Category Archives: Geek

Dead Man Walking

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Palm has released its new Treo Pro, which turns out to be just another Treo-running-Windows (not Palm OS), with few if any new features, and a marginally slicker case.

However, the real fun comes with this tidbit: It’s being released without a carrier partner and is therefore unsubsidized; it costs $549, or hundreds more than virtually any competitor from Blackberry or Microsoft or Apple (remember, the 3G iPhone is $199). Sure, it’s unlocked as a consequence of this, but this means precisely squat to 95% of the cell-buying public.

Not quite as dumb as the famously-aborted Foleo, but awful close. Somebody put a bullet in these guys; they’re done.

Once again, Microsoft sets new standards in user-hostility

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The primary Heathen machine developed a hardware fault, so I’m working on a backup and was, until about an hour ago, happy using webmail for both personal and work stuff. Our work tool is Exchange, which means the webmail is Outlook Web Access (OWA). OWA is, generally, not awful, but I just ran into some pretty annoying shit.

One of our products uses an Access database to store some data. A client’s having a problem today, so they sent me their DB so I can try to track down the issue. No worries, right? You’d think that, but…

It turns out OWA blocks Access files as “potentially unsafe.” There appears to be no way to convince OWA to allow those files through. “Oh well,” I thought, “I’ll just set up an IMAP account.” IMAP is easy and simple and means my mail won’t get out of sync despite using multiple computers. For the sake of variety and education, I decided I’d try Entourage, Microsoft’s Mac-side Outlook-like thingy.

Setup was easy, but it took about 2 minutes before I wanted to strangle someone.

It turns out Entourage won’t let me have the database files, either. The help file says:

An attachment to a message was blocked.

Cause: For security reasons, Entourage blocks attachments that could potentially harm your computer.

  • Solution: If you do not trust that the attachment is safe, delete it from your computer.
  • Solution: If you trust the message sender and want to receive the attachment, ask the sender to compress the file and then send it to you again.

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot. MS is now fixing their absurdly broken OS’s security problems by crippling their mail programs. Delightful.

More

I did a bit more digging. It turns out that, if you Google long enough there is a way to disable this nanny feature, but it involves changing a .plist file inside the Entourage bundle in /Applications. It’s totally absurd to put editable settings in /Applications, but never mind that. (Also, this little “feature” is yet another example of how Microsoft is actually not interested in selling software that appeals to users; it’s interested in selling software that appeals to administrators, but what ever.) What’s even more fun is that the list of verboten filetypes is dominated with extensions that are meaningless in the Macintosh context. I can click all day on an EXE file, but it’s not going to run on OSX, so there’s little point in keeping me from downloading it. On the other hand, Office files can and do carry destructive payloads, but .DOC isn’t on the list. Yay Redmond!

Things that aren’t clever

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The Olympics video site is built such that it will only work on Intel Macs, not PowerPC Macs.

Based on my understanding of building Mac software, doing this means they made a choice to deliberately exclude the PPC machines (and there are still millions out there; Macs have long useful lives — Mrs Heathen’s laptop, for example, is one) when compiling the software. Apple’s build tools create so-called Universal binaries by default that work on both architectures. Someone at NBC or the Olympics is basically just being an asshole.

Today’s Needlessly Inflammatory Summary

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“Programmers today are mostly idiots because they’ve only been taught the Java link-a-library cargo-cult development method that’s little more than connect-the-dots.” Discuss.

Note: if you happen to be a non-idiot programmer — which is to say, you actually understand things like pointer math and stacks and interrupts, and you’ve actually written more than a dozen instructions of assembler or, god forbid, machine code, and you’ve actually attempted to work around operating system limitations like “DOS isn’t re-entrant,” and you understand endian concerns, then this development probably means you can command a higher salary and enjoy better job security. As a friend of mine once said, “I love stupid people. They make me look even smarter than I actually am.”

You may want to check those figures, Howie

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Via John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, we find this amusing story, wherein Sony CEO Howard Stringer contrasts Apple and Sony: “Apple is a marvelous company, but it is a boutique. We are a giant conglomerate.”

Well, maybe so, but here’s Gruber’s take:

As for just how giant, Sony’s current market cap is about $44 billion. The boutique’s market cap is about three times larger, at $149 billion. In terms of net income for the most recently reported financial year, Sony’s was $3.7 billion; Apple’s was $3.5 billion.

Heh.

