It took me quite some time to get around to writing the post, however; and, when I started typing, I realized why. To dig into Apple’s place in my psyche, I had to explain my history with Apple products, and indeed with computers in general. And, as it turns out, that takes a while. The result is a post where the tail is rather wagging the dog; interesting to me, at least, but one that could most charitably be described as ungainly. (Feel free to skip ahead to the Apple bits.)

At any rate: the computers I have owned, and why I am fascinated with Apple.

Prehistory

My parents bought us an Apple ][+ in May 1982; I was in fifth grade at the time. That was the only computer we had at home through at least 1989, when I went off to college (my brother got a computer when he went to college a few years earlier); hard to imagine these days. I'm not sure when my parents got a second computer, and I know they continued using the Apple ][+ for several years after I left home, at the very least to run a program they wrote to help manage their finances.

I programmed some on that Apple ][+ (the high point being a text adventure that I wrote), but my memory is that I didn't program particularly seriously on it. I used it to write papers (and for some other writing projects, I went through a phase when I wrote short stories and a novella). And I played quite a few games on it, high points being various Infocom games and the first four Ultima games, but I also think fondly of Robot Odyssey, Le Prisonnier, Lode Runner, and Wizardry.

In 1987 (my junior year of high school) I started hanging out more at Oberlin College, and I spent quite a bit of time in the various computer clusters in the school library. I got to be a rather fluent VAX/VMS user, and (presumably through some of the math courses I was taking?) started hanging out with some computer science majors. They got me interested in learning to program in C and Scheme, and in the 1988–1989 school year I started using Unix more. I also remember helping one of them install GNU Emacs on that VMS cluster. (At the time, the computer science’s Unix cluster actually had Gosmacs installed instead of (or at least in preference to?) GNU Emacs.)

Oberlin College could send e-mail to other institutions via Bitnet, and had a DECnet connection with a half-dozen or so other colleges. (DECnet was pretty cool.) It also had Usenet feeds. It was not yet on any of the TCP/IP-based networks that became the internet.

College

When I went off to college in the fall of 1989, my parents brought me a Macintosh SE/30; I used it to write papers in non-technical subjects, play games, and do some amount of programming. (I wrote my papers on technical subjects in LaTeX; I’m honestly not sure whether I mostly typed those on my Mac or on one of the clusters mentioned below.) Continuing my habits from the last two years of high school, however, I spent much much more time on the various computer clusters around the college. I begged an account on the math department’s Sun workstation cluster, though the sysadmin and I had an iffy enough relationship that I didn’t spend very much time there. I begged an account on the computer science department’s Sun workstation cluster as well, where I spent more time. (There were probably Ultrix machines in that cluster, too?) And I got a part time sysadmin helper job on the general school cluster. (Mostly Ultrix machines, initially with dumb terminals but X terminals showed up fairly soon.)

I probably spent most of my time on the general school cluster: programming, playing around, and doing system administration work. Coming out of that, I was much more comfortable on Unix than in any other computing environment, and had installed various bits of free software (mostly GNU tools of various sorts) over and over again. I also had a friend from Oberlin who was then working at the Free Software Foundation, so I was getting a strong free software philosophical dose from him as well.

I took a couple of computer science courses (an intro theory course, a compilers course), but not many: mostly because I could learn how to program computers just fine on my own, partly because I had enough other interests competing for my course time. Also, at that time Harvard’s computer science department didn’t have the buzz that I’d gotten from Oberlin. (Though there were students and faculty members that I learned a lot from, don’t get me wrong.) I was into programming languages and compilers at the time: I did some sort of undergrad research project on compilers, I was a course assistant for a few courses on programming languages and compilers, and I spent three out of my four summers during that period doing programming-related work. (One summer at MITRE, one at DEC, one being a course assistant at Boston College; the fourth summer was spent at a math research program whose main benefit was that I became a not-hopelessly-incompetent cook.)

During this period, I had access to TCP/IP-based networks: ARPAnet had evolved into NSFnet, with the internet coming. The web poked its head out right at the end of this period, but it certainly wasn’t clear to me that it was anything more than a peer to the various other network protocol that were floating around at the time.

Life as a Mathematician

Then, after a year’s interlude, I went to math grad school in 1994. I still had my old Mac, Jordan bought a new Mac (that I played Marathon on), Liesl bought a 486 machine running Windows 3.1 (I played Myst, System Shock, and Dark Forces on that), and at some point I was given an X terminal that I could use at home. Most of my computer time was spent on the math department machines, though; and I essentially wasn’t programming at all during this time period. Also, a friend of mine gave me an NES, which started me on a spiral of depravity that I still haven’t emerged from. (One of the first things I did after getting my postdoc acceptance letter was to get a Nintendo 64; good thing my thesis was almost completely written by then…) Actually, though, my dominant leisure activity during that time period was reading books, I averaged more than a book a day over the course of grad school.

I can’t remember if I moved my old (9 years old at the time!) Mac with me when we went to Stanford in 1998; we moved Liesl’s computer, but I’m not sure if we ever turned it on. In general, I did my computing on the machine in my office at the math department; I can’t remember its specs (though I believe it had 4 GB of hard drive space?), but it was running an early Red Hat Linux version. I still wasn’t programming significant amounts: I was busy being a mathematician and a parent (Miranda was born in 1999), trying to figure out how to teach well, and playing video games, doing the latter almost exclusively on consoles instead of computers.

Returning to the Apple theme that triggered this post: during this period, my interest in Apple was quite low. I had a Mac, but barely used it; I certainly wasn’t going to use Windows machines, but really my focus was on Unix. (So, in terms of recent computing deaths, Dennis Ritchie’s is a lot more relevant.) I was at least partly anti-Apple at the time: the Free Software Foundation and the League for Programming Freedom had boycotted Apple because of their use of user interface patents, and that had an effect on me.

Transitioning

In 2002, academia and I came to a mutual decision that we weren’t as good a fit as I had thought. Fortunately, the Stanford math department was willing to let me hang around for another year; so I spent half my time that year teaching calculus and half my time brushing up my programming skills. I learned C++ and Java (object-oriented programming was far from dominant when I was an undergraduate), and contributed a fair number of patches to GDB.

It also became clear that I wouldn’t be able to depend on my employer to provide my computing resources; so I bought domains to use for my various internet presences, and, for the first time since 1989 (13 years!), acquired a new computer. It was a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop, a behemoth that was barely portable (and that, fortunately, I rarely needed to carry anywhere); we set it up to dual-boot Windows and Linux, and I spent the vast majority of the time on the Linux side.

Also, befitting my academic nature, I started reading books and going to talks. A lot of the books that I read were C++-specific (and I learned a lot from them, C++ is an extremely interesting language); in terms of non-language-specific books, the refactoring book had a big impact. The talk that had the most impact on me was one that a couple of researchers in a local corporate think-tank (?) gave about their experiences with something called “eXtreme Programming”; that was my first exposure to Agile software development.

The GDB work led to consulting work at a startup called Kealia, and I started working there full-time when I left academia in the summer of 2003. We got acquired by Sun a year later; soon after the acquisition, I became a manager, albeit a manager who spent a lot of time programming.

Agile

I spent a lot of time trying to understand Agile software development over the next five or seven years. At first, I was just trying to do this on a personal level, practicing refactoring and trying out test-driven development. Kealia’s legacy code provided some interesting challenges on the former front; the company also already had a bit of a testing culture when I showed up, and we experimented with going farther in that direction. And becoming a manager got me interested in other aspects of Agile: the more explicitly people-focused aspects, the planning aspects. And, as part of planning, the idea that programmers don’t make all of the design decisions (which was quite a change from working on GDB!): other people have a better idea of what the end users really value, what will work well in their context.

As an academic, I’d been quite ivory tower (at least aside from my interest in teaching); that changed. I was working at a startup which got acquired by a larger company that had suffered a lot over the last few years; part of startup life is trying to figure out how to make your business work, and Sun was trying to figure that out at a larger scale. Sun also put enough resources behind StreamStar (Kealia’s video server project) that we had quite a lot of room to experiment with different business strategies, trying to find one that would stick. (Far too much room: the fact that Sun didn’t cancel StreamStar years before I eventually left was a sign of Sun’s own management problems.)

