The Opinionated Bastard

From the Wall Street Journal:

Both the Bush Administration and former President Jimmy Carter were quick to bless the results of last month’s Venezuelan recall vote, but it now looks like they were had. A statistical analysis by a pair of economists suggests that the random-sample “audit” results that the Americans trusted weren’t random at all.

Previously, I’ve written about voting machines and my frustrations with the critics of voting machines on insisting on a paper trail. I think the case in Venezuela illustrates too things:

• Paper isn’t going to prove anything

• Its important to get this right, because if we do, we can clean up elections worldwide.

The lefty sites like Kos and Atrios have been trying to deny the whole Ra^therGate thing by claiming that perhaps there was some typewriter version of Times Roman, used with a proportional typewriter, etc.

Today, the Washington Post says:

Thomas Phinney, program manager for fonts for the Adobe company in Seattle, which helped to develop the modern Times New Roman font, disputed Glennon’s statement to CBS. He said “fairly extensive testing” had convinced him that the fonts and formatting used in the CBS documents could not have been produced by the most sophisticated IBM typewriters in use in 1972, including the Selectric and the Executive. He said the two systems used fonts of different widths.

Ok, the guys who invented the font now say it didn’t exist in 1972.

In a word, duh. It was always so blindingly obvious that these were fakes. Not even good fakes either. Really bad ones.

Think Atrios and Kos will give up yet? I bet not. :-)

that Dan Rather has never even used Microsoft Word. I'm sure it seems incredible to the bloggers, but lots of executives of his age haven't even used email.

Sure, the younger staffers would have, and they're probably all snickering to themselves at CBS. I bet Rather has his secretary print out his emails, he scribbles on them, and she sends the responses.

In one form or another.

I realized today that I've been blogging since I was in High School.

That's a bit of a stretch, but I realized that I had:

1. An underground newspaper in High School.
2. A weekly column in College.

Except for that long dry spell after College, I've been blogging for 20 years now. Blogging is somewhat natural, because I've always been opinionated, and I've always written about it. What blogging does for me is bridge the gulf been writing, and access to readership.

I remember seeing Bill Gates on the David Letterman show quite a few years ago. David asked him about "this Internet thing". Bill made some comment about how you could listen to music from over the Internet. David mocked him saying "isn't that called the radio". Bill Gates just shut up then.

Neither Bill Gates nor David Letterman got the Internet. The point of the Internet is that you can own your own radio station. Freedom of the press only helps those who own one, and thanks to blogging, we all own our own press.

As we say in Arizona, YEE HA!

Sigh.

Stupid religious war on Slashdot today about which OS is better.

Look, people are different. Most people are primarily verbal or primarily visual.

They will be more productive in an operating system that caters to that. A verbal person will prefer a command line, a visual person a well done GUI.

Mac OS X is visual/kinesthetic. Linux tends to be pure verbal.
Windows is a bastard verbal GUI. (more on that later)

So if you’re an artist, you’ll find Mac OS X to be easier to use and you’ll produce better work then you would on another operating system because the OS will synchronize with your cognitive mode.

If you’re a lawyer, you might well be happier on Linux. If you ask a lawyer, they’ll tell you they were happiest on Word Perfect 5.4 under MS-DOS.

No one can be productive on Windows, because Windows manages to be a verbal focused GUI. Under Windows, its all all about choosing verbs and nouns using a GUI, vs. Mac OS X which is more about the visual manipulation of objects. So there is no cognitive mode were Windows is really usable… Even worse for a visual person, the color scheme is like being screamed at all day. For most artists, using Windows is the death of a thousand stings. More subtly, art done under Windows is usually inferior to art done on Mac OS X, because Mac OS X is easiest to use in a visual cognitive mode. Windows, by forcing a shift to the verbal mode, hobbles the artist.

As an experiment, ask yourself this:

If you are drawing, do you use more or less keyboard commands? If you are writing, do you use more or less keyboard commands? If you are programming, do you use more or less keyboard commands? If you are designing programs, do you use more or less keyboard commands?

