sniping.org » Apple

A Couple of Links

fdiv_bug — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:31:34 +0000

I don’t usually just post links, but these are too great to not share.

The Nerd Handbook: This explains so much about me and “my people” that it borders on the uncanny. Everyone who is dating, has ever dated, or is planning on dating a nerd/geek needs to read this.
Installing MySQL on Ubuntu: A sarcastic response to a post by Dan Benjamin about how to install the MySQL database on Mac OS X. It still floors me when Mac people talk about how great it is that you can install software by hand, from source. We got over that years and years ago in the Linux world, FreeBSD’s Ports has been a solid solution for many years as well, and they’re even getting past it in Solaris. Mac OS X has MacPorts and lots of people use it, but there’s still a great deal of software-management-by-hand done in that world.

My New Phone

fdiv_bug — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:21:05 +0000

Like lots of people I got a new phone yesterday. It’s sleek, high-tech, and has lots of cool features. It’s also not an iPhone. No, I got myself a Cingular 3125, running Windows Mobile 5.0. In fact, I don’t even want an iPhone. I’ll tell you why, by way of talking about what I’ve been doing with my phone.

Calendaring

Early on, I got it synchronizing with my organization’s calendar suite. Using a piece of third-party software called NotifyLink, I have all my appointments, tasks, and notes showing up on my phone — in Pocket Outlook, no less — as well as sending entries I create on the phone back to the calendar server so they show up in the web client or fat client. It also yelps at me when I need to be somewhere.

I also found a great little third-party agenda tool called Agenda One. It looks phenomenal and is able to cram great amounts of information into screens using extremely tiny but still easily legible text, and I’m keen on trying it more and maybe buying a copy of it.

The iPhone can’t do this. Sure, I could access my calendar via the web interface and Safari but that won’t fire off reminders, and it’s not like any of what I’m doing is new or cutting-edge technology in PDAs or smartphones. I also couldn’t install a third-party client if I didn’t like the one they provided me. It apparently does sync with iCal, but iCal is an island unto itself in many ways, and I don’t want to be tethered to my desktop or laptop for syncing my calendar data. The iPhone also doesn’t support tasks or to-dos.

Music

While it’s not got a lot of internal space, the 3125 does support adding memory through microSD cards. I can get a 1GB card from NewEgg for less than $10, or a 2GB card for about $20. There are also 4GB cards on the market for about $100, and SanDisk has announced an 8GB card.

That’s funny, those last two are the same amounts of space that the two models of iPhone have.

But capacity may be a moot point. I found an application today called Mercora M that allows you to listen to streaming radio on your phone over the Internet for $5 a month. They also have a desktop client available, and with that running you can stream the music you have on your Windows PC to your phone.

Your iPhone has 8GB of music? That’s cute. My phone has 250GB. And I can add more for however much I want to spend on a new hard drive. I don’t think the iPhone does streaming radio, either.

I could also get a car kit that supports the A2DP Bluetooth audio profile, and have my phone play my music through my car’s stereo. Or any A2DP-compliant Bluetooth headphones. Or a home stereo. Or whatever else.

The iPhone doesn’t support A2DP.

The list could go on, I’m sure, but I’ve only had the phone for less than a day, so I haven’t found all the things I want to do with it. But what I’ve been driving at is this, if you’ve not seen it yet: The iPhone is a really pretty, very advanced phone, whereas my (or any) Windows Mobile device (or Symbian, or BlackBerry, or OpenMoko) is a platform. Sure, the iPhone does things my phone doesn’t, like photo editing, but that’s not something I’ve ever wanted to do on my phone anyway. Portable music and calendaring, however, do appeal to me. And even then, someone could write the applications to do those things. I could install them, and away I’d go. The interfaces might not be as elegant, largely due to the iPhone’s multi-touch screen, but that’s not my point.

