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Negative Space

Dangling participles left after today’s introduction of the iPhone. What exactly does Apple mean by “Runs OS X?” A stripped down version, or the Full Monty? If a stripped down version, where else might this “OS X Lite” run? Where is the SDK? What will it take to recompile existing OS X software for it? Has it got Java? Why GSM rather than CDMA? Will Widgets run as-is? Why have they hitched their wagon to a single carrier, rather than selling an unlocked phone? Does it include a corkscrew?

Sometimes it seems like Apple puts as much effort into deciding exactly how transparent / opaque they should be as they do into design. Negative information space surrounding a visible hub, carefully sculpted to encourage speculation.

Just switched to Sprint a few months ago, and am locked in for the long haul. Shame too, since Cingular offered a similar discount to UC employees; could easily have swung that way. Wearing a phone on one hip and an iPod on the other strangely seems much more awkward today than it did yesterday.

Two good reads:

Tom Evslin: Apple Fails to Reinvent Telecommunications Industry – Too Bad.

Imran Ali, with both dancing praise and concerns about openness (or lack thereof): Yay! iPhone!

Music: The John Doe Thing :: Tragedy by Definition
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Tagging Shark Fin Soup

oceana.org on shark fin soup:

Shark finning involves cutting off the shark’s fins while it is still alive, and then tossing the body back into to the sea, dead or dying. Finning only utilizes 2 – 5 percent of the entire animal, throwing away sources of protein and potential commercial and medicinal products. Up to 73 million sharks are killed every year to support the international shark fin market, threatening already overexploited shark populations around the world. Sharks are slow-growing and long-lived animals, and often their populations cannot bounce back from the incredible fishing pressure placed upon them for their fins. In fact, one-fifth of all shark species are considered threatened with extinction according to the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN) 2006 Red List of Threatened Species.

Oceana’s campaign to convince Amazon.com to remove shark fin soup has apparently been effective. The two pages I found on the site selling shark fin soup are both marked “This item is currently not available.”

Interestingly, the campaign seems to have been two-pronged — the usual email letter writing, as well as consumers using Amazon’s tagging and rating features to weigh in. Both items are currently ranked with just one out of five stars, and include tags like these:

Sharkfintags

The read/write web in action. Of course Amazon isn’t the world’s only purveyor of cruelty-generated food, but it is an important one.

Music: The Streets :: Don’t Mug Yourself
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Earthlink Dropping 80% of Email

Robert Cringely on the devastating effect botnets are having on large ISPs:

Swimming upstream through Earthlink customer support, my buddy finally found a technical contact who freely acknowledged the problem. Since June, he was told, Earthlink’s mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. It isn’t bounced back to senders; it just disappears. And Earthlink hasn’t mentioned the problem to these affected customers unless they complain.

If you study the terms and conditions of your ISP’s service contract, you’re increasingly likely to find a caveat to the effect of “We do not guarantee the delivery of any email message.” AOL’s EULA has been saying this for years, but the practice is spreading.

The botnets are winning. There’s even a front-page story in the NY Times about the subject today.

Music: The Residents :: Breath and Length
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Google Inner Space

John Battelle speculates about another way Google could apply their Google Earth technology — imagine the vast libraries of electron microscope photography that’s been amassed in the fields of biology and physics, or all of the micro-camera footage captured by doctors traveling through patients’ blood streams and colons, being applied as a sort of MicroSpace or InnerSpace mapping service, allowing anyone anywhere to “fly” through the micro-world of virtually anything. It’s a fascinating idea.

Music: The Streets :: The Irony Of It All
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Human Body Store

Miles: If you want a tummy you have to buy one at the human body store.
Me: What else can you get there?
Miles: Noses, ears, hair. Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes!
Me: How much does a tummy cost?
Miles: Ten
Me: Ten what?
Miles: Ten dollars.
Me: How much is a dollar?
Miles: A dollar is ten cents.
Me: What else can you buy with a dollar?
Miles: Toes.
Me: What if you need fingers to go with the toes?
Miles: Fingers are a little bit bigger than toes so fingers cost five cents.
Me: And what else could you do with the money?
Miles: We’ll give it to the animal shelter.
Me: Why do the animals need it?
Miles: Because the animals have nothing to buy.
Me: How much do you think a dog costs?
Miles: Because a dog is big a dog costs… [goes to weigh and measure himself, determines his height by holding a tape measure horizontally across his head]… now my head is bigger than last time!
Me: How big is your head now?
Miles: [Makes a circle with his arms to indicate 2 feet around] … A dog costs forty cents.
Me: What’s bigger – cents or dollars?
Miles: Cents.
Me: What kind of store would you go to if you wanted to buy a tail?
Miles: Daddy, I can make a notebook with my hands – watch! [scribbles in his palm] …

Music: The London Symphony Orchestra & Chambre Choir with Guest Soloists :: Sally Simpson
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SoftRAID

Returned from vacation to a struggling XServe (at work, not Birdhouse) — the main boot drive had quietly filled to capacity, and for some reason the email alert system had not kicked in. Fortunately we had recently decided to upgrade the server to a RAID 1 configuration. I had ordered a pair of 500GB Apple Drive Modules before I left, and the delivery dude arrived right as we were in the middle of clearing up space. The universe smiles.

