Reading that the German Foreign Ministry is about to change their computing desktops back from a GNU/Linux-based system to Microsoft Windows and their Office offerings, a thing that has been on my mind for a while comes back again.
I think it would be very worthwhile to start an initiative to foster european software; I think that wherever software produced in europe is available, it should be favored over other products. There are european operating system vendors – especially in the GNU/Linux arena. Why are they not getting the money, but rather the big vendor from Redmont?
There also is the point that I think particularly for sensitive information, an operating system where the code can be audited and traced is a good idea. I am not sure that you should be trusting the operations of a highly sensitive network to a company that is not all transparent about it motives, or its potential connections to the intelligence community in its home country.
I think that strategic investments would also do wonders to stimulate activity in the software market. Working towards the goal of eroding Microsoft’s dominance would be a good thing in my book. Considering that there have been many pushes towards fostering something like a european (or german, or british or …) Silicon Valley, this could just be the way to get the european software industry to focus on providing competitive offerings for basic functionality like office and desktop operating systems.
European Software
February 15th, 2011 by konrad No comments »Nokia/Microsoft vs. …
February 11th, 2011 by konrad No comments »I get the very distinct impression that MicroNokia are not setting themselves up to compete against Apple, but much rather primarily against Google’s Android. Largely, this is because again we’re seeing a split between hardware and software companies. In splitting apart those kinds of development, they are at a disadvantage to bring about the same quality of user experience as Apple shows the world as attainable. That’s also why the PlayBook and the new HP TouchPad are, to me, more likely to work well – because they are enabling themselves to just focus on what the entire package delivers to the user and do not have to compromise for their technology partner that they have decided their fate to be linked with.
And, whilst we are at it, I’m idly curious as to whether the folding of the talks between Google and Nokia was in any way relevant to Eric Schmidt giving up the CEO role at Google. Of course, one can envision that the talks between Google and Nokia were much more one-sided: Google can negotiate from a position of strength in the smartphone market; they see no necessity to bring on board a vendor who has good device knowledge. After being publicly ridiculed for the Kin and never really being successful in the smartphone market, was probably more egalitarian in the relationship. Much as I can understand that position, it also shows the fate the two companies do share in the smartphone arena and it holds little promise to how they might move forward together. That Elop was a Microsoftie and knows the culture of the company well is also something not to be forgotten. And I think that after the lack of success in delivering a Linux deliverable even though they had been at it for a while (anybody remember the Nokia N700?) might also have been a factor. If you can’t trust your inhouse Linux people to get something reliable out the door, why should they be able to do based on somebody else’s Linux-based smartphone stack?
What I am curious about, now, will be the third-party developer strategy – and that’s the very point where the interests of the two technology partners are not well-aligned. Nokia will want the developers to have their products run exclusively on Nokia devices, and will probably work hard to have a competitive advantage over other WP7 products in User Interface and probably other APIs. (They need to – they’ve already sold out Search, Maps and other key components to be the same as with the other WP7 vendors.) Microsoft, on the other hand, should have in mind to not let the platform fragment too much, or else they will also draw bad blood from their development base. The people who have stuff in the Ovi store these days are burnt anyway, because they need to completely write off those investments and, in the worst case, get their eyes set on an entirely new ecosystem. (Of course, Nokia could be providing transitioning tools, or a HAL that allows for Symbian apps to run on WP7, but I’m not sure that the phones will be up to that kind of tasks.) And as Sun learned in the transition from SunOS 4 to Solaris: Developers having their apps broken do not respond kindly.
So these will be interesting times ahead indeed. But I’m sceptic that the new Nokia Windows phones will really get that kind of market traction that other platforms enjoy.
Why IMAP is a good model for cloud services
February 10th, 2011 by konrad No comments »I do admit it: I like the IMAP protocol. I regularly use multiple computers and my iPhone, and I read and write email on all of them. IMAP makes that convenient: I have the same view of my folders and my inbox on every computer. We also use a Webmail client that uses IMAP as its underlying technology, so even via webmail, everything looks the same. And apart from the fact that I quite enjoy the way that I can look for all stuff that was sent my way, I much more like the fact that I have just one folder of email that I sent out. It doesn’t matter where I am when I send something off: it all ends up in my sent box on our mail server.