What you’ll find is that depending on the primary cognitive mode of the task you’re currently doing, you use the computer in different ways.

This is why all OS religious wars are stupid. Different people have different preferences depending on their particular cognitive preference.

Except for trashing Windows, because it sucks because it requires mutually exclusive cognitive modes. That’s ok. :-)

Computers are never more annoying then when they’re trying to be helpful.

About two months ago, I started using this program called Sp@mX. Basically, you feed it a set of spam and it munges through it for you and sends emails to the appropriate people complaining about the spam.

This has two effects: Spammers remove you from their lists, so you get less spam, and ISPs shut down spam accounts, which also helps you get less spam.

It took awhile (I’ve reported 4427 spam emails so far), but it cut my spam down from 150/day down to 33/day, and its been steadily dropping.

But its been quite interesting looking at the interaction between myself, ISPs, and the author of the program. I’ve come to the conclusion that ISPs are at least half the problem when it comes to spam. They’re arrogant, whiny, and quite bitchy when it comes to dealing with abuse messages from end users.

First off, realize that Sp@mX is not perfect. Jeff Hendrickson, the author of the program has been reasonably responsive, but he’s not the world’s best programmer. He’s had bugs, and he’s had to learn about spam reporting as he went, so early versions of Sp@mX would sometimes send messages to the wrong ISPs based on forged headers. Since almost all spam have forged headers, that means that with early versions of the program, ISPs could get deluged with messages that had nothing to do with them.

However, that doesn’t excuse their rudeness back to either myself as an end user, or Jeff. Jeff developed a tool for end users to report spam, and it works pretty well from the end users perspective. Jeff now checks before sending an email to a spamming ISP to see if they’ve been blacklisted somewhere, and the reality is that its quite possible for an ISP to show up briefly, yet innocently on a blacklist.

Does Sp@mX work perfectly from the ISPs perspective? No, not every message send from Sp@mX is guaranteed to be a problem for that ISP. But you know what? Suck it up guys! Expecting end users to spend 1 hour per spam to figure out exactly where/when a spam came from so that they can give you a report is just stupid. Instead, tools like Sp@mX are needed. Will those tools have problems? Yes.

After conversing with a number of ISPs on this issue, including a friend of mine, I have come to the conclusion that the true cause of spam is ISP laziness more then anything else. The real reason spam exists is because ISPs have been too lazy to really develop open source tools of their own for dealing with spam at their level, nor have they pushed on the IETF to modify the mail protocols to make header spoofing more difficult. Nor for that matter have they come up with a standardized format for reporting spam that would make writing automated tools simpler.

Cowboy up, guys.

So I'm a hard core Mac guy.

Apple's announcement that they're switching to Intel can only mean one thing: IBM totally screwed the pooch, forcing them to Intel. For all the claim that Apple is only 3% of their PowerPC business, IBM is talking through their hat: if Apple is only 3%, how come they were unable to make enough chips for them?

However, here's a prediction you won't see anywhere else:

I expect the high-end machines of 2006 and 2007 will be Pentiums, but dual-core, dual-processor machines. I suspect that was why Apple had to switch to Intel is because IBM had no plan to make dual-core versions of the PowerPC. I also predict a rocky year for Apple's computer sales.

Apple will still be able to compete against Windows, because Longhorn is going to suck on multiple-core machines. By that time Leopard is going to rock on “four-processor” machines because Apple will be able to build on all the improvements already in Tiger. Microsoft on the other hand, will still be patching an outdated, outmoded operating system. Technologies like CoreImage and CoreAudio are going to continue to leverage all that latent power in the video card.

So the Supreme Court ruled that Grokster could be sued. Whether they'll win or lose in court is another issue.

Personally, I think this will be good for file sharing in the long term. In all the history of this sort of thing, its become immediately obvious that people actually want to be legal.

Despite the ability to copy tapes most people buy so overall, VCRs generate millions for the Studios every year.

iTunes is now a huge percentage of the online music both free and paid.

When they started encrypting satellite broadcasts, sales of big satellite dishes actually exploded, because you could now watch legally.

