What’s the value preposition of Flavors.me? It’s to unify your various “online identities” into a single, dynamic, automatically-updated, and elegant website.

What do I mean by that? OK — so, like most people on the web, you spread public information about yourself in multiple places. You might run one or two blogs (personal and work?). You might have a Facebook account, a Twitter account. You may share your favorite books at GoodReads, your favorite movies at Netflix, and your favorite music on Last.fm.

Flavors.me lets you take all that information and put it together in a single website to serve as your “online identity”. All your publicly shared information, aggregated in one place, and displayed beautifully.

I’ve been running a Flavors.me site for some time that you can see here: http://flavors.me/pixelmonkey

Now, that’s the end product. All the content gets pulled dynamically from your various online feeds. The real magic with Flavors.me is how easy it is to get there. You can drastically change the look and feel of this site using a dynamic, “WYSIWYG” interface. You can do one or two clicks to add a service, reorder it, rename it. Another couple of clicks and you change font sizes, colors, and even the overall layout.

As I was writing this post, I noticed that Flavors.me had added LinkedIn support, which wasn’t available earlier in the beta. So I went ahead and added it. I simply logged in and pulled up the design panel.

From there, I could navigate over to “Services”, click the “LinkedIn” logo, and Flavors.me would guide me through the authorization process to make LinkedIn data available to them for display on my page. You simply get redirected to LinkedIn.com, log in there (if not already logged in), and then get redirected back to the Flavors control panel.

Next, I could simply drag-and-drop the service box in the panel in order to reorder it on the page. Yay, drag-and-drop! There is also in-line editing, and editing the title of the LinkedIn “popout” dynamically updates my profile page in real-time! Nice touch.

Finally, I can go to the “Design” panel to tweak fonts, layout, sizes, etc. Look at how Flavors.me displays fonts. It’s amazing — this is the web, but it’s easier to change my Flavors.me web design font styles than it is to change font styles in a Microsoft Word document!

Now, depending on where, exactly, you store the bits that make up your online identity, you may find yourself disappointed by a lack of this-or-that service. They already support quite a few, and they are adding more in the future, I hear. The one I sorely missed was Delicious, so I could share my bookmarks with the world.

But wait! For those services that still don’t have first-class support, Flavors.me gracefully supports RSS feeds of any variety. I simply popped the RSS feed for my Delicious bookmarks into Flavors.me services panel, and, voila! — my bookmarks are now publicly shared!

It’s this kind of simplicity, design sense, and user-centric approach that makes me love the web as a place to develop, deploy, and use software. So, what are you waiting for? Sign up for Flavors.me today: it’s free!

I also found it very interesting to hear Crockford wax poetic about the virtue of simplicity in all forms of software design. The following passage concludes the book.

When I started thinking about this[...], I wanted to take the subset idea further, to show how to take an existing [product] and make significant improvements to it by making no changes except to exclude the low-value features.

We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to consumers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce than designs that assemble long lists of features.

Features have a specification cost, a design cost, and a development cost. There is a testing cost and a reliability cost. The more features there are, the more likely one will develop problems or will interact badly with another. In software systems, there is a storage cost, which was becoming negligible, but in mobile applications is becoming significant again. There are ascending performance costs because Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to batteries.

Features have a documentation cost. Every feature adds pages to the manual, increasing training costs. Features that offer value to a minority of users impose a cost on all users. So, in designing products[...], we want to get the core features—the good parts—right because that is where we create most of the value.

We all find the good parts in the products that we use. We value simplicity, and when simplicity isn’t offered to us, we make it ourselves. My microwave oven has tons of features, but the only ones I use are cook and the clock. And setting the clock is a struggle. We cope with the complexity of feature-driven design by finding and sticking with the good parts.

It would be nice if products[...] were designed to have only good parts.

I removed direct references to the main subject of Crockford’s discussion — namely, the JavaScript language itself. The truth is, this advice is much more valuable for the design of all software products. Perhaps one day someone will write the much needed book, Startups: The Good Parts.

I’ll show why this claim doesn’t matter later, but for now, I’ll assure you that it’s true.

How many of you out there use Dropbox? If you don’t, you should — it’s an excellent tool. In its free version, it provides you with 2GB of storage “in the cloud”, using a new kind of folder called a “Dropbox”. What distinguishes a Dropbox from other folders on your computer? The following:

• Every file put in your Dropbox is automatically (and securely) uploaded to Dropbox’s servers, ensuring you have an offsite backup of all data therein.
• Multiple computers can gain access to a Dropbox, ensuring files are automatically synchronized across computers without having to use complication version control systems.
• All files in your Dropbox are versioned, ensuring you can always recover an older version of a file in case you accidentally overwrite a good version.

Dropbox is supported on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and now even has mobile applications, as well. Further, I have a special place in my heart for this service because I started using it almost 2 years ago, and it has acted as a file sharing and project management tool for my own startup’s internal operations at Parse.ly. I was therefore more than ecstatic to discover that this excellent tool and its smart founders had also made it through all of the hurdles necessary to get an early-stage company the financing it needs: they’ve raised over $7 million in financing and have over 3 million users.

But there is another reason I absolutely love Dropbox: because it was my idea. I invented it.

In the summer of 2004, I was really itching to get into Google’s Summer of Code competition. This was the summer I had taken a job working from home as the lead web developer at the Unemployment Action Center of NY. Though the job was great experience — letting me build my first full web application for a real client — I was itching to work on a technically juicy problem, something that affected me in my daily computer use.

And so, I sat down for a day and wrote up a Google Summer of Code proposal for a new system I had invented called Persistent Folders. It wasn’t exactly like Dropbox, but damn close. Even the implementation is close: Dropbox and my system both sync files using rsync, and both use a Python daemon process. The main difference is that since my system was meant to be open source, it did not require the use of a company-maintained service; instead, I proposed that users piggyback existing storage they have via web hosting providers.

Unfortunately, my project wasn’t selected.

Why am I posting this? I recently had a discussion with another engineer after I had discussed some of the technology behind Parse.ly with him. He was surprised at how liberal I was with explaining our internal implementation, architecture, and algorithms. He asked me, “Aren’t you worried that I could steal your idea?”

I responded, “You can steal it all you want; I dare you to try and implement it!” I then explained that to me, ideas don’t matter. I had the idea for a hundred startups that now exist before they started. I know from talking to users and customers of Parse.ly that they had our idea before we implemented it. What matters in software is not an idea, but execution of that idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen.

I began this post with the statement, I invented Dropbox. And now I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t matter one bit, because I never implemented Dropbox. And you can’t own ideas…

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
-Thomas Jefferson

Imagine if when I had come up with this idea, I had patented it. Would it really have been fair to force Dropbox to license my technology? To sue them for “infringing” on my patent?

No way — these guys deserve the success they have. How stifling it would have been for me to put any roadblocks in their way because “I had the idea first”! The world is better because Dropbox exists. And, these guys have had — in my opinion — near-flawless execution. So, kudos to them.

Consider the following matrix:

	Mediocre Idea	Great Idea
No implementation
Mediocre Implementation
Great Implementation

A mediocre idea with a good implementation is worth infinitely more than a carefully-guarded, good idea with no implementation. Of course, the best products are both great ideas and great implementations. And I think my proposal for “Persistent Folders” — written three years before Dropbox even started — proves this to me in a very personal way.

Now, I’m certain the Dropbox guys never read my little proposal, because it was only sent to Google and otherwise sat on my hard drive for years, not viewed by anyone. I had a great idea, but no implementation. And the Dropbox guys took a great idea (one they arrived at on their own, I’m sure), and gave it the implementation it deserved.

For those of you who guard your ideas carefully, I’d suggest you stop wasting your time, get off your butt, and focus on actually building stuff. Because if you don’t, someone else will!

