The Tao of Mac

Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs

Rui Carmo — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:50:48 GMT

The title is, like plenty of other Slashdot headlines, utterly clueless, but what fascinates me regarding the entire rigmarole isn’t Apple’s reticence in adopting Theora or the (shortsighted) perspectives on MPEG-4 – it’s the fact that someone at W3C actually got suckered into believing it made sense to specify a codec as part of HTML5 – it would be tantamount to mandating all images to be of a single format, and, seriously, is not within their remit. Their real job ought to be making sure the markup mess is fixed once and for all (including fixing some of the fundamentally wrong things about the web), instead of trying to wedge in all the frilly stuff.

☯

Commission welcomes industry's commitment to provide a common charger for mobile phones

Rui Carmo — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:22:16 GMT

This wasn’t a shotgun wedding, but there were noises of draft legislation in the works and some industry buzz (including operator pressure) for a good while now, not to mention that it’s just plain common sense – I’ve been charging pretty much everything off USB for years (mostly by dint of avoiding using phones with pointlessly proprietary chargers). Having Apple as one of the signers, however, doesn’t, as usual, imply any short-term changes to their hardware – a simple micro-USB dongle is more likely.
(more at Ars Technica).

☯

Unsocial

Rui Carmo — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:23:29 GMT

Last week I decided (for a bunch of not completely unrelated reasons) to re-assess my online presence, and as the most visible result I ended up writing a trivial Python script to archive and delete all my Twitter entries¹.

Likewise, I’ve shut down my FriendFeed account and have started paring down the stuff I have on Facebook, as well as on other pseudo-social services like blip.fm.

I’ve also decided to pony up for Evernote Premium, since despite the flaky syncing in the current iPhone version, I’m finding it more and more important to take copious amounts of private notes.

Despite Yaki’s flexibility, I don’t want to either spend the time coding in private entries (it’s doable, but time consuming) or run another website, and the Mac app is simply great.

All of this goes beyond my not wanting to spend any time whatsoever running infrastructure (that was plenty fun for the first, oh, ten years or so, but these days I simply can’t be bothered) – I want to stop wasting time maintaining an online presence except where I absolutely must.

Here’s a summary of the (public) reasons I’m doing this, which I think ought to be plain enough:

Time and Attention Span

Like others, I find that Twitter sucks the creativity out of me. It’s not just the effort to summarize things – I’m mostly fed up with the shallow bleating of a bunch of clueless people who simply don’t know the first thing about the mobile industry and all the “ooh, shiny” link fodder. It’s just too much noise, and your brain suffers from handling too much noise of any kind.
Although a bunch of people think it is now absolutely invaluable as a Marketing tool (and I’m actually keeping Eventbox running all day with a bunch of custom keyword searches), I’m starting to think otherwise. Dipping a toe into it now and then to gauge the general feeling is OK, but actually trying to keep track of stuff is madness.

The Social Angle

FriendFeed is pointless, period. Also, it is not completely symmetrical and decreases fidelity of the content it aggregates, which ought to be enough reason for my not going there in months.
Facebook is becoming too much like Twitter for my liking, and until they default to not peppering me with stupid quizzes my friends fill out, I’m sticking to accessing it on the iPhone (which is my main computing device these days anyway).
Also, it is now chock-full of colleagues (which kind of stretches the term “friends”), and one of these days I’m going to login and wantonly remove anyone I have a business relationship with and re-invite them to LinkedIn, which is where they ought to be in the first place³.

Writing

Like I wrote a few months back, good writing takes time. That Pascal quote² has been coming back to me more and more of late, and I’ve been skating on the edge of frustration because I simply can’t find enough time to write properly, and it’s getting to me.
There is much greater depth to convey through proper writing, and I don’t think it’s worth my while to dally in a 140-character microcosm.
Whatever writing I do these days is, sadly, not very likely to pop up on this site. But Evernote gives me a way to start drafts on the move and refine them at leisure, often still on the iPhone.

Privacy

I’m simply fed up with people badgering me, online or otherwise. I deal with some pretty sensitive stuff at work (the kind that 90% of folk in the industry hardly ever see), and people tend to read entirely too much (no matter how wrongly) into what I post, whatever the medium. So this is my way of cutting down on the aggravation.
Facebook is an utter failure at creating private photo albums. There is apparently no way to remove photos once you know their URL, which I guess is one of Haystack’s little dark secrets – they clearly don’t compact the haystack or clear out their CDN that often, because (and this should give you an idea for how long I’ve been planning for this) a photo I deleted on purpose one month ago is still online, if you happen to know the URL. So I’m back to MobileMe for sharing family pictures, since it now seems to work properly.
I don’t see much point in posting photos of my travels, meals, locations thereof, etc., unless they’re truly notable. Except when it’s a public event of some sort – and I sure avoid plenty of those.

