Category: Computers & Technology - Page 63

What’s the point of blogging?

No, it’s not a rhetorical question. What is the point of blogging? If you’re a blogger, why do you do it (assuming you have a cogent reason)? If you’re a blog reader, why do you read the blogs that you do?

Here’s a secondhand quote on the matter that I found on one of the blogs I read:

In many ways the core of blogging is a willingness to apply what you know to every problem you encounter, and see how good a job you can do of it in a more or less integrated fashion.

That gem, which I had to read five or six times to understand, but the more I read it the more I agree, was written by Tyler Cohen on another blog I (less often) read.

Thinking about the blogs I read most, the authors have a clear purpose; the blogs have a clear theme. The authors are experts (or at least well-versed) in the subject matter they’re writing about, and the blogs become a commentary on the events of the day (within the author’s realm), bringing to the reader’s attention items of interest that they may have otherwise missed, and supplementing the link with a tidbit (or more) of relevant discussion.

So then, assuming that the success of a blog in achieving this goal is an end in itself, the point of blogging is to act as a niche news service with commentary, or perhaps more accurately as a trusted adviser — that “in-the-know” friend (though you probably don’t know the blog author personally) who knows what you’re interested in and keeps you on top of the latest and greatest.

It’s fascinating to think of the power blogs have in this way. But it also reinforces the importance of the trust I mentioned in the last paragraph. A blogger’s stock in trade is their trustworthiness. Readers need to know that the blogger actually knows what they’re talking about, and perhaps even more importantly, that they’re not being misleading — whether deliberately (for unknown nefarious purposes), accidentally (because they goofed), or due to the invisible hand of an outside influence (money from sponsors, potential to achieve a position of power and authority).

It’s easy to say that this is a reason not to trust blogs, and why blogs will always be — or at least are for now — inferior to “legitimate” journalism. But given numerous recent examples (all of which in my mind right now involve Glenn Beck in some capacity) of the failures of traditional media for many of these same reasons, I think blogging deserves more serious consideration.

Stuff that sucks: Griffin and HP edition

I hate stuff that sucks. And these days, it seems like more stuff sucks than ever. The era of things being built to last has long since passed. Even the era of planned obsolescence is obsolete. We are living in an era when most things aren’t built to be any good in the first place. Printer companies, in particular, seem to have adopted the Gillette model of disposal razors: give the printer away for free (well, almost), and reap huge profits on ink cartridges. Now, you’d think that in order to keep their customers in need of ink cartridges, they would at least ensure that their printers work. But they’ve learned that’s not even necessary. It’s cheaper to just swap the duds with “refurbished” replacements than to ensure that no duds leave the factory in the first place.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My gripe today did not start with my HP Photosmart C4580 all-in-one inkjet printer/copier/scanner. I have a perpetual low-level gripe with it, to the point that I’ve become numb to the absurdity of having to restart the supposedly always-on, Wi-Fi enabled printer to get it to actually recognize commands from computers on my network. No, today’s gripe began with the Griffin Reveal case I purchased along with my new iPhone 3G S three weeks ago.

At first the case seemed fantastic, but within a few days I noticed little bits of dust/grains of crud/whatever were getting down inside. I removed it, cleaned away the crud, and replaced it. But the crud came back, and as the days went on it got worse.

Now, just three weeks after I bought the phone, the Griffin Reveal has left permanent, deep pits in the back of my iPhone. Observe, in this pathetically blurry picture that — for reasons I’ll explain in a bit, though you may already be able to guess given the rant that started this post — I took with my old iPhone (which now belongs to SLP).

The pits.

Now, if you could see any detail at all in this picture, you’d see that there are dozens of little pits in the back of the phone, like I stabbed it repeatedly with a drafting compass. (Which I assure you I did not. I haven’t owned a drafting compass since geometry class in tenth grade.)

Here’s the culprit, which I am contemplating returning to the Apple Store for a refund:

The culprit and its stupid box.

