technology

Microsoft Word is legendary for its awfulness. This is not news. But I just ran across a quirk so funny that I had to stop working on my tight-deadline job and blog it.

I’ve got auto-correct turned on. I’m zipping along and type “arcana.” Word corrects it to “arcane.” That’s odd–I couldn’t imagine that there would be an arcana/arcane pair in the auto-correct dictionary. And there isn’t. But there’s another feature (that can be disabled, fortunately) that will auto-correct based on the regular spellcheck dictionary. Apparently that dictionary doesn’t include “arcana” but does include “arcane,” and the spellcheck algorithm decided the latter was the only viable candidate to replace the former. So it did.

Here’s where it gets funny. Word also includes a regular dictionary with definitions–the whole works. Arcana is in that dictionary. Go ahead, make jokes about one hand not knowing what the other is doing, the insane redundnancy of two different word lists, etc. I’m with you.

Macintouch today had an item on Apple’s infernal model nomenclature

Continuing a tradition of absurdly awkward computer names, Apple has posted technical specifications for the new iBook (Opaque 16 VRAM), iBook (32 VRAM), and iBook (14.1 LCD 32 VRAM). [This naming silliness has gone so far, Apple’s Knowledge Base actually has to use footnotes to help define its iBook names! “Note 1. The parenthetical product description (Summer 2000) refers to the summer of the Northern Hemisphere.”]

While I like the initial attempt at simplicity–just calling models “iBook” or “Powermac” without four-digit numbers added on to the end to impress you–they need to come up with a better way of distinguishing variants of a model. I propose putting a few simple shapes in a discreet (but not inaccessible) spot on the machines, so they can refer to them instead as the “iBook (○△△ circle-triangle-triangle model).

While there’s no shortage of calendar apps for every taste, it seems that this is the only one that caters to mine. Calendar is very simple. I have it sitting in the background, all but invisible on top of my desktop picture. It has minimal functionality for adding events. And it displays five days worth of weather information, although it’s questionable when compared to other forecasts.

Just downloaded a specialized OS-X tool for posting to Movable Type blogs: Kung-log. This is a test post using the program. Seems to work OK, although BBEdit is still a better writing environment.

In the beginning were the Switch ads from Apple. Quirky music in the background and a regular person just describing why they switched from Windows to Macs, with a lot of jump cuts to stress certain points.

Then came the parodies. Will Farrell made an especially funny one that was played at a Macworld conference.

Then came the ripoff. Microsoft concocted an obviously faked Mac-to-Windows switch story (nobody talks like a marketing weasel except a marketing weasel). When they were called on it, they took the page down. It lived on for a while in Google’s cache, but seems to have been lost to the shifting sands of time.

Anyhow, one of the original ads in particular, featuring a teenage girl, Ellen Feiss, seemed to capture the imagination of a lot of people. So now there’s a fan site for her. And a tribute song.

And now, Apple has brought the switch ad concept to Japan. Momoko Kikuchi seems to be the one most like Ellen (her story is kind of like Ellen’s, too…). I wonder how long it takes before she gets her own fan base.

In a related story, that annoying “Dude, your gettin’ a Dell” guy is out of work. Maybe he’ll be able to get a part in Dude, Where’s My Car, Part II.

Well, thanks to the intervention of a kind soul who will remain nameless, I have scored a pirate copy of Office 2001, allowing me to run Office X after all. Now I just need to get my hard drive fixed and deal with that address-book problem.

What a disaster.

I upgraded to MacOS X version 10.2 yesterday. This may turn out to be more aggravating than the upgrade from 9.0 to 10.1. Why? Some specifics:

1. Address book: Although it was fairly primitive in 10.1, I started using the address book and depended on it. Much to my amazement, not only does the address book in 10.2 use a completely different file format, it doesn’t have any import function for the old address book. The only way to get old address-book data into the new program is by exporting the data to an interchange format before upgrading. At this point, I can’t even get my 10.1 install CD to run, so I can’t install the old address book for that purpose.
2. Microsoft Office: Some people brag about being Microsoft-free. Many others aspire to that noble condition. Apparently Microsoft itself is trying to give me a shove in that direction. After installing my upgrade edition of Office X, the installer requested that I locate the old installation or the old CD. I can’t seem to locate the CD of the previous version (I probably threw it out in a housecleaning). A frustrating call to Microsoft tech support leaves me thinking that they aren’t going to help me. Either I can buy the full new version, or I can track down someone else’s copy of the earlier version, or I could perhaps buy a copy on eBay.
3. My hard drive: When I came home this morning, I discovered my external hard drive, a firewire model from QPS, was making an ominous clicking noise every few seconds. Double-clicking the drive icon resulted in the spinning beachball of doom. Now, for the most part, this drive is reserved for my MP3 collection, but I copied my personal files to it for this upgrade, since I wanted to reformat the hard drive and start fresh. I was able to open the terminal and use the Unix “cp” command to copy the most critical data off the drive, but now it doesn’t even mount on the desktop. I left voicemail with QPS, which still hasn’t been returned.

I’ve been using OS X on my Mac for a little while now. I generally like it well enough, and there are some things I really like. But I have a peeve. Too many blue icons. Shown above is my dock, containing some of the programs I use most frequently. It’s hard to tell them apart at a glance because of the uniform color. Can’t the designers inject some yellow, or purple, or whatever?

Cool!

Since upgrading my Mac to OS X, I’ve been trying to find just the right FTP client. RBrowser isn’t absolutely perfect, but it’s pretty darned good.

2 Tinkerers Say They’ve Found a Cheap Way to Broadband: This is pretty exciting. Hacking the Wi-Fi protocol makes it possible to blanket a whole city with fast, wireless coverage. Well, that’s the theory.

“A French engineer would say this isn’ the most elegant solution” Mr. Furrier said, “but we didn’t care about that. We took advantage of these cheap commodity chips and we just wanted to make it work.”

Then again, wasn’t it a French engineer who invented the 2CV?

Defeating copy-protected CDs

Music disc copyright protection schemes such a Cactus Data Shield 100/200 and KeyAudio can be circumvented using tools as basic as marker pens and electrical tape, crackers have discovered.

To quote Nelson Muntz, “Ha ha!”

More notes on the upgrade to OS X. Just installed Quickeys X. I have been a longtime user of Quickeys, and while I probably didn’t get as much mileage out of it as some people, I found it to be extremely handy. So I am extremely disappointed by the new version, which is much less capable than its predecessor. Some of this is perhaps excusable–the software clearly had to be re-written from the ground up for OS X, and perhaps some features were intractable to implement. But there are others that they simply dropped–like inserting a custom-formatted date (which I used all the time)–which clearly would not have been difficult to implement. What had previously been a handy macro type that zipped you to a certain directory when in an Open File/Save File dialog, or opened that directory when in the Finder, has been confusingly split into two separate types, and the one that zips you around when opening/saving files operates so slowly that it’s almost not worth using (and can be easily stumped).

Perhaps with time, I’ll figure out how to bend this version to my will, but I suspect that I wasted my money on this. There’s a freeware macro utility for OS X, and that’s probably a better deal (hell, the price is right). I’ll have to check it out.

So we’re starting to see Copy-protected CDs from one of the major media conglomerates, Vivendi/Universal. The point is to make it impossible to rip MP3s from them (which, even under the absurd Digital Millenium Copyright Act isn’t necessarily illegal, I don’t think), but the net effect is that copy-protected CDs simply will not play in many computer CD-players, or even some plain-old CD players. If you buy one of these, return it as defective.

I’ve asked amazon.com to post a notice on their info page for every copy-protected CD they sell, so I’ll know not to buy it. Perhaps if enough people make the same suggestion, they’ll do it. This should make Universal sweat a little.

The Segway. Gee. It’s a scooter. A $3000 scooter. Yes, it’s technically cool, but in terms of its practical applications, I am left wondering “so what?” What can this do that a bike, cargo trike, or conventional scooter cannot do? I guess it can save the rider from getting a little bit of exercise. Ooh, there’s a benefit. Pardon my sarcasm.