Ooops

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Ten years ago, we all talked about putting Java in everything, even coffeepots, and having them on a household network for whatever reason. The Java part didn’t take, but now more and more household items are getting network capabilities — including, inevitably, coffee machines.

It turns out that such devices are really no different than anything else you put on your network, and that if you’re not careful, people will hack your coffeemaker.

Dept. of Neat Software

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Sometimes, I use my cell phone to call someone because it simplifies the process. My iPhone has all 600+ contacts in my address book in it; looking up a number there and dialing gets me talking to someone faster than looking up the number (on the phone or on my computer) and manually dialing the house phone. I can’t be the only person who does this. Trouble is, my office is on the first floor of a 3-story building, and my house is sheathed in metal, so my cell doesn’t work all that well in here.

The upshot is that I’ve often wished for a way to click a number in my address book and have it be dialed automatically. This used to be pretty common, when we all used modems, but who has a modem anymore?

Well, thanks to their sponsorship of Mac-blogger John Gruber over at Daring Fireball, I just discovered Dialectic. I tell it to dial any number from my address book, and sets up a connection using my Vonage account; my phone rings, I answer, and then other side starts ringing. How cool is that?

Even better: It plays nicely with Quicksilver, so talking to someone is never more than a couple keystrokes away. This is awesome.

It’s not just Vonage; this thing’ll work with damn near anything (Bluetooth cells, landlines, Asterisk systems, BroadVoice, CallVantage, CiscoIP, countless softphones like Skype, etc). It’s not free, but it’s cheap enough ($25) that I’m almost certain to buy it.

Oh, yeah: It’s Mac-only. Suck it, Windows dorks. LOL.

Apple: Made of Win

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The WWDC keynote was today, and Apple has just raised the bar for the entire mobile phone world in a way even more threatening to the smartphone status quo than the intro of the iPhone 1.0 last year. Even if we skip the SDK — and you shouldn’t, since what you can do with an iPhone makes all the other smartphones look stupid — it’s still a gamechanger.

The new software, for all iPhones, includes:

  • Bulk copy/move/delete operations
  • Contact search
  • Full iWork document support
  • Complete support for Word and Excel documents

Thereby closing some glaring usability gaps in an otherwise tremendous platform. (To be fair, most people don’t have 600 contacts in their phones — but I do, and that made me really miss search.)

Add to this a new service called MobileMe (replaces .Mac; $99/year) that provides over-the-air sync of not just email but also addresses and calendar data. It works with native Mac tools (iCal/Address Book) as well as PCs running Outlook, and includes access to incredibly rich web apps for all that data, in case you need it. Exchange + Blackberry Enterprise Server? Who needs that?

Additionally, iPhone 2.0 includes optional support for Exchange and Cisco VPNs out of the box, including the ability to remote-wipe a lost device.

That sound just then? Someone in Canada shitting their pants.

And that’s not all. The new iPhone 3G, as expected, got introduced today. It includes data speeds approach Wifi as well as an integrated GPS. It’s also slightly slimmer, has a flush headphone port, and the 8GB model is only $199. Available July 11 in the US (and 21 other countries; 48 other countries to follow).

I said I wouldn’t upgrade immediately, and I really meant it. I just got my iPhone a few months ago. But at $199 for the speed bump and GPS, it’ll be hard to say no. I’ll still wait for a month or two post-launch to ensure no problems surface, but DAMN.

Best Trek Wedding EVAR

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In the wake of the California ruling, George Takei and his partner of 20 years will wed in September. His best man? Walkter Koenig. Matron of honor? Nichelle Nichols.

This is really long, but really good

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Go here to read the whole thing, which includes some biz theory discussions of supplier power, adding value, commoditization of businesses, and related topics, but the money shot is the last line:

Why do I love Apple? They intend to make money because of my desires, not despite them.

Contrast ATT and Apple. AT&T wants to tie you to their network, and wants to make money from you at every turn. They’ll gladly fuck you over for an extra $30 a month, secure in the knowledge that you’re in a contract. Apple, on the other hand, damn near has a cult of motivated users who are actual FANS of the brand. This is why.

One of these options is a good business model. Guess which one.

Microsoft FAIL

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MS’s Xbox.com web site shunts me off to the Japanese version when I visit using Opera, presumably because of a flaw in their stupid browser-sniffing script. oops.

