Category Archives: Computers & Technology

My true path in life, finally diagrammed

It’s my birthday. What better time to reflect upon where I’ve been, and what I’ve become? Thankfully, Curiosity Counts (formerly a Maria Popova joint) has today linked to a flowchart, courtesy of Fast Company, that may explain it all.

A few of the details miss the mark: I taught myself BASIC, not Pascal (although I did try to make sense of Pascal while tinkering with my uncle’s IBM 5150 when I was 8), and I specialize in PHP, not Perl (distant cousins). But the lower left corner pretty much covers that, and also explains away the fact that I am married, for good measure.

Going back earlier in time, it even captures (and I’m being quite serious here) what might be the ultimate pivot point in my life: being massively obsessed with Atari but not getting into the next-generation game systems that followed it. It wasn’t for lack of interest; my parents simply refused to buy me an NES, and got me a Tandy computer (not a TRS-80, but close enough) instead. So thanks, Mom and Dad, for making a decision 25 years ago that set me on the path of lucrative uses of computers, instead of fantasy baseball and MMORPGs.

Here’s my version of the flowchart, with my path highlighted in yellow. Click the image below to see the full version, and be sure to check out the source, Taschen’s massive tome of infographics, while your at it.

Morning cup o’ links

Perhaps it would have been better to make a sausage analogy for these links, rather than a coffee-and-sausage one. But since one of the links is to a post written by Marco Arment, coffee seems appropriate. (Then again, a Google search reveals that I am far from the first person to use the phrase “morning cup o’ links” so maybe I should spend less time worrying about it being a non sequitir and instead worry that I am horribly unoriginal.)

Each morning I start the day by perusing the latest on Twitter and my RSS feeds, and I almost always find something interesting to read. But today was more interesting than most, and simply retweeting the links didn’t seem adequate. Also, some of these links may become topics for discussion on this week’s episode of The Undisciplined Room, so this is your homework.

First up, we have a post on The Verge discussing homeless hotspots at SXSW. This is a topic I’ve been reading about for the past few days, but this post was the first that made me think beyond my gut reaction that this was shameless exploitation.

Next, with a HT to Daring Fireball, and via Marco Arment, we have a look at Curator’s Code and why it’s a bad idea. The evidence has been mounting for me that Maria Popova’s 15 minutes of (borrowed) fame are almost over (especially when I’m reminded of her love of Ayn Rand and Malcolm Gladwell), and Marco helps solidify that thought.

Then we have type designer Mark Simonson (who designed the Proxima Nova font that I use in the Room 34 logo and branding materials) discussing font anachronisms in The Artist. As much as I enjoyed The Artist, issues with the fonts it used (especially straight quotes, and the fact that it used fonts in a lot of places where hand lettering would have been more appropriate) even distracted me, so I can’t imagine what it must be like for someone like Mark Simonson or Chank Diesel. (Full disclosure: I did development work on Chank’s mobile website.)

And finally… Chicago musician and multi-talent Joshua Wentz has just announced the release of the Side 2 EP by Absinthe and the Dirty Floors, one of the many musical projects with which he’s involved. He’s also made a video for each song on the EP, like this:

Slow server? Don’t overthink it. (And don’t forget what’s running on it.)

I’ve just spent the better part of a week troubleshooting server performance problems for one of my clients. They’re running a number of sites on a dedicated server, with plenty of RAM and CPU power. But lately the sites have been really slow, and the server has frequently run out of memory and started the dreaded process of thrashing.

Fearing inefficient code in cms34 may be to blame, I spent a few days trying to optimize every last bit of code that I could, which did make a slight improvement, but didn’t solve the problem.

Then I spent a few more days poring over the Apache configuration, trying to optimize the prefork settings and turning off unnecessary modules. Still, to no avail, although getting those prefork settings optimized, and thus getting Apache under control, did allow me to notice that MySQL was consuming CPU like mad, which I had previously overlooked.