What irritates me the most is that Apple used to have such a fantastic handheld platform. It was called the Newton, and it was the first serious PDA. The Newton had this amazing concept called Soups for data storage. Basically, the system would store objects — contact entries, tasks, appointments — in its long-term storage. These objects were just bundles of data with attributes, e.g. “name,” “phone number,” “email address,” and so on for a contact. Other applications could work with that data through the soup, without having to worry about harming it for the other application. If you were a doctor using a Newton-based medical practice management app, your application could store height, weight, blood pressure, or other such things in the contact object, and the address book wouldn’t care. This means that there was one storage place for all the discrete data types you’d want to track, and that each of those bundles of data would exist only once — you never needed to enter the same information twice.

I’m sure the iPhone has that level of application integration — such that when you’re creating a new calendar entry it’ll use your address book for listing the people to invite — but because the iPhone is not a platform, there’s no way for third-party tools to get at that data. Web apps will not have access to the address book, or the calendar, or your notes (of course, not even Mac OS X has access to the latter yet). If I wanted to create a medical practice management app for the iPhone, it’d have to be a web application in the first place, and would need to use its own data store, which means that doctors wouldn’t automatically have all their patients in their contact list. This is a huge step backwards for mobile computing, and it’s a step directly back along a path Apple itself walked first.

People have asked, “Well, this is a 1.0 release. What if Apple enhances it over time?” I’m sure they will; they’d be stupid not to. But when they do, I’ll judge the new releases on their own merits and flaws. In the meantime, when I see someone with an iPhone I’m more likely to say, “That’s a really pretty phone you’ve got. Have you seen my handheld computer?”

What I Look for in a (Linux) Server System

fdiv_bug — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:05:13 +0000

A coworker of mine and I had discussed my stance on Apple — it hasn’t really changed much since I wrote that, in case you’re wondering — and she asked me for my thoughts on what I look for and expect in a Linux system, so I offered to write them down here. Most of these considerations and observations also apply to other Unix, or even non-Unix systems, too.

Manageability

I should be able to deploy fifty systems as easily as I can deploy one system.

This is easily the most important aspect to any system. The various Linux distributions provide a handful of ways of doing it, and we’ve been very successful with Red Hat Kickstart functionality in the CentOS distro. With Kickstart and network booting via PXE, I can deploy a new Linux box without even really having to set hands on it — our operations team can power the system on and hit F12. Solutions like this exist for other systems, and are included out-of-the-box with Mac OS X (provided you have a Mac OS X Server machine to serve up the NetBoot images or are clever enough to hack it together yourself), so it’s hardly unique to Linux, but I would not deploy any OS that doesn’t have rapid provisioning and installation capabilities.

Packaging

I should be able to install a piece of software on fifty servers as easily as I can install it on one server.

The point of a server is to provide services to users, and to do so requires software, whether it’s a web server like Apache or IIS, an NFS server daemon, Windows file sharing services, or any of another effectively limitless number of options. Sometimes this software is part of the core system — in the case of a Windows file server, you don’t need to add anything else to the system for it to be able to fulfill that role. Other times it’s included with the system but is a separate part — this is more commonly the case in the Unix world where, for instance, Apache might be available out of the box but it’s not a core part of the OS. And in the third case you’ll find software that needs to be obtained from somewhere else and built or installed on the systems on which it will run — commercial software and lesser-known or newer Open Source software tends to fall into this category since it’s either unavailable for wide distribution or isn’t popular enough to come with your distribution. It’s largely these latter pieces of software which concern me the most, since they’re the ones that cause the most trouble. By providing me with an “easy” mechanism for packing and deploying a piece of software and all its dependencies, I can manage the software installed on my various systems as cohesive units. Think of it like a mason considering each brick in the wall he’s building: He might get most of his bricks prefabricated, while forging some of his own for applying a special unique style along the top, for instance. He can rely on the bricks he bought from a brickyard just as I can rely on the software packages provided with my distribution and depend on them for packages I’m building. Most of the Linux distributions have this pretty much nailed down, Solaris provides decent facilities for creating new packages, and even Windows has MSI bundles that can be deployed via Group Policy Objects in Active Directory. Mac OS X, however, is laughably bad in this area. There are no standards or even common practices for packaging software, and while the tools are available for creating them, no one’s packages can be expected to play well with anyone else’s. If you can’t count on the package infrastructure, then you can’t count on packaging.