I was going to write this up as a business plan someday and try to get VC money, but here goes, this is how you completely change the music, movie and TV business for the better:

Start by adding some digital rights information to existing files, and build into the playback software someplace you can easily license the file. Now, and here's the kicker, kick back some percentage of the revenue ($.02 as an example) to the source of the file.

Think podcasts are big? What if you could extract all the digital rights info from a podcast and buy the song right then? Or buy a song right off of one of the satellite radios? Or listen to a song/album review and then buy the song? For podcasts it would be really easy, just make a rule that if more then 50% of the content is something other then the current file that you can listen to that portion of the content for free. So for a podcast with 3 songs plus commentary, each song would be 33% or less of the total size, enabling free play.

You've now leveraged all the people who are willing to share their music as salesmen, and compensated them in some small way. So by doing that, you can now lower prices, because at that point, the digital right you're selling is pure profit.

So if all the file sharing networks moved to this model, I think they would explode as people would feel OK both about sharing, and they would be compensated for it.

So the webmaster for the 2004 Bush Campaign reviews the Democratic National Committee's website here.

Hisssss... Phfft... Yowl....

It's a catfight!

The recent elections in Iran, the bungled election in Washington State, plus my own research into paperless vs. “paper trail” balloting has gotten me thinking.

Is is possible to build an election system where it would be impossible to cheat?

I don't know if this is true but I do think that Apple has one of the best thought out product lines they've ever had.

I wrote before about how paper trails in voting were a bad idea.

Vindication

If you don't understand the problem, having paper isn't going to help.

An article ragging on the Dell competitor to the Shuffle, which looks even more lame now that the iPod Nano is out. Read it here

Technorati Tags: ipod

Even you granola types should like this

A friend of mine gave me this tip: He always downloads the combo installers for Mac OS X rather then use System Update. He claims that the big installers update a little more than the incremental and they tend to fix any outstanding errors in his system.

It helped fix a machine I had that wasn't bringing up the login screen, so I think I'll be doing that as well from now on.

Technorati Tags: MacOSX

So today, Google announced that they’re buying YouTube which was big news.

Target threatened the movie studios about iTunes pricing vs. DVD sales.

Last week there was “Anti-DRM” day which was no news. As my roommate put it, DRM is what white buys who don’t have real problems complain about.

Tower Records gave up.

Meanwhile, I spent Thursday through Sunday talking to software publishers.

Here’s what I found out.

Boxes are Dead

Currently, when I buy software the process is something like this.

1. Go to store/Amazon, see if it is in stock.
2. Pay for item/order.
3. Take item home/wait for UPS to deliver it.
4. Open box, throw away crappy manual.
5. Search through packaging, extract license card.
6. Go to internet, install latest version from companies website.
7. Type in serial number.

In other words, the box of software I got contains nothing of value.

Of course, this has been painfully obvious for awhile.

The thing is, the software industry has clutched onto this model of shipping boxes for years.

But software isn’t really a tangible good. When you buy software, you’re really negotiating with the software publisher for permission to use their ideas. It’s not a good, its a contract between you and the software publisher. The free software zealots talk about information being “free”. They’re not getting it. Sure, the bits on your hard disk are information, but the permission to use them has been granted to you by the software publisher in exchange for money.

That’s a fundamental principle of capitalism, you give people money, they give you something. So far so good. Where this has broken down is that the software model was more complicated then that. The software publishers wanted the process to be something like this:

1. You give them money.
2. They give you the bits.
3. You promise not to copy the bits.

The first two steps are capitalism, but that last step is just naive. It’s never worked, even before BitTorrent. So its going away. It’s just taken the software publishers a long time to let go.

My Nephew Has Never Been In a Record Store

My Nephew has never been in a record store. He downloads music onto his iPod from iTunes, and sees no reason to go to a Record Store. The same thing is going to happen to software. However, I don’t see this as the death of software retail, I see that two things are going to happen.

