I highly recommend those of you interested in the whole WikiLeaks kerfuffle to read Bruce Sterling’s article The Blast Shack. I think he’s hit on some strange socio-political conservation law where the Internet and the New World Order are variables in an equation that is trying to balance out. The problem is there are other terms in the equation that will be irrevocably cancelled and lost. A fairly down-beat assesment but very thought provoking.
A lot of people have been asking me if I will switch when the iPhone is available on the Verizon Wireless network. The short answer: Probably not. Here is my thinking. First, I’m assuming there is a huge pent-up demand for the iPhone on Verizon. That will consist of existing Verizon customer and a slew of disgruntled AT&T customers who have been itching to switch because of AT&T’s less than stellar network. This is going to mean a ton of new subscribers hitting the Verizon network with data hungry iPhones. I have a feeling Verizon’s cellular network will bend and probably break under the strain. So the Verizon network might get worse for the first few quarters while it’s under rapid expansion of subscribers and the load on the network increases. There hasn’t been a CDMA version of the iPhone so we are not sure how it will behave on that network. The result may be a poor network experience for all those new switchers. Second, I have to buy a new phone. My existing iPhone won’t work on the Verizon network so I’ll have to buy a new phone and new plan with Verizon. Which means I’ll have to cover two plans at once. Just to switch to Verizon. Not terrible but not ideal. Finally, I remember all the issues that AT&T had with activations when they first launched the iPhone a few years ago. We don’t know the details but there were a lot of processes between Apple and AT&T that weren’t fully baked and tested. The first few months were a bit rough for users with activation problems. Apple can certainly bring a ton of experience to bear but Verizon is new to the iPhone. I anticipate glitches in the Apple/Verizon backend system integration that might cause issues for new switchers. So I’m going to uncharacteristically sit on the sidelines for this launch. I have been happier with AT&T service over the past 6 months. It seems to be getting better, although I haven’t traveled to Mountain View lately. It’s been working very well in the NYC Metro area. Who knows. Maybe all those folks fleeing AT&T just might give us some more bandwidth and improve quality of service for those of us left behind on AT&T.
I don’t often see eye to eye with Ron Paul (senior or junior) but thank god someone in congress is making sense. Thanks to sean808080 for the toot!
The crux of the WikiLeaks debate via Salon
Glenn Greenwald really understands this issue. The link above points to a page with text and audio. Keep you mind open, read, and listen
Salesforce.com Buys Heroku For $212 Million In Cash via TechCrunch
I’ve never used Heroku but I’ve always known it to be the premier solution for hosting Ruby apps in the cloud. The acquisition by Salesforce.com is interesting from the standpoint that Sf.com cloud app solutions have been primarily Java based. I think their broadening their strategy, and potential user-base, by opening up to more languages. Java dominates the enterprise (Yes, I know that’s a dirty word in the Ruby community.) application space which is traditional ground for Sf.com. Presumably, vmforce, Sf.com’s Java cloud app solution will service the bulk of their customers. I don’t see how they can simply merge the two services but it will be interesting to watch this evolve.
Update: Heroku CEO Talks About Salesforce, Future via GigaOM
Heroku apparently has over 100,000 apps hosted. That’s damn impressive if they aren’t loosing money on every customer. According to the Heroku CEO, Sf.com want them to “keep doing their thing”, which should soothe the fears of those using the service. So that indicates that Sf.com will be providing a “right cloud for the right job” rather than a “one cloud to rull them all” approach. Possibly better for users but less efficient for Sf.com to run multiple businesses using different technologies.
Another great article on how terrorism is psychological warfare and how the US has taken the bait.
Bruce Schneier – Close the Washington Monument
Terrorism isn’t a crime against people or property. It’s a crime against our minds, using the death of innocents and destruction of property to make us fearful. Terrorists use the media to magnify their actions and further spread fear. And when we react out of fear, when we change our policy to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed – even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we’re indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail – even if their attacks succeed.
If you are only going to read one article on the TSA, please read this one.
How our “security” obsession costs us
“The terrorists never have to strike an actual target. It’s not even incumbent upon them to build a bomb that works. Just about anything will do. To be successful, they just have to repeatedly send things in our direction, inciting the expectable Pavlovian reaction from the U.S. national security state, causing it to further tighten its grip (grope?) at yet greater taxpayer expense.”
The more I think about WikiLeaks the more convinced I become that this is an organization trying to do good. I believe that in releasing the Iraqi War Papers or the latest dump of State Department Cables Wikileaks is shedding light into the inner workings of our own government. While I do believe there is need for secrecy and confidentiality in many government operations I believe this capability is given by mandate of the people. If the government is operating counter to the will, or in a way detrimental to the well-being of the people, this capability can and should be taken away. The government operating in secrecy, without proper oversight, and accountability to the people becomes a government that is prone to wrong-doing, deceit, and in severe cases treason. When the government operates this way its every citizens duty to repeal the mandate of power by means granted to us in the constitution. That includes whistle-blowing and leaking information to the press. Whistle-blowing helped bring an end to the Viet-nam War, the corrupt Nixon administration, and were instrumental in breaking down the power of tobacco companies. So how different is Daniel Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times from someone in the military leaking the Iraq War papers to Julian Assange? Not much if you think about it.