Dean Kamen has already come up with more important applications for the gyroscopic stabilization system in this toy, which, for some reason, never got much press.

I want to like Netscape 6.2, really I do. And there are a lot of aspects of it that I do like. But it has all these annoying habits that slow me down:

• When I open a new window, the cursor is not blinking in the URL field. Normally it should be. This drives me nuts.
• Tabbing should toggle between the URL field and the body of the window. It doesn’t, at least not reliably. If there’s a page with links displayed, tabbing moves the focus from one link to the next. This is a Windows-y behavior that I’m not used to. I need to grab the mouse to get the cursor in the URL field.
• Forms on web pages do not use standard Apple interface widgets, they use very Windows-y widgets. Not what I’m used to. I know Netscape is trying to use a common code base as much as possible, but it’s still annoying.
• There’s a noticeable pause when opening a new window.
• It helpfully can remember all your website passwords, but rather than hooking in to Apple’s keychain, it makes you enter a master password separately.
• For reasons I’ll never understand, it renders some elements differently than previous versions of Netscape, or IE, or whatever. Dumb stuff. Like some pop-up menus, horizontal rules, that sort of thing. Why?
• Oh, and this really bugs me: hitting escape or command-period used to stop animated GIFs, but no longer. Some animated GIFs I do want to watch; most I do not. Why this useful feature was dropped I can’t imagine.

I do like the fact that it’s really fast, it gives me basic keyboard controls for navigating text in editable fields (shame, IE, shame), I like its sidebar approach better than IE’s

Test of iBlog beta

I don’t like the way phones work.

First off, let’s take phone numbers. Phone numbers are not easy to remember. I can remember 10 or so. Admittedly, speed-dialers have made me lazy–I could probably remember more if I put my mind to it. I like e-mail addresses much better. I can tell someone my e-mail address, and they can probably remember it, at least until they get home. If I tell anyone my phone number, they’ll almost certainly need to write it down immediately, unless they have an excellent memory or I come up with a cute mnemonic.

Next, think of all the phone numbers people need these days. A well-connected person might have a home phone, office phone, cellphone, pager, and fax number. That’s five numbers, and two of them aren’t even for voice communications. Imagine this worst-case scenario for trying to reach this person: The guy you are calling is in the field, with his cellphone, but the batteries are run down. You try him first at home, then at work, then on his cellphone (which can’t answer). You try paging him, and he gets the page, but can’t call you back. As a last resort, you write out what you wanted to say and fax it to him. Perhaps by the time he gets to a phone to return your page, you are away from the phone from which you sent the page, so he starts chasing you at all your various contact numbers.

Admittedly, some people have multiple e-mail addresses (I am one of them), but it is usually not hard to set things up so that they are all funneled to one address, or so that you can pick them all up easily.

Phone numbers generally change when you move, certainly if you move a long distance. E-mail addresses do change for a lot of people when they change service providers, but there are easy ways to get permanent e-mail addresses so that you can move around and change ISPs with impunity, and still be easily reached.

So what do we do about this?

The future of phones is in the Internet. Phone calls will be carried over Internet lines like e-mail or pictures. We won’t have phone lines running into our homes per se, we’ll have permanently-connected data lines that carry voice signals among other things. The devices on which we make phone calls may or may not look like phones. Internally, they will be more like computers (unless they are computers, plain and simple). Cellphones will be essentially the same. Once phone calls run over the Internet, they’ll work more like existing Internet services, like e-mail.

Here are some descriptions of specifically what I have in mind.

One aspect I predict is that phones (or phone lines) will not have specific phone numbers permanently assigned to them, any more than computers have specific e-mail addresses assigned to them today. When you get to a phone, you will log into it to let the network know where you can be reached. So how would a call get to you? A few possibilities come to mind.

The folks responsible for Java have invented something they call a Java ring, which is pretty much what it sounds like. A ring that you wear on your finger, which contains a small processor, and which could be used in place of numerous keys, ID cards, etc. I love this idea, and envision that future phone-like devices will let you log into them by waving your ring over them, or touching a pad, or something like that. When the phone interfaces with the ring, the phone gets information about you from the ring, and configures itself to answer calls intended for you.