Spolsky isn’t always right, but this time he is

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The Geeky Heathen will want to go forth and consume Architecture Astronauts Take Over, in which Joel Spolsky speaks capital-T Truth about the tendency of well-funded corporate engineers to create solutions to problems that nobody wants:

It was seven years ago today [ed: Spolsky ran this 5/1] when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work together on your behalf and under your control.”

What was it, really? The idea that the future operating system was on the net, on Microsoft’s cloud, and you would log onto everything with Windows Passport and all your stuff would be up there. It turns out: nobody needed this place for all their stuff. And nobody trusted Microsoft with all their stuff. And Hailstorm went away.

I tried to coin a term for the kind of people who invented Hailstorm: architecture astronauts. “That’s one sure tip-off to the fact that you’re being assaulted by an Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!”

The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don’t solve an actual problem… they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems.

This is so true it hurts. He concludes:

…between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can’t think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. And dammit foosball doesn’t play itself.

The Future According to Clay Shirky

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Clay Shirky’s “Gin and the Cognitive Surplus” is really an amazing summary of at least one way of looking at where we are, now, societally, and how interactive, collaborative media is on the cusp of radically changing the societal landscape.

In this piece, Shirky talks a lot about how TV sort of came to the rescue of a suddenly (relatively) idle public in the postwar expansion, a public that never before had much in the way of “free time” to deal with. The sitcom was born, and we all watched, and we watched for decades, and people continue to spend a lot of time in this one-way medium. In so doing, we consumed, for a while, an enormous cognitive surplus. Instead of creating something new, we watched a shitload of TV.

Anyway, he continues to relate the story of an interview with a TV producer who wanted to see if he was suitable for the show in question. In answer to a question about what sorts of “interesting” things he was seeing online, he talked a bit about the flurry of activity around the Pluto Wikipedia page as the astronomy community shifted its categorization from “planet” to “nonplanet thing,” expecting the follow-up questions to be about authority, participation, collaboration, and the like. The TV producer’s response? “Where do people find the time?”

And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

It’s about participation, and how any level of participation — LOLCats! — is more engaging, more important, and fundamentally more interesting than what people have been doing with that time since “I Love Lucy” showed up. It’s not all LOLCats, though. Social networks are already powerful and interesting, for example. If we use some tiny percentage of our TV time to do something participatory, something collaborative, something interesting and creative, how long before one of those somethings dwarfs Wikipedia and social networking in net value? Of course, TV people don’t want to hear any of this, but it’s almost certainly true.

Shirky ends with a fantastic anecdote that has this as its punchline:

Here’s what four-year olds know: a screen that ships without a mouse ships BROKEN. Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.

WORD.

(Warren Ellis has the video here, which is worth watching.)

What we talk about when we talk about llamas

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In a brief phone call with Mrs Heathen, we discussed how many llamas there are named “Dolly.”

Mrs Heathen suggested that, while it’s true that expressing it as a percentage of the total llama population does neatly sidestep the need to know exactly how many llamas exist, llama population distribution also influences name statistics. If llamas are mostly in large groups, then there will be more names used less frequently; a llama farmer is unlikely to name two of his own llamas the same thing. On the other hand, if llamas are mostly in smaller groups, each such group could have its own “Dolly Llama,” and the overall percentage of Dollys is likely to be higher.

None of this, however, properly accounts for any large-scale industrial llama husbandry, where we presume the llamas aren’t named at all, though if we stipulate that we’re discussing only the universe of named llamas, we’re back on solid ground.

Things Worth Considering

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Travel a bunch? Consider signing up with Dopplr, which — in addition to being yet another victim of the vicious web 2.0 anti-E hysteria — helps you figure out whom you may know who’s also travelling to the same places.

In which we go all geeky about whiners somewhere else

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The Consumerist is great fun, but sometimes they, or their commenting public, kind of miss the mark — as they do in this story about a declined check at a K-Mart.

S. wrote a check at Kmart earlier this month and it was denied. No reason was given—just “denied.” It turns out a separate company, Certegy, made the decision, so S.—who writes, “I’ve never had a bounced check”—tried to track down someone at Certegy who could tell her what was wrong with her checks.

Cry me a river. First, you’re writing checks in 2008? Seriously, WTF?

More seriously, though, what the whiner ran into was a risk-based turndown. This post describes something that’s pretty common in the check verification industry. I used to work in software development for Telecheck, but it’s been a long time. The basics of the business are probably unchanged, though.