Death of the Sales Drone

Half the people who sell software are going to stop or go out of business. Just like how small booksellers got driven out of business by Barnes & Noble, and iTunes killed Tower Records. If you want to hire a bunch of teenagers who don’t know anything to shove boxes, your business is going to die.

Really, why should I buy TurboTax from Staples when I can buy it from WalMart if they both have idiot salespeople? But if Staples had classes on how to use QuickBooks…

The Barnes & Noble Model

Barnes & Noble crushed the small bookseller because lets be honest here. The big giant corporation was less greedy then the small store. When I go to Barnes & Noble, its an event for me. I wander the whole store of 100,000 books, read some of them in the store, drink coffee, leaf through magazines, and walk out with $150 in books. Barnes & Noble understood that the best way to sells books was to put chairs in a bookstore.

Every time I’ve gone in an Apple store, its been packed with people. Happy people, talking to salemen who know their shit. Meanwhile, Apple is running free classes to teach people how to use their computers.

Apple has been opening a new store every 9 days. They’re one of the fastest growing retailers in America, because they are actually selling computers the way Barnes and Noble sells books.

That’s going to happen in software sales as well. The retail software stores that remain are going to throw out all the shelves of boxes of software, and replace them with computers with the software already installed so people can try it out. They’ll have something like 1500 titles available on each machine. If you want to buy the software, they’ll print you out a license code and sell you a better written manual then what the software publisher provides. Don’t think its going to happen?

It’s already been happening in the Mac market for awhile. Half the software I own, I downloaded a trial over the internet, and paid for a license code. Every mac has a menu item, #3 under the Apple menu that links to downloadable software provided by Apple. When I bought iWork, basically the only thing that was in the box was a DVD and the license code. In fact, QuickTime Pro is basically only a license code.

Want Dreamweaver 8? You can download it directly from Adobe. Sure they sell boxes, but they see how things are going. Pretty much their entire catalog is available as a download.

Enter iLok

The thing that is missing in all this is either DRM, or bad DRM. I’m sort of an optimist when it comes to people. I think that if you explicitly made people promise not to share software, they wouldn’t. But the software industry doesn’t do that. They pretend to have this model of selling a box of bits. Well, that makes people think that if they copy the bits they haven’t done anything wrong. Since the publishers didn’t explicitly extract the promise from them not to copy its not clear that they’re wrong either.

So enter some sort of Digital Rights Management. Adobe now requires you to activate your software before using it, which basically locks it to the computer.

This blows. Almost everyone these days ends up with a home computer and a work computer. Power users have a desktop, a notebook and a home computer. So Adobe ends up allowing you to lock it to two computers. If you get a new computer, you have to “de-authorize” one of the computers. If you don’t have access to the computer, you have to call tech support, which just cost Adobe $20 whether they give you access or not.

Microsoft does the same thing. As does Palm Source and numerous other software companies.

So basically, the #1 (Microsoft) and #2 (Adobe) software companies in the world have embraced DRM. Except it turns out that they’re both a bit behind the times with their DRM solution. Pro Audio figured out this problem a long time ago. It’s called the iLok:

Disclaimer: I work for PACE the maker of the iLok.

You’re thinking “A dongle?” Dongle’s suck, who want’s to have to carry around something to plug into their computer to authorize their software.

Let me tell you: I do. I don’t know what your experience has been with dongles, but I suspect that they were pre-USB 1st generation dongles.

The iLok is a second generation, which means that:

1. It has good crypto. The iLok has never been cracked, unlike all the crappy previous generation of dongles.
2. It stores multiple licenses on one dongle. Which means ALL your software can be authorized onto one dongle.
3. It’s a hot-swappable USB device.

What this means is that the iLok get’s in your way the least of all of the other software DRM solutions. In Pro Audio, its common to have a work computer, a notebook, a home computer, a studio computer, and to upgrade them all every 4 months. With iLok, they unplug from one computer and plug into the other. The iLok, with their $50,000 worth of software licenses can travel with them as needed. So yeah, you have to carry a dongle around, but it gets in they way of your work the minimum possible.