To understand how this might work in more detail, it helps to understand a little of how existing Internet services work. Take domain name servers, for starters. Every machine that is permanently hooked into the Internet has a long dotted-decimal number called an IP number (like “192.102.1.226”, for example) and a name (like “sluggo.cartoons.org”). Domain name servers maintain long tables of the associations between the two. When you type in a website’s address, your web browser first asks a name server “what is the IP number for this name” gets a response, and then uses the IP number to connect to the web server. These tables are updated once a day.

The nice thing about this is that it is dynamic: the domain name can move around to different machines on the network. It isn’t hard to imagine something like this with phones–you would have a permanent “virtual” number (or better yet, name, perhaps the same as your e-mail address), and the network would keep track of what physical phone-like device was currently hosting that phone number. But only updating once a day is much too slow for a phone system, since people are constantly moving around–tables would need to be updated every few seconds, and that would be impractical too, since the tables would be really big.

A more productive example might be the way e-mail works. When you send out a piece of e-mail, your e-mail software connects to a server called an SMTP server. It is the SMTP server’s mission in life to take your outgoing e-mail, find where it is going, and send it there. It does not go directly to the recipient’s e-mail software, though, it goes to another server called a POP server, which acts as a holding-pen for e-mail until the recipient gets around to checking for his e-mail. You can send e-mail via any SMTP server in the world, as long as it is willing to talk to you, and you can pick up your e-mail from any POP server in the world, as long as you have an e-mail account on it and know your password (SMTP is not password-protected for some reason, which has benefitted spammers greatly. Many ISPs restrict the machines that their SMTP servers will talk to, as a way of blocking outgoing spam). Another way of putting it is that you can access your regular POP server from anywhere in the world. This is great, because you can travel without changing your e-mail address. You just need to be able to get a connection to the Internet.

How exactly would that work? That’s where the different possibilities present themselves.

One scenario would be sort of like the name-server arrangement–master tables of people and the phones they are at, which are used whenever someone tries to call you. The drawbacks to this scheme have already been covered.

Another option would be to mimic the mailserver scheme. You would have a (semi) permanent “call server” that would be analogous to a POP server; when you logged into a phone, that phone would simply learn where your call server was, and notify the call server where you were. Calls would always pass first to your call server, and then on to you. This doesn’t require master tables of phone numbers to be updated all the time, but it is inefficient to force the voice signals to be routed through a call server that may be far away.

This suggests a hybrid approach. When you log into a phone, it notifies a call server of your current location. From that point on, the call server will receive incoming calls, but notify the calling phone “here’s where he is really at, you can make a direct connection to him now.” This only requires a one-time detour to the call server, so it is probably most efficient. (In fact, this is a lot like the name server system–once your web server learns a certain machine’s IP number, it doesn’t continue to pester the name server for it.)

While not strictly necessary, it might also be handy for your call server to receive a log of your outgoing calls (technically, your call server would not need to be involved in any of your outgoing calls). This would be handy for reconciling your call log with your phone bill, although there might not be any such thing as a phone bill under this system–everythings just Internet data, right?

Billing under this scheme becomes problematic. Like I said, calls are just packets of Internet data, so you can’t really bill by call duration or distance. However, you can bill by the amount of data the call consumed, and you can also multiply that by the priority with which it was delivered. Right now the Internet cannot prioritize the types of information it carries, but it will be able to before long. Live voice conversations will require a very high priority, since we cannot tolerate long equipment-induced delays in conversations (if you’ve ever had an international call that was routed by satellite, you have an idea of how irritating this can get). It is possible to squeeze down the amount of information that a phone conversation requires quite a bit, so people should be able to trade off voice quality for bandwidth (and money) savings.

Figuring out the data volume and packet priority for the call is just the first step in computing the price. Perhaps if your call server and the phone you are calling from are operated by the same network, the price will be lower than otherwise. If the other party is on the same network as your current phone and/or your call server, there might be a price reduction for that too. It gives a new perspective on the concept of a “local call”, doesn’t it. Network proximity becomes more important than geographic proximity.