ExpanDrive

Normally, I try to keep a strict “do not feed the trolls” policy, but I’m not above a good Internet fight now and again. And let me tell you, TUAW’s “Road Test” of an OS X hacked Dell Mini 9 is certainly bad enough to risk a few punches over.

“My first real work with the mini 9 began in November, when I decided to acclimate myself to its diminutive keyboard by using it during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) to work on a novel.”

Fantastic test case for a computer designed for mobility and web access—a monumental, offline task involving hours of ass-in-chair typing. The reason people still fetishize the heavy, zero-connectivity Smith-Corona for this task is because it’s nearly perfect for it.

And yes, I have written a novel, so I would know.

“Sure, it worked for a little bit, and then began to irritate me when the gestures would fail. I decided to use a cheap micro-mouse instead, which meant that two of the USB ports were now filled — one with the cable for the mouse, and the other for the Sprint wireless broadband dongle that I use when I’m on the road.”

So wait—that’s three USB ports, which is one more than any but the most expensive Apple-branded laptop. The laptop I own only Mac laptop I can afford has only two, and since I’m stuck with the early 2006 model, other than two-fingered scroll, none of the mouse gestures work, either.

“My fingers felt like they were tripping over each other when I was typing, to the point that I found that I was actually taking longer to type emails on the mini 9 than it took me to tap them in on an iPhone!”

The choadiness and inaccuracy of my fingers is a matter of record. I’m typing this on a Mini 9, right now. Not suffering. Quotation marks are a pain. They are infinitely worse on the iPhone—the author could at least learn to lie plausibly.

“16GB is not enough capacity to load an OS, a complete office suite, and actually do some work.”

I’m sorry if this guy couldn’t run the Mail Merge Wizard, but no one I know wants a netbook so they can use Office. If you’re seriously writing blog posts in Word or coding pages in Dreamweaver, there are tons of fast, light, and awesome text editors, writing programs, and blogging tools out there for OS X. Can’t store all your music? Put it on a server and mount it with ExpanDrive. Even Photoshop has lighter alternatives.

Once the OS is on (and it fits on 8GB machines), hard drive space should be a non-issue. If not, you’re doing it wrong.

“Next, the limited screen resolution (1024 x 600) of the mini 9 made it virtually impossible to use some Mac apps that have default minimized screen sizes that are larger than that. Those apps simply had to be removed from the device, and I was stuck with a somewhat crippled hackb00k that didn’t have the software tools I normally use.”

What tools? The author is completely non-specific in what he could and couldn’t do, which is infuriating behavior for a reviewer. It’s not like he’s just avoiding brand names—aside from basic text entry, he fails to name even the tasks he attempted to carry out. How is this supposed to be helpful to anyone?

Some solutions do exist to keep peace in the battle between windows and screen space. That having been said, a netbook is “somewhat crippled” by definition. Anyone conisdering a Mini 9 needs to take careful stock of what exactly they intend to do. For broswer, mail, text editing, writing, blogging, and IM, I’ve got no beefs.

I don’t mean to belittle the author of this piece, but even his solutions are ridiculous. The 25,000 iPhone apps he cites are nothing even close to what a netbook brings you. Terminal, real SSH, multitasking, a little thing called root access, and gobs of other critical real-world features are all still only available on jailbroken phones—and I wouldn’t expect Apple to change that anytime soon. Let’s not even mention the AppStore’s strict and largely arbitrary acceptance protocol.

The sort of hybrid touch device he suggests is similarly inapplicable to this situation. It would cost far more than regular laptop, and be at least as large and cumbersome. When low cost and small size are the only reasons anyone would ever buy a netbook, I can’t see how this product would fill a similar niche.

The OS X hackbook appeals to hardscrabble, substance-over-style users who value stripped-down, efficient tools. The author of this post owns a MacBook Air, which, with its ludicrous debut price and limited features, is the epitome of all we hate about Apple. Working with a Mini 9 doesn’t live up the Jobsian Ideal, but for those of us who can manage sleeping on a bed with fewer than four pillows, it’s a Mac by any other name.

OS X is a phenomenal work environment. I’d never chose to use anything else. But for way too long, it’s been chained to machines that are, if not overpriced, certainly a financial hardship. The ability to elude this monetary burden, combined with optimized portability, is a fantastic thing—and you shouldn’t need to be the World’s Toughest Writer to appreciate that.

Some well-respected and some not-so-well-respected weblogs are linking to predictions about Apple’s iPhone OS announcement tomorrow. These predictions are sourced by the same person who said this about the original iPhone:

It’ll be coming out in January …All phone providers… Small as shit… Two batteries… Slide keyboard… Touch screen on the “outside”.

