So after half-a-year being overwhelmed by the magnitude of the cross-country move and by life with the two small excellent tyrants we brought with us, I’m trying to be more civilized again, which means, y’know, communicating with humans. As I mentioned a bit ago, I’m pro-Twitter; Facebook, on the other hand, I well and truly hate in the special lathered way that nerds can loathe technology that offends us by failing at the things we care about most. [I'm convinced that this strain of nerd-hate for badly designed things is the source of most or all great inventions, but I'll talk about that some other time.]
For whatever reason, two analogies that occur to me regularly are:
Facebook : Extroverts :: Twitter : Introverts
and
Facebook : Windows :: Twitter : Unix
The former analogy is driven by the one-way nature of Twitter following and the simplicity of their model, which put so much less burden on the target of one’s interest than the seventeen infuriating ways that Facebook flaps its annoyances in your face when somebody decides to enter your sphere.
The latter analogy is less complete, and driven mainly by my complete inability to grasp what the hell Facebook is actually supposed to be offering me at any time; it seems directly patterned after the typical Windows model of endless gray dialog boxes, each offering slightly different permutations of a subset of whatever you think you’re trying to do, and now with an extra layer of whooshy visual noise slathered all over it. FB doesn’t get within a time zone of “do one thing, and do it well”; it’s a weird walled-garden mockery of the real Internet, a joyless replica of AOL and Prodigy and all the other obsoleted competitors.
I can’t completely defend my irrational and entire loathing for the FB. God knows I haven’t ultimately spent that much time trying to navigate its baffling cryptic shit-pile of an interface (though, god also knows, it’s been more than enough), and I’ll grant that maybe I’m just doing it wrong. But I’m sticking to my guns in re: hating it, despite having re-activated my account today (killed in a fit of biliousness a few months back) because people I like joined up. The awful creepy targeted ads; the dozens of insultingly moronic ‘applications’ constantly fapped in my face (how many god-damned quizzes can you people do in a given day?); the grotesquely disingenous combination of blocking useful information before ‘friending’ but burying you in infinite inane detail post-’friend’ing… how the christ did these half-wits end up winning the social network sweepstakes and a license to print money, when so many other crap sites have failed tracelessly?
So: why not join twitter? The barrier is very low; it just doesn’t demand a lot of you before you can start flinging quickie aphorisms at me (by web browser, or various small client programs, or from SMS or iPhone apps). Think of it as a micro-blog, or as a group instant messaging session that’s asynchronous and particularly easy to involve others in. You can just say stuff; I’ll be listening at @aboyko.
Nevermind the hypocrisy/absurdity of writing 500 words on this stupid topic, never you mind it a bit.
People I worked with at the Library of Congress will recall that I ran around, during the last week of May, babbling “andy at boyko dot net” to anyone who would listen. The sad fact is, in the few months since that episode, I have been almost totally incapable of answering emails to that address, for various reasons, some good, some not. I’m on the verge of declaring email bankruptcy.
For some inexplicable reason, though, Twitter is working for me. Maybe it’s the rugged good looks of Twitterriffic that keep me coming back; more likely, it’s the fact that I’m forced to actually keep it short, unlike the emails I tend to inflict on people once I get going.
So anyhow, yeah, sorry I’ve been incommunicado; let’s chalk it up to technical difficulties, and start over via IM and Twitter.
So: hi, everyone.
Love,
-A.
A core Republican message, as far as I can interpret it:
Real America
Fake America
Also, I’m sick of laughing at these cretins; the joke isn’t funny anymore.
Every now and again I find myself wanting to read an ext2/ext3-formatted disk from a Linux box on a Mac. Once there was an OS X kernel module that sort of worked, in the sense that it often would mount an ext2 disk on OS X successfully, but the years have not been kind to it, and at this point it’s mainly good for being the only way I know to induce a kernel panic on Leopard.
Happily, though, we live in a weird sort of future where a surprisingly effective way to solve the problem is to run a Linux virtual machine (say, Ubuntu 8.04) on your Mac, and hand it the USB drive with the Linux filesystem. Being a cheapskate, and having no other real VM needs at the moment, I just downloaded Sun’s free VirtualBox (rather than VMWare or Parallels) and grabbed the current Ubuntu ISO. The only trick at all to mounting an external USB2 drive in the VM was to grant the VM access to the USB device by creating a “USB Device Filter”:
which must be done while the drive is connected, but while the VM is not booted. (When you plug in the drive, Mac OS X will complain about the Linux drive being unreadable and offer to format it, but pay it no mind, and tell it to ignore the problem).