Like a lot of gamers out there I’ve been logging my fair share of hours (and kills) in Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops. You know, the game that recently grossed about 650 million the weekend it was released? The game where you join in hours of endless, deadly, pretend combat, in savage team death matches. Yeah, that one. You can imagine how fascinated I was when I came across the article Moral Relativism in a Black Ops World, and being better humans by Jeffrey MacCormack. The first half of the article read like criticism of the typical players behavior in multiplayer online combat. I think most people would be somewhat shocked by the behavior of some of my in-game compadres. I mean how do you explain to a normal person that your opponent is heaping on generous helpings of humiliation on you by pretending to tea-bag your now bullet riddled body? Kind of hard to wrap your mind around if you don’t play, but the second half of the article is a bit more interesting. MacCormack suggests that all the attention Call of Duty (CoD) is garnering these days may be co-opted to change the real world for the better. What’s the cause he wants my fellow couch-bound war fighters to tackle? Child soldiers. More specifically, helping to reduce the types of weapons that make child soldiers even possible. I had never considered that it wouldn’t really be impractical to use a child as a soldier without a weapon that a small person could fire. It turns out that small machine guns (SMGs) are the weapon of choice dictators and warlords use to equip these poor children and they are pretty common in CoD. MacCormack would like CoD players to contact Treyarch support and ask them to remove SMGs from the next version of CoD. An in game embargo won’t change the real world situation but it might draw big media attention to the problem. I would suggest that even a half step might help. Just ban the use of SMGs in the game for a week. I know a lot of players would bitch about that but it would be for a good cause. It might just cause a minor media frenzy. I can visualize Wolf Blitzer covering the story on the Situation Room. It’s a great article. Read it and if you feel so inclined, take action.
Going Google has now become a possibility for the individual. Google is in the early stages of making more of there services available to Google Apps accounts holders. That means the differences between a standard Google account and a Google Apps account are being erased. In the past services like Google Analytics, Adwords, Blogger, and Picasa could not be used by Google Apps account holders. If you wanted to use those services you had to use a standard, personal, Google Account. This makes the decision to create a Google Apps account for a “prosumer” a no brainer. Why sign up for a personal account with a generic ‘@gmail.com’ address when you can sign up for a Google Apps account with your own personal domain? It certainly boosts the stock value of a Google Apps account.
Over the long weekend my three year old Canon printer gave up the ghost. Some kind of power supply problem. Normally I would be upset but the event simply gave me a perfect excuse to buy a new printer. Since I recently updated all my iOS devices to 4.2, that new printer would be one that supports ePrint which would let me print from my recently updated iPhone or iPad.
I found the iOS: AirPrint 101 doc from Apple very helpful. It told me exactly what printers supported AirPrint. Be forewarned. Not all ePrint compatible printers support AirPrint. Stick to the list supplied by Apple. I settled on the HP PHOTOSMART PLUS e-All-IN-ONE B210. It not only supported ePrint but wifi, decent photo printing, and scanning. It’s perfect for a home printer.
Configuring the printer hardware took about 5 minutes. Nothing out of the ordinary. The printer chugged along, cycling through diagnostics, finally prompting me to configure the wireless connection. Once that was complete, the printer emitted a diagnostic page with some information about the ePrint setup. (More about this below.) On each of my Mac OS X machines I installed the drivers, added the printer, and printed a test page or two. Each worked fine.
There is nothing to install on your iOS devices to take advantage of AirPrint. You just need to update to iOS 4.2 and AirPrint should just work. I used the aforementioned AirPrint 101 doc as a guide. My tests with the standar apps (Mail and Safari) were fine and went as advertised. I was also able to view the print queue right from my iOS device by double pressing the home button and tapping on the AirPrint “app” running in the multitasking area of the iPhone and iPad. Everything just worked. The only disappointing bit was printing from Pages. That didn’t work or at least there was no print button off the share button. I also tried Numbers and Keynote. No joy there as well. I have updated the apps recently so I’m not sure when these apps will have the print button. I would think Apple would have included this in the last update.
There is a workaround for apps that don’t have the print button. The ePrint configuration on the HP printer creates a special, Internet accessible, email address. It looks something like asdf123asdf@hpeprint.com. If you email documents to that email address it will print on your printer. It’s a great feature but you need to make sure you lock down just what email addresses can send to your printer. Anyone that knows the email address can print to your ePrint printer. As a safety measure, HP allows you to restrict what email addresses can send jobs to the printer. This setup is pretty simple and the instructions are printed on that first page the printer prints at the end of the hardware setup. I tested this from Numbers and it worked fine. A bit annoying but it’s functional.