Predictions are valued asymmetrically. If you predict correctly you will treated as prophetic. On the other hand, if you predict incorrectly you will not be held accountable, regardless of how wrong you are.

I resolve to make more public predictions.

A friend of mine writes about unemployment insurance (which Canadians call “Employment Insurance”, or “the pogey”) in Newfoundland:

Out of curiosity, I wandered into an employment assistance office one day, and began asking a friendly lady who worked there about the specifics of their EI [Employment Insurance] program. She told me unabashedly, but in a quiet voice, “Everybody around here collects in the winter, and then goes and works on top of it. I mean everybody. I even used to collect and then work part-time here in the office. It’s just part of life, how we get by. But don’t tell my boss, I’m not sure if she does that.” In Newfoundland, it seems that pogey is in bed with fishing, and that seems to be fine.

via Will Wilkinson

the WSJ has an incredible piece (Titled Just Say No to Detroit) on the amount of money GM and Ford have lost in the past 25 years. Nearly half a trillion dollars has evaporated.

Over the past decade, the capital destruction by GM has been breathtaking, on a greater scale than documented by Mr. Jensen for the 1980s. GM has invested $310 billion in its business between 1998 and 2007. The total depreciation of GM’s physical plant during this period was $128 billion, meaning that a net $182 billion of society’s capital has been pumped into GM over the past decade — a waste of about $1.5 billion per month of national savings. The story at Ford has not been as adverse but is still disheartening, as Ford has invested $155 billion and consumed $8 billion net of depreciation since 1998.

As a society, we have very little to show for this $465 billion. At the end of 1998, GM’s market capitalization was $46 billion and Ford’s was $71 billion. Today both firms have negligible value, with share prices in the low single digits. Both are facing imminent bankruptcy and delisting from the major stock exchanges. Along with management, the companies’ unions and even their regulators in Washington may have their own culpability, a topic that merits its own separate discussion. Yet one can only imagine how the $465 billion could have been used better — for instance, GM and Ford could have closed their own facilities and acquired all of the shares of Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Volkswagen.

Deploying an application using mod_rails (Phusion Passenger) is like magic.

$ gem install passenger
$ passenger-install-apache2-module

Install the gem, load the Apache module – everything “just works”. It’s ridiculously easy.

I want to fall in love with mod_rails. I’m ecstatic somebody is helping novices configure Apache and trying to make everyone else’s life slightly easier. Too many man months have been spent reading up on deploying a mongrel cluster with proxy_balancer. Passenger tries to make everyone’s life much much easier, but it goes too far. If you’re doing anything with your Apache instance that isn’t purely confined to your Rails sandbox, save yourself some time and heartache and don’t even bother with Passenger. It’ll let you down.

Rails succeeds in achieving a nice balance between Magic and Pragmatic. Rails allows an enterprising developer to peek behind the curtains and make something “custom” happen. Passenger doesn’t. For instance: the inability to get well defined behavior with mod_rewrite or mod_alias is infuriating. Equally annoying is the inability to turn off mod_rails for a given virtual host. Want to run a piece of PHP on your site or have a sub-uri host your PHP based forum? Good luck. Have a low traffic app on your domain that you’d like to use Passenger for while serving your main site with mongrel. Good luck.

Rails developers might not be the most hardcore bunch out there, but they are characteristically willing to look outside their sandbox in order to get something Better done more Quickly. Denying them the ability to adequately configure their application using ‘legacy’ methods isn’t going to get you very far. I’ve tried to deploy Passenger twice now in the past 3 months, and have officially thrown in the towel.

Update 6/29/09: These concerns are now moot. mod_rails plays nice with mod_rewrite with the high performance option. Long live mod_rails!

OpenSolaris is both great and horrible. Horrible in the sense that it is nearly impossible to get anything other than a basic LAMP stack to install/compile without 30 minutes of Googling around and 20 minutes of tweaking environment variable, shared libraries, or make files. After endless [weeks] of banging my head against the desk, Jon came about this solution:

$ pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.sunfreeware.com:9000 sunfreeware
$ pkg refresh

This sets the default pkg authority to the SunFreeware site – full of pre-compiled binaries that are to actually INSTALL and WORK on OpenSolaris/Solaris 10. How novel?

Test it out by installing sudo

$ pkg install -v IPSFWsudo

I’m tagging this post with as many keywords as possible in hopes that people come across this post via Google. I want to love OpenSolaris, but it is such a nightmare to use with open source software. You’d think that out of Sun’s 34,909 employees they could construct a team of 20-30 people whose sole job was to make OpenSolaris usable and competitive with Linux for those trying to host websites.