I think I’m entirely over my initial reaction, which was that this approach must be Worse somehow than using the unstable & unmaintained ext2fsx kernel module to achieve the “same” result with less code (and also not working). Yes, this VM approach uses more moving parts, but with the advantage of running the actual filesystem in its original context (i.e. with some presumption of correctness), with the only particular risk being added by whatever trickery is needed to pass USB through to the VM.
Anyhow, yay VirtualBox, and yay for Good Enough solutions.
My kid’s taking it to the next level, as far as tracking his reading habits on GoodReads. All the typing of book titles was boring the young lad, though, and so we just dropped just under fifteen bucks on eBay, shipped, for one of them CueCat USB barcode scanners. You may remember that name attached to an intellectual property brou-ha-ha a couple years back, since the gadgets were part of some sort of scammy spyware company’s get-rich-quick-through-encrypted-barcode-scanning scheme that, astonishingly, didn’t pan out, round about the same time people realized you could trivially hack them to be more generally usable.
Anyhow, turns out there were a zillion of the gadgets made, and apparently after the company went under, you could buy a lot of 500,000 @ $0.30 or something. Some fine enterprising dude on eBay bought a batch, hacks them so they’re fully decrypted, and sells ‘em steadily for under $10 plus shipping. Based on our experience so far, if you’re in the business of adding big piles of books to GoodReads or LibraryThing or what-have-you, or you have a five-year-old who is, you could do worse.
But so now my kid is constantly dragging stacks of books over to the computer, plugging in the scanner, and pulling in the ISBNs. I figure in another decade the kid will be so good at wanding barcodes that he’ll rise to the top of the retail job heap and be crowned King Of The Mall before he’s 17. I’ll be so proud, I might get a t-shirt made.
It’s possible that the availability of an iphone client for WordPress will make me more likely to write here, in the same way that the availability of a saw in my garage will make me likely to build an armoire. Still, how can l keep from trying it?
I kept hoping that at some point in the first week in California we’d feel settled enough that I’d be able to report intelligibly. Alas, no such luck. But:
More in a bit. I keep saying that.
Say you’ve got two people with Macs running Leopard, both behind wireless routers. Let’s say for the sake of argument that these routers are the absurdly ubiquitous Linksys WRT54G routers. What’s the least you have to do to make video chat work between them?
Near as I can tell, the answer is not, alas, “Nothing.” Audio chat seems to work with no fiddling, but for video to work, you have to do this:
Port triggering involves some sort of cleverness that saves you from having to specify the IP address of the particular machine you’re chatting on; I interpret it to mean that when a machine uses a port going outbound, it opens the same port inbound to that machine.
Apparently iChat under Mac OS X 10.4 wanted to use quite a few more ports, and was consequently a lot more hassle. So: if you’re still on Tiger, stop being on Tiger. If you’re on Windows, well, enjoy your first-person-shooter video games or whatever it is people do on Windows.
It’s not clear to me whether this would “just work” if I were using Apple-branded routers. Something tells me the answer would make me feel bad, and then good, and then kind of sheepishly guilty.
And anyhow, the above enabled my first experience using a laptop with a built-in camera for a video chat (with travelling family), and it was great. I think I might, more and more, be liking technology again, rather than loathing it; possibly influenced by my new environment.
In my house there are four people, and four computers, some fixed in place and some laptops, and I think it’s the case that all the necessary technology exists to make this situation a great deal less awkward and fiddly than it is today. One should expect to be able to migrate an active session, including running applications and data, from the iMac upstairs to the laptop over there; the family’s data should be centrally and commonly accessible, with a home directory available everywhere. So where do we stand?