There will be further evasive measures in the future, but for now that’s the status quo. I’ll keep you posted.

—

¹ At least to the extent it’s feasible, since roughly 500 entries from 2008 seem to have been lost by Twitter itself. ↩

² “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter.” ↩

³ There are always people you become friends with while working with, but I don’t see the point of assuming we’re friends by default. I don’t want to play Mafia Wars with half the company, for chrissakes. I’m there to get other stuff done. ↩

☯ (comments allowed)

Are Steve Jobs' Innards Really Any of Our Business?

Rui Carmo — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:41:36 GMT

No.

☯

Nokia Ovi Suite 2.0: The one and only Nokia desktop application (in the future)

Rui Carmo — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:38:29 GMT

Windows-only (i.e., no stated intent to support the Mac, which is sad). Also, I have a sinking feeling that this will eventually turn into their equivalent of iTunes instead of truly cutting down on the bloat – but since the current Nokia desktop software is execrable, any kind of replacement is welcome.

☯

Full Commodore 64 Emulator Rejected from App Store

Rui Carmo — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:11:39 GMT

I’ve kept as much as possible from commenting on App Store rejections (despite a lot of prodding from readers and acquaintances), but I have to link to this out of sheer brilliance in the implementation. Of course, it explicitly breaks the ground rule against emulation (so I’m not surprised at all that Apple has rejected it, despite the official licensing), but I can’t help but feel a sense of loss at having an absolutely brilliant gaming solution so close, and yet so far…

☯

Omoide

Rui Carmo — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:11:16 GMT

A simple and intuitive flashcard app for matching Japanese Kanji and Hiragana, developed by Emanuel Carnevale.

☯

Review: Apple iPhone 3G S and iPhone OS 3.0

Rui Carmo — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:43:40 GMT

Walt Mossberg delivers a combo review in his usual style, including a priceless quote that shows how far his US audience is from catching up with Europe in terms of mobile savvy: ”...a feature called MMS that allows users to send photos and videos directly to other phones without using email.”

☯

Opera Unite developer's primer

Rui Carmo — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 06:54:20 GMT

A good example of something technically interesting but which tries to solve a problem nobody really has – Unite tries to dress itself up as “social” and “free”, but, in the end, is a P2P infrastructure with web-based applications on top that requires you to be an Opera user to run them. And momentarily ignoring the fact that this is an alpha feature of a beta browser, how many people do you know that are running Opera on their desktop at all?

☯

To Pre or not to Pre?

Rui Carmo — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:28:29 GMT

Justin echoes a lot of what I’ve been thinking lately, although by the time the Pre shows up in Europe (no, don’t bother asking) the app scene will have mostly sorted itself out, at least in terms of essentials. Good, solid reasoning nonetheless, even if he (understandably) skipped multi-language support (I can’t use a device that does not provide correct Portuguese input, and since I’m still grasping at Mandarin and casting an eye to other languages, the iPhone is unbeatable for me…).

☯

IMAP Scraping

Rui Carmo — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:30:00 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Tuesday, 3 January 2006.

Update: For those of you coming here via search engines, a year or so later most of this was re-visited independently by Doug Hellmann on an article on Python magazine, which included a comprehensive solution - a copy of which I include here for archival purposes. His solution does not use SINCE to do incremental updates, but if I ever need to re-visit this, I will try to merge his code and mine.

I am currently in the process of coding a couple of Python classes to handle IMAP accounts, and am in awe at both the arcane complexity of RFC:3501 (which has a great many number of wonderful and useful things to learn) and the utter stupidity of whoever designed the Exchange renderer for the Calendar folder.

Yes, I am trying to read my appointments via IMAP. Don't ask why. Honestly.

All you need to know is that the asinine way in which the Calendar IMAP view was implemented has no way whatsoever to permit you so much as guess at item's actual appointment date without slurping and parsing the whole of the fake RFC:2822 body and the internal vCalendar - the date you get on the headers is the date an item was added to the folder.

Which, incidentally, is driving me up the wall - I know how good MAPI is, how Exchange works internally (at least until version 2000) and can't for the life of me figure out why they didn't add a simple X-Appointment-Date: header - would save me a world of bother.

Fortunately, Exchange honors SINCE, which means I can do a full Calendar scan once and then check back for any updated items (I hope - I still haven't checked what happens if I for some reason update old items).

Obviously, there isn't any way to get at the actual event data beyond the stingy sample you get on the vCalendar (which, incidentally, seems to be mis-encoded if your location or names include accented characters).

I sure as hell hope they change this in Exchange 12. Exchange is still the best corporate e-mail server as far as I'm concerned (provided you know what you're doing with it - which includes being absolutely positive you need it), but it has some amazingly limited and short-sighted "features".

Or, should I say, "incentives" for you to use Microsoft clients.