Transparency and Accountability

I should be able to know exactly what code is going on to my systems and why.

This is Linux’s — and, to be fair, the various BSDs, and OpenSolaris as well — strength in the enterprise. When I’m installing updated software or OS bits, I want to have the opportunity to examine exactly what I’m putting on there and if things have changed, I want to know who changed them. Bug tracking systems such as Red Hat’s Bugzilla and Ubuntu’s Launchpad enable me to see precisely what changed and who changed it, leaving me with a feeling of safety and comfort that I’m not pushing changes which may cause other breakages. Furthermore, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat is very careful to only push bugfixes or security enhancements and not new features. You don’t necessarily want a server to have the latest and greatest features; you want it to be stable and do its job. Obviously this level of transparency isn’t possible with Windows, and only some pieces of Mac OS X are Open Source, but at least you do have a vendor you can talk to if any problems do surface.

Monitoring

I should be able to see what’s going on with my servers and services using open protocols and standardized tools.

If I want to keep track of system load, memory usage, network bandwidth consumption, temperature, or any of another number of parameters, I should be able to use the tools of my choice. Linux excels in this area by utilizing the net-snmp tools, allowing me to query anything I can conceive of using the open SNMP protocol. Mac OS X Server also utilizes net-snmp, but last I tried to work with it I had a whole host of problems trying to get a reasonably recent version to build, and then I had to wrestle with packaging the blasted thing. Our Linux boxes install it automatically during their Kickstart, but even if it had gotten left out I could either yum install net-snmp or apt-get install net-snmp and call it a day. There are SNMP agents available for Windows, as well, but as I understand it all the best ones cost money. net-snmp can also build on Windows, I believe, but I don’t even want to know about what that’d require for deployment to servers.

Hardware Availability and Affordability

I should be able to run my systems on hardware from the vendor of my choice.

Whether I go with a certain vendor because of their lower prices, better support, higher performance, or any other reason, I need the OSes I deploy to be able to run on that hardware. Linux has excellent hardware support, especially in the low- to mid-range server space, and can readily be deployed on commodity systems. Windows has exceptional hardware support, as well. Mac OS X Servers must be bought from Apple or one of Apple’s authorized resellers, and will only — officially — run Mac OS X. If I buy a system from Sun and put Linux on it, then later decide that it’d be better serving us as a Solaris box, I can do that. I could even put Windows on it. If I bought an Apple Xserve and Mac OS X Server wasn’t doing the job, I’d be out a machine and a few thousand dollars.

I believe this covers the major bases. I might update or enhance this with additional information as time goes by, so you may want to watch this space.

Apple’s High Horse

fdiv_bug — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 15:10:45 +0000

It was revealed that a certain number of Video iPods were inadvertently shipped with a Windows virus called RavMonE.exe. Apple has put up a support page to help users affected by this problem, which is good, but in it they say:

As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.

Wait. They’re blaming Windows for this? As one of my coworkers aptly paraphrased, this is like saying:

We’re sorry that we put this fatal poison in the chocolate cupcakes we manufactured. As you can imagine, we’re upset with the human body for not being more hardy against toxic proteins.

Apple’s general holier-than-thou attitude has been getting exceedingly tiresome for me. With their “Mac vs. PC” ads, open swipes at Microsoft during WWDC 2006, and the zealotry of the community — which, to be fair, there’s only so much Apple can do about — it’s gotten to the point where I’m actively interested in not pandering to Apple’s ego or bankroll.