It’s September, folks, and we all know that means: football, free stuff on the sidewalks, and yet another batch of shiny new iPods from Apple. While people who do that sort of thing for a living are prognosticating all sorts of fancy crap for the new lines, there’s really only one thing I want to see: the quick and painful death of Cover Flow.

While it may seem like just another example of Jobs buying and/or stealing someone else’s idea and pawning it off as “innovation” (see also: Dashboard, Spaces and pretty much everything else), Cover Flow is unique among Apple’s line in that it’s complete and utter garbage.

Now before you get your irrationally-tight blue jeans in a knot over how awesomely retro cover flow is, stop and act like you’re a useful human being. Do a cost benefit analysis. Benefits of cover flow: You get top sift through postage stamp-sized images of your favorite album covers. That’s it. Costs? Where do I begin…

First of all, it kills your ability to quickly parse a list of music. While the mind scans images more quickly than words (this is why favicons are so awesome), Cover Flow lets you see nine albums at a time, tops. Of these 9 albums, you can maybe tell what 3 or 4 of them are. No problem if you’ve got every corner of every album cover in your 20,000 song collection memorized, but for those of us who aren’t idiot savants, it’s a real thorn in the grundle.

Awesome! Three copies of Elephunk! But what the hell is that off to the left?

This problem is complicated by the fact that iTunes is just way too stupid to have the responsibility of assigning songs to albums. Miss a hyphen? A capital letter? Misspell a band name? You’re gonna get three different albums. It’s not that iTunes can’t figure out what art to assign; it just can’t tell that three discs with the same art, title, and band name belong to the same freakin’ album.

Ok, sweet. I finally found Van Morrison. But what’s all this other crap?

This is, of course, assuming you have art in the first place. But if you’re below age 30 or so, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you came into a fair chunk of your collection via Napster, Scour, Limewire, BitTorrent, or what have you. Over 30, and you’ve probably brought everything in from CD. Either way, That means lots of ugly, useless space-holding images in your Cover Flow. It’s as if Steve Jobs and his evil cabal convened in their Cupertino War Room and asked “how can we shame self-conscious yuppies into paying us money for music that they already have?”

Wow, this is almost as fun as looking through identical, unlabeled folders in real life!

Apple’s real crime with Cover Flow, though, was bringing it into the OS. Maybe, if Preview were somehow disabled and you had a folder entirely filled entirely with images, Cover Flow would be an acceptable means of sorting through it. But for the most part, it’s just a slow, inconvenient bit of eye candy that brings to mind the condescending, overdone metaphor of Microsoft BOB.

Cover Flow is Apple at its worst: shiny, overpacked, and buggy. Sure, it looks real cool on TV ads, and if the compugods are smiling on His Jobsness, it’ll look fly when unveils it for the fanboys. But Apple’s recent purple patch is fueled largely by the popular perception that its stuff just works; by any standard you can imagine, Cover Flow just doesn’t.

We all hate EULAs. We don’t read them, even when the little checkbox that indicates we’ve read and agreed to them won’t go away until we’ve scrolled all the way to the bottom of the 5,000 words of legalese. When some enterprising soul does read one, usually in anticipation of new version of Windows or Mac OS, he’s always shocked at what he finds, and blogs about it to the world. The world blogs back, and blogging deathmatches ensue until the terms of the agreement are lessened. Of course, this has always been a mostly meaningless exercise, since there is already a law in place that governs how we can use software we’ve purchased. 17 USC Section 117(a)(1) tells us that you are free to make a copy to RAM of any software you own (regardless of what the EULA says) provided:

(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner

Seems pretty cut and dry. Even though you don’t own the copyright, if you buy software, you can use it. The copying of it to RAM would seem to technically violate the copyright, but this law explicitly says that it doesn’t. Until yesterday.

In a summary judgement for Blizzard, the Ninth Circuit held in MDY v Blizzard that this section of law does not apply to anybody. Purchasing a copy of software does not make one the “owner” of that copy under section 117. The section of law that applies to this class of people (”licensees”) is section 106, which makes it illegal to make a copy of any work to which you do not hold the copyright. The use of software is only legal if you are given the right by the copyright owner, in this case through the EULA, and therefore if you violate the EULA, you are in fact infringing on the copyright. Unless I am mistaken, the only way to be the “owner” of a copy of software is to be the owner of the copyright itself, making Section 117 redundant. I can’t imagine the law was intended to be interpreted this way.