And, yes… the blurry photos. I was going to scan the back of the new iPhone with my HP all-in-one, but the flippin’ thing won’t scan for some reason. I just scanned some stuff with it last week, but now the HP Scan Pro software crashes each time I try to use it. The scanner will kick in, scan a few inches, and then bail out with a pointless error message.

Translation: We suck.

Bear in mind that this error message appeared after my clicking of the “New Scan” button in the software caused the scanner to sputter to life and begin (but not finish) scanning.

I tried restarting the scanner. I tried restarting the scanner and my computer (twice). I tried deleting preferences and I tried opening HP Scan Pro directly instead of letting HP Device Manager fire it off and I tried using a USB cable instead of Wi-Fi and I tried standing on my head and chanting dark incantations by the light of the full moon. Nothing worked.

So much suck in such a small package.

Update, the next morning: Having “slept on it,” I recognize how much Apple is to blame here. Aesthetics do often trump practicality in Apple’s industrial design. The shiny black plastic on the back of the iPhone sure looks nice, at least when it’s new, but it’s way too soft and scratch-prone. My old iPhone had a brushed aluminum back, which I loved. And to be honest, the plastic back was a big deterrent for me with the first iPhone 3G. I shouldn’t need a case for my phone. A device that goes in people’s pockets and purses ought to be made from materials that are suitable for that environment.

That said, the pits caused by the Griffin Reveal case are far worse than the superficial scratches it would have received without it. I suppose the case does still provide extra protection if the phone gets dropped, so now I’m debating putting the case back on, despite the damage it’s caused so far.

Another update, later in the day: Well, there will be no returns… I checked my Apple Store receipt and it needed to be returned within two weeks. It has a one-year warranty (WTF?) though, but it seems more trouble than it’s worth. Unless I can get a new iPhone 3G S on the spot, I’d rather just live with the damage. Which is just what they’re hoping I’ll do. Sounds like HP.

On electronics and “e-waste”

I am a certified electronics aficionado. There’s a MacBook and an iPhone sitting on the desk in front of me, along with an external USB hard drive and a pair of computer speakers; on the adjacent desk, a USB turntable, cassette deck*, and two USB MIDI keyboard controllers. In the drawers of the desk are a mountain of cables, another USB hard drive, an iPod touch, a Bluetooth mouse, a remote control, and about 50 alkaline batteries of all different sizes. Also in the room are an LCD TV, an XBOX 360 and its attendant controllers (including Rock Band instrument controllers), an older laptop computer, a really old Macintosh SE, more cords and miscellaneous accessories, and of course a slew of digital media: more CDs, DVDs and game discs than I can count. (Oh yeah, there are also a couple hundred video game cartridges for the likes of the Atari 2600 and NES.)

I won’t be getting rid of any of this stuff in the immediate future, but someday it will be disposed of. And what of it then?

I don’t think I’ve thrown away any electronics in decades (although I will confess I rarely make the effort to recycle batteries). I know I have never recycled electronics — I don’t even know how I’d go about it. But when an electronic gadget outlives its usefulness for me, I do my best to dispose of it in a productive way: I give it to someone else, or I sell it at a garage sale or on eBay.

But back to the matter of recycling: what exactly happens with electronic gadgets when you recycle them? As is becoming increasingly well-known, most of them get packed up in giant shipping crates and sent across the ocean to places like China, India, Pakistan and sub-Saharan Africa. What happens then is mostly ignored by the rest of the world… out of sight, out of mind. Except it’s still there.

As this iFixit article describes, the “e-waste” ends up in impoverished communities where everyone, including children, works to break down the equipment and harvest valuable metals — copper and gold, mostly, at an average value of about $6 per device — from it by whatever means are available. This usually means burning, which releases toxic fumes into the air; and once the copper and gold are out, the rest is simply dumped, cluttering the landscape and leaving more toxic heavy metals (lead and mercury, especially) to seep into groundwater, further contaminating the environment in which these people live.