For the curious, below is my proposal to Google Summer of Code 2004, unaltered from its original draft. This is just a relic; for now, I’m glad to keep hacking on my own little idea, hoping one day I can look back and say I executed as well as Dropbox did…

PERSISTENT FOLDERS: A New Metaphor for Data Synchronization
May 13, 2004

The Problem

Computer users are more and more finding themselves with a serious problem: the fragmentation of personal data across multiple physical machines, and even multiple operating systems. Users who find it most comfortable to have a desktop machine at home and a mobile laptop computer “on-the-go” (for business or trips) have to deal with chaotic and often frustrating manual methods to copy that data to the needed places. Some users carry USB memory sticks — which hold their important “working set” of files — and either work directly off those disks (suffering reduced speeds) or make copies of the folders therein on their actual machines, as they become needed, spreading yet more copies and compounding the problem of synchronization. Others abuse ubiquitous technologies for accessing important files, by either e-mailing the files to themselves or by uploading them temporarily to web or FTP servers.

The end result of any of these methods is fragmentation of personal data, with error-prone manual processes for replication, and the inability for a consistent way to search, backup or even just keep track of all the important files and folders spread among the PCs in question.

What is needed to solve this problem, or at least make the problem more manageable, is an intelligent, user-friendly, customizable cross-platform program that allows for transparent synchronization of personal data across multiple computers and systems, either via a LAN or via the Internet.

Introducing the Persistent Folder

Up to this point, most users are used to understanding folders as existing solely in one location. The only way to get a folder’s data onto another machine is to copy that folder, thus making a duplicate. The goal of this project will be to introduce a new high-level data storage mechanism known as a Persistent Folder. Persistent Folders differ from regular folders in that they are meant to be transparently persistent, or synchronized, across different computers.

To explore a hypothetical example, imagine user Joe sits down to do some personal accounting work on Friday. He creates a folder on his desktop called “Personal Accounting,” and begins working on some OpenOffice spreadsheets in that folder. A few minutes later, Joe realizes that some of his accounting work will have to be done while he is away during the weekend, on his laptop computer.

To enable this, he simply right-clicks the folder on his desktop and says “Make this folder persistent across multiple computers.” When he does this, a dialog comes up asking him to type in a description of the persistent folder, and to select computers on which he wishes to make this folder persistent. Joe is presented with a dialog of computers currently available on the LAN. He sees his laptop, “MobileJoe”, and selects it. He then presses OK.

Within seconds, Joe sees the folder “Personal Accounting” appear on his mobile computer’s desktop, even though he hasn’t even touched his mobile computer yet. When he enters that folder, he sees the same spreadsheets that are available on his main PC’s desktop.

These two folders are now treated by Joe as “one persistent folder available across two computers.” He can add files to one folder and they will automatically be propagated to the other. He can modify files and the new versions will then exist in the other. Joe no longer has to worry about pushing his data back and forth across the computers.

Internet Synchronization by way of Ubiquitous Services

One of the major questions one may ask at this point, “that is all well and good for persistence of a folder on a LAN, but what about when I leave my home/office, and need to synchronize over the Internet?”

One approach would be to have a special server application with which all computers that wish to share persistent folders could synchronize. But then the user needs his own server, and needs to install my little server daemon on it. And not many users have their own servers on which they can just install any old application. So for normal users, this, in fact, is no approach at all.

Although most users don’t run their own servers, many modern users do have _server access_. That is, many users do have Web/FTP hosting providers to whom they pay subscriptions, and these servers power their blogs, personal photo stores, etc. The goal of Persistent Folders would be to allow users to piggyback their existing web services to synchronize their files, essentially turning a folder on that server into a Persistent Folder Repository.

A dialog in the properties of a persistent folder would include a checkbox that allows the user to “make this folder available over the Internet.” It would then allow a user to choose a method for making this folder available via the Internet, asking the user to provide a “persistent folder repository” via FTP by default (due to commonality), but equally possible would be scp, rsync, NFS, or even something like cvs/svn (the goal, of course, would be to make the design modular enough that it could support any server type with basic file system operations).

Then, every other visible machine on the LAN who shares that persistent folder would have option enabled automatically. If the machines are offline, the option can be entered manually by the same method explained above.

From that point on, the folders become persistently available and transparently usable, just as before. If the other computers are available on the LAN, then the program utilizes LAN speeds and synchronizes directly. Otherwise, it synchronizes with the Internet Repository.

Lucky Joe is now able to work on his files in the office, leave his laptop there (”the darn thing is so heavy to carry around!”), return home, and continue right on working on those files which are now found in the “same folder” on his desktop machine at home.

Implementation Ideas

I plan on implementing this idea in Python, since one of the major goals of the project is to allow Persistent Folders to exist not just across computers, but also across operating systems (so that a Windows desktop could have a persistent folder that also exists on a Linux laptop, for example). For a user interface, I plan to use PyGTK, since that’s what I know, and since it is also cross-platform. I need something powerful like GTK since there will be times when user intervention will be necessary, but since it is a goal of this project to reduce the number of times the user must intervene, I want to make sure that when he does, he is presented with sane, human-readable, and user-friendly dialogs.

I don’t plan to reinvent the wheel. Most of the magic of Persistent Folders is just making existing synchronization tools work relatively silently and in a way that makes sense with a user’s workflow. The main tool I am thinking of using is rsync, the relatively-ubiquitous UNIX utility for incremental synchronization of directory trees. I considered using the unison, as recommended by Ubuntu’s Wiki entry, but I saw two major problems: (1) unison is no longer under active development and (2) it is written in OCaml, a relatively obscure language which I don’t know. Therefore, any bugs I discover in unison would not be fixed in a timely fashion by its developers, and any features I’d like to add to support my idea would be quite difficult to implement.

As for monitoring folders for changes, I imagine the most elegant solution would be to take advantage of inotify under Linux (like Beagle does) and perhaps handle ChangeNotify events under Windows. I’d really like to avoid polling, since polling is just plain evil for something as potentially neat as this. Regardless, I’ll probably need to code Yet Another Daemon (or Windows service) to keep track of Persistent Folders on the local machine and their equivalents across the network.

Finally, for secure synchronization of files, I plan to use SSH tunneling wherever possible, which is available under Windows under the OpenSSH for Windows Sourceforge project, http://sshwindows.sf.net. Linux distros like Ubuntu, of course, have all the ssh support one needs.

Conclusion

This project aims to introduce a new metaphor users may utilize to share important files across multiple computers: the Persistent Folder. A Persistent Folder is not a shared a folder; rather, it is seen as a single folder that exists locally across multiple computers, and can be treated by the user as such. Changes at any one folder rapidly propagate to the others. Properly implemented, this may provide a better way for users to manage important data that might otherwise be scattered, fragmented, and even lost through the daily shuffle of file transfers across networked PCs.

Appendix A: Project Roadmap

o June 24: Begin Work, with ideas now fully developed in the form of documents. Post these documents to Ubuntu’s Wiki to encourage ideas from community.

o July 5: Have a console synchronization wrapper and some network discovery stuff in Python written, and have UI concepts designed in Glade.

o July 20: Make 0.1 (GUI and basic features working) release, so that Google can show it off at OSCON?

o August 1: Have other great features, like the Internet synchronization and multi-protocol support, in 0.2 release.

o August 10: Consider working on features to allow transparent backup and versioning, to include with bug fixes in a 0.3 release.

o August 20: Make simultaneous 0.4 releases on Linux and
Windows, hammering out as many cross-platform issues as possible. Add inotify/ChangeNotify support if not already there.

o August 30: The big 0.5 release, finished for Google’s deadline. Let Google/Ubuntu make the decision if it’s worthy of being renamed a “1.0″ release.

o September 1: Live a less stressful life, since my files are now neatly synchronized among my PCs! But I’ll keep making it better.

Appendix B: Hold On, Isn’t Samba Good Enough?

