christophe thinks out loud

The truth hurts, sometimes

Java is Object BASIC.

It shares with BASIC a fascination for strings, and deep in its heart of hearts is really an interpreted language (anything that runs as wild with introspection as does Java isn't really comfortable with this whole “compiled” idea).

There's just something about Java that makes you start aching for an Evaluate statement.

And an ultimate Object base class is just a stupid idea, OK? That's something C++ most definitely got right.

But it's still better than C.

Today, I hate Sprint

After waiting on hold for 15 minutes with music-on-hold that sounded like a Muzak version of Magma, I get to speak to a billing rep whose job it is to . . . take a message and issue a ticket number.

“Hi, here at Sprint we don't care enough to put people with any training on the phones. But we're happy to screech at you and throw feces at you. A billing specialist will return your call by the end of the next business day, sucker.”

I hate Sprint.

You're Not The Boss Of Me

So, to almost no one's surprise, the judge in the Apple vs. rumor site case ruled that California's journalist shield law does not apply to civil lawsuits over trade secret matters. (Technically, this is not a lawsuit against the blogs, btw, but Apple's attempt to enforce a subpoena against them.)

Of course, one could be forgiven for thinking that the ruling was something else, given the reaction of the blogosphere. For example, SFist stated that the ruling was that “California's shield law ... didn't apply to bloggers ...”. MacWorld went even farther, raising the alarm that the judge “disagreed with lawyers arguements [sic] that online publications are covered by the First Amendment.” (Quote from the RSS summary.)

Woo-hoo! Now we're cookin' with gas! Blogs aren't journalists? Blogs aren't covered by the First Amendment? How dare they! Let's turn our sense of thwarted entitlement up to 11!

Of course, the ruling said neither of those things. What's going on is that there is a free-floating narrative that's been kicking around the blogosphere for a while (given a tremendous boost by the last election), which is:

Blogs are too real journalism! They're more journalism than those stupid old newspapers! We break more news earlier than stupid old newspapers, and no one gives us any respect. No one appreciates how hip and with it and cutting edge we are, and we should get all the same goodies as those stupid old newspapers!

The Apple vs. blog lawsuit was custom-made for that narrative, because it seems to have something to do with the particular status of blogs vs. newspapers (and other traditional journalism). But it doesn't. It has nothing to do with it. Doesn't touch on it at all.

The issue is, was, and always will be in this suit: Does the California journalist shield law offer a defense against a lawsuit brought on the basis of trade secret law? Reasonable people can disagree on this point, but the judge said “no,” and no one should be surprised by this ruling; the case law definitely points that way. The reason that traditional journalists don't often get caught by this is not because the courts are in awe of them; it's because traditional journalists usually don't do stupid things like publish unattributed rumors that are likely to get them sued under trade secret law. (Daring Fireball makes this point far more eloquently than I can.)

So, in fact, this whole case rather contradicts the narrative that blogs aren't being taken seriously. Apple is certainly taking them seriously. What it does mean is that blogs are expected to have the same responsibilities as traditional media, and that means taking it on the chin if they publish things that could get them sued. To act otherwise is to act like an adolescent who starts complaining about their “rights as a human being” as a way of avoiding taking out the trash.

Don't to that to me, Dave

Ever since I switched to OS X, I've been using Safari. Safari is a fine browser, really it is... except for its incredibly annoying tendency to just “go away” into some kind of 100% CPU-use loop for seconds at a time. I have no idea what it is going, but it has rendered it nearly useless.

So, I'm switching to Firefox. But where is the system- (or at least account-) wide preference to change your default browser? In Safari, just to make you feel guilty about bagging it.

Why didn't I think of that?

This is an exceptionally cool idea: The Virus line of synthesizers comes with plug-ins for your favorite composing program. Rather than doing the synthesis in software, bogging down your computer, it communicates via USB with the synth, and the synth does the synth thing and returns the results.

And you can play it as a keyboard. I hope it sounds wonderful, because this is a very nifty idea.