IMAP is a well-specified protocol. One can argue whether it’s a well-desgined protocol, or whether parts of it are a total nightmare to understand and implement. But is is that, well-documented. Given enough programming talent, you can sit down and write either a client or a server for it. (And given the track record of various IMAP clients in the wild, it does take a certain kind of dedication and a good load of skill to really get it right.) But it’s not a technology that lets you guess what a certain field on all requests might mean or why the answers look so different on every second friday of a month starting with J.
The fact that it’s documented means multiple implementations exist. That means if you want, you can set up an IMAP server and just use that; or pay somebody to do just that. Personally, I’m not so fond of the idea of giving all of my email away to somebody who I don’t really know all so well, so my IMAP store is on a server that we run ourselves. But if your preferences are different, there are plenty of services that allow you to use their IMAP server, and be happy with that.
This is where I believe cloud services should be heading. Like so many, I’m a fan of Evernote (I’ve written about that). I’m impressed by what Google Documents can do inside the browser. But for either company: do I know who else has access to my data? What laws are even applicable for stuff that I put up? I’m sure that both Google and Evernote are subject to US subpoenas, but what about german legal demands to hand over data? Or, say, those originating in India? What happens to all the data should Evernote or Google fold? I’d love Evernote even more if there were a way to run a server of my own – because then I know for sure who has access to my data. Or the protocol they use were well-specified so that others could also contribute to a public server my Evernote client connects to.
Ah, if it only were so easy as with IMAP.
Kaffeepadleserei.
February 9th, 2011 by konrad 3 comments »Ausgehend von einer Twitter-Konversation, an der auch ich mich beteiligt habe, ist bei Maxxolution ein Blog-Artikel entstanden: die Kaffee-Frage, Meinung erwünscht. Auch AIXhibit beteiligt sich auf deren Blog: Kaffee Frage. Ausgegangen war die Diskussion ja davon, dass ich kein grosser Freund von Nespresso bin; nicht zuletzt, weil das Kaffeepulver pro Tasse in einem der energieintensivsten Verpackungsmaterialien überhaupt geliefert wird – und zwar egal, ob die Home oder Professional-Serie.
Auch die Verpackung von Pads ist ja, wenn man es genau betrachtet, nicht so das Gelbe vom Ei, wenn es um die ökologische Verantwortung geht: Papiererzeugung ist jetzt auch nicht gerade resourcenschonend. Das gilt für Filterpapier genauso wie für Schreibpapier. (Warum muss das Papier für Pads eigentlich Hochweiss sein? Warum tut es nicht ein Öko-Braun, das weniger Bleichen bedeutet.)
Bei uns in der Firma gibt es den klassischen Vollautomaten: Bohnen in einem Container, es wird tassenweise gemahlen und dann weggeworfen. Das Pulver kann problemlos in die braune Tonne. Man kann dann den Kunden zwar nicht aus einer Vielfalt von unterschiedlichen Sorten wählen lassen, aber genau genommen fragt da ja auch keiner danach.
Tee machen wir tassenweise mit Beuteln. Und andere Getränke (wie z.B. Sprudel) gibt es bei uns aus grösseren Flaschen. Alleine schon, weil ich nicht die kleinen Fläschchen transportieren möchte. Aber oft ist es bei unseren Besuchern so, dass die entweder Kaffee oder Wasser trinken – andere Sachen sind nur selten relevant, auch wenn wir sie anbieten.
Steve Jobs for President (or: Apple Engineering for politics)
December 29th, 2010 by konrad 1 comment »I admit it: I’ve started reading A Regular Guy by Mona Simpson which starts out by the main character deciding he would like to run for office. I am not entertaining any pet theories on the likeliness of Steve Jobs entering public politics or running for an office (or his particular talents making him a good choice).
How would politics be re-engineered by the thought process that work on products within Apple? What would be the things, the objectives the very, very perfectionist mind of Steve Jobs would focus on? What could a radical mind like his actually accomplish?
Data Roaming?
September 17th, 2010 by konrad 1 comment »Coming home from two weeks abroad and some idle time to think, I have a few more topics to blog about.
One of them is one of the things I consider one of the most obscene forms of ripoff the mobile phone carriers do is „data roaming.“ If you want to bring your smartphone online, what they do is they do not let you easily use their own data network, but rather insist on transporting your IP traffic over their own networks to your home provider where it then is allowed to hit the public internet.
What is this?
Let me just use the local network, I don’t care where the transit into IP world happens. This would be so much cheaper, and any decent phone can handle the configuration. Heck, I did this years ago with my Treo!