It goes beyond that though. The real key to iLok though is ilok.com. iLok.com lets you move your software licenses between your own iLoks, and even transfer licenses to other users. It lets you as an end user manage your software licenses.

For software publishers, they can use iLok.com to deliver licenses directly to users. They also can use iLok.com to mix/match their products to produce bundles, provide discounts for software upgrades that enforce surrendering the previous product. (It’s currently a big headache for software publishers if people sell their old “box” software on eBay; people buy it, then want a discount for upgrading it…)

In short, iLok enforces the contract between the publisher and the end user in the least intrusive way.

Win/Win for everyone.

Pro Audio is a tiny portion of the software industry. Yet the portions of that industry that use iLok are the healthiest. There are basically two types of companies in Pro Audio these days: Companies that are going out of business (unless they have a rich corporate sugar daddy) or companies that use iLok.

So those companies are doing better, because of the iLok. And because the software industry in Pro Audio is healthy, customers do better because they have more choices, more software, and higher quality software. Software in Pro Audio has even gotten cheaper, because there is less theft.

Yet it goes beyond that. Because the software companies can trust their users, its become common for them to give their best customers a break. The more of a companies products you own, the bigger discounts they give you on upgrades. When bad things happen, they’re more willing to give you a break.

If they even need to. One of our customers at PACE had a fire. He sent his half-melted iLok in to us, and we were able to verify his licenses and send him a new iLok with all of his software intact. If his $50,000 worth of software had been in ‘boxes’ he would have been screwed.

I have 50 serial number emails

My only complaint about the iLok is that more software doesn’t use it. I have 50 emails saved with serial numbers for software I’ve purchased. Every time I get a new computer, I spend the first 2 weeks typing in new serial numbers.

It blows. I’d rather embrace good DRM like iLok then bad DRM like most companies cheesy serial number scheme.

The other day, I bought CoverScout from Equinix software. Except their sucky DRM ties me to my notebook, because its a MAC locked serial number.

Does Equinix really think they’re going to make money off their $19.99 program when I have to email their support the next time I get a computer in order to change serial numbers? Meanwhile, I can’t use their program at work.

Long Live DRM

So long live DRM. But bad DRM? Let’s hope that dies a quick death. Because the future of software/music/movie distribution is clear.

You’ll be downloading.

I’m in serious iPhone lust. As a web application developer, I constantly get pages from the website when there’s a problem, which I then can’t do anything about. With iPhone, I can get a page for a problem, and then fix the problem, from the phone.

So work will probably end up paying for these for my staff…

Meanwhile, [OmniFocus] looks, well lame. So I’m going have to get back up to coding speed on Frictionless and get a functional spec for the next version written and finished. That will help others collaborate with me.

An of course, iPhone + Frictionless will just rock. I promise.

I get 125+ spam messages a/day. Most of them get filtered by SpamSieve on the client side.

In theory, my hosting provider uses Spam Assassin, but dialed down so high its been mostly pointless.

Meanwhile at work, we had no spam filtering at all, other then this TDMA challenge response system that I immediately disabled.

So when I looked into spam solutions for work I was intrigued by spamstopshere for my own use. It has the reputation for being the most accurate, and additionally, you can actually tell how much it will cost you by browsing their website, something that isn’t true for BrightMail or Postini.

Server-side spam filtering is far superior to the client-side spam filtering I was using previously, SpamSieve. The server do a lot of things to make sure that its really talking to a real mail server and not a spam blaster. That can help you filter out 75-80% of the spam immediately, with _zero false positives. Additionally, with client-side filtering when you have spam that are really obviously spam you still have to review them. With so much volume, you eventually stop bothering, which means any false positive is a bigger deal. If the server can dump all the obvious crap up front, then you only have to review 1-2 “possibles”/day, which I can easily deal with. 125/day was too much though, so I wouldn’t do it and soon I would have 2000 spam messages to review. I’d try to review them, but I’d get frustrated and give up…

Note that I don’t really consider Spam Assassin “server-side” filtering, because it filters the Spam AFTER the mail server has accepted the spam, which means its missing the filtering you can get practically for free.

