Category: Uncategorized

iPad and iPhone – open for a fee

There is a lot of grumbling out there about how the iPad and the iPhone are closed environments, and you can only run programs that are blessed by Apple, and available through the App Store.
It occurs to me that one is perfectly free to write software for your own use, simply by joining the Apple developer program.  You can download the SDK and write code anytime.  If you want to test the code on a real device, then you need to join the paid developer program, which currently costs $99/year.
As long as you don’t use pre-release features of the iPhone OS, you may even be able to share your source code with others.  There are lots of sites out there with code examples.
So perhaps the iPhone and iPad are not closed at all, you can run Apple approved software for no extra charge, but you can run anything you write for $99/year.

John Mucci

I am greatly saddened to report the passing of John Mucci this past Sunday.
As some of you know, I have an affinity for people when I cannot predict what they are going to say. I am not talking about randomness, but about folks who have an approach to thinking that is unlike my own and a depth of insight I rarely reach.  John was one of those people.
I first met John in 2004 when I got started talking to Matt Reilly and Jud Leonard about SiCortex. John was perhaps foremost a salesman, but he worked not only to understand the technology but to understand it well enough to see how it would apply in new situations.  At first I was surprised that the CEO wanted to interview every prospective team member, but I came to treasure the hiring meetings afterwards.  Not only could I not predict his opinion, but his assessments made sense.
As far as I could tell, John knew everyone involved with High Performance Computing and usually on a first name basis.  Walking the floor with John at Supercomputing was an experience.  The mean free path between people he knew was about 10 feet.
Prior to SiCortex, John had worked at Digital Equipment and at Thinking Machines, where our paths almost intersected, as I worked elsewhere at Digital, and later Open Market took over space in Cambridge previously occupied by TMC. I mention this because of another similarity between Thinking Machines and SiCortex – both were well liked by their customers.  I know that John Mucci was responsible for the good regard folks have of SiCortex, and I like to think the same was true at Thinking Machines.
He will be missed.

More Hotel WiFi

At SC09 in Portland, I stayed at the Marriott downtown, which was a perfectly fine hotel, except that the restaurant and bar seemed to close at 10PM.  What’s with that?  WiFi was $10 a day.  As I’ve noted before, there is an inverse relationship between the expense of a hotel and the quality and ease of use of its Internet access.
I was in New York City two weeks ago, and stayed at the Millenium Hotel at UN Plaza.  Don’t bother.  They no longer have ice machines!  This is just such a basic requirement of hotels that… I can’t go on.  In any case, they don’t have WiFi, they have wired Ethernet for $12 per day.
A few days ago, I was in Baltimore and stayed at the La Quinta BWI.  The WiFi was fast, free, and easy.  These guys have it <almost> right.  There is a browser intercept screen, but it does not ask you to register. All it does is ask if you want to join their email list (no), and then it lets you on the net.  There was no problem playing You Tube videos, which usually kills hotel networks.
I was really quite impressed.
In any case, the inverse relationship still holds.  Millenium (expensive hotel and bad Internet), La Quinta (inexpensive hotel, free  and good WiFi). Marriott, somewhere in between.
I’ll note, however,  that you can see a <lot> of WiFi networks from the 36th floor in Manhattan.

A Tribute to xkcd

I am an avid reader of xkcd.  Recently a cartoon on Movie Narrative Charts appeared. My immediate reaction, of course, was to search the Minuteman Library Network for an available copy of the time trave movie Primer.
My favorite quotes:  “Are you hungry? I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon.” and “The best mathematicians are the lazy ones.”
Win and I watched the movie the other night, and I came up with this appreciation, in the style of xkcd:

time001

Thin (mobile) clients considered harmful

I’ve tried to stop following the T-mobile / Microsoft Sidekick disaster, in which all customer’s data has been lost, but I can’t.  It is an example of schadenfreud.
So far, the word is that Microsoft embarked on a SAN upgrade without an adequate backup, or perhaps without an independent backup.  Sidekick devices are thin clients, which keep data only as a cache of the truth, which is on the server.
Thin client is an idea which periodically pops up. The reasoning behind thin client seems to take two forms: thin clients need less hardware, so they are cheaper, and thin clients are easier to centrally manage.  These days I suppose there might be a third issue, which is that thin clients are more secure, because they don’t contain your data when you are not there.
The “cheaper” argument really hasn’t made much sense for the last decade. Storage has been following the usual technology curves, and has become incredibly cheap. Processing power as well.  It just makes no sense to make the client stupid on the grounds that it saves money.  A related argument has been that thin clients are quieter than thick, because they can be made fanless.  We now have flash storage that is very low power.
The “centrally managed” argument has a place in the enterprise, in which IT can “provision” a workstation remotely, and employees can “hotel” by taking any available cube.  This argument doesn’t seem to apply to mobile devices like laptops or phones, however, because they usually are assigned to one person for an extended period. It definitely doesn’t apply to non-enterprise devices.
The security argument is a red herring, I think, and one that is easily corrected by a decent encrypting filesystem.  Yes, a stolen device would be susceptible to offline attacks.
Another issue is availability.  We are not always connected, at least those of use that depend on wifi and crappy cell phone networks.
I think that techn0logy trends and connectivity argue for local data. I want copies in the cloud, as backup, and available for computations out there, but I want local access as well.
My personal digital footprint now hovers around a Terabyte, and is only that large because I’ve been gathering digital copies of home video.  I have, I think, about 4 copies.  I can’t keep it all inside the laptop or iPhone yet, but I can keep all my historical email, all software I’ve ever worked on, all music I own, and all photos I own with me at all times.  I also have 10 or 20 gigabytes of public domain books, just in case I need something to read.
In a few years, all that will fit in my phone, and a few years after that, I can have the video as well.  Vernor Vinge got this right in his Marooned in Realtime, with a “pocket database” that could hold one’s digital footprint, plus plenty of reference material.
I think there is also an argument that the Sidekick architecture failed to adapt to technology trends.  Thin client might have made sense when Danger was starting, back in ought-two or whatever, but it doesn’t make sense now, with multi-gigabyte flash chips nearly free.