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
September 16th, 2010 by konrad No comments »It is a widely held belief that Steve Jobs is a man to transform industries. He’s done it before, and I think he (with his company Apple) has set his eyes to do it yet again. This time, it’s telephony. And I can’t blame him, it is a god-awful industry we (as a species, globally) are putting up with.
Take the epitome of modern phone technology: the mobile phone network. We’re still using phone numbers (a technology that is a century old and was optimized for the rotary phones and their electromechanical counterparts in the switching system), we’re basically using a network designed to deliver billable events and we’re communicating with voice quality that is actually more than awful.
Enter FaceTime.
FaceTime takes the telephone conversation out of the old phone network and puts it onto an IP network. It makes communication easy and fun. And it’s no longer just tied to the iPhone (which the carriers probably would have liked), but also going to IP-only devices: iPod touch and all iPads. Apple usually is known for delivering good user experience, so phone calls are good for the user.
But now, Apple is setting out to be not just the media centre of the world (with music and video already going their way), but the new phone system, too. Between the new Apple TV and FaceTime, I do have some ideas why Apple needs a new data center …
[EDITED] I do not think that the video telephony is what makes FaceTime so particularly important or game-changing. I think it is the seamlessness in which the phone and IP network interact. Ultimately, reducing the phone carriers just to another form of data carriers. I do know that Skype also works suitably well and has a good installed base. But what is different here is that FaceTime is automatically installed on every iOS device, and integrated well with the entire Apple experience (think: Address book, MobileMe, …)
Lessons in customer support
September 11th, 2010 by konrad No comments »I — probably along with many, many others of the iPhone Twitter App — discovered something that I consider a bug. As soon as you rotate the phone, your position in your timeline is utterly garbled. Where you are after turning has no resemblance whatsoever to where you were before. That means: Take the phone, rotate it, rotate it back and you’re at a completely different place than before.
This quite goes against the law of least surprise for the user. So I tried to inform Twitter of that bug. I searched for a place for such feedback, did indeed file the report and included what I take to be a start on how to resolve the issue. I received an answer from Twitter a few days later, but with something that I consider to be completely beside the point. The answer, basically was, „If this is a problem for you, you can rotation-lock your phone.“ Come on, Twitter. You can do better than that. If the mail back had at least included something like „Thank you for reporting your concern, we will look at this internally“ or „Thank you, we will consider how to best deal with the issue for a future release,“ all would have been well. But to be told that this is a non-issue is, to be honest, most disappointing. And yes, I do indeed consider this to be a problem. And no, I do not consider rotation-lockng the phone an appropriate solution. (I do tend to type on the landscape keyboard, but read on the portrait orientation, so I do in fact quite like to change the direction of the phone.
And it would have been easy to not make me frustrated about this, too.
Mailman problems
September 1st, 2010 by konrad No comments »For one of lists, one of the subscribers had the strangest problem. He kept getting bounces that the list alias does not even exist, whilst at the same time other subscribers could well write to that list. It turns out that his mail server was rewriting the To:-address, resolving the CNAME of the hostname that is responsible for running the lists. As we run a virtual-domain based mail server, this was not a smart choice: Whilst the email address does indeed exist on the CNAME-d host (lists.xiqit.de), it does not exist on the fully qualified name the server listens to. So we added an MX record for the hostname that also points to the ‚primary‘ name of the server (the one which the RDNS also resolves to), and now all is well. HIs email does reach the list.
PowerDNS under MacOS X 10.6.4
August 26th, 2010 by konrad No comments »Thanks to an entry on LSD::RELOAD I was finally able to get powerdns to run on my MacOS X 10.6.4 system.
Out of personal preference I wanted it to run with postgresql instead of mysql, so there was a little figuring out involved in how to get things going without the mysql driver — apparently, the make files only take one database backend and do not compile multiple drivers at the same time.
Also, secondary software omes from MacPorts, so paths had to be appropriately matched. And then, there was some hand-tweaking of Makefiles because –Bstatic, –Bdynamic and –lcrypt warrant special handling.
This leads to the following command line:
CXXFLAGS="-I/opt/local/include -DDARWIN" \
./configure --with-pgsql-lib=/opt/local/lib/postgresql84 \
--with-pgsql-includes=/opt/local/include/postgresql84 \
--prefix=/usr/local --with-modules="gpgsql"
Requiring code in PHP
August 12th, 2010 by konrad No comments »While writing the code to handle a small form in PHP, I just realized that I have a very bad habit — and many just do the same.
