Mr T's rants and ravings

OK I get the fondness for some of the design. Well the hardware anyway. Great stuff. The software not so much. But what I really don’t get is why people like the company itself. Twice they have allowed companies to make Apple clones to run their software and then shut them down completely. Twice! The government took IDM to court for ten years and set the industry back years for doing pretty much the same thing only once. And yet people give Apple a complete pass. Apple is as closed a system as it gets – listen to all the restrictions they place on apps for the iPhone store. People would jump all over Microsoft for less – far less. They limit iPhones to just one vendor and people are more upset at the vendor than Apple for being so closed. Its all but incomprehensible to me.

And then there is the fuss over the iPad. Tablet with no keyboard. Been done for years for Windows devices. Years. And people don’t like them but when Apple does it it is magic? Oh but there is multi-touch. Big whoop! There have been multi-touch laptops, even netbooks, for months with Windows 7. Clearly Apple is a latecomer. Wi-fi and 3G? Also been available for Windows systems for years.

How about development? I want to write some apps. Can I use a language like Visual Basic or C#? How about standard C++? Ah, no, I have to use Objective C. Not even Java? Crazy!

Oh I can read books on it! Impressive if I hadn’t been able to do that for years on Windows PCs and laptops. I run Kindle for the PC on my systems now for example. Works great.

But surely the iPad can do all the things I do most right? Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook? Ah, no, they don‘t run. But I can get a web browser – really impressive. If only I could get one for a Windows system. Oh, wait, I think there are some available for Windows.

My netbook has a removable battery, USB ports, a web cam, a microphone, and I can mark up things with handwriting recognition. The iPad can do those things right? Whoops! Not it can’t. Wait, can that be? The iPad is magic.

You know what it feels like? It feels like the iPad is the new wardrobe for the Emperor. If you are a true cool geek you can see the magic of the iPad and few want to admit that they are not real cool geeks. Sigh.

One of the things I worry about is that I think the same thing a second time and write a new blog post about it. It happened again today. Fortunately since I used exactly the same blog title the blog site would not let me post it. You can’t have two posts with the same permalink. Saved by technology. So I added a note to the beginning and posted the second post in a different blog. I had to get things off my chest and in semi public. Semi because not a lot of people read my blogs especially the second one I posted at. And public because of course search engines bring people from everywhere to just about any thing. Doing that is part of the release the attraction the value of blogging for me.

In case you are interested the posts are In the land of the blind at my computer science teacher blog and In the land of the blind revisited at my Live Spaces blog. They are similar – same topic, some same examples – but a little different. Enough different for two posts in the same blog? I thought not but maybe it would have been ok. This blogging stuff can be hard. Especially since I have written a lot of blog posts by now. Sigh.

I have no idea where this came from originally but it showed up on a mailing list I am on this morning.

1. Specifications are for the weak and timid!
2. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
3. Indentation?! – I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
4. What is this talk of ‘release’? Klingons do not make software ‘releases’. Our software ‘escapes’ leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.
5. Klingon function calls do not have ‘parameters’ – they have ‘arguments’ – and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
6. Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
7. A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment on his code!
8. Klingon software does NOT have BUGS. It has FEATURES, and those features are too sophisticated for a Romulan pig like you to understand.
9. You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert unless you’ve read it in the original Klingon.
10. Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!

So I grew up without anchovies. I mean they just never came up. The only reason I knew they existed was because you’d hear someone on TV yell out that they didn’t want anchovies on their pizza. Where I grew up, when I was growing up, pizza was pretty much either plain on pepperoni so anchovies didn’t even come up in real life. So I was left with wondering what is is with anchovies?

Well about a year ago I was at a nice restaurant and ordered a Caesar Salad (which is not Italian food BTW It was invented in Mexico) and it came with anchovies on top. now I had had it with cheese and croutons before but this was a first. So of course being far from home (Canada – It’s like a different country 🙂 ) I tried it. Oh boy did I like them. So I found that I ordered them with salads a couple more times over the next year. Good stuff.

Then I made the big mistake. I bought some in the supermarket. Why is that a mistake? Well I have more trouble stopping eating them once I start than even potato chips. And all that salt can’t be good for you. I figure that it there was a fish version of bacon it would be anchovies.

So I’m going to try to control myself on the end of buying the tins. Maybe I’ll look for a recipe that calls for them so I can add them in small controlled doses. See what trying new foods can do to you? It expands your horizons.

