3. 2012-10-03

    A-list iOS developer shop Tapbots today released a remix of their excellent twitter client ( Tweetbot ), focused on tiny pay-subscription social network platform app.net . I think Tweetbot is probably my favourite thing about my  iPhone, and so I immediately purchased it. No obvious disappointments, all the slick performance I like is there, and it brings across some features I've been lacking in ADN for a while, like the ability to swiftly upload photos. I promptly celebrated by taking photos of every last.fm staff member with an ADN I could track down . I think this will probably increase my use of ADN moderately. Mobile is an essential component of gathering the off-the-cuff asynchronous status updates a service like this is built upon.


    I'm not sure that it will gigantically increase my engagement with ADN alpha. I was a bit suspicious of all the frothy cliques, with an intangible unease that I struggled to define, at least until I suddenly realised it was a cogent reminder of the very earliest days of bootstrapping the IMDb message boards . That left me feeling more comfortable with what the thing was, but no more inspired to engage. I'm still in love with the idea and the ideals of the place, and I'm reasonably confident it hasn't yet fallen into it's proper, more useful place. I'm shallow enough to enjoy my sexy low user id on some level that even I don't properly understand.


    Has App Dot Net "arrived?". I think not yet. Netbot feels like a threshold event of some kind, in as much as serious developers are prepared to put enough effort into the ADN platform to produce fully realised software harnessed to it, and this degree of finish does not come cheap. ADN seems to be on a little draught of second wind recently, there's been a couple of fun toy apps, some positive press, and the recent price drop, bringing a wave of fresh users in. I'm still very positive about ADN as a concept, an indicator that there's now a long tail of internet folk interested enough in paying for stuff to make services like this potentially viable. I won't be really  excited about ADN until I see the first compelling application built over it that is some mostly new and useful thing, rather than a new skin on an old one.

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  6. 2012-09-13

    If you've ever tried to take over somebody else's detatched screen sessions, by using the su command to assume their login identity, you've probably seen an error message something like


     Cannot open your terminal device /dev/pts/3

    This is because your pseudo terminal device is allocated when you login to the session, and remains owned by the user id you logged in, after you've changed your effective uid by su -ing. 


    You can try and kludge your way around it by chmod -ing your pty device file to make it more arbitrarily readable, but that's ugly and stupid, and needs escalated privileges. A slightly smarter way to work around this is to force a new pseudo terminal for the assumed login session. A really simple way to do this that I've recently discovered is to use the script  utility. script is a useful tool intended to preserve a transcription of an interactive terminal session.   To do this, it creates a new pty device for the current user id. So you can use it to help you recover a detatched screen by typing this


     su - someuser

     script /dev/null

     screen -r somesession

    Passing /dev/null to script just means that the transcript is discarded.


     

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  8. 2012-09-10

    Founding Omni : Wil Shipley recalls the origin of The Omni Group.

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  11. 2012-09-08

    It's not exactly the done thing on today's web, but I'm a huge believer in paying for web services. I've never been comfortable with the ad-supported web. When pure advertising is the only revenue stream supporting a product or service I worry about the deleterious effect upon that product or service.


    I don't like the implication that they're really working for their sponsor's interests ahead of mine. I don't like the mental effort of hunting down all the opt-outs, of second-guessing potential consequences of the creepy data-mining and covert information sharing with networks of 'trusted partners'. More straightforwardly, for many cases, I suspect the numbers don't really balance; I find it difficult to rely heavily on something with a potentially precarious revenue stream. I don't want to push too much content into, or build infrastructure around things that won't necessarily be around in a year or two.


    Paying directly for things makes everything seem more explicit and straightforward. I'm the customer. I can make informed decisions about the cost and usefulness of the thing. It's in the better interests of the service provider not to abuse the relationship. A product unspoilt and unhindered by commercial marriages should stand a better chance of evolving towards it's essential form. So I'm a relatively easy sell as a consumer. Offer me a useful service, at a reasonable price, and I'm quite likely to pay you for it. 