Overall I’m quite happy with AirPrint so far. The HP printer works great. Apps that support Airprint work flawlessly. While I’m waiting for the rest of the apps I care to print from to support it, I can use the standard ePrint via email. But like all things iOS this is just going to get better as time passes. Pretty magical, eh?
When most people who don’t use Twitter (let’s call them “normals”) find out I have a Twitter account they always ask, “What do you use it for?”. Most of the information here is meant for “normals”. The twitterati will find most of this information old hat. Twitter is a feed of information from friends or other people/services I find interesting. I scan this feed for anything that I may find useful
or amusing.
Because the information is usually “real-time” Twitter is a great way to keep on top of things that are happening now.
The half-life of a “tweet” is usually pretty small. That last tweet above is probably terribly old but at the time I wrote this post it was hot. Tweets are the freshest of fresh news and like fresh mozzarella it’s best consumed ASAP before it gets hard and dry. The quality of the tweets in your Twitter feed is going to be directly proportional to the quality of the people you follow in Twitter. The people I follow come from many backgrounds from technology, news, and the arts. I also subscribe to friends and other acquaintances because sometimes Twitter is the best place to get real-time updates on what’s happening with them.
No matter where they are in the world. Twitter is an amazing tool. You can read tweets right at http://twitter.com but most people use a Twitter client on their desktop. I happen to use Tweetie on my Mac. Twitter is also great on mobile devices since you can read and post right from the palm of your hand when you are on the go. I use the official Twitter client on my iPhone when I’m on the road or just standing in line somewhere. There are a lot of Twitter clients out there. You should try out a bunch and use the one that’s right for you. Twitter is read/write. So besides consuming the information in my Twitter feed I post often. I try to post things that people may find interesting.
Sometimes my posts are just what I’m doing or where I happen to be at the time.
Other times its just for fun.
That last tweet, besides containing an embedded link to a photo, shows off how Twitter is integrated to other applications. Twitter is everywhere and can be integrated into all kinds of sites and tools. My tweets are automatically sent to Facebook. Twitter is remarkable but like all tools born of the Internet you have to spend some time working with it before you’ll get any utility out of it. There is no wrong way to use Twitter although if you post too much nonsense you may find your posts ignored and yourself very lonely. The worst thing you can do is ignore it before you’ve given it a decent test drive. So do some research and give it a go.
I fly a lot. It’s an occupational necessity. When the TSA was first introduced after 9/11 I though it was a good idea to have stepped up and consistent security procedures at our airports. So after years of dealing with the TSA, I believe we now have a system that is clearly out of control. We have all heard the TSA horror stories. At first they were few and far between but now it seems like I hear of these transgressions on a weekly basis. The latest incident at San Diego International Airport I find particularly distasteful and alarming. Full body scanners? Invasive unwarranted search? What’s next? The body scanners the TSA wants to deploy are slow, potentially harmful (especially for frequent flyers), and a violation of our rights. The TSA and other agencies say they can’t and won’t store those images, but there are no guarantees those scanner images won’t turn up on the Internet. It’s time to stop this madness. Start at Fly with Dignity. Get involved. Get educated. Then call you senator and congress person and ask them to take action. It only takes a few minutes to register a policy concern and it does have an effect. I had an hour of my live back when a customer cancelled a conference call so I called my senators and my congressman. I was done in 15 minutes and that includes contacting my state legislators. Here in NJ we have a local resolution to send a signal to legislators at the national level to stop the deployment of these body scanners in our airports. There has got to be a better way. Stepping up questioning at airports is probably a better idea.
I’m up too late but I don’t have much to do tomorrow. I’ll be riding jet plane east; home-ward bound. What’s keeping me up is the download. I bought the Beatles complete catalog on iTunes and since I’m on the road connected to the Internet via a slow hotel link, this is taking longer than I’d like. I’m playing them as they download. They are coming in chronological “release date” order. I’m only at “Hard Day’s Night”. I’ve owned this music in different forms vinyl, 8-track, cassette, and CDs. Those physical objects have been lost, sold, and some re-purchased as CDs and imported into my digital music library. Not all of it. I’ve never had it all in one place or in one format until now. I was always too broke or too busy to gather every track and import it into my library. That’s been remedied. One click and it’s all over but the downloading. I’m grateful Apple and Apple have been able to come to an agreement. It’s made my life easier. This hasn’t been a day I’ll remember forever and it isn’t a revolution. It should have happened long ago. That being said, one of my musical wishes has been granted today. Since wishes normally come in threes, I have two more wishes to tempt the muses and the powers that be in the music business tonight. The first is that the release of the Beatles on iTunes will expose more young kids to this music. Trust me kids. Listen to it. It’s good for you. My second wish is that the Zappa family and Apple come together (no pun intended) to make the complete works of Frank Zappa available on iTunes. Woohoo! Here comes Revolver! Good night folks.