So I took a personal day off yesterday. I’ve been traveling a lot lately and that has meant some Saturday and Sunday work and/or travel days. So I felt like I needed a little more “me time.”

I had a good day. I went out for the day with my son who was on vacation and we drove to Connecticut (Foxwoods casino) and played poker. Had some pizza before coming home and basically had a great day. I was away from home, from the Internet, from work and from just about all the stress in my life. Felt good.

So what is bad? I really don’t want to work today. I don’t want to read my email. I don’t want to call into meetings. I don’t want to do anything that has any stress involved. Sigh. It will take me a day to get back up to full speed.

You know the old saying “I really don’t need this job?” Well I need the salary. Don’t get me wrong, I have the best job I’ve ever had and most of the time I really love it. But even the best job is hard to beat a day off. 🙂

I read this blog post about the "social media divide" in the MA Senate race recently and have been thinking about it. I wonder how much of this social media stuff really makes a difference in an election. My question is did the social media stuff create the movement (or some of it) to Brown or did it merely reflect what what happening in the real world? Correlation is not automatically causation. I’m not sure how we know for sure.

What I do believe is that the online activity probably helped energize the believers and get them to do more and be more active. That’s a result but an indirect one. I don’t think the social media stuff won over many people but it did empower those who were already won over. Even if that is all there was that is still a powerful thing though. I think candidates ignore social media at their peril these days.

These were some comments I left on an other blog where a discussion was taking place. I thought I would post it here as well to help me save these thoughts.

I am very much the outsider in the the open source discussion. I have spent the better part of my 35+ year career working for companies that make and sell proprietary software. While I have worked on projects that more or less follow the open source model of development these projects have been pretty small and not in the LINUX world at all.

So how do I judge the welcoming ways of the open source world? By the way the people who self identify with it interact with me. Those experiences have been overwhelmingly negative. It is as if they see me as irredeemably tainted and the enemy of all that is good and right in software. This is of course not a good way to win me over. 🙂

People in this thread see open source as more welcoming of people than proprietary software projects. I had one big dream after college and that was to one day be a developer on the RSTS/E (a proprietary) operating system. I did get the chance and it wasn’t all that hard for me. Dang, I am batting 1 for 1. Home run the first time. So my personal experience has been that people are much more welcoming in proprietary software. Send in a resume, get an interview, people offer to pay you money to write code. How is that not welcoming?

What is the model for open source? It appears (remember I am on the outside looking in) that one can get the code and start working but that it often takes quite a long time and lots of hard work before people are willing to take and use your code. And then they still take it for free. You get a pat on the head and people use your code and that is about it. This is encouraging to people who need to make a living? Really?

It seems as though the process to work on open source as a company employee is pretty much the same as for working on proprietary software though. In any job having a portfolio of work to show people is an edge – open or proprietary. And frankly my observation is that makers of proprietary software are way a head in realizing the importance of a diverse population of contributors. They are well out in front trying to recruit women, minorities and all sorts of different people into the development process. Diversity is a core value where I work. Is it in open source? I don’t see it.

So apparently Tiger Woods may or may not have been cheating on his wife. How in the world is that my business? How is it your business? Is it interesting? I suppose so in a sort of train wreck sort of way. But not everything that is interesting is any body else’s business.

Angelina and Brad may or may not be having family troubles. Likewise Tom and Katie according to differing tabloids. How is that my business?

Right to know or right to privacy? When in doubt I lean towards privacy. The news media is probably the most hypocritical society in the world. According to them you have a right to know everything. Well except you have no right to know their sources. Or how they work things internally. Or their private affairs.They protect their own usually.

But getting back to Tiger, Brad and Tom. Sure they are public people with a very public job. That gives me a right (probably) to know what golf tournaments they play in, what movies they star in, and what public appearances they are making. It doesn’t give me any rights into their bedrooms.

I wish the media would let people have private lives. I can’t imagine but that a lot of this tabloid media so-called journalism is really more about making news (or making up news) than reporting news. The added stress caused by speculative and imaginative “reporting” probably kills as many relationships as any other outside influence.

And it benefits no one but the media who makes money selling sensationalism. There is little doubt in my mind that much of it is harmful to the reader as well as to the victims of the “reporting.” It shatters illusions, encourages others to emulate bad behavior, and encourages people to try to take advantage of others for fame and attention. Bah!