    The flipside of this is that I'm really cautious about the reverse. Purely ad-supported sites, especially ones that seem to be offering far too much  for free without being noticeably saturated with advertising make me feel slightly paranoid. I like to see which way the money flows.


    Here's a list of the sort of internety things I currently pay for, and will happily endorse. 



    • Spotify - I'm a long-time tenner a month customer. I think it's too expensive, but I somehow never quite unsubscribe.

    • Flickr - I have a pro account for photo hosting. 

    • DynDNS - I have a paid account, which gets me DNS zone hosting as well as a dynamic hostname

    • Pinboard.in - I like this bookmarking service. I was a very early adopter, and therefore my account cost a pittance due to the unique way pinboard is funded. 

    • Lastpass - I like this service so much I subscribed, just to do my bit to ensure they stay in business

    • Linode - my internet hosts are linux virtual machines hosted with this service. Linode is excellent. 

    • Word Podcast : I subscribed to the (now sadly folded) Word Magazine, primarily to access their very enjoyable podcast.

    • Metafilter : I don't use this site very much any more, but back in the old days, I got so much surfing out of it, I eventually bought a paid account just to contribute back.

    • Reddit : Similarly, I bought a founder Reddit Gold account when they appealed for cash, because I really enjoyed Reddit back before the eternal September.

    • iTunes : I use iTunes for quite a lot of things, apps, movie rentals and purchases, music purchases, and I have an iTunes Match subscription. If you have enough Apple gear to make an 'ecosystem', it's a good service.

    • Amazon Prime : I love Amazon. Some days, I wish I still worked for them.

    • Netflix : Most of my TV watching these days is netflix via Apple TV

    • App.net : - I signed up for an app.net account the second I heard about it.


    It's not a huge list. I'd like it to be larger. There's whole categories of things I'd probably cheerfully pay for should they exist. I'd pay a subscription for a decent search engine that wasn't a front for a creepy advertising juggernaut. I might pay for a subscription 'social' network, maybe something like a family-focused Yammer . I'd love something like a cheaper netflix that just focused on pre-1960s movies and archive TV. I'd like something like the old programming.reddit or hacker news. I'd love a smart news aggregator, and if I can't find one to pay for soon, I may have to invent one.

     

    In the olden times, there was a lot of talk about internet micropayments , and about how they couldn't possibly work, or how they were imminent and essential to safeguard the future of the web . They never really quite happened, and the shiny allure of the internet as a huge content pipe of free everything triumphed over all, but lately it feels to me like the mood is perhaps shifting a little.

     

    People seem to be wising up to some of the privacy considerations of infinitely free stuff that is only ever paid for covertly. The mobile app store culture has engendered a user community more acclimatised to fee-paying for services. Kindle is powering a minor revolution in self-publishing . Finally, there's Kickstarter , which is perhaps the most interesting current development in internet financing.

     

    There's nothing particularly new about the thinking behind Kickstarter. Through a combination of great execution and timing, it seems to have hit critical mass over the last 12 months. In the midst of all the long-tail nerd-bait (I recently signed on for my first funding )  and snake oil there are signs of some interesting funding efforts converging towards the mainstream. Champion self-publicist Amanda Palmer recently powered her project past the magical $1,000,000 mark, to flurries of 'old media' press interest.

     

    App.net is a manifest demonstration that I'm not completely alone in this line of thinking. Launched slightly before  twitter's recent frantic, shark-jumping, repositioning of it's terms of service , it seemed a futile, quixotic gesture when I signed up to fund it on it's kickstarter-esque ( apparently kickstarter's TOS precludes funding things like ongoing businesses, so they rolled their own thing ) signup page . I fully expected it to fall short of it's goal, but maybe pick up some positive news coverage as it flamed out, much like Diaspora did before. To my surprise it charged past the funding target ahead of the deadline, and closed way ahead of the target figure. Since then, they've launched the API, and built a sort of twitter clone built across it at alpha.app.net , which is busy enough to be an almost useful, slightly cliquey chit-chat network of it's own. It seems like app.net has the potential to self-host itself as at least a niche social network for privacy nerds and web developers. For some, that might be good enough, but I suspect the real power of app.net lies within it's potential to become a kind of ad-hoc real-time message bus for higher layered services over it's API. It remains to be seen if it can gather enough developer / user mindshare to deliver on the potential.

