The Middle

Just to let it be known, Apple support completely took care of me. They took my misbehaving and ebay-bought Powerbook with no questions asked, did approximately $900 of repairs for free, and turned it all around in 1 business day. Two days, if you count that it sat there all day today while I was at work, itching to escape my office and free my captive Powerbook. That's solid support.

The best part of the experience? The Apple Store. When I've had other laptops repaired, the manufacturer at best sends you an empty box to throw the machine in and return. At worst, they expect you to fork over $25 to send it to them. This of course introduces something like 5, 10, or maybe even 15 days into the process. Not to mention however long it takes to perform the repair. In my world, that's a long time to spend without your computer.

However, this time I just strolled into the Apple Store, dropped it off after work Thursday, and it was back in action and good as new first thing Monday morning. I realize that not everyone can have an office less than two miles from the nearest Apple Store, but for those of you that do, it rocks.

J$ thinks I should Only Use mod_rewrite When You Have To, and I argue that in my case, Alias would not accomplish what I wanted to do. He claims that Alias is the directive I'm looking for, but I disagree. The Apache docs describe the Alias directive in the following:

The Alias directive allows documents to be stored in the local filesystem other than under the DocumentRoot. URLs with a (%-decoded) path beginning with url-path will be mapped to local files beginning with directory-filename.

Example:

Alias /image /ftp/pub/image

A request for http://myserver/image/foo.gif would cause the server to return the file /ftp/pub/image/foo.gif.

This is not the behavior I wanted. In order for me to modify the filesystem layout but not the docroot, change the URL of my blog, allow existing bookmarks to work, and most importantly, return a 301 (Moved Permanently) response to all agents requesting the page, the power of mod_rewrite seemed appropriate. With a 301, google and bloglines have already updated themselves to the change, which would not have happened had I simply used the Alias directive. I don't even think the Alias directive would have accomplished this at all. That seems to be solely for mucking with files beyond the scope of the DocumentRoot, which was not a part of this transition.

All that said, it would appear that the Redirect directive is what I was really looking for all along. It only took me 18 months to make that change, it'll hopefully take less than that to change it again.

mod_rewrite is my hammer. This looked like a nice nail.

Scoble likes small teams better, and I couldn't agree more.

Every project starts off with only a handful of people behind the wheel. They bring in a few select folks (likey people they've worked with before and have a high degree of confidence in), and through collective long nights, hack-a-thons, and internal arguments they put out some new product or service. The team rejoices, celebrates the release, and everyone feels like they've accomplished something special. The last item is the most important. On a small team, everyone feels like they 'own' the new release. It's their baby, they love it and can't wait to see it grow up.

This is exactly the point at which things start to go downhill.

There are two possible outcomes from this juncture. One is that the new product is a success, and some VP decides to continue funding and supporting its growth. Less interesting is the other case of product failure, where everyone says goodbye, moves onto some other team or company, and gets together every five years to talk about "The Good Old Days" working on SuperProduct X.

But if the product is good, then the higher-ups decide that it requires a lot of money (a.k.a. people) thrown at it to "leverage its synergies to develop market-wide penetration and enterprise scalability" or some such nonsense. Sooner than later, the project has 37 new developers, 13 new project managers, 7 dedicated marketing reps, a nationwide team of sales advocates, and worst of all, a roadmap that includes every feature under the sun, all slated for version 2.0.

This is when the wheels come off the bus. The pre-existing 'core team' feels like everything has been ruined by contamination from the outsiders, and the sense of ownership they previously had is replaced by a feeling of being just another cog in the wheel relentlessly grinding out feature requests and bug fixes. New development slows to a crawl as everyone learns the ins and outs of the product, and a horrific tangle of new management stands in the way of every advancement. The nimble, dedicated, customer-centric super team is destroyed, and a cadre of new folks who look at it as "just a job" fill their place. There are no more late nights. There is no impromptu hallway football game at at 3:00 AM while everyone is still working. It is a factory grinding out product to meet revenue and market share quotas passed down from on high. The new folks have no more ownership or pride in the product than the woman on the assembly line who screws the cap onto tubes of toothpaste.

I realize that Rome wasn't built in a day, and two guys at MS can't expect to write the next version of Office all by themselves. It's just that small teams have something magic about them, and I'm saddened every time I see that torn away in the name of 'progress'.

Growing up is hard to do.