So a spam filtering service was the way to go. And SpamStopsHere looked the the best of them.

The road wasn’t perfectly smooth however.

Technorati Tags: spam, puppy

Assuming they live within a reasonable distance of an Apple store.

Here’s a Fortune Article talking about how great the retail experience is an Apple Store.

But I’m going to talk up one thing in particular I’ve noticed.

I’m a computer guy. So people who aren’t yet computer literate are always talking to me about how they would like to learn, but…

What I now tell them to do is go to their local Apple store. Once a week, the Apple Store has a class on getting started. Its free, they don’t have to buy anything, and they can come back EVERY week until they’re ready to buy a computer.

After they buy a computer, they can pay an additional $100/year for “Pro Care”, which means that they can make an appointment, and someone will sit down with them and go over any problems they’re having.

Can you think of any other company that does this for ANY product?

Apple seems to be the only company in America that actually supports it products these days…

Is your mac acting flaky?

9 times out of 10, I’ve been able to cure flaky macs by using the Combo installer to update why Mac. This is because of two reasons:

1. Using the Combo installer essentially refreshes everything in your operating system that’s changed since the .0 release. So anything that’s gotten corrupted is suddenly brand spankin’ new!

2. While developers get seeds of the .x releases, those are only delivered as Combo updates. There’s no way for them to test the Software Update delivery method, so basically, any compatibility problem between the Software Update version and any 3rd party software you have the won’t show up until after the official release. This happened to us at work today. Our software works fine with the Combo update, but not with the Software Update release.

So if you’re going to update to 10.4.9 today, grab the combo version instead.

Intel 310MB

PPC 167MB

You’ll be glad you did.

Thanks to Rohan, who gave me this tip about 2 years ago. It’s made my life much easier ever since.

Iraq meets Steve Jobs

That's pretty much my entire blog.

Friggin' Hilarious

So Leopard is Delayed

It wasn’t the iPhone that made them late.

It was because they didn’t hire me when they had the chance last year. I did what I was supposed to do. I sent my resume into jobs.apple.com, I contacted friends who worked there, everything. One nibble, no offer.

I mean, sure, I wasn’t willing to move to the SF Bay Area. But really, you’d have to be a complete idiot to move there. It’s ridiculously expensive, and in this internet age, why work in an area where a “starter home” is $1,000,000? Meanwhile, in my home office, I have my own personal espresso machine.

Mark my words, if Apple had hired me, Leopard would have shipped in February.

I’m that good. Or maybe its just the caffeine.

Either way, your loss guys. My new job is working out just fine, thanks.

Well, I got Frictionless 2.0 (My GTD app for the mac) done enough to be useable.

So I released it out into the world today.

You can read about it here

I’m pretty happy with the new UI design although I’m not finished. It still has some rough edges compared to some of the other GTD apps out there, but I think its more useable on the day to day basis then any of those other GTD apps out there.

NSTreeController still sucks eggs though.

I’ve been having to run Windows lately.

It just, well, sucks. I can run it on my Mac Pro via Parallels mixed in with everything else. But since I’m always booting Windows purely to fix bugs, it makes me hate it even more because I associate it with nasty things…

Just hearing the Windows boot sound now makes my back hurt.

So clearly, rebooting into Windows to play [Supreme Commander](http://www.supremecommander.com) should become a necessary part of my work day. Its the only way I can make sure that Windows users don’t get short changed. Yeah, thats the ticket.

I just ordered one of the new .33“ thick Apple keyboards.

I’m hoping I catch ditch all those stupid wrist rests I have all over my desk!

An NBC Universal spokesman has been quoted by the New York Times as claiming that the iTunes Store's raison d'etre “ is designed to drive sales of Apple devices at the expense of those who create the content that make these devices worth buying.”

I just realized. Apple is operating on the reverse of the Gillette model.

The Gillette model is to sell you the razor cheap, but force you to buy expensive razor blades.