My boss was a big fan of Clayton Christensen’s disruption theories, and I got to see both sides of the difficulties of disruption first-hand. Sun was a large company that was already far along the path of being disrupted by commodity hardware running Linux, and was trying to figure out how to deal with that; StreamStar was trying to disrupt the existing broadcast television infrastructure, replacing it with IP-based solutions. In neither case did we navigate the difficulties well, but I have quite a bit of sympathy for both sets of difficulties: surviving being disrupted is extremely difficult, and when it comes to broadcast television, you have to deal not only with the existing technological infrastructure but with the existing broadcasters and existing content providers. So it’s not surprising that we failed to disrupt broadcast television delivery, whereas Youtube was much more successful with its end run around the last two issues.

During this time, I won an iPod (one of the hard-drive based models), and a couple of years later, an iPod Nano at company raffles. I wouldn’t have bought the first iPod on my own, but its presence made my jogging a lot more presence; I probably wouldn’t have bought the iPod Nano on my own, but I was quite surprised how much more I liked its small size, the lack of skipping, and the general elegance of its design.

Our Dell laptop died in 2006, and had been showing its age enough by then that I was already planning to replace it. For my own Linux use, we got a Sun Ultra 20; to have a computer that Liesl could use and that I could run iTunes on, I got a MacBook Pro. This was the first model after the Intel transition; I felt more comfortable going back to the Mac instead of having a Windows machine around, and the fact that there was now Unix underneath MacOS was a real bonus. (Incidentally, back in 2003 I’d turned down a job offer working on GDB for Apple: I like Unix and the GNU toolchain, but I wasn’t really interested in specializing in the latter.)

At some point while I was at Sun (probably in 2008), I got an iPod Touch. That was really a revelation to me: it was wonderful having a little computer in my pocket, one that was already fairly versatile and was becoming more so every year; I had Wi-Fi access most of the places I spent time (there was even spotty Wi-Fi available from Google when wandering around Mountain View), but I could tell that having a phone network provide almost constant network access would be so much better.

But more than that: Tweetie made me sit up and take notice. That was the Twitter client that eventually became the first-party Twitter client; and despite running on this quite small device, I far preferred using it to any Twitter interface I had available on computers that didn’t fit in my pocket. That didn’t make much sense to me; clearly there was something going on with design that I didn’t understand and that could make a real difference.

At this time, I was also getting more and more tired with having Unix on my desktop. I love Emacs, but it’s stuck in the stone age in so many ways: what really drove that home was once when I fired it up on a machine where I didn’t have my standard .emacs file and realized that, by default, Emacs put the scroll bars on the left. That may have been a perfectly reasonable decision when it was first made, but it wasn’t any more and hadn’t been for at least a decade; did I really want to be working with tools that were so willfully ignorant about design conventions? GNOME had helped civilize X Windows, but it had only brought the experience up to a minimally acceptable level, and even so there were too many non-GNOME applications around.

Reaching the Present

So, when I started work at Playdom, I asked for a Mac for my work machine: that way I could have a Unix command line and tools combined with a GUI that accepted the idea that design was a virtue. Which the IT department was oddly hostile to: you’d think that a company with a large contingent of graphics artists that deploys software to Unix servers would be a natural fit for Macs, but Playdom had its quirks, and its IT department was definitely one of those quirks.

At around this time we got a second Mac laptop at home, and I got an iPhone. (My first cell phone; I am a luddite at times.) The Ultra 20 died; I decided that I wanted to continue to run a Linux server (e.g. to host this blog), but that I would prefer to interact with it through an ssh connection, so I got a virtual machine at Rackspace. Also, I was getting older, and carrying around a laptop during GDC 2010 put a surprising strain on my back; the iPad had been announced, so I decided I’d get one the next time I went to a conference. Which happened sooner than I expected, since I decided to go to GLS later that spring.

My back thanked me for the iPad purchase; but my psyche thanked me as well, to a surprising extent. I found that I preferred reading e-mail on the iPad to reading e-mail in a web browser, and that I far far preferred reading blogs in Reeder than through Google Reader’s web interface, whether I used the latter to go to the blogs’ web pages or stuck with the RSS feed. In both cases, the iPad acted like a wonderfully adaptable piece of paper: the words I wanted were right there, with enough style to be pleasant (unlike the Google Reader web interface) but without any surrounding crap (unlike blogs’ web pages). Having a screen that was much smaller than computer monitors that I was used to, and that was in portrait mode instead of landscape mode, turned out to be excellent for letting me focus on what I was reading. (As it turned out, I even slightly prefer reading blogs through Reeder on my iPhone over reading them through a web interface on a standard computer, despite the rather-too-small size of the former’s screen.)

In early 2011, one of our laptops died; rather than replace it with another laptop, we got an iMac and a second iPad. Our current technology roster is an iMac and a MacBook (one of the white plastic ones); two iPads (one from each generation); three iPhones (one from each of the last three generations, though the oldest one is being used by Miranda as an iPod Touch instead of as a phone); a virtual machine located elsewhere running Linux; and half a dozen game consoles. (My rate of technology purchases has increased enormously since 1998.) Also in 2011, I started working at Sumo Logic; as is typical in startups around here (at least judging from the ones I’ve interviewed at), it’s largely a Mac shop for development (with deployment happening on Linux virtual machines), and my coworkers generally prefer various Apple products for personal use, though there’s more variation on the personal side.

So: that’s the computers and other technology that I’ve used over the course of my life. Apple played a large role when I was young and more recently, but in the middle there was a long phase where my norm was Unix + GNU toolchain, with a strong free software ethos. Why did I shift out of that, what’s behind my recent fascination with Apple’s products and, increasingly, Apple as a company?

Habitable Software

The first is the concept of “habitable software”. I talked about this last year: the idea is that there is software that my brain shies away from using, and there’s software that I actively look forward to using, where the thought of using it relaxes me or brings a smile to my face.

I actually think that console gaming gave me my first nudge in this direction. You stick the cartridge into the machine, you pick up a controller with a relatively constrained set of inputs, you turn on the machine, and it just works. Note too that a console controller, unlike a mouse and a keyboard, is explicitly designed for the task at hand: yes, gamepads may have a few too many or too few buttons and sticks for a given game, but at least it’s focused on the domain of playing games. (Hmm, maybe the controller/game match is why I think back on text adventures with so much fondness?) I keep on installing Windows on machines with the thought that I’ll finally play the many important PC games that are missing from my background; and I keep on deciding that no, I really don’t want to put up with the crap that PC gaming makes you deal with.

But shifting from X Windows back to the Mac also gave me a huge shove towards being sensitive to habitable software; and going from the Mac to iPhone/iPad software like Tweetie and Reeder was, in its own way, just as large a leap. Every time I use X, I find something that feels wrong; a Mac feels neutral, but I don’t generally look forward to turning it on; Tweetie and Reeder make me actively happy. It’s not just software that I’m learning from, either: I was surprised how much happier I was with the iPod Nano because of its small size, light weight, pleasant screen, and lack of skipping.

The Unix command line also makes me actively happy. It’s wonderfully coherent; for certain tasks related to writing and, especially, deploying software, it’s just what I want, I love the interface that it presents to me. So it’s no coincidence that I do my programming on machines where a Unix terminal window is one key combination away, and that I use virtual machines running Linux to deploy software on: I feel completely at home in those contexts when working on those tasks.

Designing Software

Habitability is how I like to express the importance of design in software to me as a user. But I’m a programmer as well, so I see design from that side as well.

When I was younger, I spent much of my programming time concerned with tools for programmers: thinking about programming languages and compilers, working on GDB. In those contexts, I didn’t have to think too hard about design: I was an acceptable proxy for the end user for the software, so if something felt good for me, then that was good enough.

That’s a relatively unusual subset of software, however; as I started to work about other kinds of products, I realized that my design instincts wouldn’t do a very good job. And, at the same time, I got interested in Agile: and one of Agile’s main tenets is that design concerns (personified as the “Customer”) are paramount when deciding what to work on. Not that the technical details aren’t important as well—you get great benefits from keeping your code flexible and well-architected—but ultimately it’s not programmers’ jobs to decide what’s important to present to the users.

