect'. I remember every time there was a stable linux kernel point release, which was pretty frequently, they'd post a story about it, and I'd dutifully download the source, spend a couple of hours compiling it, and then install it, ruining my precious uptime in the process. JonKatz and his floundering attempts to become one of the gang.
I remember frequent stories about all these futuristic new desktop interfaces that were in the pipeline. GNUstep was well on the way to bringing my idolised NEXTSTEP frameworks into my home, cost-free. Futuristic new graphics display technologies ( Berlin, Fresco ). The amazing (and almost functional) eye-candy of the Enlightenment WM with it's realtime miniwindow pagers and overlayed virtual desktops. Some new initiative called GNOME which was going to bring a CORBA -based networked component GUI desktop framework to run on top of traditional UNIX some day. Funny submissions, hoax submissions. Disappointingly frequent pseudo-science stories about perpetual motion machines and cold fusion, and the like. Crack dot Com were writing their new game "Golgotha" that would blend the large scale RTS wargame with the cutting edge first-person mouselooked shooting genre, and they were targeting linux as a first class platform at launch. It was all intoxicating stuff, and I spent hours immersed in it, genuinely feeling some part of a community.
I was never a frequent poster. Initially I lurked, and dabbled with anonymity. I was very cautious about revealing too much of my personal information online in those days. I remember feeling really regretful for ages that I'd held off registering once I realised that people were competing over low UIDs. Still, here I am - user 24640 - 5 digits, not too bad. "scrutty" was the character I used to use on Perilous Realms MUD in my polytechnic days. I can't see any easy way to find my earliest comment by this account, and I can't remember what it was. Probably something embarrassing.
I remained pretty obsessed with the site for years. My friend Tim was reminiscing on Twitter yesterday about my introducing him to it. I can remember coming home from holiday abroad, internet-free of course, and deliberately reading the previous seven days submissions to make sure I hadn't missed anything. I quit my boring career and got a job at a cool dot com startup , just as things were bubbling up. Everyone there seemed to read slashdot reloading dozens of times a day. Important technology stories broke there hours before the mainstream news sites got hold of any of it, we were always days ahead of the 'suits' with these information nuggets. Famous people had accounts and posted amongst us (John Carmack! ESR! Bruce Perens! Neil Stephenson! Wil Wheaton!) which seemed really bizarre in those days long before twitter or official facebook accounts. Comment moderation arrived, and I remember submitting comments and then reloading frequently to check my karma score, which used to be visible numerically. Karma whoring inevitably arrived, and brought meta-moderation along with it. I was the first in our office to be selected as a meta-mod, and I remember feeling proud or cool or a massive nerd, or some composite emotion made of all three. I loved that the site was billed as news for nerds , a term I felt far more comfortable with than the more US-specific 'geek', which still grates on my ears a little.
I remember their IPO conducted in some kind of interestingly nerdy dutch auction system. I remember watching the stories of subsequent corporate ownership and acquisition and nervously watching the site for signs of imported cultural spoilage. I remember the Slashdot PT Cruiser . Slashdot was just a daily part of life, reflexively checked and rechecked. I submitted a handful of stories, but I don't remember ever getting one accepted. I remember Jim chuckling one day across the desk from me, because whilst running HEAD requests against slashdot.org to test a proxy server or something, he spotted that slashdot was inserting Futurama quotes into it's HTTP responses, as X-Fry or X-Bender headers. I remember feeling I was drifiting a little out of touch with the herd when they posted their famous iPod launch story .
I particularly remember that infamous afternoon in September, TeeJay looking over his screen at me and saying something about the Net being broken, and the World Trade Centre. All the news sites were down, but Slashdot just about stayed up enough for me to read about what was happening in New York city, and dash to the office kitchen to remain clamped, open-mouthed to the BBC news feed.
When I was formulating the boards at IMDb, slashdot was a gigantic influence on my design. Most obviously in the nested table thread structure, and the view options, but in some other subtler ways, that lead me to eschew the fiddly point scoring and filtering, and implement constant post expiry to try and prevent the conversation ossifying around the earliest, most repeated subset of views. We inadvertently spawned the GNAA, who went back to slashdot, forming a particularly weird and unpleasant slashdot troll subculture. The first time I watched as IMDb was in a slashdot home page story (probably LotR or a Star Wars prequel) I remember my disappointment at the somewhat smaller than I'd imagined size of the slashdot effect, I don't think they even made it into our top 100 referrers report. I was already visiting the site less often, I had my own enormous forum to worry about, and I'd switched back to using a Mac (which had become consumed by the latest iteration of my beloved OPENSTEP). I was still probably reading it most days a week, but posting far less.
