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Toward a Mac migration

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There are still three barriers standing between me and moving onto a Mac. Two are rapidly disappearing. (I was a Mac guy for years and shifted to a PC in the mid-’90s during Apple’s slump years, when the unreliability of the Mac OS and Mac hardware had me losing more data than I could stand.)

One is the availability of a true lightweight Apple laptop. Rumor has it that’s coming; it’s time for a Mac laptop that is slim, elegant and three pounds heavy, like the IBM/Lenovo X-class laptops I’ve been using forever. I’m sure Apple knows this and I can’t imagine waiting too much longer for such a device.

Second is the availability of a Quicken for the Mac that’s as good as Quicken for the PC. It seems plain that Intuit is never going to make this happen.

Third is that, for the moment at least, I’m still running my life and work with Ecco Pro, and it’s an old Windows app. There are modern Mac apps that do some of what Ecco does better than it does, but I’ve found none that does everything that Ecco does as well as it does, and it pains me to think of abandoning it.

In the age of Intel-based Macs it’s now quite easy to run Windows in parallel to your OS X. But Apple’s Boot Camp requires a reboot each time you want to go to your Windows app, and that’s a royal pain; Parallels doesn’t. But both approaches require that you spend $300 on another copy of Windows, and that’s an extraordinary amount to pay.

Last night I downloaded and tried out Crossover Mac, an application (based on the WINE project) that lets you run individual Windows apps from inside OS X (on an Intel-based Mac) without needing to install a second OS. The good news is that Crossover Mac worked apparently hitchlessly on Quicken 2005, which is one of a bevy of apps that Crossover officially supports. (I haven’t really pounded on it, and maybe heavy usage will uncover problems, but I’m impressed so far.)

So what I’m now wrestling with is: how to get Ecco Pro running under Crossover? The app is not officially supported (no surprise there!) and my “let’s give it a try anyway” install failed. Ecco is a solid Win32 application but it dates back to the mid-’90s so there might simply be too many archaic calls or idiosyncracies. I’d probably give up hope — but there are screenshots on the Crossover site of Ecco running successfully under Crossover/Linux. So I think there ought to be some hope here. I’m posting this largely as a beacon: Ecco Pro users! Crossover users! Can anything be done here?

I’m also pondering trying the Parallels route by using a Windows license from an older, diisused version of XP or Windows 2000; either of those runs Ecco perfectly. If I experiment with Parallels using this approach I’ll report on it.
[tags]ecco pro, crossover, parallels, windows on mac[/tags]

Kathy Sierra and the werewolves

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I attended the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, or ETech, once again this year, and, distracted by other projects, did a very poor job of blogging about it. (You can read about the excellent EFF-sponsored debate between Mark Cuban and Fred von Lohmann, on the YouTube/Viacom lawsuit, here and here; Raph Koster spoke about magic as the underlying structure of game-play; and Danah Boyd gave a wonderful talk titled “Incantations for Muggles,” about the relationship between technologist-wizards and the rest of the human race — Koster took notes on it.)

The conference, as you may have heard, was abuzz with discussion of the Kathy Sierra saga — she’d been booked as a kickoff keynote speaker, but cancelled at the last minute, understandably spooked by threatening comments posted on her site and a couple of other blogs.

Sierra’s plight set off an immediate and vast blogstorm. There was much introspection and self-questioning about the onslaught of invective, nastiness, vicious taunts and obscene threats that sometimes emerges online, and seems especially targeted at women; there was also something of a rush to judgment to point fingers at particular bloggers whose sites and posts might (or might not) have encouraged the posts that caused Sierra such grief.

A prodigious number of people seemed to feel they had to weigh in immediately on this ugly situation, though virtually no one (yes, including myself) seemed willing or able to take the time needed to explore, in detail, what had actually happened and who had done what. I still haven’t seen any fully reported-out piece on the events — the coverage in the S.F. Chronicle seemed creditable, but it didn’t unravel the toughest questions: who was stalking Sierra, and was there in fact any relationship at all between said stalker(s) and the well-known bloggers she called out in her wounded post?

Sitting in a conference without the time or resources to do any reporting of my own, I thought, shoot, there’s no way I can know enough about what happened to add anything to the conversation. Of course comments like those Sierra encountered are, and should be considered, beyond the pale; Sierra deserved sympathy and support. But the storm of anger and the rush to judgment her post sparked represented, I thought, a failure of forethought. Running a blog provides the constant temptation to shoot off at the mouth. Sometimes, though, when you just don’t know all the facts, considered silence is golden.

The irony here is that this was supposed to be ETech’s year of fun and games.
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The U.S. attorney purge and Watergate

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During Watergate, one would sometimes hear a certain volume of complaint: Sure, there was a petty burglary at the Democratic headquarters — but why was that such a big deal? Didn’t the government have more important things to worry about? Didn’t we know there was a war on?

Of course, as eventually became clear, the little breakin at the Watergate Hotel was the tip of an iceberg of corruption and fraud. And that lawbreaking wasn’t random or motiveless; it was centered on the aggressive rigging of a national presidential election. Watergate’s collective menagerie of petty evils insured that Nixon would be re-elected. That was the grand crime: subversion of the democratic process.

