Sunday, 9 December 2007
The First Reader
Somewhat disappointingly this blog got a reader the 4th of December. There are no external links here, so I thought it could live its life in peace, not being disturbed by any readers. It is the so far only recorded hit since the blog started two months ago. And then 4th December Google brought a poor soul here from कांदिवली. Can one be reincarnated as a web page?
Transparent menu bar
The following information can be found in many places on the web, so there is no reason for you to read it here. It is posted just so I can find it myself, if I need it on a Mac in a distant country.
To solve the Leopard problem:
sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 0.62
and to undo it:
sudo defaults delete /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables'
You'll need to restart your Mac to see the changes. Log out is not enough.
The number .62 is the result of trial and error of users on the internet to get the right Tiger touch.
To solve the Leopard problem:
sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 0.62
and to undo it:
sudo defaults delete /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables'
You'll need to restart your Mac to see the changes. Log out is not enough.
The number .62 is the result of trial and error of users on the internet to get the right Tiger touch.
Monday, 3 December 2007
Why I will not buy an iPhone
I have seen some discussions on the web why one should not buy an iPhone. These are a few of the arguments:
My only reason for not buying an iPhone is that it is too heavy. I want something small to fit in my pocket - preferably my breast pocket like the iPod nano. There will probably be new and lighter versions of the iPhone. Then I'll take out the wallet.
- No browser downloads.
- No possibility to add attachments to mails.
- Limited bluetooth: no file transfer.
- No usb mass storage support.
- No filesystem access.
- No flash or java in safari.
- You can't use the phone as a modem.
- No copy and paste.
- No landscape mode outside safari.
- No junk mail filter.
- No Instant messaging.
- No GPS.
- No wireless contact sharing.
- No 3G.
- No voice dialling.
- No wireless sync.
- No stereo headset bluetooth support.
- No customizable MP3 ring tones.
- No voice memos.
- No LDAP client access.
- No games.
- No MMS.
- No lyrics in iTunes.
- Locked to certain markets.
My only reason for not buying an iPhone is that it is too heavy. I want something small to fit in my pocket - preferably my breast pocket like the iPod nano. There will probably be new and lighter versions of the iPhone. Then I'll take out the wallet.
When Apple let me down, down, down
Apple is a fine company as commercial companies go, but it is just a commercial company. During the x number of years I have used them, I have been let down numerous times.
And yet I go on with Apple's products. I am pretty certain that the problems are even worse on the other side. I have used Linux, OS/2 and different flavours of Windows in parallel, and at least when it comes to daily use, they just do not match up.
I have had a few marvellous macs. My PowerBook 170 still worked after 10 years, and it was with a tear in my eye, that I got rid of it. My LC never had any problems. And my 12" PowerBook G4 and my 12" iBook have followed me for a long time, in spite of the one time harddisk failure of the PowerBook.
- A Performa of some kind in 1995 with green hue on the screen. Some hardware fix had to be applied. The local Apple dealer promised me a System in English, but refused to give me any back-up system diskettes in English. It was an integrated screen-computer - some kind of iMac of the time. And it weighed roughly as much as a medium sized battleship. After that experience I promised myself never ever to buy a desktop computer again.
- A Duo 2300c in 1998 where the hinges broke so the screen became unusable. It was just slightly more than a year, and a reparation outside of guarantee was not worth it. Until then, it had been one of my favourite Macs ever - slim and light.
- A Wallstreet PowerBook in 2000. I upgraded the harddisk to 20G, just before Mac OS X came out. It turned out that Apple only supported installations on the first 4G of the harddisk, so my remaining 16G were of little use, unless I fiddled around moving home directories and stuff.
- A Powerbook 12" G4 with a failed harddisk. I lost data for a few days since the previous backup. It got replaced by the local Apple dealer and for years emitted a beep every now and then. I never figured out why, but that problem seems to be gone with the upgrade to Leopard.
- A Powerbook 15" G4, Aluminium in 2005. This is probably the worst computer I ever had. The first one I got failed loading the OS updates and just went dark. Besides a key was not working. I got it completely replaced and the OS updates would still not load on the new one, unless I trod very carefully. The touchpad does not select words properly. After a little more than one year, the battery stopped charging. It is not a problem of the battery, which I tried to replace, but it is something internal, outside of guarantee and most likely expensive. Last week the sound stopped working - all sound controls were greyed out. A restart fixed that one. A few days ago, the processor went all nuts during the night, the fan was running like a jet motor, and I had to get up and make a cold restart. The 2 December, all USB ports stopped working - both for EyeTV and for my iPod Nano. One restart with the cables still attached failed, but removing the cables and only plugging them in after the second restart worked. I just learnt that it would cost as much to fix the problem as to buy a new computer.
