March 2008 Archives

This is a rant about WebObjects Java Client, but really about Java Web Start, XML config files, and Lazy Engineers.

McCain is the only candidate who isn't a lawyer.

Meanwhile, whizbang has had some follies with the law.

Here's McCain on ForeignPolicy "An Enduring Peace Built on Freedeom":

KARL ROVE, MacHead:

NB: All right, I've got just one more quick question for you. Last time I saw you, you'd just gotten an iPhone. How's that working out for you?

ROVE: I love it. My life has changed. I have a shred of coolness. I've got my 3,500 people in my addressbook on the phone, I can sync my calendar. I keep track of my modest little stock investments. I can check the weather of my house in Washington, my house in Florida, my boy at school, my hunt-lease in south Texas. I can surf the web, I'm just--I get part of my email there.

I mean it is just shocking how much better, how much more productive I am. I no longer carry around a giant address book, if I don't have my calendar close at hand, I can quickly check it out of my-- I don't have to carry, I used to carry several notecards, now it's just as easy to scribble on my little notepad, I can take photographs and forward them on immediately, it's just remarkable.

NB: All right. Well it sounds like Steve Jobs should call you up as a spokesman.

ROVE: There we go, there we go. And not only that, I also have the Mac Book Air which is really cool. Even my wife is jealous of my MacBook Air.

Perhaps a lucrative spokesperson gig is in his future.

[From KARL ROVE, MacHead: NB: All right, I've got...]

So I linked to Obama's speech about "race" earlier.

While I liked the speech, upon reflection, I think that ultimately it was a loser. This came to me while reading this article over at Politico titled Obama's racial problems transcend Wright.

It talks about the fact that Obama's race has mattered in the election, that many of his "string of victories" have come in states with large black populations. Obama has been winning a large percentage of the black vote. In a word, duh. If I was black, I'd vote for him. I live in Arizona, I'm voting for McCain, my wife has a Vagina, she's voting for Hillary.

But getting 87 percent of the black vote won't help him in the general. A little political math here: Most Blacks are registered Democrats. So they're going to have a huge effect on the primary. In the general? Republicans weren't going to get those votes anyways, he's getting 87 percent of the votes that were already a lock for the Democrats. In states with more typical breakouts of black and non-black voters, Obama has lost.

So if people vote by "identity", which is political speak for people voting along racial lines, Obama loses.

All political wonks know this, and I knew it before I started reading the Politico article.

But the interesting thing about Obama's campaign during his high water period was that people weren't voting by identity, or at least white people weren't. But as the Politico article has made clear, the honeymoon is over for white voters with Obama. Wright's poison saw to that.

So those voters are going to Obama and rightly asking "He's your pastor, he's baptized your kids, your book title was stolen from one of his sermons. Yet this guy thinks 9/11 was just punishment? He thinks America is evil? What's all this about?"

Obama's answer was essentially: It's a black thing. You white people wouldn't understand. Besides, you white people have your own things. We need to move away from people having things.

Fair enough as a sentiment. But I think he's blown it because now he's rubbing people's noses in the fact that he's black. If he had more of a record, perhaps more voters could transcend that. But he doesn't. Wright's charisma of hatred cancels Obama's charisma of hope.

I don't know what exactly Obama should have said. But I don't think that It's a black thing. You white people wouldn't understand. was the right answer.

A reporter from Chicago who Knew Obama when talks about his experiences.

Read it here

Submitted to Apple as bug 5806232

iPhone developers need a push API. The iPhone is a breakthrough internet device, but its battery powered. Consequently, Apple has decreed that there will be no background tasks on the phone.

Fair enough. I could live with that. I've heard from others that regularly polling from the phone just sucks down the battery life faster then a:

if (person reading this is a man)

printf("sorority girl can suck down a Strawberry Daquiri")

else

printf("frat boy can suck down a beer keg")

Unlike many iPhone developers, I spent a year with EDGE as my main internet connection, so I know that polling really does suck.

So I don't want to poll anyways. What I'd like instead is a way to push a "hey dummy, wake up and pull some new data" notification to the phone. Besides, once you're on the internet anyways, it makes a lot of sense to setup a server to filter notifications since that server can be plugged into the wall.

Now I don't know about the internals of the iPhone phone radio hardware, so there might be a better way to do this, but it seems to me that there is at least 1 easy way to go about this.

The first way, which I know would work for sure, is to leverage the existing SMS mechanism. Since the SMS mechanism already exists, this would require the following additional bits of infrastructure to be added to the iPhone.

1. The phone would have to be able to recognize these special messages, and know to treat them differently. There are a number of ways these messages could be marked as special, either via the origin (special number), or via the content of the message itself (used here for clarity).

2. Inside the message would be data indicating the destination of the message. For example, this could be a simple as a reversed domain name: com.apple.Mail would indicate that the destination was Mail. In practice, given the short size of SMS messages (140 characters) this might be something shorter, but it makes the idea more obvious.

3. Registered on the phone inside the App bundle would be code for handling the message. The iphone would pass the message into the message handler code, which would have access to the enclosing apps filesystem.

Ex:

The iPhone gets a message saying:

<iPhone>com.apple.Mail|40!gmail.com</iPhone>

This sample message shows how mail could be pushed to the iPhone very reliably. In the sample above, gmail.com is indicating that there are 40 messages available. The handler for Mail can launch, parse the message, queues a sound, and quits. This would not be much more battery cost then that used for receiving an SMS message now.

However this is implemented, I think this is a necessary addition to the iPhone SDK. (perhaps there's some other way to push a data packet to the phone? I know that Blackberry's do this for email. )

Comments Welcome.

Here's the transcript of Obama's speech on racism. I have to say, its a great speech.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all

He goes on to say:

he profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

This is pretty clever. McCain has a Basketball Picks application setup on his website. Its pretty fun!

Change smange (notice how Obama never promises to change things for the better?). McCain is the candidate of fun!

Now that I have my hands on the iPhone Software Development Kit, I've completed my first iPhone application.

This application is a digital telephony application that digitizes your voice and transmits it on a special section of the AT&T cellular network dedicated exclusively to transmitting your voice in real time. I call this technology VoCN. In tests, users said it was much superior to VoIP programs like Skype. Unlike VoIP technology, this application works whether you are transmitting data on the EDGE network or the cellular network. Steve Jobs said, upon testing my application:

Wow! My voice sounds so clear! There's none of that weird noise, the annoying delay, crashes or weird dropouts like I have on Skype! This works so much better then VoIP. I also no longer get weird text messages from escort services.

But wait, there's more! Through a special arrangement with AT&T and Apple, Inc. I have arranged to give every iPhone customer a copy of this application just by visiting this web page! While you've been reading this blog post, my VoCN application has already been installed on your iPhone!

It's called "Phone".

Enjoy!