Even though it carves out a space where design can happen, Agile isn’t actually very good at giving you advice at how to design well: specific recommendations are much more focused on the programming side of things (e.g. refactoring, test-driven development) or the programming/design interface (estimating, iterating) than on the design side of things. Also, my talents and instincts are much stronger on programming than on design: I still have a lot of room for improvement, but I’ve got some understanding of what’s involved in writing code that’s clean and functional from a technical point of view, whereas I have much less understanding of what’s involved in developing a product that people are actively happy to use.

And, to produce really great products, I’m not convinced by Agile’s engineering/customer representative split. The Lean concept of a Chief Engineer who’s immersed in both worlds seems much more powerful to me, and I see around me wonderful pieces of software written by single individuals, or startups (including Sumo Logic!) run by people with both a vision for what they want to produce and the technical chops to help bring that into existence.

Apple can probably be argued as providing evidence on either side of the argument about that split, but there are clearly individuals who made a huge difference in its products. Apple also points out how ludicrous it is to label the designer as the “Customer” if you really want to produce something new and great, and at the limits of the analytics-focused mindset that I saw so much of at Playdom; in general, Apple’s approach to iteration seems interestingly different from yet related to Agile norms. And their systems approach gives Apple many more design knobs to turn than they would if they were exclusively a software company. (Or exclusively a hardware company, of course.)

Business Success

Back in my academic days, I didn’t care about practical applications of my research. When I started working for startups, though, that changed: if you don’t have your eyes on how you’re going to make money out of your startup, you’re doing the wrong thing. (Not that startups don’t have a heavy dose of ego satisfaction in them, of scratching your own itch.)

Once I started paying more attention to making money, it turns out to be totally fascinating: if you like complex systems, capitalism is full of them. Just figuring out cash flow: where money is coming in, where money is going out, the difference between those two in quantity and in in time. So many possibilities there!

Apple’s business success over the last decade is staggering, of course. But they are fascinating far beyond their simple profit figures: the consequences of their systems approach to design, their use of their savings to buy vast quantities of parts from their component vendors (and even to allow those vendors to purchase tooling!), the role of their physical stores, the list goes on and on. There’s still a stereotype of Apple as making overpriced products, but their competitors are finding it very difficult to build products with the hardware quality of the iPad or MacBook Air while maintaining any sort of profit margin at all.

Of course, lots of startups aren’t focused on being profitable: Silicon Valley is full of company that are trying to get eyeballs, hoping that profitability will come somehow, and perfectly happy to sell the company to somebody else who can worry about that problem. We see echoes of this in the Android / iPhone fight, and these days I’m generally more interested in making money than having users without a good business model; but the iPod shows that you don’t always have to compromise, that you can win on both fronts.

Disruption

I mentioned Clayton Christensen’s disruption theory above: living in Silicon Valley, there’s no end of startups trying to remake an industry, no end of once dominant companies that stumbled, got bought, died.

Apple looked like it was following that latter trajectory; it pulled out of its decline like no other company. And did so in a very interesting way: not only did it disrupt other industries, it also disrupted itself, with the iPhone cannibalizing iPod sales and with the iPad cannibalizing laptop sales. This is extremely difficult to do: existing successes almost always lead to institutional antibodies that attack new products, leaving that success to newcomers.

Over the last decade, we’ve all become aware of disruption; the companies that can figure out how to repeatedly harness the powers of disruption will be the ones that flourish (the ones that survive at all!) over the next few decades. They will have to learn from Apple. And if I’m going to continue to build a career working at exciting companies, I’m going to want to learn from Apple, too, to help me figure out what sorts of qualities to look for the next time I’m on the job market, to pick employers that will disrupt successfully!

Repeatable Creativity

Disruption aside, though, there’s something amazing about Apple’s run of products over the last decade: one interestingly new product after another. I wish I knew how they did that.

It’s easy to ascribe this to a solo genius theory; but, while I don’t want to minimize Steve Jobs’s contributions, I don’t think that’s all that’s going on here. Pixar is another relevant datum: they’ve also managed to be consistently creative, and they continued to do that after Jobs sold the company to Disney. Perhaps because of the domain, people don’t credit Jobs with the same influence on Pixar’s repeated creative success as they do with Jobs; but, to me, the two companies suggest that Jobs has learned something about helping groups to innovate repeatably in a way that goes well beyond his personal contributions.

Over the last couple of years, stories have come out about some sort of Apple University, which seems to be trying to systematize those ideas. This reminds me of Toyota’s conscious efforts to improve themselves as a learning company; Apple is, sadly, much more secretive than Toyota, but I hope more of Apple’s methods will become public over the next decade. And, of course, I hope that Apple will be able to continue to innovate over the next decade, that their innovation really is due in part to a systematizable process.

Bad Apple

During the mid-90′s, I was down on Apple. I hoped that had gone away with the new decade, however: their user interface patents had gone away, and they were active open source contributors, though that clearly wasn’t the company’s main focus.

Unfortunately, those problems have come back in spades. By far the one that I find most distasteful is their aggressive use of patents: I think software patents are bad for the industry, bad for the world, and while I’m more and more bored by other companies that seem to largely be trying to produce knockoffs of Apple’s products, I very much support allowing those companies to do so.

Apple’s recent systems are also much more closed than computing platforms I’d used before then. I would expect that to bother me; for whatever reason, though, it actually doesn’t particularly. Certainly it would if I didn’t have ample access to other computing platforms, or if the tools to develop for iOS platforms weren’t so readily available; and while Apple teeters on the edge of behaving in a manner I find unacceptable in their application approval process, for whatever reason I generally think they’re okay. (I’m actually more worried about Amazon’s behavior in that regard.)

I’m being ungenerous in saying this, but: these days, when I read Richard Stallman complaining about Apple’s closed systems, part of my brain interprets that as RMS wanting it not to be his fault if other people don’t have software they want to use: RMS has made an open system, it’s other people’s fault if they don’t take advantage of that. These open systems are, in all serious, a great good: but actually having good software on your computer is also worthy, and having software that’s a joy to use is a great good. It’s fine if having well-crafted software for the non-programming public isn’t RMS’s concern, there’s no reason why it should be; but I see him as a single-issue voter whose issue is no longer dominant to me, and who is willfully blind to other issues that are important to me.

To those of you who have read this far: I salute you. And to those of you who don’t like Apple’s products, who don’t care about what Apple has done as a company: that’s great, there’s no reason why others’ interests should be my own. And there’s no question that company has flaws, does things I really don’t like. But I’m fascinated for many reasons by what Apple has done over the last decade, and I fully expect to be trying to sort out the implications for much of the next decade.

Some Jobs-related posts that I particularly enjoyed:

• John Shook asking Was Steve Lean?
• Another lean-focused post, this time from Evolving Excellence
• Horace Dediu on what Steve Jobs didn’t do.
• A podcast reminiscence from John Siracusa.

One of my favorite blogs of the last year or so (is it two years old now? Wow) is Asymco. It’s written by Horace Dediu, a former Nokia analyst who is very interested in disruption (in the Clayton Christensen sense) in the mobile space. If you read that blog, you’ll see posts week after week slicing and dicing the data in different, interesting ways, all leading to the same story: the incumbent phone makers’ share of the profits in the industry has plummeted by a shocking extent, their revenue share is also in a dramatic decline, and their unit sales aren’t nearly as hot as it once was. Here’s a sample post (albeit with a somewhat less intelligible graph than he normally has): Apple is capturing most of the profits in the mobile phone space, and more than half the revenue.

Of course, the iPhone isn’t the only story there, in two different ways. One is that the iPhone isn’t the only source of disruption in the phone market: Android is also helping eat traditional phone vendors’ lunch. And the other is that it’s not the only way in which Apple’s business success is remarkable: going back to traditional spaces, Apple is capturing a proportion of the profit in the traditional computer space that’s completely out of line with their proportion of sales, and the iPad has singlehandedly created a new tablet market, a market with no other serious contenders and one that is eating into traditional computers’ market shares.

