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Browsers? Yes, browsers

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Don’t just bitch and moan about the Microsoft monoculture — do something about it! Ditch your no-improvements-since-before-the-dotcom-boom Internet Explorer Web browser. You’ll be affected by fewer viruses and you’ll discover that software didn’t have to stop dead in its tracks in 1997.

I’ve always been partial to Opera, a great little browser out of Scandinavia, available in free (ad-supported) or paid versions. But if you’re allergic to ads and don’t feel like paying a paltry sum for the piece of software you probably use the most, there is also an entirely free browser that is much, much better than IE: the open-source Mozilla Firefox has just released its “0.9” version.

The numbering suggests it’s not “done” yet, but the Mozilla people are just hugely conservative with their labeling. Firefox is ready for prime time, from what I can tell, and it’s super: fast, compact and full of features you just can’t get from Microsoft. It’s also available on all the major platforms (Windows, Linux, OSX).

Microsoft Word’s Baroque era

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For those of us working primarily on the Web, Microsoft Word’s various “Smart” features (smart quotes, auto correct, auto format, etc.) have always been hydras whose heads one had to repeatedly lop off. Even if you didn’t work in Word yourself, colleagues would submit copy composed in it, and you’d have to deal with the problem of introducing junk characters. Some of us have become reasonably familiar with exactly which boxes and buttons you need to press to “web-safe” a Word installation.

Now Microsoft seems to have grown hip to how frequently we have to tell Word to “stop doing” the things its programmers have spent years enabling it to do. This is from today’s New York Times review by David Pogue of a new version of Microsoft Office for Mac:

  Smart Buttons, descended from a similar feature in Word for Windows, are tiny pop-up menus that appear in your text whenever Word has something to offer you. For example, one appears whenever Word auto-formats something you’ve typed (a chronic sore spot with Microsoft customers): turning a Web address into a difficult-to-edit Web link, for example, or automatically numbering a list. You’ve always been able to turn off these intrusions in a dialog box or undo individual changes by pressing Command-Z. But Smart Tags put “Undo” and “Stop doing this” commands right in front of you where you can’t miss them.

I broke out laughing when I read this. Consider the baroque logic: Microsoft has now reached that rarefied state of software existence in which it can offer “improvements” in the form of new features that make it easier to turn off those annoying “improvements” of yesteryear that were hitherto too difficult to discard!

But how deep within Word’s menus must one hunt to turn off “Smart Buttons” if they get annoying? And is anyone at Microsoft going to flip the page of the newspaper section in which Pogue’s review appears and read “A Design Epiphany: Keep It Simple”?

Back to BASIC

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David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games (1978): I actually have a copy of this book in paper, dug up in some used book store pile ages ago, but now, you can revel in its full glories online.

Before there were sprites and polygons and first-person-shooters, before there were CRTs on every desk to splash graphics in our eyes, there were simply teletypes chattering out lines of text. And there were paper tapes for you to store your work. Right around the time Richard Nixon was being kicked out of office, I was learning BASIC by reading the code to some of these games. (We didn’t get them from the book — they were just floating around on the minicomputer we timeshared.) “Hammurabi,” a sort of primitive, text-only SimCity, was the one I and my circle of friends latched onto — and proceeded to amend. Because all these programs were free and, in the manner of their time, open source. [Thanks, Boing Boing and Oblomovka]

Rip this joint

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For years I was a happy user of MusicMatch to organize and play my digital music collection, and I even paid the company for “lifetime upgrades” to its software. A few months ago MusicMatch did one of these “upgrades,” apparently to support its new online music store, which I have no interest in, and somehow the software developers broke the product. It crashed on my Windows 2000 box, a lot. It froze, it coughed, it was generally unreliable.

MusicMatch provides one of those “automatic update” services so I crossed my fingers and prayed that its programmers would fix the bugs fast. And to their credit, they took care of a lot of the problems. But one stubborn bug remained: I couldn’t get the program to rip my CDs without freezing after one or two songs. Since my habit these days is to rip a CD as soon as I buy it, this was a disaster.

This weekend I finally gave up on MusicMatch and decided to spend $20 on the latest Real jukebox, even though that meant changing habits. Sure enough, Real ripped my CDs just fine. Ironically, a day later MusicMatch updated itself again — and fixed the ripping problem.

Frustratingly, MusicMatch offers almost nothing in the way of serious, in-depth technical documentation on its Web site — or if they do, I couldn’t find it. Consumer software: still a mess!

Notes from under the Wasatch

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I’m here in Salt Lake City, learning about how the U.S. military — and its contractors — do software.

My network access is sporadic so I’m a little behind the curve.

But I note a handful of things:

Mitch Kapor’s reflections on the Internet-driven Korean election.

“More than 70% of people would reveal their computer password in exchange for a bar of chocolate, a survey has found.” (Via Slashdot)

At dinner last night I discovered that there is good beer in Utah.

Mainframe mania

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Last night I drove down to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to hear Frederick Brooks, Jr., Bob Evans and other veterans of the IBM System 360 project celebrate its 40th anniversary.

