Apple Employee Fired For Thinking Different | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
Apple spokespersons said the firing was necessary because Barlow “consistently failed to adhere to the normal standards of conduct and daily routines expected of employees of Apple Computer.”

Among the floutings of convention cited in Barlow’s Apple employee file: developing a pulley system to store his mountain bike above his workstation, listening to Bob Dylan on his headphones while testing software, and taking barefoot walks around the Apple campus to “feel more connected to the creative energy of others.”

“It’s okay to think outside the box,” said Avie Tevanian, Apple senior vice-president of software engineering. “In fact, we very much encourage that sort of thing here at Apple. But in Mr. Barlow’s case, he went just a bit too far.”

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Hi Peter,

ObDisclaimer: I work for Sun, but this is really *neat*: it’s a demonstration of what happens when you shout at hard disks / other loud noises, visualised as performance impact - watch the latency spikes: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

It makes you think…. maybe “audio tempest” next? A sort of inverse of http://www.vimeo.com/1109226?pg=embed ?

-alec

hat tip: http://andyleonard.com/

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Slate asks what does it mean that the top Amazon laptop sellers are netbooks. It is pretty stark, the top 20 sellers are windows netbooks or Macs, you have to get to #21 before a full size Windows laptop makes an appearance. It probably means that low priced laptops are capturing a lot of attention in an economy where everyone is concerned about costs, and also that the portfolio of top selling Windows laptops are stale while netbooks are new and fashionable.

I commented on Jeff’s blog posting:

I find the thought that the netbook craze is credit-crunch driven to be utterly laughable; since 1997 I have been trying to find the “perfect” laptop, in which time I have fitted out a Toshiba Libretto with a 30Gb hard disk, done a 2 week vacation trip to the USA with a Nokia N800 and Bluetooth Keyboard combination, bought a MacBook Air, and obtained an OLPC.

I have *always* wanted a smaller laptop than the “budget” machines on offer between 1999 and 2007, because the budget machines sucked. In some ways the perfect machine for me (of its era) was my 12″ polycarbonate iBook 700MHz G3 - except that it was an Apple and too damn expensive to do the sorts of things I wanted from a small laptop.

I wanted to go motorbiking with it. I wanted to sling it in a backpack and still have room. I wanted to drop it and not cry, risk spilling coffee on it, use it, blog from it, travel with it, create stuff on it, and above all not have to suffer bloody Windows XP.

I still have not found the perfect laptop for me, though the MacBook Air is damned close; Blackberries are too small and too limited, the OLPC is too slow but would give a toughbook a run for its money. The N800 is lovely but has an ARM processor and is too weird.

But it’s not the credit crunch.

The reason I know this is that I have a counterexample - in the middle of all this, around 2005 I bought a cheap R-series Thinkpad with a 13″ screen; in all ways it is bigger than the 12″ iBook and it’s as tough as old boots; an archetype of good cheap laptops it is one of the last of the IBM range, and works well… but it’s a damned tank and impossible to travel with. It weighs a ton, dominates any knapsack into which it is dropped, and comes with a enormous power brick.

Not a bikers / cyclists / casual travellers weekend laptop.

So: cheap, intel, small, light - pick any three, until the OLPC arrived and the vendors finally decided to change the size of their default parts set. Hurrah for the netbook, and I hope the vendors work out that the mistake was in letting their accountants design their earlier hardware.

ps: I also find the Slate author to be rather lacking in imagination (”plug in a USB keyboard” - for heaven’s sake) - I did a presentation about the future thin client at http://blip.tv/file/422428 more than a year ago, and although it’s already showing its age (flash memory heading to overtake disks) it still makes sense to me and is rather more exciting than Slate’s vision…

Netbooks: Something we always wanted... is syndicated from dropsafe.

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http://www.musingsforadarkenedroom.com/social-media/i-just-became-a-statisti-in-a-social-experiment/
http://morouxshi.com/2008/10/27/aim-the-trout-salmon-coho-screenname-and-how-to-stop-it/
http://www.guidetoworlddomination.com/2008/10/aim-coho-salmon-trout-bots/

…which tell you what it is and how to turn it off.