☯ (comments allowed)

"IMAP Scraping" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Tuesday, 3 January 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

Ars Reviews the Palm Pre, part 1: the BlackBerry killer

Rui Carmo — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 21:30:20 GMT

The title is, alas, very much misleading, and leads me to believe that Ars is determined to milk this for a good while. I understand the enthusiasm – not only has the Pre delivered on most expectations regarding what a mobile, web-oriented communication device should be like, but its launch and the rise of Rubinstein play the US tech scene’s collective psyche like a well-tuned fiddle. It’s the quintessential David vs Goliath, clever underdog and return of the prodigal son story all rolled into one, and the tech buzz opinion makers are just lapping it up. Too bad that the Pre does not have all the required enterprise features at launch (and at the time of writing of Ars’ piece, which kind of confuses web service integration with enterprise-grade features…) – lets the whole article down when, like me, you’ve been running Exchange and using enterprise-oriented devices for many years now…

☯

Android Scripting Environment

Rui Carmo — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 14:55:11 GMT

Allows you to craft simple scripts (in Python and other scripting languages) to access some Android phone functionality. Somewhat limited (I’d much rather have a Python to Dalvik engine and a way to code true native apps), but it’s interesting enough to poke at for a while.

☯

iPhone Stencil Kit

Rui Carmo — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 08:48:55 GMT

This is a great idea. Regardless of the number of graphical stencils out there for drawing programs of all kinds, there is nothing like working out UI flows on good, old-fashioned paper (if only because you don’t get distracted by all the shiny stuff that happens to be running on your computer), and a meatspace stencil is a great way to ensure the process is quick and enjoyable.

☯

This post contains thinking

Rui Carmo — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:16:12 GMT

I think it would be interesting for regular readers to know that some vacationing (such as it is) is being had and loads of reading is getting done, despite miscellaneous parental chores such as pushing swings and rinsing LEGO bricks, the latter usually performed to the amusement of the little person that keeps pulling at my leg (not quite figuratively, as you might well imagine).

More importantly, a considerable amount of mulling is also getting done, most of which pertaining to my current state of affairs.

It has recently come to my attention that not everything I’ve been doing of late has been either fun or satisfying enough, and although I have some pretty interesting things to do and my name has popped up in some nice places, in the end it all boils down to whether I’m happy enough with what I’m doing – and the honest answer at this point would have to be “not really”.

Which is, in a way, odd. These are amazing times – the mobile industry is abuzz with a number of things, of which the (all too visible) hype surrounding new smartphone launches¹ is, quite honestly, the least interesting right now (if only because I’m a tad too close to it, and therefore a bit jaded).

Most of the ongoing buzz is so far removed from what the random guy in the street actually needs that every now and then I do a double take and ask myself if what I am doing really matters in the grand scheme of things.

The trouble, as far as I’m concerned, is that I have yet to provide myself with enough of an answer to figure out whether it’s a positive one.

—

¹ Would you people please stop discussing the Pre keyboard and the 3GS features already? ↩

☯ (comments allowed)

"This post contains thinking" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Saturday, 13 June 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

The Bureau of Communication - Fill-in-the-blank Correspondence

Rui Carmo — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:16:33 GMT

Utterly, utterly brilliant. Of late, I could sit here and fill out a bunch of these out until the cows came home.

☯

Official Google Mac Blog: Introducing Google Quick Search Box

Rui Carmo — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:53:37 GMT

So, the closest thing (ever) to Quicksilver is finally out, and looks to have a bright future. Sadly, I’ve had so many tussles with the Google Updater (which operates in stealth mode and, incomprehensibly, cannot update stuff if you’re not an admin user – i.e., it’s poorly designed and doesn’t prompt you for admin privileges) that after several tries to reassert ownership of my machine I’ve instead gotten used to invoking apps via Spotlight on all of my Macs.

☯

TomTom for iPhone

Rui Carmo — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:42:11 GMT

I’m going to have a field day with this (even though I don’t drive, the app is sure to be up to their usual high standards, and the holder is pretty damn useful).

☯

Google Apps Outlook Sync

Rui Carmo — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:13:04 GMT

This is getting good. Really good. For paid subscribers alone, but still, more fuel for the cloud IT wars.

☯

iPhone 3GS

Rui Carmo — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:21:55 GMT

There go the wild theories of all the pundits who keep mistaking Apple’s game as being all about delivering umpteen new things. No, Apple’s strategy is to keep improving the things they do, often in a maddeningly small degree, and the 3GS is a good example – it adds just enough new features to increase the appeal of the platform (and get existing users to upgrade) even as it consolidates it. Yes, folks, this is a platform game, and Apple doesn’t come up with new platforms idly. Anyway, if you find the name weird, that’s because you don’t remember the Apple IIGS.

☯