And yet I go on with Apple's products. I am pretty certain that the problems are even worse on the other side. I have used Linux, OS/2 and different flavours of Windows in parallel, and at least when it comes to daily use, they just do not match up.
I have had a few marvellous macs. My PowerBook 170 still worked after 10 years, and it was with a tear in my eye, that I got rid of it. My LC never had any problems. And my 12" PowerBook G4 and my 12" iBook have followed me for a long time, in spite of the one time harddisk failure of the PowerBook.
Tuesday, 30 October 2007
Sticking to stacks
There are currently plenty of discussions on the world wide wobble about "Stacks" in Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard. Arguments vary between "I loathe it more than scorpion fondue" to "well, it's not that bad". The main problem is that there now is no way to browse nested folders from the Dock.
I am in the "hate, hate, HATE" camp, and I have sent my "kill the stacks now" feedback to Apple.
But I actually understand Apple. One of the things that make Mac OS X less bad than other systems is that it is simpler. And it is simpler because it does not provide the user with all past nifty bits, that worked, but which could be replaced by something else. In Linux and Windows you can change about anything, and all that flexibility leads to confusion, bugs and frustration.
Apple had the idea with Stacks, and it has to stick to them for the time being - because they are there. Letting people work the old way would make testing and development more expensive and the UI more complicated.
Hopefully they will come to their senses and find a way to make the Stacks usable, but even if they don't, there is method in their madness.
I am in the "hate, hate, HATE" camp, and I have sent my "kill the stacks now" feedback to Apple.
But I actually understand Apple. One of the things that make Mac OS X less bad than other systems is that it is simpler. And it is simpler because it does not provide the user with all past nifty bits, that worked, but which could be replaced by something else. In Linux and Windows you can change about anything, and all that flexibility leads to confusion, bugs and frustration.
Apple had the idea with Stacks, and it has to stick to them for the time being - because they are there. Letting people work the old way would make testing and development more expensive and the UI more complicated.
Hopefully they will come to their senses and find a way to make the Stacks usable, but even if they don't, there is method in their madness.
Sunday, 28 October 2007
Localising is not just a matter of text
Good web design takes into account the expected web layout for each particular market. Look for example at Sony's sites in different countries.
Sony Japan uses a lot of moving elements and catchy colours, things that probably would not be accepted in many other markets, where moving elements are considered distracting from the main message.
Sony USA is much more sober with no moving elements and hardly any superfluous information. It is somewhat similar to Apple's design, and, ironically, seems inspired by the peace and simplicity of a Japanese zen garden.
Sony France, Sony UK, Sony Greece and Sony Italy use the same basic layout. Sony Italy currently has one moving small element and Sony Greece a moving big central element, a promotion of the Cybershot DSC-T2 camera. The other two are completely immobile.
The European sites follow a classic layout with a menu to the left, some pictures in the middle and additional information in a column at the right of the page. The fact that the Greek and Italian sites have moving elements may be a temporary coincidence, but it may also be because moving elements are more accepted there than in Northern Europe.
Sony China has not only a major moving element, but the entire page is full of small pictures and text snippets to get as much information as possible into one page. This is entirely in line with many other Chinese web sites. Look for example at the Chinese news site Sina, where the entire page consists of hundreds of short links and some moving elements.
On one hand simple psychological experiments can show that the Chinese approach is "wrong". It is not pleasant and it is not an efficient way to get a message out or to navigate around a site.
On the other hand, this is what web sites are supposed to look like in China. Anything else would look foreign. It is as important to blend in and to look local as it is to show what the "correct" way of doing things is.
Sony Japan uses a lot of moving elements and catchy colours, things that probably would not be accepted in many other markets, where moving elements are considered distracting from the main message.
Sony USA is much more sober with no moving elements and hardly any superfluous information. It is somewhat similar to Apple's design, and, ironically, seems inspired by the peace and simplicity of a Japanese zen garden.