If you are getting Coho-spam on AIM... is syndicated from dropsafe.

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• a ream of paper
• a box of sharpies
• a small digital camera

…the resultant JPEGs can be created in seconds, mailed to anyone, and the videos can be posted to blip.tv, and they last virtually forever.

The results are ugly but they work, and have a charm of their own.

The most effective communication tool that I possess... is syndicated from dropsafe.

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There’s been a been a thread on Perry Metzger’s “CRYPTOGRAPHY” maillist, about “Why the poor uptake of encrypted email?”.

There was the usual citation of “Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt” (summary: cryptography is hard for people to grasp and harder for programmers to make user-friendly) - but because of my work on Adriana’s Mine Project I see another reason which is not really covered in the paper.

To try drive the point home I submitted my response encrypted under rot13, and bless him Perry was kind enough to post it on verbatim without querying it.

So what I have done by “protecting” that message with cryptography is deny it indexing by Google (cf: deny it integrated search like Spotlight) - make it harder to find, read, quote… all the same side-effects that “secure” e-mail imposes upon a secure e-mail’s recipients in pursuit of solving a transport security problem.

I attach the (unencrypted) body of the e-mail, below; the final few paragraphs are the key ones for the next decade of computing.

I believe there are some fundamental axioms, or postulates of computing that are flat-out wrong - or will be, soon - but which strongly inform our notions of “how computing should be”; to me these are like the the “parallel postulate” of Euclidean geometry - when they fall, when the world suddenly sees their “self-evident” nature is false, then exciting things will happen.

What are these computational parallel-postulates? Stuff like:

1. users can’t be online 24×7 (cf: ADSL, hosting providers)
2. (also phrased as) connection time is prohibitively expensive (ie: dial-up)
3. users are not able / not allowed to serve information to third-parties (cf: blogs, feeds, apache)
4. users can’t afford to host a server to act upon their behalf (cf: hosting, iPhone)
5. users can’t store heaps of data (cf: terabyte hard disks)
6. secure end-to-end communication is not possible between servers / across the internet (cf: im, skype)
7. the client-server programming model means we should implements hierarchies, not peer-to-peer meshes (iTunes Store vs: Bittorrent) [updated 1]
8. the web is a series of hierarchies, not a mesh (also known as the “deep linking is bad” argument) [updated 2]
9. computers need to be rebooted daily/weekly [updated 3]

[ed: I am adding extra entries to the above list, denoted with square brackets]

…and a host of others; I could spend a day enumerating these fallacies and defunct limitations. Almost the entire identity-provider industry is based upon numbers 1, 3, 4 and 6 - whilst people gape at the extraordinary power of Bittorrent and the shocking proposition of OpenID without seeing them as logical consequences of overturning numbers [1,2,3,5,7] and [3,4,6] respectively.

This is one of the reasons I like The Mine Project - it kicks over a bunch of those rules - most, perhaps all of them - and in such a new space very exciting things may happen.

Anyway - herewith the e-mail:

Beyond the “Why Johnny” paper - focusing upon usability - I think there is a higher problem of interoperability and information-access at play here.

There can be no access to your mail without use of a client if you are using cryptography - even ROT13 - and this alone is a big problem, because mediated access to your e-mail is *really* painful.

For some 15 years I used mh/nmh/exmh (latterly with fetchmail), then moved to Mail.app, recently tried Thunderbird for a few months, and am re-considering nmh for long-term archiving of e-mail. I also use my iPod, three laptops with varying species of Unix, and a 3G phone to access e-mail. Occasionally I still copy stuff out of /var/mail/.

I would have suffered immensely were I required to use a particular crypto-enabled client to deal with my e-mail at each stage, or were I required to use historical crypto-clients to access older mails.

Anyone whose college thesis is in WordPerfect on a 5.25″ floppy at the back of a closet somewhere, should understand this problem.

To this day Project Gutenberg uses flat ASCII as a lowest common denominator format, and similarly I need my e-mail in the simplest form so that I can grep it, perl it, quote it and search it.