     

    The most high-profile campaign I've yet seen is the Penny Arcade Sells Out . High profile, high traffic funny-picture sites are the gold-standard of high volume ad serving, with content that massive audiences enjoy, but are used to reading for "free".  Although they fell short of their more extravagant targets, including the 'complete ad removal', they hit their funding target, and raised half a million dollars. An A-lister website demonstrating the ability to generate competitive income with top level ad-sales entirely from direct user funding? Nearly. Is the tide turning? I don't know, but I can feel it pull.

     
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  13. 2012-08-27

    Fake Jenny : Disappointing, and yet perhaps appropriate, @jennyholzer is not the work of the artist, although they use her words.

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  14. 2012-07-20

    One thing I wasn't expecting, from last month's new Apple hardware announcements, was the new MagSafe 2 power connector . The new Retina MacBook Pro, along with the 2012 " Ivy Bridge " MacBook Airs, have a new MagSafe port, physically incompatible with the previous generation, unless you use a little adaptor widget , which was luckily introduced for sale on the very same day.  


    MagSafe is Apple's name for their clever system of attaching the power line to their laptops to charge. Some say too clever by half. The cable has two pins, arranged as two symmetrical pairs , so you don't need to worry about orientation when you connect it up. The pins live in a little oblong recess, surrounded by a thicker shiny metal lip, which is magnetized. The power socket has the complementary inverse shape and magnet, meaning that they eagerly cup together to form a snug charging connection when introduced. The other significant benefit of this arrangement is the ease of disconnection, nice in itself, with the additional blessing that if some clumsy person, perhaps a passing dalmatian , blunders through your cable while you're tethered to the mains, your computer doesn't fly from the desk and shatter, the magnet just snaps free. I'm a big fan.


    And so, on to MagSafe 2. Essentially it's the same thing, but in a different shape. The pin configuration and spacing seems to be the same, but the magnetic lozenge, and the companion socket have been reshaped to be longer in the lateral plane, and slightly shorter in height. The shape of the connecting plug has returned a the symmetrical rectangular nub, with embedded charge indicator. Reminiscent of the first generations of MagSafe, but Aluminium, rather than white plastic, and slightly longer, making it perhaps a bit more finger friendly. 


    Most commentary I've seen about this form change has settled on the Retina MacBook Pro as the motivation for this change, speculating that the move to thinner unibody laptops requires a thinner connector. I'm pretty unconvinced by that argument. The MagSafe 2 is only a millimetre or so thinner than the previous design. I think that if your design constraint was to shrink the connector, you could make it smaller. Furthermore, the traditional Magsafe port is almost the same height as a USB or HDMI socket, and the Retina laptop case houses these ports, without compromise. I have a different theory about the reasoning behind this new shape.


    I think the most significant change is that the contact area of the magnetic surface has now nearly doubled. It's a lot more grippy than it's ancestor. Anecdotally, over the lifespan of the MagSafe, I've heard complaints from other users about the reliability of the chargers, particularly about cable and connector failure. Having never experienced similar problems with the half-dozen plus MagSafe chargers I've owned, I've puzzled about this. I wonder how many people might be disconnecting their chargers by yanking on the cable. This works as a method of disconnection, but it's not a very sensible approach, it puts a lot of mechanical stress on the junction between the cable and the plug. Do it enough, and you'll eventually break it. The magnetic coupling is most efficient in the horizontal plane. What you ought to do is flick the plug out, by hooking a finger underneath the connector plug, and angling it up away from the socket.