Sony France, Sony UK, Sony Greece and Sony Italy use the same basic layout. Sony Italy currently has one moving small element and Sony Greece a moving big central element, a promotion of the Cybershot DSC-T2 camera. The other two are completely immobile.
The European sites follow a classic layout with a menu to the left, some pictures in the middle and additional information in a column at the right of the page. The fact that the Greek and Italian sites have moving elements may be a temporary coincidence, but it may also be because moving elements are more accepted there than in Northern Europe.
Sony China has not only a major moving element, but the entire page is full of small pictures and text snippets to get as much information as possible into one page. This is entirely in line with many other Chinese web sites. Look for example at the Chinese news site Sina, where the entire page consists of hundreds of short links and some moving elements.
On one hand simple psychological experiments can show that the Chinese approach is "wrong". It is not pleasant and it is not an efficient way to get a message out or to navigate around a site.
On the other hand, this is what web sites are supposed to look like in China. Anything else would look foreign. It is as important to blend in and to look local as it is to show what the "correct" way of doing things is.
Localising the problem
I use google analytics to track readers of my blogs. One thing that strikes me as extraordinary is the number of English speaking readers I have. More than 80% of the readers use a browser set to English language. About 70% are IP addresses in officially English speaking countries like Australia, Canada, UK and the USA. I have about as many readers in the UK as in Germany and France together, even though the UK has only 60 million inhabitants and Germany and France have 140 million together.
There may be many explanations for this, but one that is fairly obvious is that I write in English. As you may notice from some of my expressions, English is not my native language. I use it only to reach a large audience.
However, to a lot of people reading English is a real problem. If I had wanted to get a geographically even distribution of the readers, I would have to translate the blogs to French, German, Italian, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and so on.
English may be good to reach a wide audience, but it is not good enough to reach out to the world.
There may be many explanations for this, but one that is fairly obvious is that I write in English. As you may notice from some of my expressions, English is not my native language. I use it only to reach a large audience.
However, to a lot of people reading English is a real problem. If I had wanted to get a geographically even distribution of the readers, I would have to translate the blogs to French, German, Italian, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and so on.
English may be good to reach a wide audience, but it is not good enough to reach out to the world.
Reuse and die
The trend in software development has always been to reuse as much existing code as possible. One manifestation of this is object oriented programming and classes that are shared between a lot of components.
It is undeniable that reusing code saves code. You need to write less of it.
However, it is not certain that it means that you save time.
If you have a large software project and a lot of other classes depend on each class, then a bug in any shared class means that the whole project may come to a standstill, until the bug is fixed.
If you instead duplicate code, and each class has complete control of its own content, you limit the risk of generic project failures.
So duplicating code is better than reusing it? Ehm... sometimes. Look at your project and use your judgement.
It is undeniable that reusing code saves code. You need to write less of it.
However, it is not certain that it means that you save time.
If you have a large software project and a lot of other classes depend on each class, then a bug in any shared class means that the whole project may come to a standstill, until the bug is fixed.
If you instead duplicate code, and each class has complete control of its own content, you limit the risk of generic project failures.
So duplicating code is better than reusing it? Ehm... sometimes. Look at your project and use your judgement.
Collaboration is imploding and exploding
Wikipedia is one of the world's most surprising phenomenons.
It started as a wild garden, where things would grow in any direction. People added the most fantastic non sourced facts, which some people believed and some people laughed at. The result was a wild jungle of information, where you had to check double check every plant before you could trust it.
English Wikipedia is now moving in a much stricter direction. There is an army of clueless youngsters, who know very little, but who want Wikipedia to be "encyclopaedic", which to them means without anything that does not look nice. They carry machetes and clean up in the jungle, which now more and more looks like a French garden. It looks better but contains less.
This of course frightens potential authors away. What good is it to write information, if it may be deleted by an ignoramus with the only reason that it to them looks "unencyclopaedic"?
It was a wonder that the jungle version of Wikipedia worked. It will be another wonder if the French garden version will survive.
It started as a wild garden, where things would grow in any direction. People added the most fantastic non sourced facts, which some people believed and some people laughed at. The result was a wild jungle of information, where you had to check double check every plant before you could trust it.
English Wikipedia is now moving in a much stricter direction. There is an army of clueless youngsters, who know very little, but who want Wikipedia to be "encyclopaedic", which to them means without anything that does not look nice. They carry machetes and clean up in the jungle, which now more and more looks like a French garden. It looks better but contains less.