So “why has encrypted e-mail failed?” I suspect that static data encryption revolts against the nature of personal communication and the needs of personal information re-use.

For comparison, consider the convergence of instant messaging and e-mail - they are becoming ever more alike, but the former mostly relies upon end to end transport security, often assuming that the privacy of logs at either end are at the whim of *that* user.

For some reason this works rather well; as security geeks we complain about it, but there have been many times when Skype has bailed me out of trouble with its ability to drill through almost anything and provide me with messaging and file-transfer.

Similarly AIM, Jabber, GChat - all of which I happily run with OTR - give me necessary mostly-secure communication.

In the world of e-mail the problem is that the end-user inherits a blob of data which was encrypted in order to defend the message as it passes hop by hop over the store-and-forward SMTP-relay (or UUCP?) e- mail network… but the user is left to deal with the effects of solving the *transport* security problem.

The model is old. It is busted. It is (today) wrong.

It’s like ordering lobster bisque, and having a live lobster turn up at your table; what you want is in there - heavily armored - and yes you can render what you receive into what you actually desire; BUT it’s messy and you’re really stuck unless you have a mouli, a saucepan and a small PGP hotplate at hand.

And of course you have to archive copies of the lobster, not the soup.

S/MIME and its bretheren exist to simultaneously address the security of [both] data in motion and data at rest - but people don’t want the latter in the form that it provides, because it inhibits interoperability and usability at a level above the “this software sucks” matter…

And if the “data in motion”/”end to end” security issue is being addressed by things like IM/OTR and Skype, then perhaps “secure” e-mail will soon go the way of Telnet and FTP?

Performance Art: Why Secure E-mail Never Went Mainstream... is syndicated from dropsafe.

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The method I used was as follows:

su - root # become root
swap -sh # find out how big your swapdevice is
zfs get volsize rpool/swap # find out how big your ZFS swapdevice is (should match above)
zfs set volsize=2G rpool/swap # enlarge it to (eg:) 2G, 2048M, however you wish to denote it
init 6 # reboot

Poke your system at your own risk, but I found the system considerably more responsive under load when swap was increased, even if it did not get used much…

(link to official sun documentation from where i got this information)

How to increase swap space on OpenSolaris 2008.11 is syndicated from dropsafe.

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http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/08/genetic-algorithm-ev.html

Matthew sez, “This is a GA I wrote to design a little car for a specific terrain. It runs in real-time in Flash. The fitness function is the distance travelled before the red circles hit the ground, or time runs out. The degrees of freedom are the size and initial positions of the four circles, and length, spring constant and damping of the eight springs. The graph shows the ‘mean’ and ‘best’ fitness.”

…and I left it running in a tab all day; was quite pleased at how quickly it converged on the form of the classic “dirt bike”:

…with large front wheel, smaller rear, long rear swing-arm, rider weight forwards; a case of theory agreeing with real life, perhaps?

The only flaw is that the author of the code doesn’t realise what he’s done. He thinks it’s a car…

Darwin on a motorbike... is syndicated from dropsafe.

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Bad Moon Rising: an ancient Hebridean surfing song... is syndicated from dropsafe.

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I upgraded my big-ass AMD server box to OpenSolaris yesterday, and it’s durned pretty and dead useful - I am doing AVCHD to QuickTime video-transcoding on it[1] which is not something that is typically said about Solaris-at-home.

A couple of things went wrong:

* I did manual network configuration; this failed in a few ways:

• Poking the config upon first post-installation boot-up, the network config GUI tool coredumped after unplumbing nge0, and would not let me configure it again, even after manual replumbing. A swift reboot fixed this.
• My DNS hostnames would not resolve; long story short it appears that manual network configuration currently (Nov 2008) provides no way to apply nsswitch.dns to the system config?
• All the automounted NFS mounts from my (Leopard) OSX machines, failed.

The latter was a big nuisance; I use ZFS everywhere on the big server, and part of the joy was that I didn’t have to maintain /etc/exports any more; but all of a sudden, having upgraded from Nevada 90-something to OpenSolaris, I was getting “permission denied” for the NFS mount request.