A friend of mine at work, previously curious about OS X, has become enamored with the new Mac mini. Unfortunately, he has to come up "Capital Approval", a.k.a. convincing his wife he needs one. I merely pumped up his desire talking about Expose, Terminals, running Apache, Perl, PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, SSH, MySQL, LAN file serving, and fink apt-get goodness, etc (this guy is a geek's geek). However, none of that would work too well on the wife. He was the one that came up with this genius explanation:

"Honey, we have hundreds and hundreds of digital photos. We need a more robust and simple system to store, catalog, edit, and just deal with all of these pictures. There's a program called iPhoto that does all of this brilliantly, and will make our lives better for having used it.

It only costs $499...but it comes with hardware!"

Brilliant. Hope that one works for him.

So, I have a few Instiki instances here and there for personal/communal wiki usage, and noticed something rather fishy about it.

By default, the wiki uses the ruby library WEBrick to run an internal HTTP engine, but it would only bind to the network interface '0.0.0.0', which in my world is a 'Bad Thing'. Searching through the command line help and config/init files, I saw no option or parameter to change this easily.

Unphased, and relishing in the opportunity to do some coding in this crazy new language, I deftly opened up the source and added a comand line option, defaults, and modified some methods to add this functionality to specify the bind address at startup.

That done and tested, I was feeling particularly cool, and went to the Intiki TRAC site to begin the process of creating my patch. I downloaded the latest source and opened up the proper files to make my changes and create the patch.

Lo and behold, it was already in the latest repository version. No ruby glory for me. Maybe next time.

As an update to my Powerbook woes from yesterday, I got a friendly call from my new pal Ken at Apple, who had the following gems to share with me:

1. The powerbook was registered to some other dude (the ebay guy). He wanted to put it in my name. Cool.
2. He wanted to replace both the "DC Logic Board" and the "Main Logic Board". From details here, that seemed like an expensive proposition. Bummer.
3. However, it turns out the machine was less than a year old (I had assumed otherwise), so all repairs were under warranty and completly free. Awesome!
4. I'll be getting the machine back well sooner than expected. Maybe Sunday, certainly by Monday. Fantastic.
5. Being less than a year old, I still have the option of purchasing AppleCare, which is just a 3-year extended warranty that covers the whole machine. Interesting...

For the last 5 years, I've told friends and family to never buy extended warranties for any electronics other than a laptop computer, as laptops are proprietary, expensive, and often repaired at the whim of the manufacturer. This is obviously especially true in Apple's case. This being the first laptop that a giant mega-Corp hasn't bought for me, I'm now torn on whether or not to follow my own advice.

I've had this machine for about two months, and already this problem has occurred. I have to assume that this has always been present somewhat, as the first owner of the machine never used it, and the last month has been the first time it's seen real use.

So, am I likely to experience another failure? Sooner or later, probably. I'll likely just drop the couple hundred bucks and have some insurance that I can't get nailed for god-awful expensive repairs, rather than simply hoping for the best. I imagine that's what Apple planned all along.

Woon Yen asks what's a trackback?. This is me testing out if that works. Sadly, it appears that there is no autodiscovery for Haloscan trackbacks. Boo.

Where's my Mac? I want to play with Saft (via Kottke)

At the very least, bloglines seems to be handling the change, let's try one more thing.

So tonight I changed the site around to just park at andywismar.com/, rather than andywismar.com/themiddle, which was basically an attempt to keep the file system clean so I could do grand things with andywismar.com other than a humble blog.

Well, inaction ruled the day, and I decided to just clean it up.

I've implemented some mod_rewrite magic, so the old URL's will all still work, but I'm not real confident about the various newsreaders out there accepting a permanent redirect on the news feeds.

So, to both of you subscribers out there (I think 3, if you count my dad), update your subscriptions just to make things nice & neat.

I got rid of that folder structure after the domain, since it really wasn't doing anything but annoying me for the last 18 months. Lets hope the miracle of mod_rewrite avoids any problems...

J$ has a clone, and his name is Stuart Kwan

I had to say goodbye to my Powerbook today. And now I'm nervous about it's healthy return.

A little background: Last year, I caught the Mac bug in a big way, and completly fell into the RDF. I read all the Mac blogs I could, furiously followed the news and rumor sites, and pretty much dove into Mac life full-force. This included purchasing an Aluminum Powerbook G4 from a kind gentleman on eBay. It was only a G4 1.25Ghz, but this thing was decked out with every upgrade possible: 2GB's RAM, 80GB HD, bluetooth, airport extreme, all the way down to the illuminated keyboard.