Dave Smith Instruments

Years ago, when I worked at Oberheim Electronics (working on the DPX1, gobble, gobble), Dave Smith's first Sequential Circuits was still around. Like Tom Oberheim and Roger Linn, he was a brilliant analog engineer. Like Roger Linn but unlike Tom Oberheim, he got out while the getting was good, just ahead of the Yamaha DX-7 destroying the US synthesizer industry.

Smith was, in fact, largely responsible for the invention of MIDI, since he didn't want to have to build yet another damned sequencer. He also held a patent on the scanning keyboard, resulting in what must have been a nice little royalty stream.

But Smith's back, and he's making utterly drool-worthy equipment. I'm not 100% sure, but this seem to have an architectur similar to the Oberheim Xpander and Matrix-12 (although it probably doesn't use dual 6800s as the processors). It also seems to have the wonderful advantage that you can feed external audio through the filter array, not just the output of the generators.

Yum.

Is this thing on?

I'm trying the blogging client ecto for this post, to see if it can do off-line writing. To do this, I just removed the Ethernet cable from my laptop.

OK, not bad. Seems much improved from the first time I tried it.

Cory Doctorow on DRM

Pointing out an article on Boing Boing is a bit like saying, "For strong illumination, be sure to try the sun first." But this post is just so good, so cogent, so together, I have to mention it. Cory Doctorow simply demolishes the arguments in favor of DRM in one easy-to-read article. It's great.

A Plea to Developers

In particular, a plea to developers of applications that use a plug-in architecture: Please, please do some kind of lazy or deferred initialization of the plug-ins. Speaking as someone who routinely uses Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, and Final Cut Pro, I cannot count how much of my life I waste watching the “initializing plug-ins that you will never, ever use” messages zip by on the splash screen.

Thank you.

BitTorrent Goes Adult

It appears that Adult Peer is a commercial version of BitTorrent (I have no idea if they use the same underlying protocol or not, but the marketing copy on Adult Peer makes it obvious that it is using the same concept).

Adult Peer should be very happy that the developer of BitTorrent chose not to patent the key concept, which is the distributed download sources; it's a more patentable idea than 99% of what passes for software patents these days.

Sin City is using it to download their free "on the set" features (via Fleshbot).

Clearly, I'm Missing Something

It's that time of year, and that time of year means that it is time for us to renew our Cisco support contract. You would think, Cisco being such a hip, with-it, connected company, that this would be as painless as spending money ever is.

Oh, and how wrong you would be.

First, you can't just walk up to Cisco and say, "We'd like to renew our support contract, please." Oh, no, you foolish little mortal, Cisco does not deal with the likes of you. You must go to your Cisco Partner, and they will pass your supplication along to Cisco for consideration.

Fine, whatever. We go to the company we buy a lot of our tech stuff from, and ask them, "We'd like to renew our support contract, please." And they say, sure, we'd love your money . . . and here's how it works:

• We give our Cisco Partner our money.
• The Cisco Partner calls Cisco, and tells Cisco that the Cisco Partner has our money.
• Cisco contemplates this interesting tidbit of information, and gives the Cisco Partner a Very Important Number (VIN, for short).
• The Cisco Partner then ships us this VIN in a box.
• We then (I think) are supposed to go to Cisco's web site and type in this VIN.
• At this point, our service contract is supposed to be renewed.

How is this superior to going to Cisco's web site, giving them our credit card number, and having our contract being renewed on the spot? Well, it's not, of course, but it's just the Cisco Way.

SonicWall used to do something remarkably similar, but they wised up and let you renew without having to buy a Very Important Number from a dealer, and having that VIN shipped to you in a box. Someday, maybe Cisco will figure out that this web thing is pretty cool for selling stuff.

How Pervasive is Wi-Fi?

My new commute takes me from Alameda to San Francisco and back each day, via ferry. Just for giggles, I fired up MacStumbler during my commute home last night. I managed to pick up WiFi networks (although not strong enough to connect to) in the middle of San Francisco Bay.