When I write a new file, I place all the includes at the very top, before anything else happens. But in my current script, there are many code paths that do not require the major part of all those includes. Only in one specific instance do we require the bulk of the code. Previously, any invocation of that script would have gotten all the code dragged in. Now, I’ve moved the include to just where I need the code (basically, going into a specific case of a larger switch statement … And the load on the web server has just been reduced, without any change to the functionality.
So why do we all put the includes on top?
eBooks
August 10th, 2010 by konrad No comments »So there’s a new Kindle that looks quite attractive. Many things on the Kindle plattform appear quite nice: You can read the Kindle books on multiple devices (the Kindle app for iPhone and iPad just as well as your desktop and laptop computer) and have your library available on all devices equally. The way I understand it, you even see your own notes and progress on your books on all platforms; this is how storage should be done (local copies for offline, but basically be accessible from anywhere).
And yet, as with many other of the new media consumption gadgets, you get a big bag of concerns that at least still give me second thoughts on all of this.
For one, I don’t want to leave such a well-documented trail of what I read, when and for how long. I know that by shopping at Amazon, I already leave quite the trail about my reading habits, and buying stuff on the Kindle does not change that all too drastically. And still, I feel that the more data Kindle transfers to Amazon, the less comfortable I am with reading stuff on such an electronic gadget.
Also, we’ve seen that Amazon is able to change the library on the Kindle without your approval or interaction. This gives an entirely new meaning to the concept of „purchasing a book.“ It’s actually much more like a public library: You pay for the privilege of being allowed to read a book, but only little of the experience is under your control.
And that brings us around to the next point: I want to be able to pass on books. Once I’ve read them, I want to have somebody else have them. Or I want to be able to loan them; either just for an afternoon of leisure or for others to completely read those books. That’s just not possible on the Kindle. But then, I also think that it’s not possible on iBooks, so that levels the playing field.
For the time being, I just might be stuck with paper books.
Software I like: Evernote
August 5th, 2010 by konrad No comments »I’ve been a user of Evernote for quite a while now, and I must admit that I’m also one of the lovers of that service. It does data storage the way I felt it should be done. You can access your notes via local applications on desktop and laptop, and that works well. I personally use only the Macintosh version (but that on multiple machines) for workstation use. But I can also access my data via the iPhone application, or with the evernote web app from just about anywhere. There’s also a Windows version available, but I’ve never played around with that.
I journal all the ideas that are on my mind within Evernote; that way, I am sure that I have all ideas that might warrant revisiting at a later point are caught, because it’s just so easy and quick to write them down and have them stored in a way that I can access from anywhere.
I know that there are many more features (uploading PDFs, capturing images and storing them, image recognition and many more), but none of those have provided important to me. The fact that I can get to all my notes from anywhere, and with software that makes using the storage easy and fast — it does feel like it’s a local application, because it is — that’s what has me convinced.
And the best thing? It just works.
Highly recommended.
Home media integration and other televisory matters
August 5th, 2010 by konrad No comments »Following up on my last posting, there are a few more things that come to mind when thinking about the future of TV sets. With all those video streaming services that I want, I also would like integration with my lapop (or iPhone or iPad, or whatever other media consumption devices there are in the household). If I see a video on one of my devices, I’d like to be able to easily transfer that running stream onto my TV set. So, for instance, I am browsing TED and find a presentation that I’d like to continue watching while I do something else on an iPad (which I currently don’t own, but that is another topic). So then, I’d like to bounce the stream off to the TV set in the room I’m currently in and continue to use the iPad for other things.
And on the subject of transfers: I more often than not carry my iPhone on me. I can easily have my earphones plugged in there, and the cable not tangle with anything. So then, my laptop should link up with the audio output of the iPhone and transfer it’s sound out via the iPhone. That way, I could walk around and continue to listen to what I have on the computer — or just not be tied to the computer by means of headphone cable.
