Oblomovka

2002-07-10»

The iBook’s power adaptor went on the blink earlier today. And me with only ten minutes left to copy my work files over! No problem, I thought, with neophyte MacAddict glee – I’ll just pop over to the nearby swanky Apple Store and pick up a new one.

The G3 iBook AC adapter costs $68. Unless you want one from an Apple Store, the man at the “Genius Bar” said. In which case it costs $68 plus an $85 “service parts charge”.

To be fair, he did tell me I’d be better off ordering online, and offered to recharge my Mac there while I wandered around the Mall for a couple of hours. Disappointed by this level of genius, I declined, went home, ordered the part (two days delivery), and then hacked together a fix using a leatherman and gaffer-taped. I so wanted to be just a meek little consumer today, too.

Anyway, enough Jerry Pournelle-style whining. Here’s another Linux to MacOS X blog. Useful notes on identifying which OS version you have from the terminal, remotely mounting disk images, changing shells and the like. No permalinks though.

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2002-07-08»

Well, it’s day four of messing around with Loaner – Cory’s old 466 ibook he lent me on Independence Day. I was keen to poke around with the development side of MacOS X, so I bought me a copy of Garfinkel and Mahoney’s Building Cocoa Applications on Saturday, and got to work. Inconclusive conclusions so far:

Things I like

• That the development tools and docs are gratis these days. Yay!
• The old Project Builder/Interface Builder stuff is great, in a weird mid-nineties timewarp kind of way. What all the NeXT addicts endlessly go on about is true: it’s a breeze to get up to speed. I managed to get my first dumb application up and running by Sunday afternoon, and that’s with no knowledge of Objective C, precious little remembrance of C, no clue about AppKit – and not too much blind clicking on buttons. Gads, I’m almost looking forward to grokking AppleScript.
• The built-in WebDAV support (in Finder’s “Connect to Server”) is cool. I can already see some applications for that.
• the fact I can run all this on a 466 256KB iBook without strain.
• Fink. Natch. What can I say? I’m a Debian boy at heart.

Things I’d do differently (given I’m such a darn free software wonk):

• I think there should be an officially supported “Source” folder in the app bundle. Apple’s talked about encouraging open source, and having this as an option would make sharing source on the MacOS a breeze. You could stash the code for GPL’d or BSD’d software inside, and still be able to hand people a single application file. It’d turn app binaries into little Kinder Eggs of source. And somebody could sell a shareware utility called SuperAppCompressorDeluxe which deleted that directory from all your apps, and charge $14.95 for it.
• It’s a damn shame that the NIB format is a proprietary binary affair. Having non-text bits of a development project is nasty – it makes archiving and oversight much harder, ties you down to one development environment, and scares the horses.

Things that, after all these years, remind me I’m back in Macland

• Dozens of open applications, before I remember command-Q
• Dreaming of a keyboard shortcut for “Hide Others”
• Took me five days, but I still found myself messing around with File and Creator Types. Thank goodness Quick Change kept up with the times.

And yes, you’re right. This is a displacement activity :).

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2002-07-06»

Incoming!

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I’ve been lent a MacOS X iBook! This is great news, because I’ve been curious about this new OS for months – ever since I saw how many hackers were playing with it at Emerging Tech. Even better, the unspoken condition of the loan is that I do some open source hacking on the platform.

I’ll be writing most of my experiences up on the Forwarding Address: OS X” blog, but I thought I’d dump these notes down here first, because they’re a bit less technical and very unformed.

Much of the actual OS is gently familiar from my everyday Debian life. It’s the social differences that are disorienting me most of all. I’ve been looking around for good Mac sites the past few days, and getting a lot of culture shock.

Rumour Sites

Despite what Slashdot might imply, I don’t think it’s possible to maintain rumours for very long in Free Software land. “A little birdy tells me that Alan Cox might be working on a new I2O implementation!”. Either the object of the rumour comes along and grumpily puts everyone straight, or (if it’s a more subjective piece of gossip), two gangs of fanatics come along and flamewar each other until no one cares what the truth is anymore. In MacOS land, the only person who appears to know what’s really going on except Steve Jobs. And he’s never on IRC. It’s exciting!

“User-contributed tips”

Mac Websites have this quality of “I’ve been exploring and stumbled upon this cool (yet mysterious) trick! How endlessly curious is my strange friend!”. Linux sites have much less of this idea of PC as mysterious black box. Tips tend to come with long explanations attached as to why they work, and why all other ways of doing it are Considered Dangerous.

Shareware

I’ll say it: paying for software seems eery, old-fashioned, and frankly, a bit spiv-like. You’ll share this with me, but won’t give me the source code, and cripple it until I give you money? What definition of “share” is this? Let alone having to pay to see what the top shareware items even are. It seems so stingy. Oh, and yet, so tempting…

Not saying that any of this is bad – just that it will get some getting used to. Thank goodness for the homely familiarity of fink, hey?

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Seth has done a great job at an objective explanation of what Palladium is (and congratulations to Microsoft for explaining it to the EFF without an NDA). It’s reassured me on a couple of points – for instance, it’s possible for a 386 Linux to take advantage of the Palladium’s features, and the Palladium doesn’t leak ID data about the machine.