Days of (Vista DNS) Rage

I have a Trendnet print server between the LAN and an HP1320 USB printer.  The printserver speaks LPR, among other things, and I set up Cathy’s Vista laptop to print via an LPR port to 192.168.166.7, queue HP1320, and it worked fine.
After a rework of the network infrastructure, the printserver moved to .167.39, and acquired a DNS name on the internal network of studyprint.stewart.org.
To make printing work again on the Vista laptop, I created a new LPR port to studyprint.stewart.org queue HP1320 and all was well.
Yesterday the laptop stopped printing.  Jobs were queuing locally.  From a command prompt window, I could ping 192.168.167.39, but I could not ping studyprint.stewart.org.  Aha! DNS problems.  However Firefox and IE worked normally for names outside the LAN.
I tried nslookup, and it works fine.  studyprint.stewart.org resolves, as it should, to 192.168.167.39.
Then I discovered that I could ping “studyprint” but NOT “studyprint.stewart.org. I presume because the DHCP server told it the default domain was stewart.org.  There is really no excuse that the fully qualified name doesn’t work.
At this point, I remembered that Vista is not my fault, and hardwired the printer port to 192.168.167.39.  Printing works again.
Dear Microsoft.  How is it that you cannot make DNS lookups work reliably? How is it that nslookup works fine but ping does not?   It is really too bad that C has some sort of Mac allergy.
Did I mention that the Trendnet printserver speaks Bonjour?
I think it is supposed to speak windows networking as well, but I’ve never gotten it to work.

How to stop itching

Hot water stops itching.
This is not well known, but here are some links:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/394710/how_to_stop_the_itch_of_poison_ivy.html
http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2005/10/18/hot-water-for-itches/
Scratching really doesn’t work.  After a few minutes, you want to scratch again, but hot water really does work, for hours.
Evidently, itching is caused by release of histamines from the skin.  Hot water causes the skin to release the whole reservoir at once.  This causes a truly weird sensation for a few seconds, but after that, the area won’t itch for quite a while – hours – until the histamines build up again.
The water has to be rather hot – not full on hot (140 at my house) but hotter than feels comfortable.  Experiment.  You will be a happy and itch free person.
I use this technique with poison ivy or mosquito bites.

iPhone tweaks

Overall I am very pleased with the iPhone 3G after a year.  Like everyone else, I detest ATT.
There are things that could be improved.
UNDO! In the mail application, I sometimes accidentally delete a message.  I notice right away, but it is a pain to recover.  My several mail apps use different naming schemes for deleted messages. I sure I could fix that, but right now I have to check each of the Trash/Deleted Messages folders  to locate the one the iPhone uses.  Then I have to scan down the list of deleted messages because the table of contents is kept sorted.  I delete so much spam that there can easily be dozens of spams ahead of the message I want.  Once I find it, I have to refile it back to the inbox.  All thus could be fixed with one undo button.
MARKING – It is a common event that I scan arriving mail while on the go.  The iPhone keyboard is not so wonderful that I respond that way.  Instead, I’d like to mark the messages I want to deal with later.  I could refile them to a todo folder, but I’d rather mark or flag them in the inbox.  I’m not much for sorting email into folders.  I just create a sequentially numbered archive folder with a few thousand old messages every few months.  I’ve been doing this since 1978, so it is kind of set.
The iPhone could use the edit dialog for this.  All it does is let you mark mail for deletion right now.  Instead, you could flag messages with the edit dialog.  To flag a single message, you might swipe it to the left.
Other iPhone apps.  I use Google reader on the iPhone.  Whevener my daughter borrows the phone, she logs into her account on Google reader.  When I get the phone back I have to retype my own login data.  The Google reader app could make it easier to select from multiple sets of credentials.  Or maybe the whole phone could have a switcher so multiple people could easily share it.
The iPhone needs a way to turn off all phone functionality while leaving WiFi running. This is for airplanes with WiFi.
UPDATE Sept 12.
I forgot the most important improvement to Google Reader.  “Mark all items as read” should also return to the feeds view, rather than staying on the particular feed looking at an empty screen.  My feed reading style is to scan the entries, reading the ones that look interesting, then “Mark all as read” and move on.  I always have to click again to return to the feed list.