Hype, Reality and Expectation

Categories: News Say

Here's a little history: in the early nineties, much of my consultancy work orbited (often eccentrically) around a binary model: the development of new technologies and helping clients to understand how those technologies could help their businesses and to work out how and when to jump in. It still does.

To complement my arm-waving, I devised a simple model to help demonstrate and explain the accelerating curve of hype, bubble, bust and disillusion that typically accompanies the development of new technologies and services. With tongue only slightly in cheek, I called this the Hype Cycle, and it's proved a useful way of helping people understand the interplay between capability and perception in investment, marketing and strategic decision-making.

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First Impressions: Apple iPhone

Categories: Industry News News TechnoGear

I've been waiting for this. I've been waiting a long, long time. In fact ever since I first cabled my Apple Newton to my Nokia phone and managed to get a feeble-but-exciting GSM data signal from within the bunker of the Palais de Congres in Cannes (it was a very very tedious conference session). And that was fifteen years after my first mobile computing experience – an only approximately luggable Texas Instruments thermal printer terminal with a built-in acoustic coupler: the first mobile combo device. Since then, I've been through the mobile mill: I've carried around every 'mobile' device Apple ever made (if you've ever played with a Newton, you'll understand the quotification of 'mobile'), helped design a couple of them and, when Steve The Revenant canned the Newton in a Learish fit of Alpha Male pique, I reluctantly went over to and through various incarnations of the Palm. Compared to the Newton, it was but a nursery toy but it did have the major advantage of being truly pocketable, unlike the dear old Newt. Along the way I dallied with an early incarnation of the iPaq - for about three days, after which I returned it as "unfit for purpose" - to say that I was disenchanted with PocketPC (as it then was) was a galactic level understatement.

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Apotheosis of the PowerBook

Categories: Mac and Back TechnoGear

The MacBook Pro is a very cool, very fast and very shiny computer. But, as of now, largely pointless for me: until such time as core applications for the photographer and image munger are released as Universal Binaries, I'd simply be paying more for a machine that ran Photoshop and its ilk more slowly than my existing machine (under the Rosetta emulation environment), and which wouldn't run some plug-ins at all. Unless I was using Aperture as the heart of my workflow (which I can't, due to its current, "limitations" in RAW conversion), the only benefit would be that the Finder, email and text editor would run ludicrously fast (and they're fine already). The first generation MacBook Pro has also taken some backward steps in its specification that smack of a rush to market.

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The Powerbook is Dead…

Categories: Mac and Back TechnoGear

…Long live the, ah, MacBook.

So we're starting with sad note in technohistory: I've been surgically attached to both the name and entity of Powerbook since it first appeared rather more than fourteen years (and to my laughingly named Mac “Portable” before that), so I'm unlikely to convert to the casual dropping of, “I'll just grab my MacBook…” overnight. Or possibly not ever. And what happens when Apple migrates their Power Mac range to Intel - do we end up with the Mac Mac?

But enough of the sentimental maundering – this is supposed to be about what the Intel shift means to travelling photographers and meedja types, for whom a <whatever>Book is their weapon of choice, and for those Wintel frustratees who are considering a shift, now that direct platform comparisons are possible for the first time.

First things first, then – just what is a MacBook, and what's changed from the previous generation of PowerPC-based machines?

Design

A full specification is available on the Apple web site, so I'm not going to reiterate that, but concentrate on what's changed, for better and worse. The basic industrial design remains as for the 15“ Aluminium PowerBooks, albeit in a case that's 1cm wider than before, but a couple of mm slimmer – almost back to the thickness of the PowerBook Ti. Depth remains the same. Strange to tell, that little extra slimness is much more significant for travelling than the extra centimeter of width – I'll happily trade a bit of footprint for something I can stuff into the narrowest possible space in a crowded equipment bag. A good start then. Now for the rest…