Sadly, sometime in the last week, the machine started misbehaving when I would try to go mobile (the point of a laptop, right?). Whenever it was running, which it did perfectly on AC or battery power, the insertion or removal of the AC plug would cause it to immediately shut down as if it had no power whatsoever.

So, I tried resetting the PRAM. I tried resetting the PMU. I tried a buddy's battery AND AC adapter. Same symptoms every time.

After reading all the praises for the heralded "Genius Bar" at each Apple store, I signed up for an appointment today at my local Apple store. As a side note, signing up for a queue with arrival times at service-oriented merchants on the web is brilliant! I wish the car mechanic, dentist, and every other service provider did this. No more waiting, ever!

I arrived at the Apple store at my appointed time, and was promptly talking with Katherine, my own personal Apple Genius. Turns out they aren't all of exceptional IQ in every range of Apple hardware, as she basically took my problem down, and escaped into the back to 'call the Mac Genius', some super-genius breed that is too rare to stock one in each store. I imagine they sit in some Cupertino black-ops call center, frantically answering questions from the lowly 'Apple Geniuses' around the world.

Anyway, once she told them the problem, they immediately said "Logic board hosed. Take it, box it up, and send it to the mothership, we'll have it patched up and returned in 3-5 business days".

"Logic board hosed" were really not the words I wanted to hear. I was, however, quoted a very reasonable price to have the whole thing repaired. So I handed the box over, filled out a form with my name and powerbook's serial #, and was out the door.

Shortly thereafter, I realized I had just handed over to a complete stranger several thousands of dollars worth of gadget, not to mention the primary, and in some cases, the only copy of a great deal of my digital life, and had received no confirmation from them as to the makeup or even their possession of my gadget.

I know Apple is very lovey-dovey, and committed to customer service, but that makes me extremely nervous.

So now, filled with anguish for not having my Mac to use at home and for pet projects, I also get to spend the next several days, including the weekend, assuming that my powerbook will be repaired, returned, and summarily placed on eBay by some unscroupulous Apple store employee. Fun times.

Continuing my Ruby on Rails education this evening, I thought I'd poke around some log files and see what I could make out. Low and behold, looky what we have here:

The whole request, all data acccess, how long each step took, all kinds of good data.

When someone else makes my life this easy, I start to get suspicious...

And by the way, it turns out they call it FAST-cgi for a reason. Wow, that's quite an improvement.

Would it still be my favorite if it was not titled 1984?

For the first time in my life today, I had one of those moments where I said, "Wait a minute, I should capture this little gem with the low-quality camera built into my cell phone!" The moment in question?

It would seem that Taco Bell uses some embedded linux variant for these devices. You can barely make it out in the low-res picture, which mostly displays the machine's BIOS POST (at a 90 degree rotation, no less), but down in the bottom right corner the screen was frozen with an ominous "LI".

I guess "The second-stage boot loader loaded, but could not run."

I tried to explain that to the gnome inside the device taking my order, but she sounded confused. So I just got some tacos instead.

Something that it took me awhile to notice, but I thought this was insanely clever. By using user-specific domain names, such as wismar.tadalist.com, they've completely erased the need for the ubiquitous "Username" field. Check it out:

I can give that password to others, or I can keep it to myself, but there's no need to go ahead and ask for a username, as that information is already embedded in the URL. Crazy Rails folks and their "Don't Repeat Yourself" mantra.

Paul Graham: "if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."

Hmm, this AppleInsider Special Report was the first I'd seen of this:

Finally, sources note that the mini's non-standard power connector contains too many leads to serve solely as a power source, and could provide hints of upcoming add-ons, such as a potential iPod dock connector or media station.

Block the reality distortion field...stay on target...fight the urge to buy....wait for Tiger....

Those wacky guys at 37 Signals are up to it again, with the release of Ta-da List.

If I wasn't already a basecamphq.com user, I certainly would be after using this.

I'm just waiting to see the GTD guys jump all over this. Those guys are list-aholics.

The app is pretty self explanatory, it really is as simple as being a list manager. That said, the interface is of course fantastic, not to mention blazingly fast, and full of gmail-riffic XMLHTTPRequest goodness.

