December 2004 Archives

I've been reading John Dvorak's IT opinion pieces since the early 1980's. He's always entertaining, and frequently provocative, if not always right.

This week he posted a piece where he extrapolates from browser statistics to conclude that the Macintosh platform is irrelevant and doomed in the marketplace.

You can choose to agree or not with his conclusions, but he's got his data sources confused.

In the piece he says he's using data from the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium founded by Tim Berners-Lee and others. The W3C is a highly respected organization that develops and maintains standards for the Web.

But the statistics Dvorak links to are actually from w3schools, a site of web tutorials owned and maintained by Refnes Data, a Norwegian software development and consulting company. The w3schools web browser statistics are derived from the log files of their particular site. While these might be globally indicative of browser and platform market share, there's no guarantee that this is an accurate inference.

I don't know about you, but I'm leery of opinions expounded loudly by people who can't properly identify their data sources.

And, interestingly enough, the w3schools stats show a significant increase in Mac market share - from 1.8% in March of 2003 to 2.7% in December 2004. That's a pretty dramatic increase if it's indicative of global trends.

Perhaps more interesting is the growth of the Mozilla browser use to over 21 percent. Now that's impressive!

We're back from our Caribbean trip, if not yet caught up from the jet lag (it's a four hour time difference).

While I'd always been skeptical of big cruises, it turned out to be a lovely experience, and a great way to handle a group of nine people ranging in age from 6 to 83 with a variety of interests and tastes. The excellent staff of the Celebrity Constellation took great care of us, and the various islands we visited (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Barbados, St. Lucia, and Antigua) were beautiful, fascinating and very different from each other.

We took a submarine ride around a coral reef in Barbados, played on beaches on St. Lucia and Antigua, visited a batik studio on St. Lucia, walked around old San Juan, Puerto Rico, and more.

One of the things I really liked about the cruise ship was that everything from stateroom access to shore excursions to ordering extras (like espressos and wine) was controlled by a single ship identity card. It was great not to have to carry a wallet full of different cards for different purposes. It seems like life would be a lot simpler if I could get by on a daily basis with a single card.

I have to admit that it was great to not be online for ten days. The only time I touched a computer during this trip was to burn a set of photos to CD to free up the memory sticks for the rest of the trip. Creation of computer accounts on the ship were, of course, enabled by swiping the ship ID card.

Photos of the trip are here, with some additional photos from Old San Juan (a wonderful city) here (for some inexplicable reason, .Mac's photo web page creation tool only lets you create a single page per site, with a max of 48 pictures per page).

I had a great time, and I'd be really happy to spend more time exploring the region and getting to know the cultures and geography better.

My mother wanted a Carribean cruise for her 80th birthday... and don't you think 80-year-olds should get what they want?

Normally a cruise wouldn't be our usual style of vacationing, but right now it sounds just lovely.

So tomorrow morning we're off on an 8 am flight to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where we board the Celebrity Constellation, bound for seven days of fun and sun with nine family members and 2,000 of our closest friends (and no connectivity)! Then we'll spend a few days in San Juan, playing tourist.

I'll be the guy in the chaise lounge with the funny drink with the umbrella in it...

Happy Holidays to all of you - see you in a couple of weeks!

I gave two short presentations today at our quarterly meeting for campus computing support staff. One was just a bunch of announcements from UW Computing & Communications. The other was a very brief (two slides) update on the calendaring software landscape.

We'll have audio files from all of the presentations from today's meeting online next week.

I hate to admit it, but I have bad email habits...

I get several hundred emails a day, and I just can't cope (who can?).
If I actually have one of those rare days when I'm sitting in front of my computer in my office most of the day I can just about keep up with what's coming in. But a day of meetings, or days spent travelling and at conferences, and it's all over.

And I'm one of those people who let email pile up in my inbox if I haven't finished dealing with the issue. So the size of the inbox just grows and grows and...

So my admittedly poor technique for dealing with it:

When I'm about to go out of town I save all the messages in my inbox, read or unread, to a folder named "pending". Before I do that, I delete any messages that were already in there from the last time I did it. Then I have a perfectly clean inbox for a few minutes, and when I get home I read the messages that are in the inbox first, referring to messages in the pending folder as needed.