Which is pretty amazing: a single instance of disruption like that would be enough to make people sit up and take notice, but two back to back is really something. And it certainly makes people wonder what’s going on there: in particular, how much is Apple’s integrated hardware/software approach making a difference? (There’s also their increasing design for manufacturing expertise and their sales channels; I won’t talk about them much other than to note that the old story of Apple products being too expensive is quite out of date, with Apple maintaining healthy profit margins on the iPad while other competitors are unable to undercut them on price while maintaining any sort of decent manufacturing quality.)

In the phone operating system space (not yet in the tablet space, though maybe that will change), Google is of course their main competitor. And it’s a bloody, bloody battle, especially around patents. Not just between Apple and Google—Microsoft is making a quite credible amount of money off of patent licensing agreements with Android device manufacturers—but between Apple and Google it’s particularly bloody, because Apple has no apparent desire to license their patents: they’re trying to prevent distribution of competitors’ devices entirely.

This is, of course, a lousy thing: it’s bad for consumers, it’s bad for programmers, it’s bad for innovation. It is, however, fascinating to watch, and here my favorite source of information is the FOSS Patents blog. Its author, Florian Mueller, does a wonderful job of keeping track of all the various lawsuits in this area, both digging up primary documents and providing well-informed commentary. (And it’s not just about the Apple-Google fight, e.g. he covers the Lodsys patent battles better than anybody, and Google is also under heavy heavy attack from Oracle.)

Patents seem to clearly be an area where Apple is much better prepared to work than Google is: Google, to me, seems to be giving off an aura of not, at its core, believing that anybody would take software patents seriously. I’ve been shocked at how vulnerable they seem to be to Oracle’s attack, and when your Chief Legal Officer is made to look stupid on Twitter by Microsoft’s general counsel, you really are not doing a very good job fighting your battles.

Both of these stories led to Google’s announcement a week and a half ago of their plan to purchase Motorola Mobility. The big question there is: how does this fit into the above narratives? Is it a patent play, is it an integration play, is it both, does Google even have a clear plan for the acquisition? (In general, acquisitions do badly for the acquiring company, so the default assumption should be that this one won’t turn out well…)

The early coverage assumed that this was all about the patents: that with Motorola’s patents, finally Google would be able to defend themselves against Apple. The problem with that is that Apple was already going on the offensive against Motorola: so why should we assume that those patents will succeed in defending Android against Apple more broadly?

But if it’s an integration play, then that directly attacks Google’s main selling point of being a level playing field that all vendors can pick up and use on equal terms. There were already chinks in that the idealistic version of that story—Google didn’t release the Honeycomb source code, and the Skyhook fight makes it clear that Google will use their muscle to shut out third-party replacement of their components. But if Google turns into a major Android phone manufacturer, that story will be in tatters: maybe Samsung and HTC will stay strong Google partners, but my guess is that they’ll become a lot happier about adopting Windows Phone 7 and/or that we’ll see long-lived Android forks that evolve away from interoperability with the trunk.

I hope somebody at Google has a good answer to this, because I want there to be as many strong competitors in the mobile operating system space as possible—I certainly don’t trust Apple to behave themselves without frequent pushback!—but at least at first the Motorola deal seemed very rushed, especially for a 12.5 billion dollar acquisition. (With a 2.5 billion dollar kill fee, an amount that is shockingly high and suggests that Google didn’t have the upper hand in negotiations at all.)

So that’s the first half of the week; the second half of the week, however, brought the news that HP was not only stopping WebOS development (which was one of the few other plausible contenders, and probably the most plausible integrated stack play), but they were exiting the consumer PC business entirely! And in their announcement, they admitted that competition from tablets was a big part of the latter decision: basically, they were saying that they don’t know how to build a tablet that’s competitive in price and quality with the iPad, and that they (the largest computer manufacturer in the world!) also don’t know how to keep their profit margins on non-tablet PCs high enough for it to be worthwhile to stay in that business.

This is a classic disruption story: a new entrant has come in and redefined the bottom of the market in such a way that incumbents don’t have a good response; those incumbents, in turn, flee upmarket, which will help in the short term but who knows for how long. (With the extremely unusual twist that the new entrant isn’t new at all.) I was surprised when IBM sold off their laptop business to Lenovo a few years ago, but it looks like a great move in retrospect, getting out of the business while they could still sell it for a reasonable value while reinventing themselves as a service business. HP’s move seems a lot more desperate, though, and neither their Palm nor (I assume) their Compaq acquisitions have turned out at all well. Which puts quite a spin on the ten billion dollar acquisition of Autonomy that they announced the very same day; maybe that acquisition will do better, but personally I would not bet on that. (It does seem, however, that selling printer ink for thousands of dollars a gallon is still a good business to be in.)

But it’s one thing to read about classic disruption stories; it’s another thing to see them play out right in front of you in real time, involving three huge companies each of which is located a few miles away from your house. Definitely time to bring out the popcorn.

And, if WebOS is no longer a contender, Android is unable to produce competitive tablets (and is in for somewhat stormier weather in general), and Microsoft is insisting that desktop OSes are suitable for tablets, where is the iPad competition going to come from? My best guess right now is Amazon, but the way they’re treating developers in their app store (making Apple look good!) has me a lot less excited about that prospect than I once was. I really hope somebody succeeds, though, the idea of a monoculture doesn’t make me happy at all.

And, as it turns out, the news in this area didn’t end with HP’s dramatic shift out of the PC industry, which was when I’d started thinking about this post: the next week brought the sad announcement that Steve Jobs was retiring from Apple for health reasons. What I am most curious about in that regard is to what extent Apple has managed to successfully formalize their thought patterns. They’ve apparently been trying to do that over the last few years; I’m a big Toyota fan, and one of the ways in which Toyota impresses me the most is the extent to which they’ve built up a long-lasting company culture.

If Apple has been self-aware enough to do the same thing, then maybe the iPad isn’t the last great disruption to come out of there; and if others can learn about their culture the way others have learned about Toyota’s, then maybe that can transform design for the industry as a whole. Though the Toyota analogy suggests an alternate outcome: even if outsiders do learn about their culture, the vast majority of outsiders are unlikely to be able to learn enough from those lessons to really make a difference…

He started off with a history lesson, talking about the Comodo breakin and about the origins of SSL. (He managed to track down the person who designed the SSL protocol, who hasn’t been active for a decade and a half.)

SSL has worked quite well from a security and integrity point of view, but the whole security trust model is quite threadbare by now: there are 650 organizations worldwide that can sign certificates (and the cost to become such an organization isn’t prohibitive if you’re a criminal enterprise of decent scale); that means that lots and lots of people are in a position to be able to run man-in-the-middle attacks. (Which were a theoretical possibility in 1995, but are quite real these days.) And even if all of those organizations are well-meaning, do you really trust their internal security measures? (He gave an example of one registrar that had their private key accessible for more than a year from a directory on their web site.)

So what do you do if you don’t trust one of those certificate authorities? Right now, your options aren’t great: you can, say, remove Comodo from your browser’s list of trusted certificates, but if you do that, you’ll cut yourself off from all web sites that have a certificate signed by them, which is apparently somewhere around a fifth of all web sites. Or you can imagine replacing the distributed certificate authority power with a more centralized one, e.g. one where each root TLD has signing power over certificates associated to its domain; but lots of people in both the US and China wouldn’t want their government involved in signing certificates, and what about supposedly international TLDs?

And then there’s the whole issue of self-signed certificates: right now, if you just want to secure communication and don’t want to get a browser warning, you have to fork over money to a third party, and the benefit that you get for this is increasingly dubious. (This is a problem that annoys me every single day, because my iPhone can’t remember an exception for a certificate I generated myself.)

The core issue here is that we want “trust agility”. Users should be able to decide whom they trust with certification, and be able to revoke that trust and any time. Right now, sadly, our system has low trust agility: the point is that there are three parties involved, namely the user, the site in question, and the authority certifying the site; currently, the site choses the authority, so removing that choice from the user.

(At this point, he digressed to talk a bit about the ability that DNSSEC provides to put your SSL information in your DNS record: this reduces trust agility still further, by eliminating the possibility of removing an untrusted authority from your trust database.)