This of course frightens potential authors away. What good is it to write information, if it may be deleted by an ignoramus with the only reason that it to them looks "unencyclopaedic"?
It was a wonder that the jungle version of Wikipedia worked. It will be another wonder if the French garden version will survive.
Text is not text
One of the fascinating things with computers is that not even as simple a thing as a text document is universal.
One would think that text was so simple that all systems could agree on one and the same standard.
However, already in the beginning of time there was confusion on which kind of character to use for "new line". In the Unix world one used the Ascii character 0A (LF, Line feed). Mac OS started instead using the Ascii character 0D (CR, Carriage Return). And DOS and Windows decided to go for both belt and braces and used CR+LF. Mac OS X decided to switch to Unix type LF to confuse its users. This is one of the reasons you sometimes see documents with very large distances between paragraphs or no paragraph marks at all.
So much for the new lines.
Then the problem was the rest of the characters.
In one respect it was a pity that the English language dominated early computing, because there was no need to handle accented characters. Ascii contains just the letters a-z; no é or å or 福. To write accented characters one extended Ascii to what your web browser probably calls Western (because it is really wild) and to write other languages many other encodings were introduced.
The first reasonably successful attempt on standardising on one encoding came in 1991 with Unicode, which encompasses most of the major alphabets in the world. However, Unicode is still not standard default in most cases now more than 15 years later. If you save a text file in Windows or Mac OS X, the default encoding is based on the language of the computer. If you type a text file in Notepad.exe in French and send it to a Chinese colleague, it is very possible that the accents will turn up as gobbledygook in his version of Notepad.
Then is the solution not to force everyone to use unicode?
It could have been. However, there is more than one unicode standard, and they all have different advantages.
If you save an English file in unicode UTF8, it is not bigger than if you save it in "Western" encoding. However, a Russian text takes about twice as much space if saved in UTF8 as in a dedicated Russian encoding, and a Chinese or Japanese text takes 50% more than a native Chinese or Japanese encoding.
If you instead use unicode UTF16, the Chinese and Japanese texts do not take more space than a native encoding, but English text takes twice as much as with Western encoding. And most HTML pages and programming languages have mostly English characters, so UTF8 makes more sense there.
So next time you double click on a text file and it displays with surprising paragraphs and gobbledygook characters, don't blame the author - blame the fact that the first computers were not built by Indians. There are more than a dozen different alphabets in India, so they would probably have been able to figure out a better solution much earlier on in the process.
One would think that text was so simple that all systems could agree on one and the same standard.
However, already in the beginning of time there was confusion on which kind of character to use for "new line". In the Unix world one used the Ascii character 0A (LF, Line feed). Mac OS started instead using the Ascii character 0D (CR, Carriage Return). And DOS and Windows decided to go for both belt and braces and used CR+LF. Mac OS X decided to switch to Unix type LF to confuse its users. This is one of the reasons you sometimes see documents with very large distances between paragraphs or no paragraph marks at all.
So much for the new lines.
Then the problem was the rest of the characters.
In one respect it was a pity that the English language dominated early computing, because there was no need to handle accented characters. Ascii contains just the letters a-z; no é or å or 福. To write accented characters one extended Ascii to what your web browser probably calls Western (because it is really wild) and to write other languages many other encodings were introduced.
The first reasonably successful attempt on standardising on one encoding came in 1991 with Unicode, which encompasses most of the major alphabets in the world. However, Unicode is still not standard default in most cases now more than 15 years later. If you save a text file in Windows or Mac OS X, the default encoding is based on the language of the computer. If you type a text file in Notepad.exe in French and send it to a Chinese colleague, it is very possible that the accents will turn up as gobbledygook in his version of Notepad.
Then is the solution not to force everyone to use unicode?
It could have been. However, there is more than one unicode standard, and they all have different advantages.
If you save an English file in unicode UTF8, it is not bigger than if you save it in "Western" encoding. However, a Russian text takes about twice as much space if saved in UTF8 as in a dedicated Russian encoding, and a Chinese or Japanese text takes 50% more than a native Chinese or Japanese encoding.
If you instead use unicode UTF16, the Chinese and Japanese texts do not take more space than a native encoding, but English text takes twice as much as with Western encoding. And most HTML pages and programming languages have mostly English characters, so UTF8 makes more sense there.