This ruling also sets a bad precedent for the status of other legally purchased digital property. If this judgement is correct, Fair Use does not exist. While it hasn’t been tested in court, it is generally assumed that one has the right to copy CDs for archival purposes and transfer to a different medium (Section 117(a)(2) seems to say this, as well), but all it would take would be some text printed on the inside of a CD case to explicitly make that use illegal. No contract needs to be signed; the owner of the copyright simply has to make reasonably sure that “licensees” read the agreement. Of course, this amounts to agreeing to a contract you haven’t seen, since no stores will allow to open software boxes or CD cases before purchase, and most won’t allow you to return opened software or CDs should you not agree to the terms. Since breaking the terms of this agreement now makes one a criminal, that is a bigger deal than ever before.

Slate talks about Wall-E today, and they’ve made me angry.

http://www.slate.com/id/2195126/

This is a very bad representation of the movie’s themes. In Wall-E, the environment didn’t collapse because people were fat and lazy. In fact, the movie makes pretty clear that people didn’t get fat until they’d been living in space for hundreds of years. This progression is shown several times (think of the successive captains’ portraits). It’s well-established science that you will get fat and lose bone mass floating around in space. The movie explicitly states that the Axiom’s denizens have grown obese under the effects of micro-gravity (it’s unclear why this would be, since the Axiom appears to have artificial gravity, but it is stated in the dialogue, so we’ll have to take their word for it) and more dramatically, technology. It may be true that some people are genetically predisposed to being obese, but if nobody has to walk anywhere anymore, everybody is going to get fat.

And everybody does get fat, but that’s a symptom, not a cause. The movie’s link between “obesity and environmental collapse” is much more circumspect and thoughtful than the Slate author insists it is when he says “Wall-E tells us that if we don’t change the way we live, we’ll all get really fat and destroy the world”. That chain of events actually happens in the opposite order, so finding the idea that “we gain weight and the Earth suffers” in the movie is bordering on fabrication. The same bad habits caused the environmental catastrophe and the bloating of humanity, but to suggest that the blame is laid at the feet of the genetically obese is a deliberate misreading.

Earth becomes uninhabitable because humans are wasteful, negligent, and encouraged into over-consumption by the giant corporation that also serves as their government, not because they’re fat; we’re even shown that they’re not fat when they leave Earth. No amount of FUD is going to change that very obvious (maybe too obvious) thematic statement from the creators. You can argue with it, but don’t don’t raise straw men and invent themes that just aren’t there in order to more enhance your offense. If you see the movie and come out with the idea that Pixar is decrying compulsive consumerism exclusively because it will make us all fat, then I will suggest you are missing the point entirely. If you come out thinking that Pixar believes obese people are destroying the Earth, I will begin to judge negatively your comprehension skills.

So Greenpeace dropped their annual list of environmentally unfriendly tech firms yesterday, and once again, through calculated data manipulation complete coincidence, a successful, fashionable and approachably-branded company is bringing up the rear. Nice work, Greenpeace. Way to contribute to the credibility of environmentalists.

Anyway, all this talk of eco-friendly technology got me thinking that, as far as greeness goes, Magnetk must be up there with the best in the world. After all, there are only three employees at the office, and not one of them drives to work.

Jeff usually bikes or takes the commuter rail, even though we all know from his Twitter feed that the stations frequently smell like pee. And Jon cycle-commutes with such intensity that cars are often forced from the road because of it.

While the office may not be LEED Platinum certified, it’s still in a converted Victorian; with all the impacts and emissions associated with demolition and construction, modifying an old structure is usually less harmful than building a new one.

Also, having windows that actually open means that on all but the hottest days, climate control can be achieved without switching on the small window AC unit (or “entropy pump”, as Jon likes to call it).

Furthermore, the company is bootstrapped—the guys that own it built it with their own cash. That means no unpleasant uber-capitalists are cranking carbon-besotted dollars into your seamless SFTP integration. And because there’s no physical product, packaging, or shipping, the environmental costs of production are all but nonexistant.

Even the office location screams Earth-friendly: it’s in one of the most bikeable cities in America, and everything from the train to the subway to locally-brewed beer to sushi to the best burritos in town is well within a five-minute walk.

If the employees were feeling unusually lazy one day, it’s still not a crisis; any number of local establishments deliver by bike. There’s no need even to step out for a cup of coffee, thanks to an office bottomless cup card from the coffee shop downstairs.

So are there greener companies out there? Probably—people are way into that sort of thing these days. But they tend both to work way too hard at it, and to shove it in your face once they’ve achieved results.

Magnetk’s greeness is elegant and serendipitous, and if I hadn’t written this blog post, no one at the company ever would have bothered to tell you about it.