I’m Getting Fed Up with Apple

fdiv_bug — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 23:12:37 +0000

After a terribly disappointing round of announcements at WWDC, I’m giving serious reconsideration to my affiliation with Apple and the Mac OS X platform. I’ve grown weary of Apple’s constant push to upgrade – if you’re not running the latest version of Mac OS X you may as well be running DOS. I’m tired of their flirting with the server and enterprise markets – they offer some fairly decent servers in the Xserve, but they run Mac OS X Server on them, which is an excellent server operating system if you don’t mind system management practices that date back to the early Eighties and a reliance on GUI tools – almost all of which only run on a Mac OS X client, by the way – for doing things remotely. I’m not the only one leaving or considering leaving the polished white and brushed metal of the Apple camp. I agree with both Mark and Cory’s reasons, but I’ve got my own personal gripes to air.

Performance

Mac OS X is slow for a Unix. There are documented performance problems with Mac OS X, many of which stem from the Mach microkernel, from which the Mac OS X kernel XNU descends. Mach relies heavily on passing messages from one internal construct to another which levies a drastic performance cost, and this makes Mac OS X Server a lousy choice for the vast majority of what I do with servers: Web and database stuff. It also shows in the client, I believe; my PowerBook (G4 1.5GHz, 1GB RAM), while not the newest machine in the world, is sluggish, far more so than my even older Windows XP machine (Athlon XP 2500+, 1GB RAM) at home. Admittedly, you could easily argue that the Athlon in my PC is a faster chip than the G4, but that’s not what Apple would’ve had you believe back when the G4 and G5 were current chips, and the fact is my PC is still built with older components than my PowerBook. Speaking of that, Apple telling people the PowerPC chips were superior in spite of the slower clock speeds is something else that grinds my gears. Let’s go back a few years, to remember what they used to say. Clock speed is all marketing. The PowerPC is more efficient. The G4 is a supercomputer. Intel sucks. Fine, whatever. But why, Apple, are you forcing your supporters who backed your PowerPC play in the community to eat crow with the great switch to Intel chips? It doesn’t – or at least, it shouldn’t – engender a high level of grassroots support by us fans in the field.

Innovation

Furthermore, I’m tired of the “look at Microsoft copy us” rhetoric. It started at WWDC two years ago and they engaged it in again this year. Friendly rivalry is cute and generally benefits the consumer, but with these guys it’s become frothy-mouthed zealotry. The way Steve Jobs was talking at the keynote on Monday, you’d think Apple had invented two Leopard features unveiled therein:

Time Machine – A way to get back old versions of files that you accidentally overwrote, implemented in Windows Server 2003 a few years back and in VMS decades.
Spaces – Virtual desktops so you can have more effective screen real estate, something that Unix and X have been able to do with one window manager or another since the late 1980′s.

They tout each new feature as though they alone conceived of it and that it’s completely unique to their platform, and I’d imagine to the overwhelming majority of their users who don’t care enough to go digging, those perceived claims are upheld and Apple, once again, is the only company doing any innovation in the realm of personal computing. Apple also has a nasty tendency to take – sometimes wholesale – the work of other developers and integrate it into their own apps and system without so much as a by-your-leave. A while back it was Panther, I believe, that stole the work of Proteron’s LiteSwitch app-switcher that fired off when you hit cmd+tab, and next year it appears that Leopard will be taking DesktopManager and calling it the aforementioned “Spaces” along with – something they’re calling new and original – MailTags and its ability to create to-do items and notes from messages in Mail. These developers are small and these applications, even though they’re shareware or donation-ware, are in part or in whole how these people earn their living. They were the first, or at the very least the best, at bringing those valuable features to Mac OS X users around the world. But, if it’s a good idea, Apple might steal it. At least Microsoft has the courtesy to purchase the companies that make some of the best tools, utilities, and games for Windows and the Xbox (see the Wikipedia entry “List of companies acquired by Microsoft Corporation” for a much more complete list). Apple just takes the ideas they like from their community. With friends like that, why should a small developer innovate on Apple’s platform? I’d rather get bought by Microsoft than stolen from by Apple.