And of course, it's another notch in the ever-growing belt of the Rails application framework.

Jay Allen describes the new Movable Type 'nofollow' plugin.

Is it just me, or is this a completely contrived "solution" to the problem of comment spam? Now, "All links submitted by external users in comments and TrackBacks" will not be followed by search engines.

What about Russel's infamous Motorola post? Or J$'s international cxt post? Through comment links and trackbacks these posts and others like them have become the de-facto web gathering place for discussion of a particular topic.

So, to all the spammers out there, the best and brightest at Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and blog tool creators have gathered to say "In your face, we'll just devalue EVERY link, crippling your model and our own in the process!".

What about the new kids on the block: Technorati, Feedster, and Bloglines? Will they implement this "solution"?

Is this really the best we can do? MT-Blacklist, TypeKey, and others have all been valiant efforts, but they have fallen short. Is blindly ignoring all links really the answer? I can't bring myself to think that it is.

I realize authors can still directly link in their own entries, but ask the big guys, and I'd bet that most of the good follow up links come from comments and trackbacks. What's next, 97 UPDATE: blocks following every post to sell the 'good' links to the search engines? How is doing that easier than using MT-Blacklist or some other de-spamming tool?

This is an ugly solution to an ugly problem which doesn't even warrant being called a hack. It's a kludge.

Miguel de Icaza reminds us all to revisit Lawrence Lessig's presentation at OSCON 2002 (transcript), which I just watched, and I'm sad to say I hadn't seen it before.

Some interesting tidbits for all proponents of Sonny Bono's theory that copyright should last "forever minus a day". From the transcript,

But what you probably don't recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, "stole" Willie from Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill."

It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years--just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire.

The young Disney Corporation then fortified the foundations of its empire by taking works from the public domain, the venerable Brothers Grimm fairy tales and others, and recreating them for a new audience in a new medium. For this work, they were richly rewarded and became the conglomerate they are today. How did they return to society the riches that had befallen them? They, and with plenty of help from others, through the perpetual extension of copyright have completely excluded this from ever happening to them. Larry says it better:

No one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. That though we had a culture where people could take and build upon what went before, that's over. There is no such thing as the public domain in the minds of those who have produced these 11 extensions these last 40 years because now culture is owned.

(emphasis mine)

Now, this is all pretty well known to most people reading this blog, but my main question is how do we change this if nobody cares? My grandma doesn't care that the new Velvet Revolver CD comes laden with DRM in a vain attempt to deter ripping and copying. Your neighbor doesn't care about the Broadcast Flag being imposed upon technology manufacturers. Your mailman has no idea what the DMCA is or what it means to him. How do the people, like Mr. Lessig, who recognize these threats convince the masses that these technologies, seen as "good enough", that they are anything but? That our culture is no longer free, but instead fed to us by corporate executives in whatever manner they see fit? Efforts like savetheipod.com are commendable in the attempt to relate these issues to technologies that are widely comprehended by the general public, but based on the lack of progress so far, it's just not enough.

To go back to Lessig one more time, he sums this up:

In an interview two days ago, Watts said, Here's the problem with Washington: "If you are explaining, you are losing." If you are explaining, you're losing...Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem. Six years after this battle began, we're still explaining. We're still explaining and we are losing.

And losing in a big, big way. If anyone has an idea other than opening up your wallet (which is a great one, by the way), I'd love to hear it.

Crossbred Breeding Value - CBV

J$ and Prall are up to no good, just doing my part.

Great tool, wish I could add it to the web developer toolbar: slayeroffice | Mouseover DOM Inspector

Armed with a freshly received Linksys WRT54G (thanks, Mom & Dad), my Airport Express, and an Airport Extreme Base Station donated by the kind gentleman who sold me his decked-out Powerbook on eBay, I set out to create a nirvana of wireless internet around my house. I needed access everywhere, I wanted wireless tunes everywhere, and I wanted to bridge my upstairs PC and PS2 to my internet connection. My biggest concern was that the WRT54G WDS hack that lets the Airport Express connect wouldn't work on the Airport Extreme, but much to my delight, it was almost exactly the same.

I'm a smart guy, I live for gadgets, but I spent at least two hours last night trying to get this setup to work. This was incredibly non-intuitive. There are approximately 97 guides claiming to be the definitive source on how to do this, all containing conflicting info. Here's what worked for me:

Firefox on Mac tabfocus fix: Everything Sysadmin: Sweet Jesus, I can't believe Apple didn't make this the default! Read the comments for about:config fix.