Upside Down, with Little Xs for Eyes

Blowfish gets a positive deluge of spam. Given that we have a bunch of public email addresses, and have had them for years, this is not surprising. After much tinkering, I decided to Get Serious, and on recommendations, I bought a Barracuda Networks 200 dedicated spam filter. (It’s really just a Linux box running custom mail filtering software. It sucks up the mail as your primary MX, and then sends on the stuff that passes the test to your real mail server.)

I installed it with much excitement, and early reports were promising. It was, indeed, much more effective than my home-grown solutions.

And then it all went terribly wrong.

At 8:30am on the Saturday after it was installed, it just stopped working. Plop. Kernel panic message on the console. Power cycle, cross fingers. Nope, Saturday evening, same thing. Fine, whatever, back to our old mail server, call tech support on Monday. (Why do these things only happen on weekends?) The nice tech support guy SSHes in, fixes a file system corruption (!), and the box runs fine.

Until the next Saturday. 10am, plop, dead spam box. This time, it’s even more insidious: it will open connections, but won’t actually accept email, so our monitoring service doesn’t flag it as down. Drive out to Blowfish, cycle power, and same problem.

Hassle with Barracuda tech support again on Monday. This time, they send me out a replacement box. Great! Finally! I really want this to work. So, tonight, I install it and . . . Dead on arrival. It will boot, and the console comes up fine, but even after setting the network address properly, it doesn’t respond over the network interface. No web admin, no ping, nothing.

I can hardly wait for my conversation with Barracuda tomorrow morning. I think I sense a market opportunity out there; anyone want to start a spam filter box company with me?

Konfabulated by Dashboard

Over at Daring Fireball, you can find an excellent article about Apple’s new Dashboard feature in Tiger vs. the existing Konfabulator system. Short summary: Painting Apple in the villain in this piece isn’t fair.

Jenna Jameson Gets All Lessig On Us

Now, this is a confluence of interests. The sex business and patent activism, two of my favorite subjects, in one topic!

Jenna Jameson, famous porn star, has lent moral support to the fight against yet another spurious technology patent, this one by one Acacia Research that claims to cover pretty much all streaming media.

(Of course, Jenna is a savvy businesswoman and nobody’s fool . . . her site has plenty of streaming content on it, too.)

As usual, the depth of the patent holders commitment is shown in that they are going after adult industry sites, rather than, say, Apple, Microsoft, or Real, the companies that actually build the technology. Of course, Apple and Microsoft have enormous cash mountains and battalions of lawyers to fight just such absurd suits . . . I detect some traditional playground bully behavior here on the part of Acacia.

Of course, this “bet the company on a highly dubious IP claim” strategy is hardly unique to Acacia. Just like in that case, the hope is that you score easy victories against soft targets who can’t afford a long patent fight, hoping that you can build up enough bad case law and cash so that you can then either go after the big boys, or have enough to retire on when the IP is found to be bogus and the music stops.

What we need is a wholesale revision of intellectual property law. Until then, it’s just going to be one of these stupid cases after another.

Robotic Swarming Traffic Cones

That pretty much says it all. If these do not appear in a science fiction story in the next two months, writers everywhere should be ashamed.

We write the microcode, so you don’t have to

Well, that’s cool.

A company called Stretch (a name that is full of history in computing) has announced a chip that combines a plain ol’ RISC processor with a large programmable logic array. This, by itself, isn’t that wild. What’s interesting is that they claim that their proprietary C/C++ compiler will detect patterns in code that will benefit from having custom instructions produced . . . and will create them on the fly in the programmable logic array.

Although I’m not sure that it will find much use in personal computers or servers, at least right away (can you imagine having to swap out an entire PLA each time you change processes?), it sounds very cool for embedded applications.

Leonardo’s Automobile

Who would have thought that the Italian tradition of fine automotive engineering would date back so far?