One common response to this project may be, “Aren’t Samba and SMB shared folders good enough?” Though Samba is good, I do not believe it is good enough. Here’s why:

(1) Samba does not aim to present the user with a metaphor of a folder existing in multiple locations at the same time. I believe this metaphor would be appreciated as powerful by longtime computer users and subconsciously acknowledged as highly usable by novices.

(2) Samba only allows users to share folders on their drives. Other Samba users may then mount those folders via the LAN. This two-step, asymmetric process already seems complicated and convoluted to end users. But more importantly, synchronization is left up to the user. In theory, users could avoid synchronization altogether and work on the files directly, via the share. In practice, LAN speeds are not adequate, and other issues are raised (such as file locking and write conflicts). This forces users to home-brew their own synchronization protocol to make sure duplicate files at different versions doesn’t result in an accidental loss of data.

(3) Samba does not provide any easy method to access personal files once one leaves the LAN and enters the WAN, short of opening up a bunch of ports on your router and trying to connect in from outside (a very slow and insecure method).

(4) Samba provides no recourse when a computer is no longer available. Persistent Folders, on the other hand, make data available “offline” by design.

(5) Samba does not know whether two duplicate files exist across the network. Therefore, Samba cannot be immediately utilized as a transparent form of backup.

Is the Persistent Folder meant to replace Samba? Of course not. I believe Samba has specific purposes: to allow for easy, fast, one-time transfers of files across a LAN, and to allow networked printer and device sharing. I do not believe Samba is an adequate solution to allow a user to treat a folder as if it existed on multiple computers at once.

Appendix C: Versioning’s the Thing

Upon further contemplation of this project, I realized I had left a question unanswered in this document. What is the right way to deal with version conflicts during the silent synchronization phase among Persistent Folders?

Imagine user Joe works on a file in a Persistent Folder which exists on his laptop and desktop computers. The first version (let’s call it version 0.1) was created on his desktop, and Joe had the laptop on the same network, allowing automatic synchronization to occur. But then Joe’s laptop was disconnected from his desktop, as Joe was without network or even Internet access. He works on the document a bit, which can now be called version 0.2. But then Joe forgets that he worked on the document on his laptop, and when he gets home, he works on his desktop computer, creating a version 0.2 there too. Which version 0.2 should be synchronized?

Normally, the answer would be to pick the most recent one. But we don’t want Joe’s laptop work to be lost, just because Joe forgot about his prior work, do we? Well, what needs to happen is a bit of smart conflict resolution with no data loss.

I propose that Persistent Folders should also be versioned to a sane degree. Perhaps by default 3-5 versions of files are always kept, with the most recent versions visible directly in the persistent folder, and other versions buried (in .dotfiles or hidden folders) behind there. Then, the Persistent Folder monitor should inform Joe (”whisper” to Joe via the notification area/systray) that there was a conflict, and the newest file was chosen. But at any point, Joe can choose to revert a file back to an older version. The interface should be such that Joe can even see where the file was edited, for example:

Personal Accounts.xls – Prior Versions
o version 0.2: edited on MobileJoe
o version 0.2: edited on DesktopJoe
o version 0.1: edited on DesktopJoe

Of course, versioning could be disabled (at risk of data loss to the user), or could be enabled as “smart versioning” to only version files when conflicts occur during synchronization. Some may say that versioning is dangerous because it can drastically increase disk usage, but as I mentioned above, the other benefit is that the user gets redundant network backup of files for free. In higher versions of Persistent Folders, things could get more sophisticated by allowing users to turn off versioning even at the file-level, but I don’t think that’d be necessary in the first few releases.

So, for those not keeping score, Dropbox supports:

• Windows, Linux and Mac OS X syncing, using a scheme similar to that described above, except with a managed set of servers (Dropbox’s) acting as the “repository”
• sync over LAN (in latest beta releases) when PCs are local
• file-level versioning
• Collaboration by sharing folders with other users — a feature I didn’t discuss in my proposal, but that would be a clear next step for a managed service

Go Dropbox!

960.gs is a CSS grid framework, similar in spirit to Blueprint CSS and YUI Grid. However, 960.gs is at once more minimalist than these approaches, and more thorough.

The author has a detailed blog post explaining his motivations for working on 960.gs, so I won’t rehash each of those. Instead, I’ll just dive into what I liked about it.

1. Very simple and comprehensible name choices for CSS classes: You can see their demo page (view its source) for examples, but I can even summarize the approach in a few short sentences. You begin a grid container with a container_XX class, where XX is the number of total grid columns in the container. Every child element has a grid_XX class, which is the number of columns (aka colspan) for that element. All grid_XX elements should add up to the XX amount in the container if you are using all the grid elements available. To use larger gutter widths, you can use prefix_XX and suffix_XX classes. Finally, for any child grid elements, you need to mark the first one with an alpha class and the last one with an omega class — this is necessary to get rid of left/right margins on starting and ending elements.
2. Excellent CSS generator: this online CSS generator tool lets you generate 960.gs CSS that is just right for your website.
3. jQuery-based bookmarklet for double-checking grid layouts: another online tool is a bookmarklet which will “inject” a customizable grid overlay on any existing site, to help with alignment.
4. Templates for every major design tool: I saved the best for last. Nathan’s focus in designing 960.gs was to allow better collaboration between trained graphic designers (whose tools are typically Adobe Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator, etc.) and trained web designers (whose tools are things like Rails, Grails, Django). To ease this collaboration, the author provides templates for every major graphic design tool that has “grid overlays” compatible with the 960.gs framework.

Finally, the entire project is hosted on bitbucket and developed in the open. What more could you ask for? This has really simplified my approach to standard CSS designs.

I immediately called Chase Customer Service. In order to confirm the details about my account, the representative needed me to identify the fraudulent charges, but also identify charges that were actually valid. For this latter bit, I needed to identify the time/place of a specific transaction. This card was mostly used for online auto bill payments, so this turned out to be impossible for any of my last 20 valid payments. Yet the customer service rep insisted that I name a time and place. I told her, “The time and place was whenever the server for this system decided to automatically bill my account. I don’t know where their server is, I don’t know what time their cron jobs run.”

“Cron jobs?” she said.

Right, I had been hanging around techies at DreamIt Ventures for too long. “Listen, the transaction didn’t take place physically, it took place digitally. I can identify one transaction, which is about a month old, where I actually used the card in-person to buy something.” She finally understood and let me move on.

Burak from Trendsta said he felt bad for me, for how patient I had to be with this person. But that was the least of it. This little technical misunderstanding was nothing compared to what followed.

I was told that in order to get a credit back from my account, they had to collect from me a signed affidavit indicating the charges were fraudulent. This affadavit would be “securely shared” with me via e-mail. OK, “sounds good” I said. I waited around for the e-mail to come in.

Finally, two e-mails arrived in my inbox. The important bits are in red. First:

Message from Chase Customer Claims Secure Document Exchange

From: chase_customer_claims@secure-dx.com

Welcome to the Chase Customer Claims Secure Document Exchange. You recently contacted Chase regarding your claim number XXXX. Your documents are available for your review.

Per our telephone conversation, you will need to register to our secure website.

Your initial password is: password

Your initial user name has been sent to you in a separate email.

On your first log in, you will be required to select a new password.

Thank you for using Chase Customer Claims Secure Document Exchange.

To contact Chase for claim related questions or to withdraw your claim, please call 1-866-564-2262.

Any geek reading this will immediately identify some key things wrong with this e-mail that make it look like a total phishing expedition. Namely:

1. The e-mail address, rather than being from a chase.com domain, was from a strange domain named “secure-dx.com”.
2. Rather than sending a cryptographically secure, expiring activation link, a default password was sent in plain text.
3. To make matters worse, the password is the same for all users, and thus anyone who can guess my e-mail address can easily impersonate me on this “secure document” website.
4. The default password is “password”. WTF?! I mean, c’mon?