The basic idea to solve this that he presented is that of “perspectives”. When you get a certificate from a site that you want to talk to, don’t ask that site for the authority to use to authenticate the certificate. Instead, ask a third party (a “notary”) to also get the certificate from that site: if they get the same certificate that you do, then either you’re dealing with the correct certificate or the man in the middle attack is in between the site and both you and the notary!

This has some flaws: something about not applying to all communications that I didn’t understand, privacy (the notary knows whom you’re talking to), and notary lag (caching problems, basically). So he proposed a tweaked version, namely “convergence”.

Convergence takes this perspectives notion and modifies it in a few ways:

• You send a certificate with the notary request; if the certificate doesn’t match the notary’s cached version, then the notary can check again before sending an inappropriate mismatch response.
• Have the client cache certificates, to improve both performance and privacy.
• Have the client talk to multiple notaries, e.g. allowing you to implement voting behavior and to configure specific notaries for different domains.
• For any communication, proxy the notary request through one of the notaries: that notary doesn’t know which site you want info about, and the notaries that actually receive the request don’t know who asked for the information, preserving privacy.

There are still some problems (Citibank has multiple certs for the same host; captive portals present a chicken-and-egg problem), but they seem workable. And I really like the fact that it removes certificate authorities from the loop entirely, treating self-signed certificates no differently from externally-signed certificates. (And if you wanted I imagine that you could modify the voting behavior to allow externally-signed certs to get an extra vote, or something.)

He’s published source code for a notary server and a Firefox plugin. It definitely seems worth a try, and is a useful reminder that I’m depending more than I’m comfortable with on closed systems: I’d like to run this on my phone, and I can’t. There are reasons why I’ve moved away from open systems over the last few years, but that move still makes me sad, and I’m losing as well as gaining in that trade.

• When I was thinking about getting an iPad, I wondered what format I should buy books in. I was thinking the contenders were Amazon’s proprietary format versus ePub books (sadly largely with encryption in both cases); but when I actually got the iPad, I discovered that it’s a really great PDF reader. (Don’t get me wrong, I’d love a retina screen on it, but it works quite well as is.) And, as it happened, some of the early books that I bought were from the Pragmatic Programmers, which lets you get books in PDF and ePub (and Amazon’s format, but I don’t have a Kindle yet, so no reason to choose that if I’m not buying from Amazon). And, for now, I’m liking PDF books a lot more than ePub. I just hope that the book industry doesn’t take as long as the music industry to start embracing non-encrypted formats, so I can get PDF books from other sources.
• Having said that, non-page-based formats do have their uses. A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Nicola Griffith’s Always on the Kindle app on my iPad. And then I found myself out of the house with some time to kill, so I pulled out my phone and switched over to reading the book on that. (I didn’t have my iPad with me.) And that worked great, much better than reading a PDF on my phone would have or sitting around being bored would have.
• Another unexpected electronic book benefit: our dog Zippy is getting rather old, and wakes me up squeaking a couple of times a night on average. (For better or for worse, I’m a much lighter sleeper than Liesl is.) Sometimes he needs to go out, but sometimes he’s achy and just needs cuddling for a while. And I like being able to read while cuddling with him without having to turn on a light.
• Speaking of Nicola Griffith, I’d forgotten just how amazing an author she is. Or rather, I’d been somewhat reminded of that when I read her memoir, and I like her blog as well, so I’d been meaning to dig back into her fiction, but I hadn’t gotten around to it until the last month. I don’t think I’d reread Ammonite since it came out, but it’s quite good; better still is Slow River, and rereading The Blue Place was eye-opening. I’d never read Stay or Always, but I’m quite happy to have remedied that omission.
• Speaking of omissions, I’d somehow stopped reading Madeline L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journal after the first two books. No idea why I stopped then; I went back and reread them just now, and they’re rather wonderful. Though so far I’m not enjoying the third one as much; maybe it will grow on me (it took a while for me to appreciate the first one, I seem to recall), or maybe it’s just more targeted at Christians?
• I’m very glad to have been reading a lot of fiction these days. I’d been weighting my reading rather heavily towards technical books over much of the last year; partly for good reasons, but partly because I’d been swayed by sales of electronic books at a couple of publishers. And while electronic books don’t raise exactly the same inventory concerns as physical books, they’re still inventory, and the fact that I own them still unduly influences me to read them. I’ll have to be more vigilant about that in the future.
• Sad that Borders is going out of business. I like independent bookstores, but to me it’s much much more important to have a large selection of books available for purchase, and Borders did a great job of that as a chain; I visited the local Borders about as frequently over the last few years as any other physical bookstore. Their time has passed, but I salute them and will miss them.

But I could use some advice from people who have done this before. Some context: I’m only planning to use this for games, and I have no intention of playing the latest and greatest Windows games on this machine: LOTRO aside, the most likely candidates are older games and indie games. And, frankly, I don’t expect to use it all that frequently even for those! With that in mind, some questions I have:

• What’s the recommended approach? Pure Boot Camp, pure virtual machine, or Boot Camp accessible via a virtual machine?
• What’s the current recommended virtual machine vendor for 3D graphics performance / stability? Last I was following this, Parallels seemed to be in the lead, but that sort of thing can change fast.
• Am I correct in assuming Windows 7 Home Premium is the way to go?
• Am I correct in thinking that having an XP license key alone isn’t good enough to qualify for upgrade pricing, I’d need an actual XP installation?
• Am I correct in assuming 64 bit is the way to go?
• Any mouse recommendations? For that matter, is a trackball a reasonable approach for FPSes? Not that I plan to dive into competitive multiplayer or anything, but I’m guessing that Apple’s mouse/trackpad won’t cut it for even basic Windows games…
• How big a partition should I give it?
• Any tips on finding a good price? Paying $280 for Windows + Parallels doesn’t exactly excite me… I see OEM links that claim to knock $100 off the price of Windows, but I’m worried that there are hidden gotchas there. (Hmm, digging around, sounds like drivers are harder to come by with OEM versions, but I guess Boot Camp and virtual machine solutions would each come with all the drivers they need?)
• Anything else?

Thanks in advance for any guidance you can provide.

A few weeks ago, though, I tried using double-tapping to switch between applications; and, to my surprise, I found that I rather liked it. In fact, I found that, when I’m switching applications that way, it feels like the machine really is multitasking: going to the home screen triggers an “exiting an app” feeling in my brain, while double-tapping to switch triggers a “switching between active apps” feeling in my brain.

Which is, I realize, kind of ridiculous: I am quite aware that there’s nothing different going on in those two scenarios. Brains are funny things, though, and it behooves us to design interfaces with that funniness in mind!

(Incidentally, this change in habits makes me wish that I had a case that didn’t cover the home button, because the case makes the button mushy enough that I can’t reliably double-tap. Definitely something to avoid next time; I may well go without a case at all next time, both because of this and to better appreciate Apple’s industrial design.)

To me, the most interesting aspect of the project as initially announced was its decentralized aspect. That seems to have been largely a failure at the start: it was possible to get accounts on different nodes, but the early buzz seemed to be that they didn’t all work equally well, and all the people I’m following (all four of them) are on the same node as myself. I don’t want to second guess Diaspora’s apparent choice to deemphasize the decentralized aspect of the project, but personally I would be more interested in its possibilities if aspects weren’t there but if people were spread across hundreds of nodes, and if it were easy, performant, and secure to run your own server instance. Hopefully that will come, though, and that probably wouldn’t make any difference at all from a social point of view, so I guess I shouldn’t worry too much about that. And I certainly don’t want to write off Diaspora: it seems to still be getting a healthy stream of commits, which is great.

Anyways, enough about Diaspora: what do I want social network publishing to be like? My current model is to do all my posting on Twitter, with that syndicated to Facebook. That has some good aspects: my attention isn’t spread, I feel at home in my Twitter feed but I also appreciate the comment threads that occasionally pop up on Facebook, I have a social graph available for Facebook game purposes. But, of course, it also some bad aspects: it gives too much control to Twitter (I don’t even have an archive of my own posts!), Facebook is more of a second-class citizen than I’d like.