Hmmm… that got me thinking. I fired up phpMyAdmin and took a look at the running processes. Much to my surprise, almost every MySQL process was devoted to an abandoned phpBB forum. Within moments I realized the forum must be the source of the trouble, which was confirmed when I found that it had over 500,000 registered users and several million posts, almost all of which were spam.

As quickly as I discovered the problem, I was back in the Apache configuration, shutting down the forum. Then a quick restart of MySQL (and Apache, for good measure), and the sites were faster than I’ve seen them in months.

The moral of the story: if you have a web server that suddenly seems to be grinding to a halt, don’t spend days optimizing your code before first looking for an abandoned forum that’s been overrun by spammers.

On innovation, litigation and exasperation

I was just reading Craig Grannell’s new blog post, There’s no justification for piracy, but there are obvious reasons why it happens, and I found myself once again agreeing exactly with what he says. The post was prompted both by the amazing Matt Gemmell’s The Piracy Threshold, as well as by yesterday’s Oatmeal comic, I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened, which basically explains piracy not as justifiable, but as the inevitable result when a person exhausts every reasonable avenue for obtaining content legally.

As Grannell points out, there are arguments to the contrary, but I think what it all really comes down to is simple: People want your content. They will make a reasonable effort to obtain it legally, at a reasonable price. But when you build a wall around your content, by charging exorbitant prices, deliberately misunderstanding the concept of fair use by fighting format shifting, or simply making it unavailable altogether, a lot of people are going to find a way around that wall.

I don’t condone torrenting, nor do I participate in it. In that regard, I don’t know if I’m in the minority on the Internet or not. But I can understand why it happens. More importantly, I believe it would not be that difficult for content owners to eliminate, or at least diminsh to irrelevancy. They just need to try.

But trying means change. It means meeting content consumers halfway. First, it means recognizing them as potential customers, not as potential thieves.

Change can be hard to accept. But I just cannot comprehend how “big media” doesn’t recognize the potential here. Instead of fighting desperately to hang onto dwindling DVD and CD sales, there’s a huge potential market for online distribution. But it requires thinking differently. Prices may go down, but so will distribution costs, by a lot. Like, almost zero. Margins may be slimmer, but that can be more than made up for with volume.

Would making everything readily available online, legally, at a modest price, eliminate piracy? Probably not. But that’s not the right way to think about it. Every advancement in technology since the printing press has presented the risk of IP theft (though, granted, that’s a modern concept), but it has also presented far greater opportunity for those who aren’t afraid of it.

So, you can resent and sue your would-be customers. Or, you can respect and engage them. I think we’re all fed up with how things are working right now. Let’s be reasonable.

Mac App Store “sandboxing”: perspective of a long-time Mac “power user”

In the web world I reasonably qualify for the title of “developer” as I spend most of my work day writing server- or client-side code. In the iOS world I nominally qualify as a “developer” in that I have paid the $99 fee to join Apple’s iOS developer program, although I have yet to do anything with it besides download early betas of iOS 5 that I never even bothered to install because I don’t have an extra device to experiment with. But in the Mac world, I am nothing more than a “power user” at best. Aside from a couple of Automator scripts (which do not count), I’ve never created a Mac application and doubt I ever will.

Therefore I’ve kept a healthy distance from Mac app developers’ criticisms of the ongoing “iOS-ification” of the Mac, specifically where the Mac App Store is concerned. I don’t use most of the iOS-like features in Mac OS X Lion, and probably won’t in Mountain Lion either, but I do use the Mac App Store, occasionally. I think it works pretty well. It’s actually gotten me to buy some apps — games mostly (of course), plus a couple of utilities like Space Gremlin (yes, that’s a utility, not a game) — for the Mac that I probably would neither have known about nor bothered to pay money for otherwise.

But there are some things that, as a power user, I recognize as problems with the Mac App Store, specifically concerning the “sandboxing” requirement that will take effect on March 1. Essentially, in order to be carried in the Mac App Store, an app cannot access the Mac’s file system except in very limited ways dictated by the OS. It’s a huge step towards making the Mac behave like iOS, which is mainly beneficial in two ways: it improves security by reining in potentially malicious applications, and it simplifies the user experience for novice computer users in a tried-and-true way.