I didn’t quite understand why I needed a “second e-mail” now, but I opened it up. Here it is, excerpted:

Your Chase Customer Claims Secure Document Exchange Electronic Package is available online

From: chase_customer_claims@secure-dx.com

ANDREW MONTALENTI,

Welcome to the Chase Customer Claims Secure Document Exchange.You recently contacted Chase regarding your claim number XXXX. Your documents are available for your review.

Per our telephone conversation, you will need to register to our secure website by clicking on the link below or copy and paste the link into your browser’s address bar.

https://chase.secure-dx.com/consumerdcx-chase_atm

Your user name is my.email@hidden.com

Your initial password has been sent to you in a separate email

On your first log in, you will be required to select a new password. NOTE: This site is different from Chase.com and passwords are not related. Updating your password on Chase Customer Claims Secure Document Exchange will have no impact on established Chase.com passwords.

Once registered, you will be able to access your customer correspondence on our secure website. You may be offered the option to complete and sign the form online if you wish to do so. [...]

To say I was confused would be a major understatement. I was downright depressed.

My guess is that the engineers at Chase thought that by separating the “password e-mail” from the “user e-mail”, that somehow made the whole communication more secure. Two e-mails are better than one, right?

The most important thing to point to is the link. The link where this secure communication will happen is not at the chase.com domain Instead, it is at https://chase.secure-dx.com/consumerdcx-chase_atm. There is no way, NO WAY this is a real Chase site, I think.

I click on the link and in Firefox, I see this:

At this point, my paranoid self turns on. Curious, I click through the link anyway. And I see this:

Now I’m really paranoid. Links off secure-dx.com pointing back to chase.com’s privacy policy. A username and password box and a sort of hokey imitation of the Chase.com web design. I realize, holy shit, I’m being duped! Not just small-time credit card fraud, but someone has managed to really take over my life!

Why am I freaking out? The customer service person I talked to, I realize what must have happened. That wasn’t Chase. Someone stole my credit card information and then set up a call forwarding on my cell phone, somehow, to point Chase’s customer service number to some fraudulent interceptor. This person then diligently took my claim only to send me an e-mail that would get yet more information out of me and take me for even more money. I freaked!

Immediately, I double-checked my call logs and compared them to Chase.com customer service numbers. I made sure to change my DNS server to OpenDNS to make sure no one was somehow intercepting that. Finally, I realized I could look at the number written on the back of my Chase credit cards. It all checked out — the number was good. So I switched phone. I called Chase customer service on both my phone and Olivia’s. I made sure the messages were exactly the same. From Olivia’s phone, I called back Chase again to speak to someone there about this. But then I got even more paranoid — how big could this be? — so I decided to hang up. Instead, I called my local Chase branch in my neighborhood.

With my local branch’s help, I got transferred via a branch office line to the actual Chase customer service. Finally on a secure line, I thought to myself. When they picked up, I was expecting to uncover the scam of the century. I felt like an investigative journalist right on the tail of something truly big.

But then I spoke to the Chase representative, on the secure line, and she explained to me that this is just the normal procedure. secure-dx.com is the website they use for “securely” sharing documents.

I was livid. I explained everything wrong with this setup. I demanded to speak to a supervisor. I spoke to a supervisor. He said he did not know why the system was the way it was. He wasn’t a software guy. He just knew that “with the way the business is changing lately, a lot of systems are in flux.” I said this flux was unacceptable. “I’m a software engineer,” I said. “How can I possibly trust Chase to manage my financial accounts if something as simple as sharing a PDF document is done in the least secure way possible?” What other skeletons might they have in the closet?

I wanted to be forwarded to the department responsible for that. After my explanation to him of what was wrong, he fully understood the problem. To his credit, he admitted it was wrong the way it was set up. He actually tried to track down a supervisor. But there was none that could field IT and software requests.

They promised to call me once they could track someone down to talk about this. No call yet.

My excitement came down a couple of notches. I was not the investigative journalist undercovering an elaborate scam any longer. Instead, I was a software engineer. And some members of my profession have let me down. Big time.

In the meanwhile, I did the research and found the vendor who provided this service to Chase. They are Wolters Kluwer, a “financial services and banking compliance solutions provider”. The product page for “SDX”, Secure Document Exchange, is completely ludicrous. They claim this product includes “industry-leading security, including PKI encryption and multi-level user authentication, to keep communications safe at every step of the process.”

Right, so the password was sent in plain text. The default password is “password”. And, rather than having a chase.com subdomain which points at Wolters Kluwer’s server (e.g. secure-dx.chase.com) and sharing a secure chase.com certificate with them, they decide to host the whole thing outside of the chase.com domain, so that as a user, I have no way of confirming this actually is an e-mail or system originating from Chase. Users are so confused by this that they have already reported it as a phishing scam, even though it is not one.

That’s industry-leading? That’s “safe communication”?

No, that’s a joke. Chase should be ashamed.

You see, for almost a year, Sachin (the other founder of Cog Tree) and I have spent every moment of our free time to the path of starting this company.  We felt quite nomadic during that time — …

The process took some time, which is why I saved it for a weekend. To backup my hard drive took about 2 hours, and doing the partitioning operations took about 3 hours. I went out in the nice weather and picked up groceries while it was loading.

When I got back and could kick off the installation process, I was pleasantly surprised by the installation wizard UI. It easily guided me through the partition setup process. Even though in my case I had to make use of the “Advanced” editor, it easily visualized what was going on in my hard drive, and even detected the operating systems I had on there (WinXP and Intrepid).

I set up my new ext3 partitions (after deciding ext4 too unstable for my taste), and got started. I was pleasantly surprised when instead of asking me to reboot my computer, it just started right up. I still had access to a functioning computer while it was installing! Nice. That allowed me to jump on my blog and start on this post I even connected my MP3 player and have some tunes playing!

I was considering doing an upgrade of my system from Intrepid->Jaunty, but decided to give a clean installation a try. I get the feeling that there is some “drag” in my Linux installation which has been running on my machine for almost 3 years now. (Wow, has it been that long since I got this laptop?) I went through multiple releases of Ubuntu via upgrades, and I simply feel my requirements for my system have shrunk so significantly that a clean install was best to ensure my system is configured well and cleanly.

What do I mean by “shrunk” requirements? Well, when I profile the usage of my computer, nowadays 90% of what I do personally happens within Firefox. The remaining 10% are all handed by newer software. Among things that don’t include Firefox are browsing photos and listening to MP3s. Even some of these tasks are moving to the web platform.

For my work on Cog Tree, I really only have 3 development tools I lean on directly: vim, WingIDE (Python), and Eclipse IDE (Java). Javascript development and debugging happens inside a browser. I still lean on VMWare to give me some high-quality creative professional tools from the Windows world, e.g. Photoshop and Topstyle (for CSS). Aside from these, I don’t really need nor want much other software on my system. Any other development tools can be installed on-demand using Synaptic.

Jaunty’s installation percentage is about 50% right now. We’ll see how the system runs once it boots directly off the hard drive. I’m pleasantly surprised that most of my hardware seems to be working out of the box. Even my volume buttons, brightness buttons and media buttons on my laptop now work, which is a nice touch. My sound quality is still a little poor due to a chipset detection problem that still seems to be present in the snd_hda_intel driver. But I’m pretty sure by setting some options in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base I’ll be able to get it working better.