    Apple certainly seemed to recognise that there was a UI problem here. Perhaps an expensive one, if enough customers were returning broken chargers to stores. They even produced a technote about the correct way to disconnect a MagSafe. Then MagSafe plug connectors changed shape over time . The strain relief on the cable junction lengthened, and then the plug changed from the original stubby T-shape, to a longer L-shape, itself subsequently re-inforced with additional strain relief. This connector shape encourages a lower-stress detatchment, but spoils the nice symmetrical property of the plug, because you can now connect it facing forwards, where it will obscure your other ports. MagSafe 2 returns this helpful feature.


    So is reliability a plausible motive for this redesign? I think so. The increased contact area of the magnet in MagSafe 2 makes it quite a bit harder to disconnect by cable-tugging. The larger plug housing is easier to grip with the fingers and angle out. The connector is a sufficiently different shape to visibly distinguish it from it's predecessor. It will be interesting to see if the reliability reports from users  improve. 

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  16. 2012-07-14

    Monolithic : it turns out that a prototype transparent monolith prop from the film 2001 is on display near Tower Bridge.

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  18. 2012-07-05

    No, Really : Marcel Proust playing Air Guitar with a tennis racket.

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  19. 2012-06-25

      Chevalier d'Eon : 18th century cross-dressing French diplomat recently identified as subject of a painting in the National Portrait Gallery.

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  20. 2012-06-22

    It seems like I've been waiting all my computing life for VDUs to exceed 200 DPI . Well, that's an exaggeration. I've been waiting for it for about as long as I was first exposed to system-wide vector-based  type rendering, in the late 1980s. So I'm understandably excited about Apple's new "retina" MacBook Pro , with it's display of ~220 DPI.


    Why care so much about DPI? It's all about the text, in particular the inherent problems with clearly scaling non-rectilinear strokes.  Text is the fundamental component of everything I do with computers. It always has been, and it seems likely that it will long continue to be. As a floppy haired, slack-wristed aesthete, I really care that the text, which I will be staring into for hours, is clear and beautiful.


     The LCD screens used for most modern displays are constructed from a mesh of tiny discrete transparent shutters , which work in combination to make up pixels, which are the smallest visual element that can be addressed on a bitmap display. Typically these pixels are nearly square, and they are arranged in a 2D matrix of perhaps a few million elements. That may sound like a lot, but it's coarse enough to introduce perceptible distortion into lines that are not perfectly rectilinear.


    One of my favourite things about Mac OS X, and it's upstart little brother, iOS, is the respect their type-generating software applies to letterform. Typefaces render very faithfully, regardless of scale, and pains are taken to smooth out the curves, using anti-aliasing techniques, that detect the staircasing edges of lines, and soften them into their background with gradual shading. This works very well, but it's not un-noticeable; there's a soft-focus effect that gives a fringey halo to certain text shapes; you become inured to it over time. Other GUI systems tend to adjust the letterform to make the text better align to the pixel grid, it's common for people who aren't habituated to the Mac to comment about the degree of blur.


    Things are much better than they used to be. Way back in the day, when outline curved rendering was just too computationally expensive to be routine, everything on-screen was painted as a copy of a pre-drawn bitmap , and blocky graphics were everywhere, particularly once scaling and translation was applied. We peered at them on our tiny goldfish-bowl CRT monitors. Outline font rendering was a specialist feature of certain software packages or dedicated computer systems, perhaps not even rendered online. The fanciest workstation computers had gigantic 20" CRTs , and all vector graphical engines like Display PostScript . It seemed reasonable then to expect the exponential improvements in technology to scale this up to at least print-quality DPI, and the costs to come down.


    The costs did come down, and the computers continued their frantic pace of improvement, but something appeared to lock mainstream display rendering at somewhere around 100 DPI for over a decade.  I think it was a combination of factors.