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Router Madness

Categories: Say TechnoGear

Netgear DG814

I live in the country, in a place where the beer is real, wellies are green and broadband is something of a latecomer. In fact I didn't get broadband in this corner of Surrey until two years ago, at which point, and after years of reliable ISDN service from my old faithful Netopia 3100 router in connecting to both the Net and our corporate Cisco-based systems, I leapt excitedly on the DSL bandwagon with a Netgear DG814. Now I'd modestly reckon that I'm usually pretty good at assessing technology and getting it right (it being part of my job'n'all…), but, as what followed demonstrated, I do seem to have developed a rather Nelsonian blind spot with regard to low-end routers…

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LloydsTSB Security Hole

Categories: Say Security

Banks are conservative organisations, who worry about the security and integrity of their customers' financial data, right? They're conservative in that they won't introduce new technologies or processes until their highly-skilled security analysts have had the chance to ensure that all bases are covered in terms of any potential security vulnerability, to themselves or their customers. Sounds entirely reasonable, doesn't it? It also means that we should forgive them for being, shall we say, a tad slow in catching up with the way the world is and wishes to be.

So here's a challenge for LloydsTSB: Please explain this:

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Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better

Categories: Industry News Mac and Back News Say

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, when the pigs take over the farm, and set up their workers' paradise, the mantra of the revolution, repeated ad infinitum by a Greek chorus of bleating sheep, is "Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good". Which pretty much sums up the level of debate we've had in the camps of the Motorola/Macintosh and Intel/Microsoft alliances for the last two decades. It's also a war that's been fought on two fronts – from the mud-bogged trenches of the Mac/Windows jihadists to the free-flowing desert warfare of the Intel/Motorola skirmishes. And, as any general will tell you, a war fought on two fronts is bloody hard work, with the principal sufferers along the way being the confused and shell-shocked civilian population.

But one part of that war is heading for a conclusion: Apple is switching to Intel. Let me say that again: Apple. Is. Switching. To. Intel. It's like watching Martin Luther walk up to the church door in Wittenberg and nail a piece of paper to the door only to find that, rather than the 95 Theses of Contention, it's an advert for a lap-dancing club. So it's probably time for a little reflection, not to mention eating of crow. I'll have ketchup with mine…

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Browsers and Brain cells

Categories: Say Standards

Here's an opinion: The Web is about being accessible to all –  it is not, nor should it be, the domain of any one operating system, organisation or web browser. There are a good set of international standards which determine how information is delivered to and presented by browsers. Most – no, make that, "nearly all" –  browsers are compliant with those standards, within a few degrees of buggishness and interpretation. So making a site work with these is a matter of tweaking by degree, not kind. There is of course one notable exception, and that (again, "of course") is Microsoft. And here we do appear to have a combination of conspiracy AND cock-up: Microsoft are trying to drive/keep the industry in thrall to a proprietary browser and the related server architecture. They are also guilty of producing a product that, in terms of compliance to standards, is full of bugs, ommissions and misinterpretations of best practice. Whether those are driven by corporate decision, gratuitous disregard or blind ignorance is another matter. By whatever means though, its browsers display a moderately cavalier disregard for standards and are of such a bug-ridden nature that making a site work consistently requires delving into an underworld of hacks, tweaks and rewrites that are sufficient to cause apoplexy or death-by-boredom in any thinking organism. Approximately 40% of the development time for this site has been spent in trying to implement fixes and work-arounds for Microsoft's browsers. In comparison, tweaking for all other browsers has been, in most cases, a matter of minutes.

In order to tread the fine line of compromise between high-handed disregard for poor design and monopolistic practice and preventing the many users of such products from actually accessing these sites, we've gone for the "greatest good of the greatest number" and made everything work with W3C DOM-based browsers and the later versions of Internet Explorer, on Windows and Mac. But please do consider this, by preference, an ABM site: Anything But Microsoft. If they ever learn and decide to create standards-compliant browsers, then that's just fine and dandy. In the meantime, I look forward to the day when the world's web designers bring a class action against them, to claim for the time, brain cells and money lost in trying to make their bloody browsers work. Me, I'm off to ride my motorcycle.

