Magic!

Remember when we had WiFi cards that we could stick in the side of a computer with the antenna poking out? That was pretty cool. Now this tiny chip does the same thing, only it integrates with your photo software. Holey Moley.

Technical quibbles: it only works with JPEGs (even sharing on your own network, which strikes me as odd), and the SD form factor doesn’t work in all cameras. There are adapters, however.

Back when they thought we’d have atom-powered flying cars, they didn’t think of this stuff.

Somewhere out there, some geek/historian must be compiling this kind of info. I searched a little bit but it was all about fastest on the planet. Consumer devices (other than game boxes which are only compared to other game boxes) need not apply. But those guys are missing the true revolution: that our phones and cars and DVD players are wicked-fast computers. Supercomputers are being measured in petaflops these days. Big Whoop. I’ve got a phone that can understand my words.

But there’s something about this device. I’m not one to get tech envy; I don’t have to have the latest phone or the slickest TV or anything like that. But when I saw my coworkers with their iPads, I have to admit I turned a little green.

When it first came out I couldn’t decide whether it was too big or too small. Both, I decided. Too big for your pocket, too small for serious work. Then I started seeing the things in meetings where laptops used to rule. The executives who use my work are all-iPad. At least at Apple, it’s proven to be a serious business tool. Not too big. Not too small. A portable conduit to the Infoverse, with a screen big enough to interact with all that stuff out there.

So now I own one. I’ll still be taking the laptop to meetings. Most meetings, anyway. And I did work out today, and read while doing it.

You see, the world is running out of IP addresses. An IP address is like a computer’s phone number on the Internet. When you type muddledramblings.com, you start a complicated series of interactions (“I don’t know where that is, but I know who to ask…”) out there in the Interwebs and eventually it is resolved that what you’re looking for is computer 173.245.60.121. You get the same answer for JersSoftwareHut.com and jerryseeger.com. (That’s actually an IP owned by CloudFlare, who sends things on to the actual IP of 66.116.108.197. But that’s not what matters here…)

At the time of this writing, jer.is-a-geek.com resolves to 98.210.116.58, the IP of my home router. The actual number may change, but there will always be an ip address used up by the router. (Don’t bother going there; there’s nothing to see unless you use ssh and already have a key installed on your computer. (The key file itself is locked with a password I may have forgotten.))

Anyway, the IP address is a finite number, and so there is a limit to the total number of computers connected directly to the Internet. This is a very, very big number, but when they came up with the number they didn’t think people’s toasters (and telephones, and cars) would be connected to the Internet. (In your house, most likely your computers and other gadgets go through a router or a modem. That router has to have a unique ID, but the rest of your network uses a special range of IP’s reserved for internal networks. So, your household only eats up one of the limited supply.)

We are starting to reach the limits of the IP system, just as in the US there was a shortage of telephone numbers. (Some of the reasons we ran out of phone numbers are similar as well, as I’ll mention in a bit.)

With phone numbers they split areas into smaller chunks, and created new area codes. While there was the inconvenience of people’s area codes changing, everything still worked.

The Techno-Wizards who run the Internet saw the IP problem coming some time ago, and set out to solve it. What they came up with was IPv6 (currently we are using IPv4). The only problem: the two systems are not compatible. So now a new network based on IPv6 is being deployed, and the people on it can’t look at Web sites that have IPv4 addresses without some sort of middleman. Sucks to be one of those guys. (Muddled Ramblings is now visible on the IPv6 network thanks to CloudFlare.)

Meanwhile, at work, my team needed an IP address for one of our servers. We were advised by a coworker to just go ahead and grab a block of 256 addresses, so we’d have them if we needed them. Really? When IP addresses are running out?

Yep. It turns out that long ago, organizations who were on the ball could buy up huge blocks of IP addresses on the cheap. MIT bought a Class A* block, as did Stanford (who has given it back, I believe), the Army National Guard, IBM, HP (they have DEC’s block now, too, I think), and Apple. Each Class A block has almost 17 million IP addresses, and represents a significant chunk of all the IP addresses available.

The US military has several blocks, and the British military has some as well.

Oh, and Amateur Radio Digital Communications has a Class A, along with Prudential Securities. Ford and Daimler. Three or four pharmaceutical companies. (I imagine Merck or whoever bought one, and their competitors followed suit out of habit.)

I think you might now be getting a glimpse of a core problem. The huge blocks of IP addresses were allotted to whoever asked for them, with no requirement that the organization actually show that they needed them or would not hoard them. Does Ely Lilly have a side business as a data center?