So, what are we to do? I’m not much of an activist: I don’t think protests get you very far. When there’s money to be made in something, it’s pretty easy for the makers of that money to ignore the ravings of the hippies picketing outside their doors. But if you want to be a conscientious consumer of electronics, the best thing you can do is to take actions that will prevent your gadgets from winding up in one of those China-bound shipping crates.

I’m not saying “don’t recycle your electronics,” although I suppose I am saying “don’t recycle your electronics if you don’t know where they’re going to end up.” The best thing you can do, I think, is probably what I’ve been doing all along anyway: keep the gadgets, or find someone else who wants them when you’re done with them. Ensure that they’ll get a maximum lifetime of use before they’re disposed of. (And by that time maybe you’ll think of them as collectibles and keep them in your personal electronics museum, like I’ve done with my Mac SE and the Atari 2600.)

Of course, there’s another solution, though it’s one I find a bit hard to swallow: don’t buy the stuff in the first place.

* Regarding the cassette deck: I’m proud to say that it’s something I recently acquired by salvaging it from a “free” pile at a neighbor’s curb after a garage sale.

My favorite new feature in iTunes 9

Yesterday Apple released iTunes 9 and iPhone OS 3.1, and this new version of iTunes addresses one of my ~~biggest~~ few frustrations with the iPhone: organizing your apps.

I cringe at saying “apps,” fearing I sound like Michael Scott talking about something they sell at Dave & Busters. But, given that it’s known as the App Store, I guess that’s what to call them.

Anyway… this is not about what they’re called, it’s about how they’re organized. And up to now, the only way to organize them was to go to your iPhone’s home screen, hold your finger on an icon until they all start to wiggle, and then drag them around. Not bad, when you only have one screen’s worth of apps, or even two or three. But I have seven — and that doesn’t even count the apps I downloaded but deleted from my iPhone.

Trying to keep seven screens’ worth of icons (16 per screen) organized by this finger-dragging method is tedious to say the least. And now that even the default configuration includes two screens, Apple realized they had to do something about it.

But now, we have this:

Brilliant. I love it. The only flaw now is that this layout is too big to fit into the iTunes interface on my MacBook without having to scroll the entire thing, since the iPhone screen is represented at actual-pixel size. (I had to take two screenshots and stitch them together in Photoshop to create the image you see above, which is scaled down slightly from the actual size.

Then again, it’s always something, isn’t it?

CakePHP Auth component, Flash and Internet Explorer… a deadly combination

OK, it’s not really deadly at all… other than that it will kill your CakePHP session and log you out.

My CakePHP-based CMS uses YUI Uploader, a Flash-based file uploader utility. It’s much better than the default HTML file uploader, because it supports a fully CSS-customizable progress bar and multiple file uploads.

It’s pretty slick, even though I did tear some hair out earlier in the year trying to get it integrated into the CMS. All went well for several months, until one particular client, using Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 8, discovered a showstopper of a problem: whenever you uploaded a file, all would seem well until you went to save your changes and you’d get kicked back to the login screen, without the changes being saved. Bad news!

I did some diagnostics and determined that, yes indeed, the CakePHP session was in fact being dropped as soon as the Flash process finished queuing the file uploads (an AJAX-based process), before you actually click the “Save” button… but since there’s nothing else happening dynamically on the page, it wasn’t obvious that the session had been killed in the background.

Anyway, some research led me to a perfect explanation of the problem, and an equally perfect solution: Flash is sending a different user agent string, which was resetting the CakePHP session. I’m still not sure why it was only affecting Internet Explorer, but at any rate, a simple change to the app/config/core.php file solved the problem in a snap. The critical line:

Configure::write('Session.checkAgent', false);

I suppose by removing this line, the application is ever-so-slightly less secure, but there should be enough other precautions in place that removing the user agent check as part of the process of validating a session should not pose a significant security risk.