As the implosion of the Gonzales Justice Department continues, it’s important to keep that history in mind. Right now we’re still hearing the protests: This was just about firing a few political appointees! They weren’t following the White House’s wishes! Bush wanted them to root out election fraud, and they weren’t getting with the program! Why are we troubling ourselves over this stuff? Don’t we know there’s a war on?

In the U.S. attorney purge scandal as with Watergate, the “it’s just not a big deal” defense is collapsing — only faster this time. To understand why you only need a handful of facts.
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Broken Bloglines

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I’ve been happily using Bloglines basically since the service began. It meets my needs in an RSS reader simply and effectively. And RSS reading is now the center of my online information consumption.

I’ve never had a complaint with Bloglines; sure, it goes down for maintenance for a few hours every now and then, but I don’t mind. It is, after all, a free service. And I’d gladly pay a few bucks for a premium service of some kind if they offered one.

About two weeks ago, Bloglines inexplicably “updated” all 100+ of my feeds: in other words, it lost track of my “unread” posts and told me I’d read everything. This was a minor disaster, since my reading of feeds is somewhat sporadic. I know it wasn’t something I did by accident. The mishap followed a “maintenance downtime.” I assume somehow Bloglines lost the data.

I don’t know how widespread the problem was, but I was miffed. I was even more miffed when I couldn’t find anything on Bloglines itself talking about the problem, other than a few lonesome complaints on some sparsely populated support bulletin boards — complaints that had yet to be answered by Bloglines staff.

Under its founding management, the company had done a good job of maintaining its own blog and staying in touch with its customers. Now? If anyone’s minding the shop, there’s no sign. (The “News” thread in the customer support forum has zero posts!)

I returned today from a weeklong vacation and discovered that Bloglines seemed *yet again* to have lost my “unread post” tallies — at least, I’m reasonably sure that Boing Boing has posted more than 12 times in the last week!

Bloglines is now owned by Ask.com which is owned by Barry Diller’s IAC. Maybe that means it’s now just a small cog in a big faceless corporation. But if there are still people working there who care about their customers, it would be nice to hear something about these ongoing problems. And if it’s just me, or me and a small handful of users, then it would be good to know that too! Otherwise, happy as I’ve been with Bloglines, it will be time to start scouting out alternatives.

If other Bloglines users are finding these problems, or if you’ve seen other posts about this (since I’ve been away and now my feed reader’s busted, maybe I missed them!), let me know. I see Jeremy Zawodny recently complained about the service, though not about this particular problem.
[tags]bloglines, rss, feeds, feed readers[/tags]

AFB

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As in “away from blog.”

I spent much of this past week at Etech but the blog posts from the conference have gotten way backlogged, and now I’m off for a family vacation marking the annual rite of spring break at my kids’ school.

So everything will have to…wait.

COPA plaintiffs win, yet again

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Alberto Gonzales has bigger problems these days, but his Justice Department just lost the latest round in a longstanding Internet censorship conflict.

The Child Online Protection Act went on trial again in recent months, and today, again, a federal court has struck down the law — which would require commercial online publishers like Salon to make sure that their readers are over 18 or face criminal prosecution for publishing material that might be “harmful to minors.” Publishers are supposed to be able to protect themselves from prosecution by requiring site visitors to register with their credit cards, thus ostensibly demonstrating their adult status.

The law is supposedly only aimed at commercial pornographers, but the law is absurdly vague. Somehow, publishers are supposed to trust the Justice Department to make the right call and understand who is a “bad” publisher and who isn’t. Placing such trust was problematic when the law was passed, under the Clinton administration; in the era of Bush justice, doing so would be utterly foolish.

Here’s the decision, which concludes that:

COPA facially violates the First and Fifth Amendment rights of the plaintiffs because: (1) COPA is not narrowly tailored to the compelling interest of Congress; (2) defendant has failed to meet his burden of showing that COPA is the least restrictive and most effective alternative in achieving the compelling interest;
and (3) COPA is impermissibly vague and overbroad.

I am proud that Salon has been a plaintiff in this suit since 1998, when the ACLU first launched it. (Here’s my account of the 1994 oral arguments before the Supreme Court in an earlier phase of the COPA fight.) I have no idea whether, defeated at every turn, the Justice Department will drag this proceeding into another decade by appealing it. In the meantime, we can take another deep breath and be glad for the victory.

Here’s the AP story. And here’s a post by Salon editor Joan Walsh, who testified in this most recent round of the case. And here’s the ACLU’s page. And here’s CNET’s story.
[tags]copa, aclu, child online protection act, salon, internet censorship[/tags]

WSJ headline writers hallucinate again

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Today’s Journal features an op-ed piece by Edward Jay Epstein on the recent confession by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (“KSM”). The article is headlined “KSM’s Confession.” The subhead (that’s how it appears online — in the print paper, it appears as a blow-up quote) reads: “New Questions About the Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda.”