People who know me know that I’m very skeptical about my computer and about Linux. I regularly complain about all the little silly regressions that Linux has suffered over the years. I’m also particularly upset about how certain beautiful and essential pieces of software never end up making it into the Linux mainstream, e.g. TuxOnIce. But hopefully, Jaunty will capture my heart this time, and gain some love from this Linux cynic…

1. A Whirlwind Excursion through Writing a C Extension. This talk by Ned Batchelder (author of coverage.py and cog) shows that you can write a Python C extension module in under 20 minutes. This is my top talk because I never thought that my skills in C would be so directly useful in writing Python applications. Considering how damn easy it is to write a basic C extension module, I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason I ever write C code again is to implement some Python functions or types in C. Truly the best of both worlds!
2. Reinteract: a better way to interact with Python. Owen Taylor (of GNOME/GTK+ fame) has spent some time over the last few months building a better Python shell. Specifically, it’s a lightweight shell that is meant to be a prototyping or “worksheet” environment a la Matlab, Mathematica, or Maple. Except, you’re running and re-evaluating Python code. It even supports things like in-line graph plotting, but I’ve already used it to experiment with Python web services API. Any Python programmer who has been frustrated with IPython before should check out Reinteract.
3. Easy AI with Python. This talk might have gotten the #1 slot for most interesting, but not the #1 slot overall because it seems like this talk has been given at a lot of conferences (not just PyCon) over the last few years. This talk introduces some complex AI topics in a very short time frame, and in a very intuitive way. For me, the neural networks example with Jets and Sharks was particularly impressive. Raymond Hettinger is a great presenter, and if you have some time you should definitely check out his recipes on ActiveState’s Python Cookbook and his How-to Guide for Descriptors.
4. Abstraction as Leverage. A talk by one of my favorite Python authors, Alex Martelli (who wrote the best book on Python on the market, Python in a Nutshell), this talk isn’t so much about Python as it is about software engineering overall. But it’s thought-provoking as his talks usually are.
5. Class Decorators: Radically Simple. The presenter is the author of the Class Decorators PEP, Jack Diederich. If you like decorators and you are curious about metaclasses, you’ll love class decorators.

Feel free to share your favorites!

I highly recommend the entire book. It is not so much a book about beautiful code as about passionate and opinionated programmers and their tastes. But this is a good thing. It was one of the few books about software that I have read in the last decade or so that actually gave me entirely positive feelings about my profession. There is so much raw creativity and thought captured in these few essays. What Brian Kernighan finds beautiful is entirely different from what Matz or simonpj find beautiful. And that’s the thing about a fundamentally creative craft like software. You put five software engineers in a room with a piece of code, and you’re lucky if you come out with only six different opinions about it. It’s like art, or writing. Taste matters.

I don’t recommend people read Beautiful Code to try to imitate some of the code described therein. Instead, I recommend you read it as a sociological or psychological study of what makes proud and bright software engineers tick. For example, for Kernighan it is the simplicity and minimalism that is embodied in UNIX. For Matz, it is the notion that the programming language should be as syntactically flexible as our real languages are. For simonpj, it’s that complicated can be made easy, given the right abstractions. And for Jon Bentley, in one of the more thought-provoking essays in the book, beauty and elegance was only perceived as the size of his code shrank.

The essay about the SVN Delta Editor not only illuminates the internals of SVN, but also illustrates the social dimension to software engineering and design. It is a story about programmers, debating an API, producing it, and then putting it into practice. It is about give and take, and an unteachable skill in problem size and complexity reduction. All this in C! There was a period of time in university where I actually programmed in C full-time, so I have a lot of respect for the elegance with which they crafted this powerful API. C gives you few tools (like OO or explicit interfaces) for doing this kind of work; they had to work in spite of the language’s features and plan carefully.

I have about twenty students in my class, so I was going to print up one copy and get it copied and stapled at a local print shop. (See note on copyright below.) I opened up my ebook PDF of Beautiful Code with acroread on UNIX. I navigated to the right chapter and realized that I wanted to print just that single chapter. I always remember being annoyed whenever I had to do this, for a number of reasons.

1. PDF ebooks sometimes lack the proper “bookmark” information to navigate to the right section to print
2. Since ebooks were once print copies, they tend to have page numbers at the bottom of each page. But since the ebook itself has a different page numbering scheme, all sorts of psychic dissonance occurs. You navigate to page 30 (in the print copy) but have to note that it’s actually page 42 in the ebook. You then navigate to page 45 (in the print copy) but have to note that it’s actually 57 in the ebook.
3. OK, now I know what I need to print… I think. So now I have to enter one of those print ranges in the “Print” dialog. Is it 30-42? No, wait, it’s 42-45… I mean, 42-57 — that’s it! Is that inclusive or exclusive? Oh, my…

It’s really not that bad, and it’s only an occasional annoyance, but it’s always there. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

I had recently upgraded to acroread and noticed that the UI was all spiffed up. And I noticed that this ebook had the right metadata for the bookmarks. I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be nice if acroread supported printing a chapter?” I right-clicked on the first entry in the chapter bookmark and was astonished. Lo and behold, my feature existed! (See the image to the right.) I clicked the “Print Pages…” button with a bit of discomfort. I don’t trust software too often, and am always suspicious when I find a feature I didn’t expect to be there. It’s like my inner programmer is saying, “Yea, right — too good to be true.”

A few minutes later, my chapter was printed. I looked it over, and brought it with my other materials to the local print shop. One hour later, I picked up my copies and brought them home to look them over.

I noticed something very strange. Instead of my copies containing pages 42-57, they contained pages 42, 43, 46, 51, 55, and 57. Damn it. There didn’t seem to be much of a rhyme or reason to the pages that were selected. What kind of sequence was this? I felt that there must be some pattern, some fibonacci-like, non-obvious sequence that applied to these pages. I suspected the first, and obvious, culprit: that the printer had made a mistake. Maybe it’s a human error. But then I looked over my original and indeed, the original only had those pages. Not a human error. I thought to myself, “How is this possible?”

Of course, I’ve probably given you enough information that you’ve already figured it out. Especially if you’re a programmer. We’re just wired to think this way. But in case you haven’t figured it out, I’ll indulge you.

When I went back into acroread, tracing back my steps, I noticed something about that menu item I clicked. It didn’t say Print chapter. Instead, it said, Print pages. Now, conceptually that seems like a small distinction, but I picked up on it.

I started to think like a programmer, rather than a user. This function with a for loop emerged from the program and hovered above it, almost magically. It said:

def print_pages(self, selected):
    to_print = []
    for bookmark in selected.self_and_bookmarked_children():
        to_print.append(bookmark.page())
    PrintSubsystem.queue_job(to_print)

Then I realized the pattern in the pages it picked. There was no pattern. This was a beautiful little bug. A butterfly.

You see, within the narrow world of this Print Pages function, the “feature” works as expected. But from a user’s perspective, it makes absolutely no sense. Rather than printing everything from that bookmark to the next bookmark at the same level (that is, rather than printing a chapter), it printed each individual page that happened to be physically bookmarked (or ’sub-bookmarked’) in the PDF, at or below that level. This resulted in a bunch of pages being printed that happened to be the pages on which subsections began. But this left out most of the chapter, somewhat randomly.

The worst traits of our profession come out when it is at its least social. I have no doubt that this function that prints these pages was written by a single programmer in a windowless room, without any peer review, pair programming, or other check on his logic. I am sure that he was given the narrow and ill-defined requirement to enable an action to “print bookmark pages”. He needed to think, but instead, he decided to code. And coding got “it” done, for some very weird value of “it”. He was probably under time pressure. But one thing is certain to me: he was alone. No two programmers, debating the design and implementation of this feature, would let each other make this mistake.

The behavior it exhibited truly caught me by surprise. Strange as it sounds, I admired how easily I had been duped by this feature. The human error — the anti-social error — made by that programmer exhibited an odd and enigmatic computer behavior. A human inelegance created a strange sort of cruel machine elegance.

I found it ironic that in trying to print a chapter about beautiful design from a book called Beautiful Code, I came across this beautiful bug. I call the bug beautiful because it managed to fool me, to get me to suffer its wrath while thinking I was getting some convenience. It exhibited behavior that challenged me to identify a pattern, where there was none. It was so clever, it even cost me money (the printing charges). And even though I was a discerning programmer — skeptical of the feature, and so unsure of the software’s operation that I checked the output, albeit too briefly — this little bug managed to outsmart me.

My students will have to live without the chapter, or read it online on their own. I’m not upset about it. There can be beauty, even in failure.