I addressed three things and finally fixed it: first I was getting messages like:

Nov 29 18:50:56 suzi mountd[453]: [ID 664212 daemon.error] No default domain set

…which is a reference to the contents of /var/run/nfs4_domain and the NFSMAPID stuff; to fix this I uncommented NFSMAPID_DOMAIN=domain in /etc/default/nfs; whether this helped I don’t really know, but it was one more thing ticked.

I IM’ed Darren who said he’d had a similar experience with NFS mounts failing when IP addresses on the server were not resolvable… so I populated /etc/hosts with the addresses of the clients.

Still nada.

Finally I repopulated the sharenfs parameter of my ZFS exports, and that worked; where formerly it read:

sharenfs=rw=192.168.1.3:192.168.1.7

…it now read:

sharenfs=rw=luther:zephyr

…which combined with the relevant entries in /etc/hosts, magically vanished the problem.

So, what’s this? No more explicit IP-address exports, then? Or is this an effect of zpool export?

–
[1] I am translating huge 1440×1080i M2TS video files from a Sony HDR-SR8 camcorder, into tragically huger 720p MJPEG, because my old iMac is not powerful enough to edit the content in its native highly-condensed format - and anyway Apple don’t supply a codec that lets you do that, so you need to use third-party software like Voltaic, or plug the actual camera into the machine and let iMovie convert it.

You are supposed to plug the actual camera into the Macintosh, because on it is AVCHD metadata describing the file format and “official” software needs that stuff in order to perform the conversion.

Of course, the original files have been deleted from the camera.

Instead I am archiving the M2TS (.MTS) files - nice and small - and re-converting them on demand using the latest FFMPEG and an extremely intricate driver script that I’m refining… FFMPEG is an adventure all by itself.

There are solutions for this out there on the web already. I think I have tried them all - all the free ones at least, and some of the commercial ones too. It’s been a nightmare of bad code and csh-scripting. They all are exceedingly painful, except for Voltaic but that costs money-per-machine and is slower than it need be.

Once I get the FFMPEG driver-script polished, I will share it.

Mounting OSX 10.5 NFS Clients from OpenSolaris NFS Servers is syndicated from dropsafe.

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But it is a bit weird - not on par with “Avast, ye scurvy dogs!” or whatever some places used to respond to fake HELO SMTP strings in sendmail, but nowadays we take humour where we can get it.

READ Nov 13 14:24:58.090 [kCFStreamSocketSecurityLevelNegotiatedSSL] — host:imap.gmail.com — port:993 — socket:0×17a89750 — thread:0×19113450
* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UNSELECT IDLE NAMESPACE QUOTA XLIST CHILDREN XYZZY
1.23 OK Thats all she wrote! m27if606389pof.20

GMail IMAP server embeds easter egg? is syndicated from dropsafe.

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Lenovo will let you kill a notebook with a text message

Lenovo is working with Phoenix on a BIOS that will let you disable a ThinkPad notebook PC by sending it an SMS text message. The feature should be available early next year, reports TG Daily. The story says:

The lockdown will happen immediately if a notebook is turned on or, when it is turned off, the next time the system signs on to a cellular network. To reactivate the disabled PC, a user needs to enter a pre-set passcode created during notebook startup.

Since not many people have notebooks with built in Sims, it would be more useful if you could disable a notebook over the internet. Maybe you can….

It would also be more useful if every notebook PC had this sort of feature, as it would tend to discourage notebook theft. However, bear in mind that it doesn’t protect your data, because someone can always remove the hard drive and read it with a different PC — unless the data is encrypted.

Lenovo will let you kill a notebook with a text message | Technology | guardian.co.uk is syndicated from dropsafe.

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I can’t wait to see what Schneier makes of this, but I am disappointed with the thrust of what Tim quotes below, from David Stephenson.