I’d read the general coverage of this event, in which the imprisoned al Qaeda leader confessed to a long list of attacks and crimes. I hadn’t followed it in great detail, but I couldn’t recall anything in the confessions that seemed to offer any real news about the long-discredited notion that, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam and al Qaeda were in cahoots (they were, it was reasonably clear before the war and even more evident today, enemies).

So I read the Epstein piece closely, looking for “new questions” about “the link” that never was. And, strangely, though the article discusses many subtleties about the information the 9/11 commission relied on, about possible connections between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks, and other complex intelligence issues, the name “Saddam” does not appear once in the piece. There is virtually nothing in the article about putative links between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

There is only one paragraph that even mentions Iraq: that’s where one of the 1993 bombmakers, a guy named Abdul Rhaman Yasin, fled. But the notion that this reopens the question of a Saddam-Qaeda link depends on a long list of conditionals — If KSM is telling the truth (which Epstein says is a big question); if the network KSM used to plot the 9/11 attack also drew on support from his former cohorts from 1993; if one of those supporters was the Baghdad-protected Yasin. There are no “new questions” at all; there is, at best, a set of preliminary question that, should they all align in one direction, might set up a new question or two. That may be why Epstein himself confines the matter to a convoluted aside in his article, which mostly focuses on what he views as mistakes made by the 9/11 commission (which he’s writing a book about).

Is it possible that someone at the Wall Street Journal editorial page is still clutching desperately at the thinnest reeds of justification for the Iraq war, still trying to put flesh on the ghastly skeleton of Dick Cheney’s misleading claims about the Saddam-Osama axis, still doing everything possible to burn the phrase “link between Saddam and al Qaeda” into our consciousness?

Oh, right, it’s not only possible, it’s inevitable.

John Backus, RIP, and up next in Code Reads

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I was all set to dive into “No Silver Bullet” for the next Code Reads, but given last night’s news of the passing away of John Backus, father of FORTRAN, I thought I would do a quick revision of the plan.

The next Code Reads will focus on Backus’s 1977 Turing lecture, “Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?” It’s full of equations and math notation that, superficially at least, look daunting to this reader — but I will give it a try, and perhaps the collective expertise of all of you will help bolster me in those areas where I falter!

Assignment Zero

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Jay Rosen and his team at NewAssignment.net, a sort of citizen-journalism or “open source reporting” lab, have unveiled their first project: Assignment Zero, a coproduction between Rosen’s group and Wired News. The focus of the work is an attempt to create a comprehensive study of the phenomenon known variously as “crowdsourcing” or distributed peer-production. This is precisely the form NewAssignment.net’s journalism takes. So, depending on whether you’re a glass-half-full or -empty type, there’s either a lovely form-follows-function dynamic happening, or the whole undertaking is hopelessly involuted and self-referential.

I’m betting that Jay’s idea is worth pursuing. There’s stuff to be learned here. Eventually this technique needs to be cut loose from introspection and trained on topics that are less “meta.” That, of course, is already taking place informally — most vigorously and impressively, to me, over at Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. But I can see the value for NewAssignment to get its feet wet with one immersive overview of the field before it takes a deeper plunge.

I’ve been on the site’s advisory board from early on, and now I’ve volunteered to take on one of the literally hundreds of assignments the project has been broken down into — manageable morsels of reporting that will eventually be assembled into a tapestry of information. There’s lots of work for NewAssignment still in making its site easier to use; that will come in time. In the meantime, Rosen’s looking for more volunteers — pros and amateurs, people who want to do reporting and people who want to help organize the project.

Robots are hard, too

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Friday’s Wall Street Journal included a book review of Almost Human: Making Robots Think,a new book by Lee Gutkind that’s a portrait of the work at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute.

That work, it seems, has its frustrations, and — as the reviewer, George Anders, tells it — the difficulties sound eerily like those recounted in Dreaming in Code’s description of the things that make software hard:

Mr. Gutkind’s second big insight involves Carnegie-Mellon’s approach to project management. It’s awful. Goals aren’t defined. Interim deadlines aren’t met. Crucial subsystems turn out to be incompatible. People rely on all-nighters to get everything finished. Such bad habits invite catastrophic blunders by exhausted people whose last-minute “fixes” snarl everything else.

In the most maddening breakdown of all, the scientists devising research projects seldom communicate well with the engineers trying to build them. Even the word “target” becomes a sore spot. To scientists, it means their working hypothesis. To engineers, it means the robot’s physical destination. Unaware of this gap, supposed colleagues get mired in confusing conversations.

Gutkind’s book is now on my “must read” list. One final irony to me, coming out of Dreaming in Code, is that Carnegie Mellon is not only home to Gutkind’s roboticists; it also harbors the Software Engineering Institute, which is ground zero for the CMM, CMMI, TSP and other acronymic attempts to add a framework of engineering rigor around the maddeningly difficult enterprise of producing new software. I might be jumping the gun (not having read Gutkind’s book yet), but it sounds like those roboticists and the SEI people should have lunch some time.