If anybody has a better technique, I'd love to hear it.

Ed Felten has written a P2P application in fifteen lines of Python code - cool!

TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language. I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless.

Pointed out by Donna Wentworth on the indispensable Copyfight.

On Monday I noted a couple of articles from unusual places lauding Costco as a place to shop.

Then today, I notice that this week's issue of the Seattle Weekly (our local left-of-center free weekly rag) has a cover article with the headline "Company For The People" and the blurb says:

Costco is defying Wall Street and whipping Wal-Mart, proving that you can succeed in business with 'blue state' values.

Is this what they mean by a meme?

First Greg Atkinson (the well-respected Seattle chef) writes in the Seattle Times Pacific Magazine:

In our experience, Costco employees are an enthusiastic, hard-working lot who genuinely want me to find what I need when I shop where they work. And generally speaking, I do.

I certainly don't shop for everything at Costco, just those items that I think of as "Costco items." For example, I can find real Reggiano Parmiggiano, the Parmesan cheese from Parma, for about half the price it sells for at the supermarket. And if I want to peel curls of that cheese over some killer sun-dried tomatoes, I can find those in the grocery section. I can snare some good imported olive oil and balsamic vinegar there, too.

And now it's Kevin Kelly, Wired magazine's founding Executive Editor, writing in his Cool Tools blog:

Costco has become my personal shopper. I do some research, then I buy what they sell. Like all discount chains they have professionals working full time looking for deals/quality. But what I like about Costco is their niche -- which is my niche. They consistently find a bargain in the "highest common denominator" bracket. What they seem to aim for, and what I am happy with, is the highest quality common quality. Not the very best, not the cheapest, and not mediocre either, but a good brand-name bargain in the high middle. They consistently deliver a great price on a very popular and competent item. It's neither optimization (the top model with the most features), nor is it minimization (cheapest per feature) nor plain thriftiness. Rather Costco aims for some sort of consumer satisficing, to use Herb Simon's term: a high quality that is just good enough, but at a low-end price.

Tim Bray (who now works for Sun), reports on an interesting get-together to talk about bringing Java and the dynamic languages (Perl, Python, et al) closer together. Intriguing.

Even if Sun didn’t approve of other languages on the Java platform, they’d happen anyhow. I approve, and when I started going around Sun asking, it turned out that everyone I asked did too. So I asked Graham Hamilton, who’s kind of at the centre of the Java universe, if he thought it would be a good idea to bring in a roomful of dynamic-language experts to help us figure out how Java could be made a better home.

Mozilla's Thunderbird mail client has gone to full official 1.0 release.

So far I don't notice a lot of difference from 0.9 (though I do like the new icon for search-based folders).

Congratulations once again to the Mozilla team!

Boy - you never can tell who's going to start writing blogs these days.

The Becker-Posner blog is a new entry on the scene. Gary Becker is a Nobel Prize winning economist on the faculty of the University of Chicago. Richard Posner is a federal circuit court judge and also a faculty member at Chicago, with an interest in intellectual property issues.

This should be an interesting one.

Ed has posted this over on our Vietnam Bike Ride Blog. Definitely worth a read.

Tom Heller is a Seattle physician doing AIDS work in Cambodia. From time to time he writes to his friends with stories and updates about his work and experiences in SE Asia. Even though Tom's work doesn't have anything to do with our bike trip, his letters are quite moving. I thought you might be interested in hearing what he has to say...

Bob Dylan gave his first TV interview in almost twenty years tonight, to Ed Bradley on Sixty Minutes.

It was an interesting few moments with Dylan. I found the most interesting comment where he was talking about how his early songs just came to him and how he can't hope to write those kinds of songs now, but that now he can do different things (though Bradley didn't ask him what he can do now that he couldn't then - that would've been interesting).

"I don't know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written," says Dylan, who quotes from his 1964 classic, "It's Alright, Ma."

"Try to sit down and write something like that. There's a magic to that, and it's not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, you know? It's a different kind of a penetrating magic. And, you know, I did it. I did it at one time."