The good news is that the computing industry has, in many ways, caught up with where IBM was 30 years ago, and so we have cheap and ubiquitous virtualization. But we haven’t generally reached the understanding they had, that it’s much more useful a metaphor to consider an “operating system” a hosting environment for applications, rather than as the literal and original definition as the interface layer between hardware and applications. In theory, virtualization renders that distinction obvious and transparent, but it’s obscured by the fact that we’re still running home computers that are conceptually the same as they were 25 years ago, and, whether Windows or Mac, we’re still bound to the notion of the hardware as significant; it takes about a minute spent with Windows to recognize that it’s obsessively about the hardware and your interactions with it — little USB icons, and hard drive icons, and a constant need to care about the components in the ugly box on the desk.
Until fairly recently it still felt obscenely profligate to indulge the idea of “virtual appliances” — applications bundled in a virtual machine, pre-configured and ready to run in a private copy of the operating system — at least, obscene to those of us who’d spent formative years struggling to shoe-horn applications into shared servers that, even if not overtaxed in physical resources, were inevitably rendered a mess by the necessary intricate configuration management needed to keep the myriad applications and configurations from stepping on one another. Ten years ago, it was perfectly reasonable for a half-dozen web developers to work concurrently on a single desktop-grade machine with a half-gig of RAM, given some mildly fancy footwork with “virtual host” configurations in DNS, and in Apache, and in Tomcat… it was never pretty, but in the best cases it managed to work. So it’s been hard to adjust to the notion that the overhead of even a lightweight OS distribution, replicated for each application, could ever be less than gross inefficiency. But the distributions get lighter (see Ubuntu Jeos, “Just Enough OS”) and more to the point the machines have grown so massive, so quickly, that it’s a false economy to quibble about the cost of partitioning a server’s applications into virtualized appliances. Solaris’s Zones, which provide the maximally lightweight implementation of this notion by virtualizing the OS around a common kernel, rather than virtualizing the hardware stack, make this economics plain — a typical machine can host hundreds if not thousands of zones at trivial incremental cost. So it’s a lazy or shortsighted administrator indeed, at this point, that resorts to spending time figuring out how to make applications coexist, given ample solutions for isolating them in clean OS instances, from hardware virtualization (Sun’s LDOMs, IBM’s LPARs) to software hypervisors (VMWare/Xen/KVM/etc/etc/etc/) to OS virtualization (Solaris zones, Linux virtual servers). (Thus it’s all the more ironic that the worst cases I’ve seen, in the last few years, of Unix servers with configuration management nightmares, with over a decade’s accumulated cruft of configured applications interdependent on ancient versions of tools nobody remembers installing, are inevitably AIX machines on IBM p-series machines, which support hardware virtualization and thus could have avoided the problem years before a Linux/x86 machine had a comparable solution.)
At any rate, there’s no mystery as to what we can expect to see in the next few years — desktop-grade computers with more cores than we know what to do with, enough RAM to cache an HD movie, and virtualization tools that approximate VMWare ESX’s all-out stance. So how’s this all help my kid and his iMac? Well, first: why wouldn’t any interactive session be likely to occur in a VM, given technology that can hot-migrate a running VM from one host to another? On a gigabit network, transferring an entire running VM image from upstairs to downstairs still shouldn’t take more than a few minutes; and after 10G Ethernet becomes commonplace (and how long could that take — a few years at most) the wait would cease to matter. So freeze your Garageband VM session upstairs, and retrieve it downstairs, on the laptop; close the laptop and take it to the coffee shop. From that view, the traditional approach of switching usersm as in Windows and OS X, is symptom of the familiar historical configuration management problem — why should I and my son share the same Applications folder, just because we both sit at the same terminal? Why should my tools, and my entire OS configuration, not float from box to box?
Of course, given a dozen cores and a dozen GB of RAM, a single machine could, in raw horsepower, serve even a very large family using thin clients of some kind or other. But this is complementary to the notion of portable VMs floating around the house, not contradictory — in normal use, everything could run on the basement 16-core monster, and only migrate to the laptop when heading over to the library.
Anyhow, bafflingly, the biggest barrier I can think of to reaching this point in the next half-decade is, bizarrely, the simple fact of Apple’s restrictions on virtualizing Mac OS X, a problem purely of license rather than technological. If one were willing to inflict Linux or Solaris on one’s family, such scenarios are probably reachable soon, but as long as OS X only runs on native hardware, the floating-VM notion will have to wait for Apple to catch up.