I never quit completely. These days I'm probably down to a couple of visits a month, perhaps less than that. It still feels like an important part of my life, and I think it also represents an under-appreciated contribution to internet culture. It was the first blog-formatted site I recall ever seeing, although nobody called it that for years. It was the first successful news aggregation site to find a mainstream audience, and it unquestionably forged the the user-sourced content and discussion model template used by subsequent sites like Digg, Reddit and HN. I think it was a peer group for a huge number of people much like myself, and an important bridging stage for internet community culture in between USENET and the all-encompassing web. It was "Web 2.0" and "Social" years before they arrived. It really promoted a sense of belonging. I have never met Rob Malda, but I remember feeling elated all day, when he used slashdot to successfully propose marriage to his girlfriend , and yesterday when the surprising news broke about his resignation from the job he invented at the site he founded, it gave me far more pause than the more famous, wealthier man who grabbed all the headlines by resigning the same day.
Slashdot will endure, and I expect I will still visit it, sporadically. I'm not going to pretend it's as important to me today as it was even five years ago. I only just realised yesterday, that Rob Malda is one of my heroes, and I never even said "Thank You". Well, I have done now.
It seems like the iPhone 3G has been another smash hit. Certainly here in the UK, with pretty universal 3G signal coverage, there's lots of interest, and the handsets are selling out as quickly as they come into stock. Several people I know who waited out the first generation immediately signed up for the 3G edition.
Responses to the new platform seem mostly positive, although there's already some mild grumbling seeping through across the web. There's more software glitches, unsurprising; given the rush of new third-party applications there's countless potential software combinations interacting in unpredictable ways. The new units eschew the metal casing of the original iPhone, for a return to possibly scratch-prone iPod plastic. 3G mode depletes the battery rapidly, just as Apple said it would, when they justified their initial transport choice of GPRS/EDGE. The camera is unimproved over the first generation (although I have always been rather impressed with the iPhone camera. For a phone, with no flash it takes great photos, a textbook-worthy example of why it's nothing to do with the megapixel count)
So maybe it's not the holy grail of portable devices. It's certainly not for me. I don't like the idea of being locked to a single phone company. I don't want a smartphone that can't be used as a 3G modem - I've grown too used to being able to connect a variety of devices up to the net, using USB / bluetooth or even infra-red links. It's a little big for my idea of a phone.
As a portable, internet connected, media player cum tablet, it can't be beaten. The mobile browser is immeasurably better than any others I've used. The iPod, photo, and movie playing is slick, and the iPod + iTunes combination still the best available digital music library implementation. The straightforward syncing of contacts and calender information beggars belief (at least for Mac users, such as myself ). Thrown in a few simple PIM applications, ebooks and games from the Application store, and you're looking at a compelling platform.
Of course, you can get the majority of this behaviour in the iPod touch. Smaller and lighter than it's phone siblings. Metal back. iPhone-trouncing storage capacity (up to 32GB). Runs the same operating system and applications, same beautiful interface. No contract. The downside being that you can only use it as an internet device over WiFi, which means you need to be tethered to a hotspot. Except it doesn't mean this at all.
There's a simple recipe to open up the iPod touch's internet capabilities to something much closer to the iPhone.
Arrange a 3G phone+data connection with the phone provider of your choice. I use T-mobile , I'm very happy with the service.
Choose a phone handset, with a high speed modem capability. Make sure you get a model with WiFi . I have a Nokia E51 . It's lovely. Depending on your phone contract terms, you may get this as a freebie.
Configure your phone to act as a WiFi hotspot, using something like WalkingHotspot
Join your iPod touch with your phone's WiFi network. Enjoy 3.5G connectivity on the go!
Of course it's not a drop-in replacement. You don't get an in-device camera or GPS, although you may have these in your phone. You do get to spread the battery load between two devices, one with the big screen and multimedia capabilities, another with the data transmission hardware. Although WiFi use will run down your iPod battery faster, you might still find that this combination outperforms an iPhone 3G.
Over at Eddie Campbell's blog, there's a run of posts springing from the idea of the extended comic-book page spread, that particularly caught my eye. I always enjoy Eddie's writing, whether in it's justly celebrated comic strip form, or in his wry, thoughtful articles critiquing the medium. This series of articles seems to be loosely orbiting Dave Sim, which is what has provoked me into comment.
One of these days, I always tell myself, I'll write a piece about the peculiar thing that is Cerebus , and how it plumbs in to my life. Or if I wait long enough, perhaps Andrew Rilstone will do a better job of it. Until that day though, finding sensible Cerebus coverage is a rare enough thing, and it's nice to read some well-formed opinions by Mr. Campbell.
Cesare Bonizzi, a 62 year old Capucin monk from Milan, Italy fronts a genuine metal band . They have recently released their second album<a> . According to the BBC piece it's 'hard core' metal.
Every time I install a fresh debian derived linux, I subsequently find out that I'm missing the man pages for the C library. Usually many months later, it's not like I program in C for kicks. I then waste twenty minutes fruitlessly grepping around in apt using patterns like 'glibc'. The package name is actually 'manpages-dev' . Perhaps posting it here will fix this in my memory.