    There was the move away bulky from beam scanning phosphor dot CRT monitors, which are theoretically capable of precise drawing at a perfectly graduated range of resolutions, over to the more space and power efficient LCD displays, with the aforementioned discrete physical pixel elements. Fifteen years ago I had a 19" ADI multisync CRT monitor, and the effective resolution of my computer display crept up as I upgraded my graphics card and display, and the monitor kept  pace. For the last ten years, I've been using a nice 23" HP widescreen LCD , and my desktop resolution has been locked at  1920x1200 that corresponds to the mechanical pixel array of my screen.


    LCD screen technology manufacturing is closely tied to flatscreen television production, where the standard vertical resolution has settled on 1080 pixels, which is marketed as ' High Definition ' which is actually pretty low definition if you stop to think that cheap desktop computers were routinely rendering higher than that years before its roll-out.


    The system software used on desktop computers, made optimisations and took short-cuts based on the average dot pitch, using fixed bitmaps for painting GUI elements, making assumptions about proportions and spacing of on-screen elements that entrenched and subsequently proved remarkably hard to shift.


    The turning point seems to have come with the iPhone 4 , and it's "Retina" display, with a DPI count of 326 - close to that of low-grade print - on it's highly saturated backlit LCD screen. Text looks fantastic on this generation of iPhone, still to me the nicest display of this type I've seen. This was followed up by the slightly coarser (264 DPI)  Retina iPad model a couple of years later, with a and as of last week, the still slightly astonishing Retina MacBook Pro.  Seems like the high DPI era I've been waiting for is here!


    And yet I'm not going to buy a Retina MacBook Pro. I did give it some excited thought. I rushed right out to Apple Covent Garden after the announcement, and fondled one for a little bit, and decided it's not really for me. Experience has taught me to steer wide of a 1st iteration Mac Platform, especially one where Apple seems to be pushing the hardware design into some advanced new shape. There's often early adopter trouble. A couple of early warning signals jump out at me from the start. Pushing that many pixels around is really going to need some grunt work. I have my suspicions about cooling; why the big air vents down the side, why devote five minutes of the keynote describing a cunning new fan design? It's a Mac, I want no fans. Steve always wanted No Fans . It's too big and heavy for me, and yes of course, it's really expensive.


    I ordered a new generation 13" MacBook Air . It will replace my current laptop, a last generation 13" MacBook Air. Which replaced my previous laptop, a 13" MacBook Air from the year before. Seems I have a MacBook Air habit .


    The wedge-shaped MacBook Air is iterating rapidly to converge upon my ideal computer. Light enough to move around without becoming a burden. A full scale keyboard that I enjoy typing upon, as an emacs -wedded touch typist prone to RSI. Enough pixels on the screen to productively juggle the magical 3 window pattern I tend to adopt for work (an editing window, a reference window, and a command shell). Enough power that I don't need to worry about where my next charge point is. And the 13" display has fairly small pixels (~128 DPI). Smaller text isn't as legible as I'd like, mind you, and some of the GUI elements are a bit small. It would be nice to have more CPU cores. Like I say, iterating rapidly...


    200+ DPI displays are clearly here to stay. Where Apple plant their flag, all the OEM PC hardware makers ineveitably follow. Microsoft Windows , which to me increasingly looks like it's playing catch-up, seems to me, looking from the outside, to be more completely resolution independent than either of Apple's operating systems at this point in time, so that shouldn't be a hold-up to broader deployment any more. Production will simplify. Costs will fall with scale. 


    I had been planning on buying a nice external display, probably an Apple Thunderbolt , because they make lovely docking stations for Thunderbolt-equipped laptops, but that's a foolish idea now. It seems sensible to bet that there will be a high-DPI equivalent along within a couple of years, and monitors are a long term investment. I can wait. 


    We seem to be at something of a transitional phase for the personal computer at the moment. It seems likely that the future of the Mac is some kind of convergence point between the iPad, the retina MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air, but I can't quite figure out what shape that thing will take. I am typing this final sentence on my box-fresh, just powered up, 2012 MacBook Air, with it's new Mac smell, and it's LCD screen cleaner than I will ever be able to polish it; already I am day-dreaming about it's replacement.

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