So: what can we do about this? One computer science reflex is to solve problems by adding an extra layer of indirection, and that doesn’t sound like a crazy response to the current power that Twitter has over my publishing. (In fact, I’d vaguely hoped at one point that maybe I’d switch to writing on Diaspora, and syndicating from there to both Twitter and Facebook.) The problem with that approach, though, is that you need to make sure that you don’t lose the current benefits of those sites: Twitter isn’t publishing, it’s a conversation. So you’d want to pull in conversations from Twitter and Facebook as well, presenting you with a merged feed (including detecting duplicates from other people who are also syndicating). (Incidentally, one aspect of 龍が如く for Twitter that I really liked was that, when showing you a tweet that was a reply, it automatically included the replied-to tweet as well: yay for increased visibility into conversations.) And you’d want to combine all of that with a searchable archive: I still find it kind of amazing that there’s no way to search your Twitter feed, to pull up past tweets that you’ve read about a topic. (You could further extend that archive functionality, e.g. saving the target for shortened links.) Eventually, you’d want to support direct syndication between instances of this mythical platform, to avoid the need to go through a third party at all. (And exporting a social graph for non-conversational purposes, e.g. games, is important!)

And then there’s the problem of the platform owners. Twitter has a nice and flexible API, but they’ve recently come down hard against third-party clients, and the dickbar debacle has left me with a bad feeling. I’m embarrassed to say, given my previous employment, that I don’t even know what Facebook’s API is like for reading the feed: I assume it has one, except that, if it does, why isn’t there a better iPhone client out there, a Tweetie analogue? (There probably is, it’s doubtless just my ignorance showing.)

My first reaction is that the best place to start attacking something like this would be with the archive aspects. The fact that I don’t have a record of my own microblogging bothers me (though, honestly, less than I would have expected a few years ago: I’m comfortable with the ephemeral nature of my tweets); and if we could combine that with an archive of conversations, so much the better. That’s a concrete task that would force the implementor to confront with the realities of the data; hopefully, adding publishing on top of that wouldn’t be difficult.

Though the problem with taking that kind of data-centric point of view: where is it stored? I depend on having Twitter access from all sorts of places; would I be comfortable adding a layer of server indirection to have access to that? (And that’s just what would be necessary to make clients possible: actually writing them is a whole other kettle of fish!) If I don’t want to have a persistent server, would I be comfortable having my iPhone as the trusted repository for this data?

Thoughts? I’m not seriously proposing this as a project that I’m going to launch into—I have a job keeping me happily busy, after all! And certainly there are way too many social network ideas floating out there. But there is something wrong with social network publishing as it currently stands; I’d like to better understand how I’d like that world to look.

Though, to be honest, it wasn’t much of a shock: the computer was one of the original Macbook Pros, which meant that it was almost five years old, quite long in laptop years. So I’d been thinking about replacement plans for a while; in fact, disk space concerns might have forced my hand on that over the next few months anyways. (And kudos to Snow Leopard for reducing disk usage enough to not have forced my hand a year ago!) I talked it over with Liesl and Miranda, and we decided that my tentative plan of replacing it with a desktop machine plus a second iPad made sense, and that it also made sense to hold off on purchasing the second iPad for a few months, until the next model is released. (We have a Macbook around the house, too, so we’re not exactly lacking in options in the interim.)

So, the next day, I went to the Apple store and got a replacement (a base model 27″ iMac, specifically), along with the new Apple trackpad, an external drive for backup purposes, and a copy of iWork that was on sale. (Though, in retrospect, not on sale enough, given the appearance of those programs on Apple’s Mac app store the next week…) And, fortunately, for the second time this year, my backup strategy proved to be up to the task: when I turned on the new computer, it asked me if I wanted to restore from a Time Machine backup, I did so, and all our files and applications were back.

Though, as it turned out, not all of those restored applications worked. Almost all of the problematic ones didn’t work for the same reason, namely DRM. Some of that was straightforward but annoying (I had to re-enter license keys for a bunch of Popcap games), but I ran into real bugs with Spore and with iTunes’s ability to play Audible files that took some amount of googling to figure out. (The Spore problems were particularly special; the joys of PC gaming…) Also, on a non-DRM front, I ended up deleting and reinstalling Macports after some problems there (which, admittedly, may have been partially my fault); not my favorite piece of software, that.

Still, all in all, I’m quite happy: I’ve had two computers die on me this year, and in both cases I had a quite functional replacement working the next day. I still don’t feel entirely comfortable with my Mac backup strategy—Time Machine is magic enough that it seems to me that there’s more scope for bugs than I’d like, and the backups there are physically colocated—but it’s definitely passed the test so far. And the new computer is really nice (and Miranda seems quite fond of it indeed, it turns out that she really likes 27″ screens), and I’m quite happy with Apple’s trackpad as well.

I’m tentatively planning to install Windows on it as well at some point: I can’t imagine playing major new Windows releases, but it would be convenient for indie games or for Vintage Game Club stuff. No urgent plans along that front; I’m tentatively thinking a Boot Camp install plus Parallels, but I might go pure Parallels, or change my mind entirely.

And then I started making changes, at which point I hit the tab key, and Emacs indented the line by four spaces. The problem is, the file used two spaces for tabs. But I’ve done this enough times, surely I can quickly figure out how to configure this? Let’s see: C-h tab-width looks promising, but it has the value 8, so surely it isn’t relevant. The first answer while googling mentions c-basic-offset, which sounds just dubious enough (that c- prefix) to be right; but its value, rather than being a number, is “set-from-style”.

At this point, I have a few options. I can set c-basic-offset to a number, to see if that works, and then figure out the appropriate mode hook to do that for me. I can figure out what set-from-style means, to do it right. I can do more googling, to find a better answer.

But, I think, the best answer is: realize that I have better things to do with my life than to put up with that sort of user interface crap. (Or with the absolute joke that is Emacs’s “Preferences” menu item.)

(Another charming instance of Emacs’s user interface: on a lark, I thought I might as well go through the motions of looking through menus, though I’d be shocked if anything relevant was found there. And, of course, I didn’t find anything relevant; but what I did discover was that one of the menu options was “Read Mail (with RMAIL).” How many people in the entire freaking world are using RMAIL? Is there even one such person? I read my e-mail in Emacs for a very long time, but even I moved off of RMAIL more than a decade before I gave up on reading e-mail in Emacs.)

So, I guess, that’s the reason why I’ll buy TextMate: because I want an editor that doesn’t have an actively hostile UI (and no, don’t suggest vi, its UI is at least as hostile), that can be used for programming, and that isn’t as super-bloated as IntelliJ or NetBeans or Eclipse or whatever. (Admittedly, I haven’t used NetBeans and Eclipse much, so maybe I’m mischaracterizing them. But I doubt it.) $50 still seems like a ridiculous price to pay for it, and I’m worried by its apparently stalled development, but it has enough supporters that maybe it has virtues that I’m missing? If anybody has other editor suggestions, though, I’m all ears.

Which I’ve just turned on, as an experiment, so you’ll see a little “Post Revisions” note at the bottom of my blog posts. At least for the time being; I almost never revise my posts once I hit the ‘publish’ button, so it’s mostly noise. I fiddled with the styling to make it pretty inconspicuous, but I’m still not convinced it’s pulling its weight; so don’t be shocked if you come back a month from now and those messages are gone. Here’s an example of a post where I actually made changes, if you’re curious what that looks like.

At any rate, it seems like a clearly good idea in general; hopefully it will catch on enough to get incorporated into WordPress proper, at which point theme makers will find ways to present that information in a less obtrusive fashion. Actually, right now it would probably be fine if I could get it to go after the publication date; taking a look, that seems not brain-dead easy, but maybe I’ll be able to find a way to do that without too much patching.

But there are a couple of lurking issues behind this change, too. Link roundup posts make it harder for me to save one particular link for later perusal; or, from a philosophical point of view, I don’t have a URI that I can use to refer to the link recommendation. (This is the main thing that bothers me with Twitter’s new retweet feature, too.) Also, I don’t want the link roundup posts to overwhelm this blog, but that has led to batching, which leads to a wealth of problems, so I’d rather eliminate that bit of Work in Progress.