A note about copyright: some readers on reddit and on my comments section suggested that I might be ignoring copyright issues by thinking that I could just photocopy a chapter from this book to distribute to my students. Trust me, I know about copyright. The content of this chapter happens to be available online for free under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Karl Fogel, the author of the article, has even given his informal blessing in my comments section. And finally, by most people’s interpretation of the rules of Fair Use, it was OK for me to copy a chapter for my classroom. I’m surprised no one suggested that this bug might be beautiful in another way: that it saved me from a copyright disaster. I don’t think it was that good… If you are really interested in seeing a debate about this, you can read this thread on reddit. Warning, somewhat painful and longwinded. (Also, if you clicked the anchor link within the article to get to this note, simply click “back” in your browser to return and continue reading.)

This trip emerged as a major convenience for me. My brother was heading out to California for the Real Estate Connect conference, since his company is intimately involved with Real Estate technologies. But he didn’t want to go alone, so he paid for my plane ticket and hotel stay the first few nights to convince me to come out. (Thanks, Alex!)

I got in touch with some people I knew out there, but many of them weren’t going to be around during my stay, due to summer vacations, etc.

Joseph Sofaer, a friend of mine from NYU, was gracious enough to delay a trip to Europe to show me around the area. I was even lucky enough that the first first day I was there, he invited me to a party at the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, where I briefly met Mark Zuckerberg, saw Robert Scoble walking around, and met about twenty other software developers in a room of 300, who worked for companies like Yahoo, Pandora, del.icio.us, and, of course, Facebook itself.

The train ride home, I was riding with the creator of the MillionDollarHomepage, probably the best website idea of all time.

Palo Alto and Software is Sexy
—
The vibe in Palo Alto was enviable, especially for a native New Yorker. When I pull out my laptop on the train or in a cafe in NY, screens full of code or running with full-screen vterms, I get stares and strange looks. (Including right now, as I write this blog post on the LIRR…) In Palo Alto, my brother and I walked by two or three cafes, and in each I saw young guys and gals at their laptops, coding away, screens full of GNU make output scroling by, emacs and vim buffers splitting off. I overheard conversation snippets like, “we’re hoping to release our next version in a couple weeks”, “you have got to try metaclass programming with Python”, and “did you see that article on /.?”

In New York, people aren’t that proud to be a geek. You go to a typical gathering and say, “I’m a software developer” and the typical response is, “Oh…”, followed by silence, followed by, “I think I need another drink…”. Sexy in New York, programming isn’t. If you want sex appeal, go into finance, law, or politics.

Opposite in Palo Alto, of course. Which makes you feel great as a software developer. What are you into? If you answer, “Stocks, bonds, and the market” you’ll get the treatment I described above. You answer, “Ruby on Rails” and you’ll be having a 2-hour, heated conversation.

BTW, the Silicon Valley excitement about Ruby on Rails is palpable. Everyone wants a Rails developer.

A quick anecdote to illustrate the NY disdain for geeks: I was out with a friend once who had attend culinary school and was trying her way up the restaurant ladder, to become a chef. She complained, however, that the money in these entry level jobs (food preparer, etc.) in the kitchen was way too little, that it was difficult to get by. So, someone suggested, “Why don’t you waitress on the side?”

Her response, “Waitress? I’m trying to become a chef. That’s like saying to someone who wants to run a company, ‘Why don’t you work as an IT guy?’”

Something tells me that joke wouldn’t work that well in Palo Alto.

San Francisco and Good Coffee
—
It was great to be able to get a little sense of the Silicon Valley vibe on my first day in Northern California. But by the end of the day, my head was spinning. I was ready to head back to an environment that was less technobubble, something a bit more real.

My second day there, I walked around some neighborhoods on my own, particularly Union Square (which is a bit of a tourist center), the Mission (which reminds me of Astoria, but with a different set of ethnic groups), and Noe Valley (which reminds me of the Upper East Side, but with houses instead of apartment buildings).

In the Mission, I ended up stopping by a coffee place named Philz. I asked for an iced coffee. I then watched as the barrista (who I think was Phil!) took a scoop of coffee beans, ground them in a grinder, put them in a coffee machine, and made a fresh cup of coffee. Some ice went in with frothed milk atop it. I kid you not, the BEST iced coffee I have ever had.

Later in the day, when I met up with Joey at his apartment, I mentioned that I had just stumbled upon the best iced coffee of my life a couple hours ago. And he said, “Oh, man… if you want good coffee, you have to try this place Philz.”

I laughed and said “THAT’s exactly where I was!” and he responded, “Man, you had ‘just stumbled upon’ possibly the best coffee in the world.” So that was a bit of good luck. We ended up going back to Philz later that day

Joey had to leave the next day for Europe, but we spent the rest of the afternoon chatting about software ideas, in particular details about his latest idea, a Blackboard replacement application hosted on the Facebook Platform. If you’re on the Facebook, check out the application called “Courses”. It’s quite cool, even if it is in the early stages.

The Weekend
—
My brother’s real estate conference was winding down, so he snuck me in so I could catch the last couple presenters. Unfortunately, I had missed the presentation by Craig Newmark (of craiglist fame), which was apparently pretty good. Instead, I caught a panel by some head honchos of real estate technology at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Realtor.com.This panel was mighty uninteresting. Despite the fact that these guys were all supposed to be team leads and head-techies-in-charge, they all gave tired lines and made me question whether they actually knew what they were talking about.

Nonetheless, it was interesting to see a conference of this kind — lots of buzz, lots of software developers all gathered together, a lot of excitement about an emerging market.

That afternoon, we took a bus tour of San Francisco, which was well worth it due to the hilarious tour guide named “Silvio.”

We spent that night at a Vietnamese Restaurant named “La Colonial“. Excellent.

Saturday morning, we walked around the city, starting out in Union Square, moving through to Civic Center. We stopped at the Asian Art Museum, where I saw an exhibit on Manga and Japanese Wood Block art, both very good, among others. Finally, we ended up in the Lower Haight and Haight Ashbury, where we spent the afternoon lounging and exploring.

At night, we headed to North Beach and ate dinner there. We ended the night at the bar at the top of the Sir Francis Drake hotel, which my brother said reminded him a bit of Windows on the World, when that was still around.

Conclusion
—

For a short trip, I got to see a good chunk of the city, and even got to take that important visit outside the city. Overall, I had a great time.

As a technologist based out of New York, I have to say that San Francisco is quite appealing. The weather, the laid back attitude, the independent shops, cafes and restaurants, the technology buzz. But moving there would certainly seem like selling out. Sure, we may not be able to reproduce Silicon Valley but we can do our own thing. New York is too strong a city to be left in the hands of financiers and lawyers.

One thing I have wanted to do is to create a “schism” in my blog between the political and technological sections. I realize there is no sense forcing my audience to wade through technology posts to get to the political stuff they may be interested in, and vice versa.

The main thing stopping me from doing so is the fact that even as I have a single blog for these two topics, I hardly find the time to post to either of them. That isn’t to say I don’t have much to say. I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about Lisp (for the first time in my life), and have interesting ideas surrounding my use of Eclipse technologies and modeling tools at work. I have been following a lot on the political side of things, from Libby’s commuted sentence to debates over globalization, to WSJ’s potential new owner. And I’ve finished a slew of books, from John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.

But I just lack the time to write. I’m busy at work (at least 10-12 hours a day, when you include commute time), and the last thing I want to do when I get home is use computers some more. Which is sad, but an inevitable result of my situation.

I truly do not want this blog to die. How might I save it?

Dilbert’s pointy-headed managers are everywhere. In my current Fortune 100 company, virtually none of the managers with any authority have ANY IT development background. They manage entirely by cost and project plan – ignoring any and all input from those developers who actually have a successful track record.

I can’t say this is true in my team, at my company, but I have certainly heard it from a lot of my IT friends. Also, I have an acquaintence who is an IT Project Manager who thinks that development is “easy work” and that most software developers are just “lazy”, which is why projects end up behind schedule. I think many innumerate IT managers share this opinion, and this can lead to problems, low morale, and resentment.