I’d like to be able to watch HD content, record and playback it at my leisure. And get HD content in such a way so that I can watch different HD channels on different TV sets concurrently, and without paying a monthly sum for every single device. We can do that now, with the plain analog cable service that we have. By means of cabling, we can distribute the signal to multiple TV sets. Anything but that would be a step backward, to my mind. It would be a great plus if the HD content could also be watched on laptops (and we have both Windows and Macintosh devices in the household, of which one Windows laptop regularly gets used for watching TV with a USB TV tuner), but that is even a secondary goal. I’d be happy if we could just get two TV sets. Of course, if we just had one media storage solution so that recordings of TV shows could be shown on any screen around, that would be a plus — but that seems to currently not be easily available.
It seems there’s still a great many challenges out there to get media stuff working conveniently and easily …
TV sets and online experience
August 3rd, 2010 by konrad No comments »It seems that TV sets that offer some form of web connectivity are the latest craze, right next with the 3D stuff that is not yet ready for consumption, at least to my mind. I say web connectivity because it’s about the web more than it is about internet connectivity — the TV sets are even a far cry from fully giving you a decent browser experience, let alone thinking about other protocols or applications. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing — but one still should be honest about what kind of experience a device is delivering.
What this is about, though, is that youtube is not enough. Of course it’s fun to look at various video clips and that one site is very rich in all the content it offers. Maybe, if the manufacturer is kind, they’ll also include other online video systems (vimeo, ustream.tv, or sevenload and myvideo.de in Germany) But as we all know, the web is filled with so many more opportunities. Being in the german TV market, I also want to be able to look at the online video offerings of the local TV stations; incidentally that also requires a Flash player on the device. I presume that other markets will have other offerings that the consumer might be interested in — a constant, steady battle for the manufacturer if the want to follow this all. And then, there’s video podcasts, there’s streaming stuff coming up that we don’t yet even dream about. A nightmare to keep current, even more of a nightmare if you have to keep pushing updates to the sets at the consumers constantly.
So we have established that the requirements for the TV online experience are high: Flash player, a decent full browser to support all the various offerings, a good update path to get new versions released (just imagine if IE6 had been distributed with every TV set that a certain manufacturer shipped five years ago, with no clear way for the customer to update). I think we’re getting dangerously close to having a full operating system on the TV set. And then we haven’t even touched integrating the normal TV services, video on demand, time-lapse watching, new ideas about pay per view.
Watching a home entertainment system for the living room certainly won’t be getting easier!
My code sucks.
August 2nd, 2010 by konrad No comments »Chasing a link via Twitter, I recently read Your code sucks. Having gone over a lot of other people’s code myself, and writing code for long enough to have a good history of my own work to go over, it resonated with me.
I recently had the mispleasure of debugging a piece of code that I wrote almost ten years ago. It was, in many ways, painful to read. Although I still use the same language as back then, things have way evolved: The language, for one. Development tools. (Well, not mine: I still use Emacs.) But most of all: My knowledge and my mental horizon in programming. I’ve looked at various other things to enrich my skill set, bringing to my own coding habits tools that work well in other languages. I also got to understand the tools I use better (especially database tools — those are so rich, and so few tools ever really use them). So, with that experience in mind: My code does suck. But I much prefer something that I wrote ten years ago to be painful to read, because it means that I have learned a lot. Even though I feel great satisfaction with the things I write today, I am sure that in another ten years time, I will look back at todays work and feel a slight sensation of being ashamed of what I did.
And this humbles me in reading other people’s code. It does not hurt to assume competency in others; they may have different routes they take in solving problems. But if one gets to think like they do, understand why they wrote the code the way that they did, that certainly may lead to your taking away something for yourself.
Now, if only everyone adhered to K&R indentation, I could read all the other people’s stuff so much more easily …
More basement finds …
June 15th, 2010 by konrad No comments »So if you thought that the last post dates me, see here. This is from the mid eighties, magnetic stripes to save stuff on. One stripe held all of 1.2 kb. What fun to remember!
URL shortening, a new approach
June 14th, 2010 by konrad No comments »There is an approach in URL shorteners that I have not yet seen, but think that has some merit: Store all the information for the URLs in a DNS zone. Store the URLs you point to as TXT records. The zone can then be pulled and perused at will. That way, data is never stored in just one companies database, you can just go in an pull those links that interest you. If the shortening engine then allows for user specific zones, you can just get to all the data you are interested in.
The prototype should not be so hard to get in shape.
Look what I found!
June 14th, 2010 by konrad No comments »Cleaning up the basement (because we had some water leaking in, but that is a different matter entirely), I found stuff that practically makes me feel ancient … 