Apple claims 330 million QuickTime downloads. That's an awfully suspect number. I know at least 29 of those have been me rebuilding machines.

I need one now! Better make that TWO! iProduct

Wow.

Time for a trip to the Apple Store.

I really didn't think that Steve could announce a new iPod line, an SFF machine, and two new software packages in the span of a few hours, but he sure did.

My only real beef is with the two levels of Mac mini's. For an extra $100, all you get is ~200Mhz of speed and 40GB of hard disk. I don't know if anyone at Apple has been to pricewatch recently, but a few Megahertz and a couple Gigabytes of disk do not add up to $100.

I'm not sure if the $599 unit will sell well at all, based on the miniscule difference in specs, as I expect most folks would buy one of the $499 units, replace the (seemingly?) one RAM slot with something usable (at least 512, 1GB would be better) and be on the way to Mac glory. Extra disk comes in much more economical quantities in the form of USB2.0 or Firewire external disks, which should be quite easy to add on, in pretty "Mac mini" form factors and colors, I'm sure.

That said, I want one. But with a new Powerbook that dusts these machines, and travels (and has a screen), it's a little hard to justify. But I'll definitely be going to the Apple Store nearby to drool on one.

And to buy an iPod Shuffle. I needed a bigger flash drive, anyway.

My favorite multinational conglomerate isn't entirely evil: The New York Times > Technology > I.B.M. to Give Free Access to 500 Patents

Bloglines.com dominates RSS Market Share

From Wired 13.01: The BitTorrent Effect,

The executive vice president for research and planning at CBS, David Poltrack, elaborates: "In our research with consumers, content-on-demand is the killer app. They like the idea of paying only for what they watch." The trick, he figures, is to work out a solution before the audience for illegal downloading becomes truly huge. He figures the networks have 10 years.

Seriously, Dave? Ten Years? Try last week.

From this, we can conclude that the networks know we want a la carte, on-demand TV. So why in the world can't I have it right now? They have a website, I have a bit torrent client, so the tech's there. So what's stopping them from making it happen?

For one, what happens to the sales of Lost DVD's three years from now, when everyone who was a serious fan of the show (a.k.a. the 'target market') already has the whole series on his PC, or better yet, on his "Media Center"? Storage costs are increasingly miniscule, so why ever delete a TV show? I'm sure the moguls would hate to see the new revenue darling of releasing old shows on DVD disappear so quickly after its rise in popularity.

Then there's that DRM issue. You don't think CBS would give us DRM-free versions of CSI: Boise, do you? At the same time, all the early-adapter geeks who could really spread this like wildfire will refuse to do so if the only format option is "CBS-Super-Duper-Encrypto". We've seen how well that works (ATRAC, anyone?).

However, the movie execs have a huge advantage over their music industry counterparts, and that is one of consumer familiarity with file formats. Everyone and his mother had a few gigs of MP3's by the time the RIAA got seriously pissed. But right now, we've got Divx, MPEG-*, Quicktime, and 14 other codecs for video files. A digital song == an .mp3 file, at the peak of Napster and MP3. But there's no dominant file format for TV and movies that I can see. More importantly, there's no sense of freedom that people had with MP3's associated with video formats, at least not as widespread as the adoption of MP3 seemed to be at its peak.

So will DRM-laden, low-res, commercial-ridden, a la carte, on-demand TV be the future? Yeah, probably.

Sigh, oh well, a guy can dream, can't he?

Classic Bill Gates quote: "In terms of our agility to do things on the browser, people who underestimated us there in the past lived to regret that." Sure glad Ben is up to the challenge.

Geek Notes: Google Suggest Number - I'm a paltry 7.3, damn Andy Warhol.

In this post, Russell Beattie summarizes what I'd been wanting to say about the $500 Mac for the last few days. Just a few additions:

A) I really hope this happens, I can't imagine these things not flying off the shelf. B) I wish I'd known about these a few months ago, I could've saved a bunch of money on the Powerbook I bought. C) I think there's a distinct possibilty I've become completely enveloped in the Reality Distortion Field and nobody else gives a shit.

But can it rip DVD movies? iFlicks, iTunes for movies (and a case of blatant UI theft), via The Unofficial Apple Weblog