I still think that it has strong monopolistic tendencies however. Given that anything in the Palladium can trash anything outside of it, but not vice-versa, there’s a strong market pressure to move into the Palladium context for most uses. And now we have a situation where not only are specific applications OS-specific, but specific application’s data files are OS-specific too. This is only as bad as, say, the Microsoft Word or SMB situation was a few years ago. But there’ll be no reverse-engineered OpenOffice or SAMBA projects. It still encourages homogenuity, even while being on the face of it platform-agnostic.

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2002-07-03»

The DTI has issued a report that says “compelling content will drive the next wave of broadband services according to the study” and recommends setting up a “Broadband Channel”, “a Channel 4 for the broadband age”.

This kind of out-and-out idiocy – that broadband adoption is being held up by a lack of movies to watch – seems to be widespread on both sides of the channel. So far, I’ve seen it mainly trotted out to back braindead bills like the CBDTPA, or to fleece gullible ISP’s (who are talked into desperately teaming up with low-grade, low-budge “content providers”). This was @Home’s business plan, and BT Interactive’s too. Both roaring successes.

Broadband’s not being held up by a lack of bloody content. Oh yeah, I get that all the time: “Oooh, I’d gladly fork out for a 2 meg connection, but you know, I just don’t think there’s enough on the Internet for me right now.” Broadband’s being held up by simple technical reasons, and the telcos reluctance to lose their monopoly on the last mile.

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2002-07-02»

He was one of the original Class of ’94 UK net entrepreneurs, and now runs another.com. That boy thinks too much.

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2002-07-01»

Damn. I remember Cory being so pleased with those goggles in London. The only way I can think of cheering him up is to push his story of having them stolen a little higher up the Daypop list.

I’ve never been mugged. Last Christmas, I was walking down Oxford Street and bumped into a young man. He got really angry (in that “I’m quite enjoying being this angry” way), and as I was trying to calm him down, his friend came from the side and punched me quickly, forceably, straight in the head. They laughed at my tottering, shocked expression, and walked on. One turned around and shouted “You’ll look where you’re going next time, won’t you?”. All of this in the middle of London’s most crowded street at the busiest time of year.

It was the speed that amazed me. The punch was out of the blue, and I didn’t even have time to see who did it. No-one else on the street would have spotted it, and if I’d shouted after the gang, it would have been me who would have looked strange and suspicious. It even took me a few minutes to register what had happened. I was edgy about crowds for about forty minutes afterwards, until I’d sat down with a drink with some friends. There are two times in your life when you know exactly what to do when someone assaults you on the street – every moment you live before it happens, and all the years afterwards.

One of the things I considered shortly afterwards was applying for a Data Protection Act copy of the CCTV’d videotape of the event (the DPA allows you to demand copies of any camera footage of yourself, and Oxford Street is one of the most CCTVd streets in Europe). Not for catching the puncher – CCTV’s don’t really help much with that, and I’m not sure the police would be that sympathetic. But just to reassure myself that it all really happened.

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2002-06-30»

Previous post notwithstanding, I’m disturbed to discover that I had literal nightmares about Palladium last night. And sensible ones too (in the sense that they didn’t consist of Steve Ballmer chasing me across a landscape made of giant naked librarians).

I’m still clarifying my thoughts on this, but Palladium appears to involve sacrificing liberty (the liberty to choose what runs on my computer) for some temporary security. And the more I think about it, the more I don’t like it. Ryan Lackey, in more forthright terms, agrees.

In his fascinating summary of what is to be done, Ryan discusses mass public rejection of Palladium, and I currently see this as the best solution. But I’m still trying to bring together my thoughts to convey why – and I worry that many geeks don’t instinctively understand the risks.

Before they were slapped into wakefulness by the wet trout of legislation, many knowledgeable people assured me that information could never be controlled, because the PC was, de facto, an open system.

Worse, there was a tacit assumption by a lot of (especially software) folk that over time, everything was an open system – that people wouldn’t stand for anything else, and that if nothing else the ingenuity of the black market would guarantee our freedoms. As someone who has watched Rupert Murdoch succesfully introduce a completely closed, cryptographically secure, digital content-provision system to 40% of UK households, I know that isn’t true. There’s a lot of (illicit) money to be made cracking the Sky Digital box, and it hasn’t been yet. Open systems are the exception, not the rule.

Palladium would install a closed environment on every usable desktop on the planet. Who entered and what exited that environment would not be controlled by the owner. Your programs would not run there, except at the behest of Microsoft. Software that did run there would be hidden from your sight by strong cryptography, so there would be no way of knowing what it was doing in the Palladium. And all the vital parts of your computer – the low-level hardware, a chunk of your RAM, a slice of your harddrive, even perhaps a sizeable amount of your networking capability – would only be accessible from within the Palladium. The Palladium is like Shakin’ Stevens “Green Door”. You don’t know what they’re doing, but they certainly are laughing a lot behind it.

Cory talks about the universal Turing machine as a unique object, that differs from the rest of our consumer electronics. Intel exec Leslie Vadasz warns of “neuter[ing] the personal computer to be nothing more than a videocassette recorder”. But the hardest part of this fight will be explaining to the media and the politicians (and maybe the public, although I think they have a better grasp than the rest) what the difference is. And why putting this tiny little poisoned and closed chalice into every PC destroys what has driven so much of the innovation of the last thirty years.

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2002-06-29»

You know, when people say I’m paranoid about all this surveillance legislation, I like to point them to this analysis of the RIP legislation (bottom left, near back end of cat). Now, that’s paranoid. (Found on a flyer handed to Andrew Brown yonks ago).

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