Today, I did some digging on the Metacity bugzilla to see if it was fixed, and found this bug.

Over the course of 3.5 years, this bug has sat on the bugzilla, and still isn’t satisfactorily resolved. There is now a reduced_resources flag in gconf, but this flag only disables the minimize animation at the expense of forcing you to use an ugly wireframe window dragging animation. (Complete, utter insanity.)

I don’t understand how after two years of debate, and nearly 3.5 years down th road from when this bug was first opened, the final fix was something that throws the baby out with the bathwater.

I don’t want the minimize animation, but I don’t want wireframe windows, either. Why can I only opt out of them as a couple?

Havoc, you asked for rationale and not rant, and lloyd had provided it:

the window minimization animation’s sole purpose is to indicate to an absolute GUI neophyte “where the window goes” when it’s minimized. for a huge number of users – basically anyone who’s ever used a GUI with a taskbar before, which is in excess of 98% of current desktop computer users – they are never useful because they already know this.

for the remainder, window animations are useful exactly once in their lifetimes – the first time they minimize a window and wonder where their application window “went”.

thereafter, window animations are a distracting waste of time, and to me and many others, an annoyance. it’s roughly equivalent to never being able to turn off Clippy.

I wholeheartedly agree with this analysis. Minimize animations are useful to newbies, not useful to anyone else.

The lack of an ability to disable this animation (alone, not in a catch-all flag that enables wireframe drawing, for crying out loud!) is completely absurd. On my Core Duo 1.6 Ghz machine running an Nvidia graphics card, this animation still feels slow and clunky, and is completely superfluous.

In the future, maybe we’ll be able to use compiz and get nice fade in and fade out that works smoothly and nicely. Even then, I’ll still want to be able to disable it, because it serves no purpose for me, and isn’t central to metacity’s operation.

In the GNOME community, we’ve heard mention of “Nat’s Pendulum”, referring to Nat Friedman’s insistence that the GNOME “usability pendulum” has swung too far in the other direction. The 3.5 years spent blocking on the inclusion of this simple gconf flag, was, I think, a perfect illustration of what Nat meant. The fact that the flag still isn’t there in the form suggested may mean that the damage may just be permanent in this community surrounding metacity development.

Why must gconf be “usable” too? Don’t give me a reduced_resources catch-all flag, but give me separate flags to enable/disable certain animations/effects. Is this really such a usability disaster, or are you just being a Metacity Nazi:”no fine-grained configuration for you!”

As Jeff Waugh has mentioned, religious usability insistence like that expressed in this thread was enough to send many would-be GNOME users and contributors packing for projects like KDE, XFCE, or even to proprietary platforms like OS X. The damage is deep and felt. I lost a lot of faith in GNOME personally because of these issues, and am only slowly regaining it.

Has anyone already written a patch which removes the reduced_resources flag and adds this fine-grained control of the minimize and wireframe animations? If not, I’ll write it and attach it to this issue.

I will not open a new bugzilla bug for this, because I think history is important so that we learn from our past mistakes.

I’ve been in contact with an ALSA hacker, Tobin Davis, over a series of patches that provide support for the sound chipset (intel-hda) that is part of the HP DV2000 laptop.

His patches over ALSA 1.0.14rc3 enable the following new features:

• The headphone port now works, and the speakers automute when the headphones are plugged in.
• The microphone port now works, with great sound quality.
• The built-in mic on the monitor now works, though obviously with worse sound quality due to ambient noise.

The new patches aren’t perfect. I’m noticing some sound quality issues at high volumes, and in order to get it to work Tobin had to essentially enable two PCM channels (PCM and PCM-2), which have a very strange behavior. The first one controls the volume directly from the sound system. The second one controls the volume only between the sound system and the speakers (and thus, will have no effect on the sound when the headphones are plugged in). The master volume control effectively modulates both of these. Tobin has told me that the chipset produced by Conexant is particularly weird, which is why he had to this. I find that it’s not so bad, as long as I keep a launcher to gnome-volume-control set up so that I can control it, knowing these rules.

That said, it’s a huge improvement over out of the box sound support for Ubuntu (which is ALSA 1.0.11). Inside this post you’ll find further instructions, which are adapted from a text document Tobin sent his tester group via e-mail. These are step by step instructions to set up 1.0.14rc3 ALSA drivers plus Tobin’s latest patch.

1. Backup your current drivers

tar -zcvf original-drivers.tgz /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/sound

2. Next, get the latest release and bring it current.

wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.14rc3.tar.bz2

wget http://members.dsl-only.net/~tdavis/alsa-patches/conexant-latest-rc3.patch

tar -jxf alsa-driver-1.0.14rc3.tar.bz2

cd alsa-driver-1.0.14rc3/alsa-kernel

patch -p1 < ../../conexant-latest-rc3.patch

cd ../../

3. Build the code.

cd alsa-driver-1.0.14rc3

./configure --with-debug=detect --with-cards=hda-intel

make

sudo make install

sudo depmod -a

sudo dmesg -c >/dev/null

4. Stop all audio applications and remove all audio drivers

On my system, the following works:

modprobe -r snd-usb-audio

modprobe -r snd-hda-intel snd-hda-codec snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-pcm snd-timer snd snd-page-alloc

5. Reload the new driver

Simply run modprobe snd-hda-intel, look at the dmesg output and test it out.

Using alsamixer will show you all available channels. In gnome-volume-control, you can also enable additional channels with Edit->Preferences. You’ll need at least Master, PCM, and PCM-2 enabled to get proper volume working on the headphones and speakers. You’ll need Capture enabled in the Capture tab to get mic input working.

If nothing works, or one function doesn’t work, try reloading the driver with “model=test” as a parameter. On Ubuntu, this can be done by doing sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base and adding a line to the end that says This should enable everything.

If you have issues, you can try to contact Tobin Davis or other hackers at the ALSA team. Or you could even post a comment here and I’ll pass it along. Please include the system make/model, the subsystem line from “lspci -s 0:1b -vn” (Ex: Subsystem: 103c:30b2), the dmesg output from above, and the output from “cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#0″.

Update: Modified instructions based on Henrique’s input below. (Patchlevel argument for patch command was incorrect.)

Asking me to get off my a$$ and code drivers for this baby is what I consider elitist and a very unreasonable demand on the end user. It’s one thing that gives GNU/Linux zealots a very bad name in the real world.

I have sneaking suspicion that you get this response from the Linux community because we feel you’re placing unreasonable demands on us. Your points are valid, but your energy is misdirected. Unfortunately for those who don’t like to code, that’s how software is created and improved. We invite you to participate in our projects in a variety of capacities including but not limited to programming, but of course participation is not required.

I think that Linux “zealots” get a bad name because much of the “real world” believes in a culture of entitlement. Look at everybody living life with a chip on their shoulder, blaming everyone else for their problems and scoffing at the notion that they take responsibility for their own situation. Somewhere along the line we stopped believing in opportunity as a means of realizing our dreams and began to foster the idea that we’re entitled to our expectations. In “Linux land,” we believe that the opportunity to participate in our information society is fundamental to our inherent desire as human beings to better our situation and control our own destiny.

Of course, money can make just about any dream come true. Mark Shuttleworth, for [example], invested $10 million to help make the Ubuntu project a reality. But years ago my great-grandmother told me the story of how my family came to America with nothing but the promise that here they would find a land of opportunity. This is the same promise we make with free software. This isn’t elitist, this is egalitarian.

I have to say, this is part of what makes me love Free Software.  It’s this idea of widespread opportunity.  Sure, F/OSS has power structures and means of coercion/control built into certain parts of it, but for the most part, it’s based upon a very simple, powerful, and egalitarian idea.  “Anyone can improve this, anyone can make it better.”  It’s that kernel of an idea that makes any process — whether software production, book editing, encyclopedia editing, or even beer brewing, more enjoyable to those involved, and, as a side effect, better for the general public.