So a separate linkblog seemed like the way to go. And Tumblr seemed easy to use, and I like the way it encourages building off of others’ recommendations while preserving recommendation history. (In other words, it nicely avoids the URI problem mentioned above.) And I’m certainly happy with it so far; I wish it had a native iPad client, and I wish that Reeder added Tumblr to its list of link forwarding locations, but neither of those is a serious problem.

And I enjoyed using it. Some of the reasons for that were obvious: I only sporadically had wifi access during that trip, and the cell data access was quite slow. So having a device in my pocket with a program that would cache RSS feed content and images was obviously useful. (Incidentally: if you don’t have a strong reason to do otherwise, can you all please make sure that your RSS feeds include full text? I promise I’ll still visit your web site occasionally.) But some of the reasons for that were less obvious: even when we got home, I found myself using Reeder on my phone at odd moments, and, to my surprise, I found that I preferred going through RSS feeds on Reeder on my phone than through Google Reader on my laptop.

Which is pretty weird! In general, I think of Google Reader as a pretty good program—not as nice as Reeder, but pleasant enough to use—and while the iPhone’s screen is fine for what it is, it’s far too small to be ideal for serious reading. So what’s going on there?

I’m not sure that the issue is with Google Reader itself so much as with my manner of using it: on Google Reader, I generally use RSS feeds simply as a navigation aid to getting to the articles on the web sites in question, while when using Reeder, especially in a low-bandwidth environment, I ended up staying on the RSS feed most of the time. And the truth turns out to be: most people’s web sites give a less pleasant environment for reading the articles on them than a good RSS reader can provide.

So: why is that? Some of it is because most of us are awful at design. (And yes, I freely include myself in that category.) I will be happy if I never again see a website with tiny text, with columns that are 200 characters wide, with a white font on a black background. (Well, almost never: just don’t do those things unless you have a specific reason for it.)

Some of it is the whiplash of having every blog look different. When going through feeds in my old manner, my eyes would be confronted with a slightly different look every ten seconds; in retrospect, I’d discounted the mental load that that places on me.

Some of it is the amount of superfluous content on web pages. My blog is quite stripped down compared to most, but even so I’m now wondering: just what purpose is that right column serving? It’s there because it’s the sort of thing that a blog is supposed to have, but I suspect that, in 99% of the visits to this blog, it’s pure noise. I’ll have to think about it a bit more, but don’t be shocked if, a month from now, I’ve switched to a one-column layout, with the current sidebar content banished to separate pages that are linked to from the footer.

And a big portion of it is optimizing for a specific device, and for a device that’s the size of a book or (in the case of my phone) smaller. Which related to some issues that I struggled with the last time I changed this blog’s theme: at the time, my feeling was that different people have different preferences (in terms of font size, browser window size, etc.), so I should, for example, have the font size specified as 100% of the browser default instead of a fixed size.

But I had a hard time getting that to look nice on the different browsers I used and, poking around at different web pages, I wasn’t convinced that changing my own browser defaults would have improved my browsing experience. So I ended up changing to a fixed 14px, and I’ve been happy with the results. And the main reason why I was at peace with that philosophically was that I’m surrounded by thousands of books, and I’m just fine with the fact that they are laid out by a professional who has a good idea what leads to a readable book, and who has made decisions based on that knowledge.

And it’s the same thing with Reeder. The iPad is about the size of a hardcover book; so, when reading text on it, I’d like that text to be laid out in a manner that would be suitable for reading in a book. And Reeder does a decent job of that, with results that are much more soothing than a typical web page. I’m not against some amount of customization—e.g. it wouldn’t shock me if I started to prefer reading large-type books at some point in my life—but I don’t want unlimited personal customization of the appearance of text that I’m reading, and I certainly don’t want every article that I read to look different. (Imagine if a newspaper did that! It would be a nightmare.)

The iPhone isn’t, of course, the size of a normal book; but the main problem that I have with text on the web isn’t that it’s too narrow, it’s that it’s too wide. It’s no coincidence that large-format print forms such as magazines and newspapers generally use a multicolumn format; in fact, the iPhone’s screen is almost exactly as wide as the columns that my local newspaper uses. (Maybe I should change my screen at work to have a vertical orientation instead of a horizontal orientation? I continue to be skeptical of the current fetishization of 16:9 display ratios.)

The wild west of the web has many wonderful aspects, as does the fact that I have thousands of monitors to choose from when deciding what to plug into my computer. But there are form factors and designs that have stood the test of time over the centuries; I should spend a bit more time listening to their virtues.

So I put “set up a cloud server backup” on my next action list, where it languished for several weeks. But, this weekend, Miranda was out of town with her grandparents, leaving me with a bit more free time than normal, so I figured I’d take the time to set it up. And, within 15 minutes, I had a new server to play with.

At which point I went to write down some notes on the process in the reference folder on my home server; strangely, though, my ssh connection had hung. I went upstairs and noted that it was unresponsive; I rebooted it, but two minutes later, it had crashed again. Oops.

Fortunately, I did have a previous backup strategy in place; it wasn’t quite complete, but I hoped that it was pretty good. And my experience this weekend has shown that, yes, it really was pretty good. (Protip: rsync’s –exclude-from flag skips all matching files, not just matching files at the top level of the directory hierarchy you’re backing up.) It was remarkably easy to get most of my files transferred over there (nice to be transferring gigabytes of files between two computers with good internet connections instead of over a connection including home wifi and Comcast); I had my share of moments wondering what was going on when dealing with Apache configurations, but all in all I had the new server serving all of my sites approximately 24 hours after the old one died, despite sleeping in most of the morning and having friends over for bridge and dinner.

I’m still fiddling with details here and there, but I think the new server is almost completely working. I was always planning to bump up the server’s memory usage if I had to use it for real, but I was surprised at how well it was holding up with only 256MB of memory; even so, I thought the better part of valor was to bump it up to 512MB, and the oom-killer reared its head several times today despite that. I’ve played around with Apache and Passenger configurations this evening, hoping that I’ll still be able to fit under that memory limit: Miranda and I are the only people who use the Rails application running there, so I certainly don’t need many Passenger processes, and this blog and my other web sites certainly aren’t very popular, either. So, if I can stick with 512MB, that would be great; if I have to bump it up to 1GB, I’ll grumble a bit but will live with it, given that it’s cheaper than buying a physical server and that I’m sure prices will fall. (My home server had 2GB of memory, and the prices for such configurations are expensive enough to make me think twice, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to avoid that.) Also, one nice aspect of running in the cloud is that, if I inadvertently post something popular here and notice it quickly enough, I can beef up my server for a week with only a few minutes of downtime and only paying the extra money for that time period.

So, while I wish that my home server hadn’t died quite so soon (at the very least, lasting another 24 hours would have been nice), all in all I’m happy with how things have worked out. It’s nice to be reassured that my sysadmin skills haven’t atrophied too terribly, I’m sure future guests will appreciate not having to listen to that machine’s fans, and I’m quite pleased with my Rackspace experience so far.

• Liesl’s dad visited us last month, and spent quite a lot of time playing with the iPad. He probably spent more time playing Flight Control HD than anything else, but he also clearly enjoyed using it for web surfing, and being able to hand it over to us to show us something he’d found. He doesn’t (I’m fairly sure) have a laptop, but he’s now thinking about getting an iPad.
• Earlier this month the three of us spent a week at my parent’s house. I did bring along one of the laptops this time, but it never left my suitcase. This was also the first time I’ve turned on the 3G on the iPad, which was useful given that my parents don’t have WiFi. (But less useful than it could have been—I only had edge speeds in their cottage.)
• Just now, Liesl’s mom and Liesl’s mom’s husband were visiting us. They’re planning to do a fair amount of traveling now that they’re retired, and were thinking of getting a laptop to take along with them; but they put the iPad through its paces and now seem to be leaning in that direction.

I’m now assuming that we’ll change from a two-laptop house to a one-laptop house once this laptop dies. (Though I’m also assuming that I’ll get a desktop machine to replace some of this laptop’s uses.) The iPad is just a lot nicer for most uses.

My verdict: absolutely the right choice. Everything that I expected to work well did in fact work well; several things worked better than expected, and there was one complete surprise. And that was without my reading books on it: as I shift to electronic books, I expect its advantage to grow.