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Movable Type : Machine Translation

Categories: Movable Type Say

Our core web technology platform (the Two Worlds vServer) is aimed at communities and enterprises which require universal content and collaboration services that can be updated and managed in multiple ways, from mobile devices and in strange and exotic places where bandwidth and means of access may be decidedly limited. Many users have English (if at all) as their second language, so I want them to be able to both post in their own language, for those posts to be avaible in other languages and to all users with direct translations of any site content. Here I call in the excellent service at freetranslation.com, which it is possible to call directly from a web page to carry out a machine translation of that page. In fact, if you subscribe to their Platinum service, at an astonishly reasonable $3.95 a year, you a) encourage them to keep going and b) get the facility to refine the dictionary for informal language and automatically follow links in the target language once you've translated the first page. So…

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Movable Type: Where Am I?

Categories: Movable Type Say

The vServer that hosts our own and our clients' web sites is based (loosely) upon the Movable Type blogging engine. In the versions we're currently deploying (2.661/3.11), there appears to be no embedded way to get at the current page URL for any page on the site - MTEntryPermaLink will give you the effective URL for an individual entry, but that's a special case. So what to do? Enter php, stage left, with smug grin: Now I'm a complete newbie at php, so there may well be much easier way of doing it, but what the hell - this one works, at least in my production environment, which is, FYI, Mac OS X/X Server 10.3.5/Apache 2.0.47/php 4.3.2/MT2.661.

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Installing Math::Pari and Crypt::DSA for Movable Type under Mac OS X

Categories: Movable Type Say

What and Why?

I am not now a programmer and haven't been one, real or surreal, for at least fifteen years. So WHY have I just spent two days solid trying to get a single perl module compiled for my server? Rhetorical question –  any smartarse answers should be placed in the usual wormhole on a piece of EBCDIC punch-tape.

The Challenge: install the perl module Crypt::DSA on a shiny new Movable Type 3.11 installation, to allow us to make full use of the features and get best performance from the comment registration mechanism. So I go to CPAN and try installing Crypt::DSA. It tells me I need the Math::Pari module first and then falls over in grand style on trying to install it. That was four days ago. I have just got it all working (or installed, at least) and this is for anyone going through a similar process –  hopefully you'll find this before you acquire significant bruising on your forehead, much like the one I'm currently nursing.

Resources

Firstly, useful resources:

The starting point for all this is Benjamin Boksa's description of installing Math::Pari, taken together with some hints and pointers found on a Mac thread on the Pari site. That tutorial was then corrected by David Jacob's blog on installing Math::Pari on Mac OS X.

Whilst pointing me in the right general direction, none of these actually worked. So here's what did, with my system configuration of:

• Mac OS X Server 10.3.5 installed and up-to-date (according to Software Update)
  
• Xcode Tools installed and up-to-date
  
• Perl 5.8.1 (default Mac OS X installation)
  
• Movable Type 3.11
  
• Pari 2.1.5 –  as of today, this is the latest stable release of Pari. If you're using an earlier or later one, you'll need to change the process to suit the names. D'uh…
  

So, for those who are trying to install Crypt::DSA, or anything else that needs the Math::Pari module and libraries, here's what worked for me, presented in step-by-step fashion, with minimal geekspeak, although it does require some familiarity with the Unix command line. using the tcsh shell. Some of this may be overkill, but I'm being deliberately pedantic here and describing every step that led me to a working installation.

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CurSSing Fluently

Categories: Movable Type Say

During the development of the Two Worlds vServer and my subsequent iceclimb (with crampons and two axes) up the North Face of the CSS learning curve, I came across a bug in the Mac OS X version of Internet Explorer, up to and including 5.2.3. Nothing new there, except that appears to be unique to the Mac version and doesn't appear to be desperately well documented (at least for this CSS newbie).

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