Cost and Value

The common catcall from the anti-Mac crowd for many years has been “Macs cost more.” The party line response from Apple’s fans has been something to the effect of “You get what you pay for. BMWs cost more than Hondas, but you don’t hear BMW owners complaining.” At least, until it comes time for an oil change. Or a radiator repair. That’s kind of been my experience with the Mac, to a large degree, as well. Apple has a constant upgrade cycle, for all their software including Mac OS X, and it grows old having to shell out $70-$130 every year for new applications. That’s also not including their .Mac service, which is a guaranteed $100 a year for something that lots of people claim isn’t that good anyway. I used to have a .Mac account, but I stopped paying for it after I started working for Apple and got it for free, and when I moved to my current employer I didn’t feel that it was in any worth picking back up. But, if you want to synchronize your data easily between two Macs, or use their Backup tool to its full extent, or make one-click iPhoto albums, you have to pay for their walled Internet garden. I’ve already got a web host, Apple. It works well. It provides me with WebDav access to my site, which is the same protocol your apps use to access .Mac. Why do you want more money from me to pay for a service I’ve already got, for far less, from someone else? Apple tries to claim that I don’t need to upgrade. I don’t need to do a lot of things, but if I want to have software updates and enhancements beyond security updates then, yeah, I do need to upgrade. It also doesn’t hurt them that as they introduce new features and subsystems into their OS, application developers pick up on them, and suddenly you need Mac OS X v10.latest just to run a text editor.

Progress

One of the hallmarks of Apple and of Mac OS X for a few years were the constant state of improvements and progress in the OS. It got more stable, faster, better looking, and more supported as time went by. The user base grew accustomed to this dynamism, and so its present absence is quite striking. I suppose it’s inevitable, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. With the Leopard preview at WWDC, I was really hoping to see some improvements to Finder which is so very, very terrible in its current state in Mac OS X. It’s a pale imitation of the predictability and cleanliness of the Finder in Mac OS 9; that Finder was so solid from a usability standpoint that the GNOME project’s Nautilus file manager was patterned after it and it’s spatial paradigm, where the window displaying a folder is, for all intents and purposes, the folder. It was easy for users to understand, and it makes a lot of sense. Meanwhile, Mac OS X’s Finder has more in common with NeXT’s file manager, and is just a mess. Here’s some other people who criticize Finder: John Gruber – Daring Fireball, John Siracusa – Ars Technica (and here where he talks about how Leopard might be our chance), and Daniel Eran – RoughlyDrafted here, here, and here.

I was really hoping to see fixes for my two big issues with it:

It’s Brushed Metal, unless you click the pill-shaped icon in the upper-right corner of the window, in which case it looks like the older, better Finder windows, but just that one window. There doesn’t appear to be a good way to set this globally.
It’s unstable. Not counting beta software – OmniWeb and Opera, I’m looking at you – it’s the least stable and trustworthy app on my Mac, which is sad considering the important job it has.
It’s inconsistent. If I’ve got a folder open in three different windows, with three different views – icon view, list view, and column view – then does the order in which I close those windows determine what they’ll show when they last open? That’s kinda dumb, and is a problem solved by the spatial metaphor – when you open a folder in a spatial file manager, it opens the window for that folder, and subsequent openings of that folder simply bring its window to the front.

These three problems combine to make one crappy application, and since most people think of the Finder as “the computer” since it’s what’s running when they start it up, it doesn’t exactly look good for it when they can’t even figure out why it’s displaying their data the way it is.

Loving the Journey?

I want to love Mac OS X. For a few years, I did love it. But Apple’s become distracted by iPods, as near as I can tell, and is rapidly forgetting the operating system that put them back in the computing game. It could be so good. It’s a solid Unix, despite its flaws, there are loads and loads of good applications for it, people adore the systems on which it runs, and it’s Not Microsoftâ„¢. But it feels like in spite of how far they’ve come, they’ve still got a long, long way to go, and I’m wondering if it’s time to stop paying them to get there since I’ve been doing that for a while now and we’re still not at our destination.