A poster under the name “jerryleecooper” says,

Vista is far more powerful than windows XP, and runs twice as fast. It is also much harder to pirate, and this point more than anything else has the Linux crowd in a panic.

and, in a follow-up post,

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services?  That sounds preposterous to me.

Is this serious, or satire?  If it’s serious, it’s absurd.  If it’s satire, it’s genius.

This is a stunning, damaging decision for public radio and its commitment to music discovery and education, which has been part of our tradition for more than half a century. Public radio’s agreements on royalties with all such organizations, including the RIAA, have always taken into account our public service mission and non-profit status. These new rates, at least 20 times more than what stations have paid in the past, treat us as if we were commercial radio – although by its nature, public radio cannot increase revenue from more listeners or more content, the factors that set this new rate. Also, we are being required to pay an internet royalty fee that is vastly more expensive than what we pay for over-the-air use of music, although for a fraction of the over-the-air audience.

The Copyright Royalty Fees for Internet Radio broadcasters (like the hugely innovative Pandora.com) have been increased to the point where many of these stations will have to close down.

The music industry has certainly made a big fuss about threats coming from the Internet, but I don’t spend any of my nights crying for the music industry.  They make millions upon millions of dollars, and keep America locked in a relative monoculture where new and independent artists are left out of the musical discourse while mindless and mind-numbing music is played everyday on radio stations across the ClearChannel nation.

Yet, despite my relative dislike for this exploitive industry, I have to say that every technological innovation that we’ve seen — from LPs to tape cassettes to CDs, and now to MP3s — has seen an increasingly growing recording industry, usually due to, rather than in spite of, these technologies.

Interent Radio actually has more of a potential to benefit the music industry than any other one of these technologies.  If you don’t know, Pandora.com is an amazing site based upon “The Music Genome Project.”  The concept is simple: you enter a song or artist on the site, and it creates a playlist of songs that “sound like” that artist or song.  I can mix these intangibles (”The Doors” and “Michael Jackson” gives me classic rock tones with pop melodies) and discover new artists I had never even heard about, simply by exploring my “taste matrix.”  This amazing functionality comes in particular handy after I get my paycheck, since I go to Pandora.com, see which artists/songs I’ve listened to lately, and with a click I can purchase these songs from the music industry.

I hadn’t bought a CD in years, until discovering Pandora and, through it, independent music I liked.

Who, exactly, loses in this situation?  I discover songs I’ve never heard of, I buy CDs that probably don’t sell very well, I get to benefit from high-quality radio from work on my work PC, and Pandora makes a tiny slice of money on advertising.

I’m sure the music industry wishes they had thought of Pandora, so that the little money that it does make from advertising would be theirs.  But tough!  This is supposed to be a competitive economic system, and if you snooze, you lose.  (Given actions like these by government, I’m not sure that it is really a competitive economic system, unfortunately!)

This is only the beginning of the places these technologies can go.  Don’t allow their efforts to be quelled by big corporate interests!  Please strike down these ridiculous copyright fees!

Think Corporate Power is showing any signs of weakness?  Nope.  The big wheels keep on turning…

I have been perpetually delaying a review of Capitalism 3.0 and Dreaming in Code, both of whom deserve it. But I promise one soon. I use Hofstadter’s Rule of Thumb lately for estimating time: however long you think it’s gonna take, double it and add a unit of time. So if you think it’ll take two hours, it’ll really take four days. If you think it’ll take five days, it’ll really take 10 weeks. And so on.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been busy at work — actually working on some cool stuff from a technology standpoint, mainly in the realm of hacking with pieces of the Eclipse Modeling Framework, and its related projects like GMF, RCP, Eclipse Core, etc.

On my commute, I’ve been enjoying reading Making Globalization Work by Stiglitz. Although one of my friends mentioned to me that this book would be quite boring, and for the most part he was right. Not the lofty stuff of Barnes in Capitalism 3.0; but perhaps Stiglitz’s recommendations are much more practical for ways to improve the current system.

The other book I started recently is a long, written interview with John Kenneth Galbraith (much in the style of Socrates) which is entitled, Almost Everyone’s Guide to Economics. What’s amazing is to see Galbraith, this towering (literally) Keynesian economic thinker, speaking in the 70s of the growth of corporate power, the undermining of labor, and the insidious nature of market fundamentalism. And yet, here we are, 30 years later, heeding none of his warnings, and entering into the new “global age” of “The World is Flat”.

Oh yes indeed, I do need to write some reviews very soon.

I’d post a longer review, but I’m headed down to New Orleans today. Will post a longer review when I get back, hopefully also of Capitalism 3.0, whose ideas have been swimming in my head the last few days of commute.  I think they really deserve to be summarized and presented here.

In the meanwhile, I’ve started reading Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz. This book, in particular, has been a kind of catharsis for most of my armchair ideas in economics, at least so far.  It’s a very strange feeling to read the ex-Chief Economist of the World Bank explaining his own ideas about overcoming the zealousness of “market fundamentalism” prevalent in economic circles, while I, who never studied economics formally, think, “Why would anyone trained in this discipline actually believe that markets are a magic force that work on their own?”  But I guess ideology always trumps rationality.

The website provides a way for Dell customers to vote on the issues which are most important to them. The number 1 issue right now is making Linux available as an install option on their Dell PCs. There are a slew of issues below that related to gaining driver support for Linux, and offering Windows with OOo and Firefox, and even offering OS-less computers to avoid the Microsoft tax.

It’d be interesting to see how this pans out, but in the meanwhile, go ahead and contribute a vote!

On February 13, they’re going to have the creator of VIM, Bram Moolenaar, giving a talk on VIM7.  What’s funny is that Bram, who has been working full-time on VIM for the past few years (living entirely on donations and money votes for VIM features) has now been hired by Google.  Smart move.

Perfect for my commute. Up till now, I’ve been depending on PBS, which has good content, but doesn’t give it all away for free.

Check it out: Fora.tv.

In particular, there’s a talk by Peter Barnes (author of Capitalism 3.0) in there.

Here’s what I wrote:

Hi Miguel,

It looks like a new set of “Halloween Documents” have come out, thanks to a case in Iowa, Comes et. al. v. Microsoft (http://iowaconsumercase.org/index.html). I’m wondering if you have any comments on this document in particular, which suggests that Microsoft management knew full well they were “stealing Java” to intentionally marginalize the cross-platform language issue.

A select quote from the document, “Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let’s move on and steal the Java language.”
Here’s the e-mail archives, which was submitted into evidence:

http://www.iowaconsumercase.org/011107/PX_2768.pdf

I’m wondering, given these thoughts from within Microsoft management, and given the recent news of Sun open sourcing the Java language under GPL terms, how is it that you can still push for the Mono project on Linux? Aren’t we always going to be fighting an uphill battle against a monopoly company protecting its biggest cash cow: the Windows platform?

Although my question was more “devil’s advocate” and meant to rile him up, Miguel provided some of the strongest and most cogent arguments for Mono that I’ve seen on record.

I just want to say great work to Miguel and the Mono team, and that if you ever doubted your raison d’etre, all it would take is reading this thread to be convinced! You’ve certainly convinced me!

Update: it’s really this kind of dependency on Windows I’m worried about in .NET. I think it’s just that the culture of the Java runtime is one of platform independence, whereas .NET from Microsoft is one of “platform dominance,” and Mono is some sort of stepping stone between Microsoft’s single-platform vision and those of us who want to write cross-platform apps using .NET.

You can read the entire thing in a scanned copy from the Iowa case Comes et. al. v. Microsoft Corp.

Update: my discussion with Miguel de Icaza makes this seem “less official,” but I still think the mentality from this document also pervaded the mentality of .NET development, specifically that cross-platform would never be a goal of Microsoft .NET.