They appear to be suggesting that the government - say, for instance, the TSA - should be invited to tell people what to say-and-do with Twitter; to me, this is only one step from inviting them to censor it. There is more terror in the scenario that Stephenson appears to suggest:

Oh my God I am stuck under the rubble in a bombed-out hotel, I could Twitter my location but then the terrorists would come and bomb me a second time, because they would never have thought of setting-off a second bomb to cause more chaos without checking Twitter!

I could shout-out too, but then they might come and kill me, under all this rubble…

…than is extant from Twitter.

The language is regrettably unclear - eg: “people can and will use these devices and apps in a terrorist attack” - does he mean bad-guys or good-guys? And if Stephenson means bad-guys, what is to be done? Terrorists use other parts of infrastructure too: cars, buses, roads, cellphones.

Maybe we should just ban terrorism to prevent that. Oh, wait…

(my emphasis, below)

Interesting People List

Good piece by W. David Stephenson:

http://stephensonstrategies.com/2008/11/26/us-officials-must-monitor-learn-from-use-of-web-20-in-mumbai/

Once again, the first news of the Mumbai attacks came not through the media, but through Twitter. India is extremely sophisticated in use of mobile devices, probably more so than is the case in the US, and many Indians are active users of Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and other mobile social networks. It’s imperative that US officials closely track how Indians are using these services during the continuing attacks, and try to glean ideas on how they could be adapted to the US.

I can’t stress enough: people can and will use these devices and apps in a terrorist attack, so it is imperative that officials start telling us what kind of information would be relevant from Twitter, Flickr, etc. (and, BTW, what shouldn’t be spread: one Twitter user in Mumbai tweeted me that people were sending the exact location of people still in the hotels, and could tip off the terrorists) and that they begin to monitor these networks in disasters, terrorist attacks, etc.

Tim O’Reilly, Founder & CEO O’Reilly Media
1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472
tim@oreilly.com, http://radar.oreilly.com

Stephenson / O'Reilly Go Off The Rails About Twitter Terrorism? is syndicated from dropsafe.

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The Xtracycle conversion kit arrived a few days ago; here it is in relation to the “donor” bike (my 1993 Raleigh Amazon) so you can see how far back it is going to stretch the bike.

I’ll do a rough-fit assembly next week sometime, and then buy a few replacement parts to set it up properly; it’ll need a new chain for starters…

Xtracycle Conversion Kit - Subframe is syndicated from dropsafe.

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The Harvard Crimson :: News :: Reflections on a Harvard Tribal Gathering

[…]

The Chief nodded his head and the contestants took the field. With him, three of his “yara” (household servants) moved sedately and ceremoniously to the middle of the ground to supervise proceedings. Then, at the signal of a high pitched blast on a cowrie studded war horn the young men, the “samari,” (warriors who have reached full puberty, been initiated into the tribe, but are still unmarried), the hope of the future and the finest physical specimens available, met, and joined, if not in combat, then certainly in the nearest thing to it short of actual warfare.

By general consent, a halt was called, and the amphitheatre was again given over to the maidens and the “gadarawa,” this time each group being accompanied by their own troupe of drummers and hornblowers, and each vying with the other to enhance the general cacophany. Then, for a second time, the warriors took the field. Again the mock battle was repeatedly enacted, an advance here, a retreat there, until the crowd was cheering wildly.

I was awakened out of my reverie by a raucous voice shouting in my ear. “Iced Coke–Hot chocolate!” The electric time clock at the end of the horseshoe flashed to its final reading–00.00. The referee’s whistle blew. The contestants withdrew. A score of nil-nil was generally adjudged by the cognoscenti to be as good as could have been hoped for.

I was still thinking, as I strolled with my host in the rear of the band back towards Harvard Square (quite the best way to avoid the traffic) that what I had witnessed was but a manifestation of what I had seen a hundred times before during 7 years in tribal Africa. Perhaps, I mused, there is something to be said for tribalism after all: perhaps the urge to “belong,” to be at one with a greater whole, to sink individuality into tradition and tradition into loyalty, is too strong for any of us to resist

The Harvard Crimson :: News :: Reflections on a Harvard Tribal Gathering is syndicated from dropsafe.

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