The advantages started when I was packing. Normally, whenever I’m going on a trip, I stuff my backpack full of books and electronics. This time, my backpack weighed at most half of what it normally does on a trip: lighter electronics and, even though I didn’t end up taking advantage of it, the availability of electronic books meant that I didn’t have to worry about potentially running out of reading to material. (JIT reduces queues.)

And then, when I was on the plane, I was reading a (paper) copy of The Progressive, noticed some bits that might deserve quoting, and I remembered the WordPress app’s offline mode; so I decided to draft a blog post right there. I was still getting used to the iPad keyboard, but it worked just fine; and the smaller size of the iPad compared to a laptop meant that it was easier to use in cramped airport quarters.

In fact, that was the major issue that this trip resolved for me: the iPad is a fully capable machine for writing blog posts, as evidenced by the fact that I wrote almost 6500 words of blog posts on the trip. I did bring a wireless keyboard in my suitcase, but 4000 of those words were written on the iPad’s software keyboard, and it would have been fine if I hadn’t had the physical keyboard at all. (Incidentally, the WordPress app is somewhat buggy; it’s obviously very useful for offline work, but for online work, I ended up using the regular web interface as often as not, once I learned that you can use two-finger scrolling to scroll panes in it.)

For gaming, the iPad worked great, better than the iPhone ever has for me. The Nikoli iPhone apps control rather better when blown up in size (though I still very much hope Nikoli produces iPad-native versions with larger puzzles), and Plants vs Zombies HD and Flight Control HD are both lots of fun. The platform is obviously very young, and I don’t get the impression that there are a huge number of other games on it that I would enjoy as much as those ones, but for me, the larger real estate is making a big difference, and I imagine that many game developers feel the same way.

And it also worked well as an e-mail reading machine—I checked my work e-mail periodically during the conference, and I could make it through a couple hundred e-mails pretty quickly. (I occasionally wished for an undo button there, though.) And, as I’ve already noted, it works shockingly well as an RSS reader. In both of those cases, the main lesson was: hold the iPad vertically, with only one item at a time visible, and you’ll really be able to focus.

I bought the 3G model, but I ended up not activating a 3G subscription, because both my hotel and the conference had good Wifi. Still, that’s an advantage that the iPad has over my laptop; there were times on vacation last summer that I wished I had 3G on my laptop, and it may well come in handy this summer’s vacation, too.

So: a great choice. Which, incidentally, I wasn’t the only one making: during sessions I frequently was sitting at a table with three iPad users and two or three laptop users. Maybe I was at non-representative sessions, but it felt to me like there were actually more iPads at the conference than Windows laptops, which I never would have expected.

(And, after I hit publish on this post, I will turn off this computer and spend the rest of the evening using my iPad instead. Well, actually, I’ll probably sneak in some time playing Edgy too…)

I first tried to use Google Reader on the iPad, since that’s what I use on my laptop. You can get it to work, but it’s not pleasant: the mobile version is designed for a phone, and the full version doesn’t work well without a mouse and keyboard. (It was completely unusable until I learned that you can use two-finger scrolling to scroll one pane of a multipane layout.)

So I searched for native iPad clients that can hook into my Reader subscriptions; the first I tried was Feeddler. And I was blown away: it was my first experience with just how much better the iPad can be at certain interactions. I doubt I’ll be able to explain it adequately, but here goes anyways:

I prefer to read most blog posts on the blog’s web site. So I would go through Reader, j’ing to each post and typing ‘v’ to bring up the article. But it takes a little while to load the article, so I batch them up: I clover-backtick to get to Reader, then repeat this a few times, and once I’ve got three or four loading, I clover-backtick to get to the oldest. Or at least to one of them: the main downside of Snow Leopard for me was that it changed the window cycling algorithm so that I ended up reading articles in a somewhat random order.

This interaction style doesn’t work at all on an iPad: it’s just not built for opening a bunch of windows (or a bunch of tabs) at once. So I was worried about reading RSS feeds on it: I don’t want going through my feeds to take twice as long because of all the page load wait time.

So I fired up Feeddler, and told it to show me oldest unread article. Which it did, displaying the contents of that article from the RSS feed. And then I tapped on the title, which I correctly guessed would bring up the article from the blog’s web site.

What I did not guess, however, was that the article would show up extremely quickly. I haven’t measured it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s loading pages four or so times faster than this laptop. It is, admittedly, an old laptop, but I’d always assumed that it was fast enough at rendering, and that the latencies were in the network. Apparently, my assumptions were wrong: occasionally, I’d run into a post that would take a while to load on the iPad, but most of the time they would pop up very snappily.

And this, in turn, subtly changed my interaction with the blogs I was reading. Rather than having four or five windows open in my browser (and with more icons/windows visible on the screen from other applications), and having some small part of my attention aware of the fact that I’d queued up multiple blog posts, I would just focus on one post at a time. That post would fill my screen, I wouldn’t have any other distractions, and I’d move on to the next when I was done. (Incidentally, one of the things I’ve learned from my recent iPad usage is to use the vertical orientation whenever possible: fill the screen with what you’re concentrating on, only bring up navigation lists on demand rather than always having them as a left pane.)

It got better when I tapped on a Youtube video: it started playing, I noticed a fullscreen icon; so I tapped that, and turned the iPad on its side, and all of a sudden I was immersed in the video I was watching. (It helped that the first video I watched this way was really pretty.) Again, the same principle applies: by having the video fill my screen, I was minimizing my distractions, and just watching it rather than looking at the words and pictures surrounding it on the page.

At home, I’d pretty much only using the iPad to play games; no longer. If I’m in the mood to read stuff, then the iPad is a much better device than this laptop.

Advice for other iPad owners: as part of this, I sampled a few of the RSS applications. This is clearly a fast-moving space: Feeddler had a lot more bugs a week ago than it does right now. Having said that, my current opinion is:

• NewsRack is much slower at bringing up web pages than Feeddler is, and doesn’t have any compensating benefits (I think it even had one or two other annoyances), so it’s not a choice for me.
• My current favorite is Reeder. (That link goes to an iPhone version, but hopefully he’ll add iPad screenshots soon.) It is much more elegantly styled than Feeddler, which is important to me for iPad applications; it also starts up noticeably faster. (It’s possible it brings up web pages a touch slower, but it’s still fast enough to be quite workable.) It took a little while for me to find some of the options: to see unread articles oldest first, you have to go to its settings within the general settings application; to see a specific feed, use two fingers to expand the folder that the feed lives in.

My initial hardware device for this will be an iPad, but I’m wondering what my preferred format should be for books that are available from Apple and Amazon but not from elsewhere. Some specific questions I had:

• My understanding is that both formats involve encryption; is that correct, and, if so, is it possible to remove the encryption? (Googling suggests Amazon’s isn’t too hard to remove.)
• My understanding is also that Apple uses a somewhat more widespread format, but their proprietary DRM makes their content unportable for now; is that right? (Is there an Apple-sanctioned way to read an iBooks book on a device other than an iPad or an iPhone/iPod Touch at all?)
• Is there any way to browse Apple’s bookstore through a computer, or can it only be browsed within the iBooks application?
• In general, are Kindle books or iBooks books more pleasant to read on an iPad, or is it a tossup?
• Are there any other large stores for non-public-domain electronic books that I should be aware of?
• Anything else I should be asking that I’m not?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions people provide.

So we’ll start playing Another World more or less immediately; we’re still deciding when to start Psychonauts, but it’s next in the queue, and (given Another World‘s short length) we’ll probably start it in a couple of weeks.

If either of those games strikes your interest, please join us! If they don’t, please suggest another game that does strike your interest! I’m looking forward to playing both of them, and I’m very grateful to the members for being willing to work with the new system and to AndrewArmstrong and oozo (and Michael, of course) for stepping up as our first champions!

(Side grumpiness: I would be even more excited about playing Another World if my Virtual Box installation of Windows actually worked acceptably. Fortunately, I have another couple of options for playing that game, but I’m wondering if I should break down and buy a cheap Windows PC for VGC purposes. At some point, I’ll buy a reasonably powerful desktop Mac that I’ll set up for dual booting, but I’m not planning to do that any time soon, especially since I just ordered my new computing device for the year…)