Does he think he can do it again today? No, says Dylan. "You can't do something forever," he says. "I did it once, and I can do other things now. But, I can't do that."

I find Dylan's protestations that he never meant to be seen as a spokesperson for his times to be more than a little disingenuous. I mean, really - if he wanted to just be a "song and dance man" he could've been singing standards instead of writing Blowin' in the Wind. And his earliest career moves were to emulate Woody Guthrie - the man who had "This machine kills fascists" written large on his guitar. Those are not the actions of someone shirking from making a statement.

"My stuff were songs, you know? They weren't sermons," says Dylan. "If you examine the songs, I don't believe you're gonna find anything in there that says that I'm a spokesman for anybody or anything really."

"But they saw it," says Bradley.

"They must not have heard the songs," says Dylan.

Oh, really.

If you can find a video of the interview it's worth a look - there is supposedly some video available on the 60 Minutes site, but I couldn't get it to work on my Powerbook. I imagine the interview will be available on the major file-sharing networks too.

My colleague Josh Larios has put together a version of the UW's Pine email client for OS X.

While Pine isn't the prettiest email client in the world, being bascially a character-baased unix terminal application, it is very full-functioned, including features that I haven't seen in any other email client I use - like being able to search all the messages in a folder for any participaing in the mail (including To:, From:, Cc:).

Pine also allows you to keep your address books and configuration info in an IMAP folder on a remote server, which is really handy if you use multiple computers regularly.

The advantage to using Pine running natively on a desktop operating system, instead of using a terminal connecting to a unix host is that you can open attachments and urls in the email with just a click instead of having to separately download or copy and paste.

I don't imagine that there's a large audience for Pine on OS X, but I know it will come in very handy on my desktop. Thanks, Josh!

My only question is why he didn't call it Pineapple :)

I've been working from home today, still recovering from this crud I've had all week.

As I work I've been listening my way through the five-CD set of Miles Davis' Complete Jack Johnson Sessions. The original release, "A Tribute to Jack Johnson", recorded in 1970, has always been one of my favorites, being the absolute height of jazz-rock fusion. The complete sessions are also terrific, with an all star cast including John Mclaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Billy Cobham, Steve Grossman, and more. Highly recommended!

I still remember buying my first 5 megabyte hard disk for my 8088 Zenith back in 1985, from Ralph LeVan - used, for $150, if I remember correctly.

Now Gizmodo is reporting that Samsung has released a mobile phone with a 1.5 Gigabyte hard disk.

Guess that makes me old.

Is it just my imagination, or has the behavior of opening web links from within email messages changed with Thunderbird 0.9?

It seems to me that with previous Tbird releases when I clicked on links within email they opened up a new browser window to display the page.

Now the links open up in the currently active browser window, replacing whatever content was previously in that window.

I think I liked the old behavior better. I don't see any preference settings about this, and a quick google search didn't turn up any obvious help on the question.

Comments are still off, so email any suggestions, please.

Update - Michal wrote in saying "In Firefox, check Preferences -> Advanced -> Tabbed Browsing. There should be three behaviors for you to choose." And indeed there are three preferences for "Open links from other applications" in either a new window, a new tab in the most recent window, or the most recent tab/window. Cool! I choose to open in a new tab in the most recent window. Gotta love that Firefox.

Thanks, Michal!

One more thing I wanted to note from ECAR was a fabulous talk by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran about his research in cognitive neurology. He's worked extensively on "phantom limb" phenomenon, where people who have had limbs amputated continue to feel the missing limb, and is now working on synesthesia, where people get their various senses "mixed up", like seeing different colors for numbers, or tasting sounds.

The conclusions he is reaching from his research is that the human capacity for understanding and using metaphors may be hard-wired in the brain. This is fascinating work which I certainly can't do justice to. But fortunately, the BBC has a series of five lectures that Ramachandran gave in 2003, available both in audio (which I recommend if it's anywhere close to the kind of talk he gave us) or transcripts. I haven't had a chance to listen to these yet, but I fully intend to.

I've been remiss on keeping up with blogging for the past couple of weeks - things got really busy after getting back from ECAR, and then Thanksgiving happened, followed by my immediately getting sick. I'll try to catch up over the next few days...really :)