It may be reasonable to question at least one, if not both, of those benefits however. Regarding the latter, I suspect that most would-be Mac owners who have too much difficulty understanding the Mac interface, and who would be better served by making the Mac more iOS-like, would really be better served by not buying a Mac at all, and just getting an iPad instead. Since Apple sold more iOS devices last year than all of the Macs it has sold, ever, that seems like a no-brainer. For a large and growing majority of its customers, Apple is the company that makes iPhones and iPads, not the company that makes Macs.

But it’s the former issue — the security-enhancing measure known as “sandboxing” — that is more troublesome for established Mac users like me. A lot of Mac apps need unfettered access to the file system to do what they do. Especially for those of us “power users” who write code — for the web or otherwise — we need applications that not only have full access to the file system, but that can even let us see “invisible” files. (I always have Mac OS X set to show invisible files, since I frequently need to work with .htaccess files, for instance. Did you know that any filename that begins with a period is automatically hidden by the OS by default? It’s an old Unix thing, designed to help keep users from accidentally deleting critical system files.)

A real Mac app developer has weighed in on the problems posed by the sandboxing requirement for his company’s app, SourceTree, and how, as a result, Atlassian has had to remove SourceTree from the Mac App Store.

Fortunately, unlike with iOS, the Mac App Store is not the only way to get applications onto your Mac, and I think it’s a reasonable assumption (but by no means guaranteed) that the Mac will always allow power users to do things the “old fashioned way” and install directly applications that do not conform to the App Store’s strict requirements.

But a look at the features of the upcoming Mountain Lion version of OS X gives pause. Clearly Apple wants to move the Mac more and more in an iOS direction, and clearly even beyond the growing sibling relationship between the two platforms, just on the Mac itself, Apple is putting a lot of effort into streamlining and simplifying things, making things on the Mac work, as Grubes said yesterday, “closer to how things should be rather than simply how they always have been.”

But how things “should” be is subjective, especially when it comes to what “real” applications on a “real” computer can reasonbly be expected by “power users” to be “able” to “do.” (Quotation marks indicate uncertainty.)

There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years about how we’re entering into a “post-PC” era. With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets (90-some percent of the latter being iPads, of course), new interaction methods and increasingly mobile-first web experiences, what is to become of the trusty old PC (Mac or Windows)? What surprises me most in all of this is that Apple and Microsoft are leading the charge to turn traditional computers into post-PC devices. Both Mac OS X Mountain Lion and Windows 8 are radically diverging from their traditional interfaces into new directions inspired by their mobile siblings.

In some ways this is an exciting and fascinating time. For about two decades now, Mac OS and Windows have been very similar, presenting nearly identical ways of interacting with computers. But iOS and Windows Phone (which is coming to Windows 8 as the Metro interface) are very different from each other. The next standard UI has not yet been established. We haven’t seen this kind of competition and variety since the early 1980s, before Microsoft’s desktop OS dominance was established.

But it’s not the early 1980s. We’re not living in a time of unprecedented invention and discovery. We have nearly 30 years of GUI-based computing experience under our collective belts, and the conventions of standard GUI interfaces (as represented mainly by Windows and Mac OS X) have become expectations of the “power users” who rely on them not just as an alternative form of entertainment while sitting on the couch in the evening, but to do real work — creative, technical, business-oriented work.

That’s not going to change overnight as February passes into March. And it may not change significantly in our lifetimes. But if Apple aggressively restricts what applications in the Mac App Store can do, in ways that prevents users from getting work done, while simultaneously pushing the Mac App Store as the primary (and eventually only) way to install applications on a Mac, they will effectively kill the Mac as a tool of creative professionals, which is pretty much the only thing that kept Apple alive through the ’90s in the first place. Sure, Apple doesn’t really need us now (and it would still have us anyway… I’m not giving up my iPhone anytime soon), but making the Mac too much like iOS doesn’t necessarily make it better. It just makes it… unnecessary.