It's been copied by:

• Ink Jet Printers (often cheaper to buy a new printer then a cartridge)
• Nintendo, Sega, XBox, Playstation
• Cellular Providers

Apple's using the reverse model: Content is cheap, the player is expensive. I'm calling it the Rozar model.

Which makes sense to me, I use the iTunes store a lot. I've purchased 1618 items from the iTunes store.

But I have 14,000 items in my iTunes library so 90% of my content was purchased on CDs. For a Razor model to work, 90% of my content would have have to come from iTMS not 10%.

So selling the content online doesn't make any sense as a business model. Not only that, but since Apple doesn't try to make huge profits on the iTMS, that means you're competing with someone who doesn't care about profits. So your profits are going to be miniscule.

NBC is run by idiots. The only way to fight Apple's Rozar model would be with a Razor model: $99 player, $4.99 shows. I could see that working, but in that case, NBC wouldn't be making any extra money because the extra cost would have to go to subsidize the player. So NBC is actually better off with the Rozar model.

So if I can’t have a dev kit for the iPhone because of “cellphone network security”, what’s your excuse for the iPod Touch which doesn’t have a cell phone?

Though I expect some sort of announcement in the Leopard timeframe.

Oh, and by the way, Palm better pull their head out of their ass. (Sorry, other Steve I know who works for Palm.)

My wife wants an iPhone now.

Why?

She wants to be able to add phone numbers to her phone without waiting for her nephew to visit.

Literally. Despite having a computer geek for a husband, her solution to putting contact numbers in her phone is to hand her nephew her rolodex and her phone and make him do it.

The price cut didn't help either, she was willing to wait when it was $600, but now that its $400, it seems more feasible.

Then a friend of mine told her I was getting a $100 rebate. Which isn't quite true, work is getting a $100 rebate, since they were the ones that paid for my iPhone.

So as long as I’ve had DSL, calling my 2nd phone line has caused my Internet to die for about 30 seconds.

Turns out the stupid cheap-ass phone company filters are only on line 1, and my DSL is on line 2. Even worse, they don’t even give the phone company techs 2 line filters, they have to re-wire your jack.

So I told the tech to leave the jack alone, and I ordered a 630LCCU-2F-50 via Amazon.

$7.50 shipping for a $3.99 part.

Stupid phone company. They’re probably spending more money in technician calls then it would take to just ship out 2-line filters.

Qwest better not charge me for the service call…

Ok, so [various pundits](http://daringfireball.net/2007/09/the_ringtones_racket) are ragging on Apple for the whole 99-cent ringtone thing.

Not me, even though I’ve made my own ringtones.

Because I’ve done the math.

Maximum ringtones I would ever want on my phone, realistically: 10

Cost via iTunes Music Store: $9.90

Cost via IToner: $15

Cost of a relatively cheap audio editing program: $29.95

So basically, you’re paying 99-cents to be able to edit the audio. iTunes Music Store is cheaper, vastly cheaper if you only want a few ringtones.

So all these guys that are whining are geeks. They already own some sort of audio editing program, so paying $.99 is additional cost. But if you don’t own an audio editing program already $.99/ringtone is actually pretty cheap.

Now I’m a geek too, so I already own an audio editing program. But like I said, I already worked around iTunes to install my own.

So Ringtones aren’t a racket to my mind. If you’re a geek, you can make them free. If you’re not, you can use iTunes to make them for you. Seems like a reasonable breakdown to me, given the stupidity of the music industry.

Update: iTunes 7.4.2 is out, and now it seems that the tweak to make a file a ringtone is to do both:

1. Add a ‘stik’ metatag with 14.

2. Set the extension to .m4r

Which actually seems to mean that rather then “locking up ringtones”, it sounds to me more like they’re doing them properly. That is, ringtones will show up correctly in the finder as a ringtone, and iTunes can recognize them from the filedata.

Seems good to me..

OK, so I was listening to the songs that people turned into ringtones just out of curiosity.

Then I thought, “you know what would make a great ringtone? The alarm clocks from Pink Floyd's Time off the Dark Side of the Moon”.