I had done some research on software RAID solutions for OS X Server, and was hearing great things about SoftRAID. Yes, OS X includes built-in RAID software, but this comparison between Apple’s RAID and SoftRAID had me sold.

There are a zillion ways to set things up, but the process turned out to be incredibly smooth. Disabled services to prevent data changing during the upgrade, installed the drives into bays #3 and #4 in the XServe, initialized and grouped them to RAID 1 with SoftRAID, used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the existing drive onto the new volume, set the new RAID volume as the startup disk in system preferences, shut down, ejected the original drive, and brought the system back up. The whole process took two hours, and everything was running like butter. Well worth $129.

Music: Blind Willie McTell :: It’s A Good Little Thing
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200 Calories

Wisegeek presents dozens of images of foodstuffs, apportioned to the equivalent of exactly 200 calories. Most of it is about what I expected, but some images are surprising. For example I was surprised that eggs aren’t higher in calories than they are, and conversely that Hershey’s Kisses are so high. Two entire onions, or one teaspoon of peanut butter? A big plate of kiwi fruit, or half of a cheeseburger?

I’ve never thought much about calories, but can tell that middle age will soon make it mandatory. I’ve definitely become more carb-sensitive over the past year – digesting bread-y stuff exhausts me.

Music: James Chance & The Contortions :: Throw Me Away
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Total Fag

Alternet collects the Most Outrageous Right Wing Comments of 2006, including this doozy from one of America’s most transparent nutjobs, Ann Coulter:

Coulter responding to Hardball host Chris Matthews’ question, “How do you know that [former President] Bill Clinton’s gay?”: “I don’t know if he’s gay. But [former Vice President] Al Gore — total fag.”

Other gems include Michael Savage asserting that Wolf Blitzer “would stick Jewish children into a gas chamber,” Rush Limbaugh blaming the obesity epidemic on liberals, and Debbie Schlussel questioning where Barak Obama’s loyalties would be as president, being that his dad is a Muslim and all. More at the site.

Music: The Roches :: Nurds
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Chinese Motorcycle Industry

“The price of Chinese motorcycles built for the rapidly expanding Asian export market has dropped to $200 (U.S.) on average, from $700.” The Chinese motorcycle industry is breaking the stranglehold of the Japanese market not just with lower manufacturing costs, but by decentralizing — no, by removing — the centralized corporation.

Unlike traditional manufacturing industries, where tightly regimented production hierarchies spit out end products under the command of a single leader, the Chinese motorcycle industry consists of hundreds of different companies that collaborate on motorcycle design and manufacturing. The approach has been so successful that Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha, once dominant throughout Asia, have lost 40 per cent of their market share in the past 10 years.

The motorcycle market in China today is a series of points, loosely joined — one group makes frames, another speedometers, another engines. The business of collaborative design and self-organizing alliances is conducted over pots of tea in the back rooms of restaurants. One group does sales, another distribution, another customer support. Everyone gets their slice of the pie, interchange is optimized, and there is no single controlling body for the process. Linux-like, in ways.

Interestingly (inevitably?) collaborators sometimes capitalize on the the name-brand market positions of the very Japanese counterparts whose business they’re killing (check out the “Hongda Waze,” which competes with the “Honda Wave”), much as KDE and Gnome, also produced through mass collaboration, are basically knock-offs of the Windows UI.

Music: Rev. Moses Mason :: John The Baptist
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WP Predictions

On the WP-Hackers mailing list, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg offers 7 WP predictions for 2007:

* We’ll do 3 major point releases
* People will start Wordcamps around the globe
* WP will become the #1 used tool on the Technorati 100
* Daily spam will be 10x what it is today
* WYSIWYG will no longer annoy savvy writers
* Several new WP-based companies will start
* We’ll figure out the whole plugin/theme directory thing

10x more comment spam? I don’t doubt it, but scary indeed when you look at Akismet’s graphs showing the rise of comment spam through 2006.

See also Heise Security’s half-serious-but-plausible 2007 in Review.

Music: Lennie Tristano/Lee Konitz/Warne Marsh :: Mean To Me