Researchers at the Florence Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Institute and Museum of the History of Science, a truly fascinating place) have constructed a self-propelled wagon from notes in Leonardo da Vinci's Atlanticus Codex.

Patently Absurd

One of the most pernicious trends of the last twenty years is businesses getting patents on “business processes,” usually by claiming that they came up with the idea of taking some normal, real-world process (a shopping cart, an auction, a “buy now” solicitation) and implementing it on a computer. Calling these patents “bullshit” is slandering manure, frankly; at least manure can grow things. Even speaking as someone with a few patents to my name, the current patent system is completely out of control.

Although the vast majority of these patents are utterly invalid, often on the face of them, companies still can use them as legal weapons until they are found invalid. Fighting the necessary fight to get the USPTO to invalidate a patent requires tons of specialized legal work, and specialized legal work is not cheap.

As one of my “What would I do if I won the lottery?” fantasies, I imagined starting a foundation that would do nothing except file challenges against these idiocies. Thus, I am incredibly pleased that the Electronic Freedom Foundation has announced that they are going to start doing precisely that. If I do win the lottery, they’re getting a big old donation. Heck, they are getting one even if I don’t win.

A Healthy Glow

Oh, hot damn, I found this again.

A while back, in the Wind and Weather paper catalog, I saw Ambient Device's Weather Beacon product, and snatched up the phone to order it . . . shoot, unavailable, and they didn’t give the manufacturer, so I couldn’t track it down.

Then, out of nowhere, I ran across it again. I love the web.

So, what do the Orb and Beacon do? They take a numeric value (temperature, stock value, etc.), and turn it into a color, which they glow. That’s it. It seems absurdly simple, but the applications are endless, since you can display whatever numeric information you want. (Besides the shape, the only difference I can see betwen the Orb and the Beacon is that the Orb is set up to track stock prices by default, and the Beacon temperature.)

They use a wireless receiver (based on a digital pager’s network) to pick up transmitted data. You can use their web site to configure a variety of streams, but you can also configure it to use a custom data feed, either via the web and wireless, or its serial port. Temperature in your server room? The number of orders that your company is currently receiving? How fast traffic is on your route home? That there are new job or apartment listings? New things on your RSS newsreader? Have it flash red when your remote webcam picks up motion? The possibilities are, as they say, endless.

We live in a constant stream of data, but data are not information. As the data stream gets faster and faster (the “drinking from the firehose” problem), we’ll need more things like this to help us make quick sense of it.

iPorn

I thought this was a brilliant idea. After all, isn’t porn the killer app of the web?

Then I realized it was a satire. Mentioning Peter North should have been a give-away; he’s so 1998.

But then again, life frequently imitates satire.

A9 knows what's good for you

Amazon has pulled the wraps off of their new search service, A9. It's built on top of Google, but is enhanced in a variety of ways. John Battelle has written a good article about it.

But what is interesting about it to me is that it apparently has "Safe Search" turned on . . . with no obvious way to turn it off. It doesn't use your Google preferences. Signing in doesn't provide an obvious way of setting your level of safety. Is lowest-common-denominator search the wave of the future?

(Via Boing Boing.)

StyleMaster

StyleMaster from (I wish I'd thought of this company name) Western Civilization is simply the coolest thing I've run into for building and validating style sheets. Such a tool is important, as style sheets are godawful pains in the neck to get right, given the number of browsers out there.

Speaking of which, allow me to add that Internet Explorer 6 on Windows is a buggy pile of manure that should have never been released, and which has caused me more trouble than all the other browsers put together to get to display this site correctly (thank god for Virtual PC). If you are on a Windows platform running IE6 and are having text display issues, hit reload. A lot. (And before any Microsoft apologists out there get on my case, CSS does not contain a "draw the text and then quickly blank it out only to randomly redraw it on hover" style attribute. I checked.)

Even better, everyone on Windows should switch to Firefox immediately. You will thank me later, I assure you.

Lies Programmers Tell Ourselves, 1

"XML is human-readable, and is thus suitable for use in configuration files."