Except...turns out that you first have to buy the song, then you can turn it into a ringtone. Except Time is album only.

Plus I already own it on CD.

While I wouldn't have minded paying $.99 to turn it into a ringtone, making me buy the album to make it into a ringtone when I already own the album...that's just lame.

Plus the UI sucks, it's very non-obvious that you have to buy the song, download it, then click on the bell to make it into a ringtone.

It's so bad I reported it as a bug, bug 5518031.

Here's what I said:

Summary:

Making a ringtone is confusing and poorly thought out, requiring at least one-leap-of-faith, and rubs the users nose in DRM limitations.

Steps to Reproduce/Expected behavior:

Try to turn the alarm clock sounds from “Time” on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon into a Ringtone. You'll hit everything that's wrong with the whole system all at once.

1. Clicking on the bell icon does...nothing. It doesn't even say “you have to buy the song first dummy”. Leap of Faith: You have to know to buy the song, THEN click on the bell in the purchased window.
2. You can't buy the song, its album only. But anyone with any musical taste at all already owns this album on CD.
3. Searching for “Time” in your Library. Select “Create Ringtone...”. A dialog will come up saying “You can create Ringtones from many purchased songs in your library”. But it won't tell you you can't do it from that one...

Trojan Condoms Website

I laughed so hard it brought tears to my eyes...

So it was bugging me that iTunes doesn't automatically sync between computers.

So I filed as a bug with Apple, and I gave it a funny name: “Too many single iTunes Engineers”, because if you're married and have two computers and one iTunes account, its an issue. So obviously all the iTunes engineers are single...

I got back a duplicate report as I expected (still worth filing the bug, because filing duplicates raises the priority of the original bug).

But I had to laugh when I read the message...

Subject: Re: Bug ID 5540373: Too many single iTunes Engineers

This is a follow up to Bug ID# 5540373. After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering. This issue has been filed in our bug database under the original Bug ID# 3165623.

From the leopard feature set:

Sandboxing

Enjoy a higher level of protection. Sandboxing prevents hackers from hijacking applications to run their own code by making sure applications only do what they’re intended to do. It restricts an application’s file access, network access, and ability to launch other applications. Many Leopard applications — such as Bonjour, Quick Look, and the Spotlight indexer — are sandboxed so hackers can’t exploit them.

Which means that the next iPhone update will definitely close the 1.1.1 “bad TIFF” exploit.

Hi Pierce,

This is a follow-up to Bug ID# 4924560 . Apple has just announced via Apple HotNews an iPhone SDK will be made available to developers in February 2008.

Third Party Applications on the iPhone

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.

Steve

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch. [Oct 17, 2007]

Best Regards,

The Bug Reporting Team Apple Developer Connection

Now I feel all warm and fuzzy...

From this NYT Article

There are no “verbs” in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or “verb,” to do something to it.

Hey, I pointed out a long time ago that Windows was this bastard child that forced you to think verbally while using a GUI... Here it is. I'd actually been saying that for years, and I know for a fact that a long email I wrote on the subject even before the above posting was heavily CC'ed around the Apple UI team.

Steve Jobs stole from me!

Oh well, my iPhone is cool. Much love Steve.

One of the Windows guys brought up the Zune music store during our meeting today. So if you go to the Zune store and search for an artist, it will show you the artist and their albums, but it won't show you that you can't buy say and AC/DC or Beatles song until after you tunnel down to the album. Which then throws their entire store into Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Then again, that's always my experience with using Winblows. “Will it work? I hope so. Let's see... squint, brace myself, click Whew, it worked.

With the Zune store you can have the same experience. Can I buy the song? I hope so. Let's see...

When I got my first iPod, and I opened the packaging, it was like the beginning of 2001; all that was missing was "Thus Spake Zarathrustra" playing the background.

Because this "fake" website actually looks like every other giant corporate site in the world.

The mission statements are incredibly hilarious.

Da Link

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!

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.

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

I kept wondering, "am I going to see a Blue Screen of Death"?

It was there.

Perhaps I should have asked myself, when, not if.