So next time you double click on a text file and it displays with surprising paragraphs and gobbledygook characters, don't blame the author - blame the fact that the first computers were not built by Indians. There are more than a dozen different alphabets in India, so they would probably have been able to figure out a better solution much earlier on in the process.
Stagnant software
Two years ago I installed Mac OS X 10.4, Tiger. I thought this was a waste of money. There was no functionality in 10.4 that I really needed. However, I had the money and decided to spend it just for the sake of curiosity.
Yesterday I installed Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard. That was also a waste of money. Worse than that, it actually broke the way you easily could access items in subfolders from the Dock. So I paid to get less functionality. And Apple promotes this as one of the 300 new "features" of Leopard.
Certain things, like the once cutting edge tool Grapher have not been touched at all. Creating filters in ColorSync is still a matter of a large amount of patience to get around all the bugs in the UI.
This is not something that is typical only for Apple.
Microsoft do the same thing. There are certain things in MS Word, like the ways Styles are handled or Master Documents, which basically are so broken that they are unusable. They have been in MS Word for decades, and Microsoft does nothing to fix them.
IBM does the same thing with Lotus Notes. It is virtually impossible to change the layout of a table in Lotus Notes today, just as it was 15 years ago. But IBM does not care. They add LDAP technology and javascript, which is all well, but it is used only by the Lotus Notes administrators and designers. For each administrator there are typically dozens or hundreds of users, so the needs of the majority of the users are not taken care of. IBM cares about the decision makers in the buying process - not the users.
That is typically a great idea for short term revenue. It is not necessarily a great idea for long term customer retention.
Yesterday I installed Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard. That was also a waste of money. Worse than that, it actually broke the way you easily could access items in subfolders from the Dock. So I paid to get less functionality. And Apple promotes this as one of the 300 new "features" of Leopard.
Certain things, like the once cutting edge tool Grapher have not been touched at all. Creating filters in ColorSync is still a matter of a large amount of patience to get around all the bugs in the UI.
This is not something that is typical only for Apple.
Microsoft do the same thing. There are certain things in MS Word, like the ways Styles are handled or Master Documents, which basically are so broken that they are unusable. They have been in MS Word for decades, and Microsoft does nothing to fix them.
IBM does the same thing with Lotus Notes. It is virtually impossible to change the layout of a table in Lotus Notes today, just as it was 15 years ago. But IBM does not care. They add LDAP technology and javascript, which is all well, but it is used only by the Lotus Notes administrators and designers. For each administrator there are typically dozens or hundreds of users, so the needs of the majority of the users are not taken care of. IBM cares about the decision makers in the buying process - not the users.
That is typically a great idea for short term revenue. It is not necessarily a great idea for long term customer retention.
I hate computers
Ever since I started using computers I have hated them. They take too much of our time whenever they break, and they break too often.
In private I use almost only Macintosh. That is not because I love Mac OS, but it is because Mac OS is the operating system I loathe the least.
Mac OS is not perfect. It is not even good. It just happens to be the least horrible of the operating systems mankind has seen until now.
My favourite system would be entirely character based, like a DOS window or a Unix shell, but supporting unicode characters and Chinese and Japanese character input.
Or it would be something that one day will come, but is not yet there. Not that I am very optimistic about the future. There were things with Mac OS 6 in 1991 that were better than Mac OS 10.5 in 2007. Features come and go. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
In private I use almost only Macintosh. That is not because I love Mac OS, but it is because Mac OS is the operating system I loathe the least.
Mac OS is not perfect. It is not even good. It just happens to be the least horrible of the operating systems mankind has seen until now.
My favourite system would be entirely character based, like a DOS window or a Unix shell, but supporting unicode characters and Chinese and Japanese character input.
Or it would be something that one day will come, but is not yet there. Not that I am very optimistic about the future. There were things with Mac OS 6 in 1991 that were better than Mac OS 10.5 in 2007. Features come and go. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
Yet another one
I have been told I have too many blogs that never get updated. That is probably true. But this blog is different, I do not intend to list it anywhere, so even though it won't be updated, that fact will not disturb anyone.
The intended purpose is to give me some outlet for my many confused opinions on technology in general. Someone claimed that the technical information was too void of content, but I cannot guarantee that this blog will be any more useful.
The intended purpose is to give me some outlet for my many confused opinions on technology in general. Someone claimed that the technical information was too void of content, but I cannot guarantee that this blog will be any more useful.
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