System 360, rolled out in 1964 as IBM’s $5 billion, all-in-one, bet-the-company New Thing, became the core of modern computing. It powered the original SABRE airline reservation system and the NASA program, and drove the rise of information technology as an engine of business change. Its amibitions were vast: It aimed to meet “every need of every user” (!). Its name referred to the 360 degrees of a circle. It was intended to be literally all-encompassing. And — after some rocky initial months — it was phenomenally successful, so successful that it became the ultimate symbol of the computing establishment. That has also made it, ever since, into a target for revolutionary cudgels. (Apple’s famous 1984 ad didn’t actually depict an IBM computer; it didn’t have to — everyone knew who Big Blue Brother was.)

Today, System 360’s mainframe technology has been repeatedly superseded by succeeding generations: first came the minicomputers from Digital, HP and others, bringing the price of computing down, extending its availability and changing its paradigm from batches of cards to “interactive” sessions; then came the microcomputers from Apple, IBM, and eventually everyone else, putting a computer on every desktop and, as the PC visionaries repeatedly told us, changing the world in the process.

What was fascinating to hear on Wednesday night was the number of times the speakers used the phrase “change the world” to describe the impact of the System 360 itself. In 1964, Brooks suggested, the design concepts it embodied were revolutionary in their own right: a single product family, with upward and downward compatibility, so that software that would run on the cheapest model would run on the most expensive, and vice versa; a standard input/output interface allowing for easy swapping of devices; a disk-based operating system; and other fundamentals of computing that we take for granted today.

Brooks, who helmed the software development effort for the 360 and then left IBM for academia, was inspired by his work on the project to write “The Mythical Man-Month” — one of the first and still among the very best explorations of the nature of programming. Someone asked Brooks how he came to write his classic:

“When I was leaving IBM, Tom Watson came to me, we had a very good conversation… He said, you’ve managed the hardware part of a project and you’ve managed the software part of a project. What is the difference from a management point of view between the hardware and the software? Why does software seem to be so much harder to manage? And I said, well, I can’t answer that on the spot, but I’ll think about it. It took five years.”

Though Brooks’ years of though provided us with some valuable answers to these questions, Watson’s pained query still haunts the computer industry, 40 years later.

Programmers — and writers — at work

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I had the pleasure on Tuesday of attending the “Programmers at Work” reunion panel at SDWest. My column covering the talk — which featured Andy Hertzfeld, Charles Simonyi, Dan Bricklin, Jaron Lanier, Scott Kim, Bob Carr and Jef Raskin — is now up, here.

As it turned out, the discussion centered on some questions about software development that fascinate me. In truth, they have obsessed me for the last year and a half. During that time, an idea for a book on this subject gradually assembled itself out of the bits and pieces of my enthusiasm. The idea acquired its own force. I could not ignore it. After a career of helping friends write book proposals, I wrote one myself (I’d done this only once before, in my previous incarnation as a theater critic, and the results were negligible). One thing led to another, and now, to my amazement, I have a deal to publish it (with Crown, a division of Random House).

So it looks as if I am actually going to get to write the book I want to write. Which is really all any writer can hope of the world.

Though I don’t plan to write the book on this blog, I’ll probably be posting occasionally about it, as time permits. If you’re curious, today’s column touches on many of the themes I’ll be exploring. I’m not leaving Salon — not after pouring my heart into it for 8 1/2 years! — but beginning soon, I’ll split my days between my job and research on the book. I feel comfortable doing this because — compared with some of the bumpier periods since the collapse of the Internet boom — Salon is in a good way, overall, with lots of new editorial energy and strong business leadership.

Now, if we can only unseat the Bush administration, 2004 may turn out to be a pretty good year!

War room stories

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Light blogging here as we devoted considerable energy this week to the launch of War Room ’04, our new group blog. Spearheaded by our new senior news editor, Geraldine Sealey, and featuring contributions from across Salon’s staff, War Room will be a centerpiece of Salon’s election-year coverage, and we’ve got more features to roll out in coming days and weeks (including, soon, an RSS feed for it).

We wanted to publish War Room as a blog within Salon’s existing content management system, so its content would be integrated with our search and directory. That meant we couldn’t just pull an existing blogging tool off the shelf; we had to write our own — or rather wrestle the existing software we use to publish articles into a different form. This is something I’ve been waiting for and advocating we do for, well, for as long as we’ve been rolling our own software — since early ’99, when we were still producing the blog-like “In Box” for Salon Technology but had to update and archive everything by hand. I recall conversations with different developers at different stages of Salon’s evolution about the need to flow small items through our site. We sat and talked about how we might do it (“we’ll call them ‘storettes’!”, I recall one programmer deciding), but we never got around to doing it because there was always something more pressing and revenue-related for our production team to focus on.

So hats off to our crew, especially Dominic Dela Cruz and Max Garrone, who did the heaviest lifting, for getting this up and running. I’ll continue to blog here, of course, but you’ll also find some of my commentary over in War Room.

Programming’s two cultures

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Joel Spolsky is one of the great writers on programming today, and his essay on the differences between Unix programming culture and Windows programming culture — built around a review of Eric Raymond‘s new book, “The Art of Unix Programming” — offers a slew of useful insights. (You don’t need to be a programmer to get a lot out of this piece.)

The key idea here: “Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.”