Back then (late 1990s), TCK had two main products for merchants:

  1. Their flagship guarantee product; and
  2. A verification-and-collections product that was cheaper.

Guarantee cost a percentage of each processed transaction, but it meant that if TCK issued an approval code, then the merchant was covered — if the check went bad, Telecheck paid him anyway, and collected the money plus the bounce fee on the back end.

Verification-and-collection was just what it sounds like: they’d run checks at POS, and approve or deny against the same database (with some differences), but bad checks were just bad checks. The merchant would only get paid for them if TCK managed to collect, minus a commission.

So, when a check is run through the system, the first thing that happened was a search for any actual negative data. For TCK, you’re negative pretty much only if you actually owe TCK money and/or the bounce fee. People who bounce checks and then pay TCK later after a paper notice are TCK’s favorite people (think about it), so neg-data turndowns only happened if you had an open item; that turndown was called a Code 4. Owe Telecheck money, or owe a Telecheck verification client money? No checkwriting for you. Don’t? No neg data. Knock yourself out.

That was the end of the story, as I recall it, for verification customers.

However, with guarantee, actual risk analysis turndowns came into play for people without neg data. As a boss of mine used to say, there are two kinds of bad checks: people borrowing money, and people committing fraud. The former are collectable, and the latter aren’t. The trick is knowing which is which.

To try and eliminate fraud, they used scorecards. There used to be a single checkwriting scorecard, across all SIC (essentially, type of merchant) codes, published by (I think) Fair-Isaacs. TCK developed a whole bunch more, since it turns out that LOTS of factors correlate to the relative riskyness of an unknown checkwriter, for example:

  • Men are riskier than women
  • Younger people are riskier than older people
  • New accounts are riskier than established accounts
  • Low check numbers are riskier than higher check numbers
  • Checks written at the end of the day, or in particular Friday afternoon, are riskier than checks from earlier in the business day/week.
  • Etc.

Obviously, too, some merchandise is riskier than others. Subwoofers are risky. Carrots aren’t. All this intelligence — and there was a half a floor in Houston full of very smart people doing the analysis behind this — came into play only for guarantee customers, since it was actually Telecheck’s money getting risked there.

Getting a risk-based turndown from TCK meant you looked too dicey for them to say, absolutely, we’re gonna cover this check for the merchant. The merchant could, of course, decide to take it anyway (but would get no guarantee), and will certainly suggest another form of payment, but TCK just doesn’t want any part of it. For Telecheck, the risk turndowns were Code 3.

Now, back then, some other companies were trying to also do risk management turndowns, but they’d do stupid things like simple velocity turndowns (“no more than N checks in Y period of time”), which is mathematically indefensible, or even simple cumulative price limits (also stupid). TCK had LOTS of years of actual POS data to draw from to create valid predictive models, which is what made them the higher-end provider back then.

So, at the end of the day, risk turndowns are just that: risk management. I don’t know anything about these new companies in the check verification market, and (as I said) my TCK insider knowledge is a decade old, but back then the whole code 3 thing wasn’t surprising or weird to me. It seemed like good business based on the inherent riskiness of checks and the inventive product (for the time) that TCK was selling (guarantee). Sure, people whined about it, but TCK wasn’t and isn’t in business to make checkwriters happy. They’re in business to make sure POS checks are as safe as possible for their clients.

Endnote: Since college, I’ve never written POS checks, even when I worked for TCK. Too much trouble. Amex uber alles.

Dept. of Geeky References

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I totally didn’t notice until it was pointed out to me, but on Friday’s Battlestar Galactica, four characters meet clandestinely in “weapons locker 1701D.”

ZOMG!

What? You don’t get it? Ah. I forget, sometimes, that not all the Accumulated Heathen are orthodox geeks. Naming the locker thusly was a deliberate shout-out to that oldest of geek tribes, the Trekkies. Every iteration (well, except one) of the Star Trek “Enterprise” has been numbered some variant of “NCC-1701.” Wikipedia helps us with the lore (no, not the Lore):

Missing from this list is the version captained by the dude from Quantum Leap in the wholly forgettable and blessedly short-lived Enterprise series; since there are no letters before “A,” even in the Star Trek universe, that ship was the Enterprise NX-01.

Old but worth reading

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A little while ago, this essay about working on the Donkey Kong Atari port surfaced online, and since then it’s been sitting in an unread tab in my browser. I’m in allergy hell today, though, so I’m cleaning house, which means I’m finally posting it here. Enjoy, my geekly brethren.