A possibly-apocryphal story I was told the other day: Back when IPs were up for grabs, someone at Apple proposed that they snag a Class A. The powers that be decided against the move, so he got the purchase of the block wedged into the budget for something completely unrelated. It turns out to have been a pretty savvy move. Now every IP address that starts 17. belongs to Apple.

Of the companies on that list, I’d certainly say Apple has more business owning a Class A block than many of the others. Whether the US Military really needs all those huge blocks I’m not qualified to argue. But the fact remains that while we would be running out of IP addresses eventually anyway, the careless and haphazard way they were originally handed out exacerbated the problem mightily.

I mean, does the Department of Social Security in the UK really need 16.7 million IP addresses? Really?

* The term ‘Class A’ is a little out of date, but reads better than ‘/8 block’

Note 1: I got my information here and there on the Internet, then found it all here.

Note 2: This episode contains a lot of parenthetical comments, part of my crusade to address the global overabundance of parentheses. I encourage you to use a few extras as well, until supply is back in balance with demand. (As usual, I blame the Chinese for the surfeit.)

Tethering the phone to my computer, now that’s a big deal, and something that iPhones can’t (or at least couldn’t) do without cracking them first. So I don’t currently have an iPhone.

The 4S is the one that finally has me tempted, however. To understand why, let me tell you what I wish my current smart phone could do.

1) I wish I could pick it up without looking, push a button, say ‘navigate home’, set it back down, and have the GPS system take me to my current address. Naturally I want this function when I’ve taken a wrong turn and I don’t want to mess with a damn phone, I just want to get out of there. I don’t have any spare attention to work through menus or wait while the phone processes ‘navigate’ and I can then tell it my address (which includes a street name that the voice recognition never gets right).

2) Again I’m driving. I want to pick up the phone, say, “I’m in traffic” and have the phone notify my boss that I’m running late, and send a message to anyone I might have an appointment with in the next 30 minutes. This would lower my stress immeasurably and remove a temptation (which I never succumb to) to make a phone call while driving.

Enter Siri, your humble personal assistant, and the real thing that’s exciting about the 4S.

Here’s a story an Apple board member told today at Steve’s memorial service. He related that on the day Steve came before the board to resign as CEO, he stuck around for the rest of the meeting. It was the day Siri was demonstrated to the board, and after a few minutes Steve said “let me see that thing.” The presenter hesitated, saying the phone had been calibrated to his voice, but really he knew that Steve was going to throw something unexpected at the device to see how it handled it. You never said no to Steve at a time like that. Steve started by asking the phone a couple of typical questions, then said, “Are you a man or a woman?”

Siri responded, “I have not been assigned a gender.” Steve, I believe, was pleased.

Al Gore, also a board member, told another Siri story. Al’s theme was that people genuinely love Apple’s products (there is, apparently, neurological evidence supporting this). He pointed out, however, that technology really doesn’t love you back. To illustrate the point he told of a friend (daughter, maybe? I’m a bit sketchy on the specifics) who asked Siri, “do you love me?”

Siri said, “I respect you.”

Oh, yeah, you can also say “Siri, text Katherine and say I’ll be late,” and it will. “Katherine says no problem,” Siri might say a few minutes later. Not as fun, but a lot more useful. I’m confident that with a little fiddling Siri can actually do my two use-cases above.

If Siri is as good as it seems, it will be remembered long after people stop putting ‘i’ at the front of everything. Our robot overlords will remember Siri as a turning point. It is the next user interface, the hands-free, eyes-free, give-me-what-I-need-without-interrupting-my-current-task interface. The one from Star Trek and Galaxy Quest, only, unlike in the latter, anyone can talk to it.

Siri says, “I am your humble personal assistant.”

I searched high and low for a vector animation tool and couldn’t find one. There was Macromedia Director, which I used extensively back then, which put out files for Web play in a format called Shockwave, but it wasn’t a true vector-based program. Not the right tool for lava lamp buttons, that was for sure. I’d started playing with a java applet to draw my buttons, but it seemed like vector animation was something the Web really needed. I mentioned this to a friend of mine, and he said, “Oh I know some guys with the tool you’re looking for.” At the time it was called FutureSplash.

I mentioned FutureSplash to my boss. It was going to be huge, I predicted. His response: “Maybe we should buy them.” (Ah, those dot-com boom days, how I miss them.) Three days later Macromedia announced that they had bought FutureSplash (for a lot more than we could have paid) and contracted the name to Flash.

The rest is history — until the present.

There was even a time when I imagined that a lot of the Web would end up as Flash. Or at least it should. Flash had a lot of things right that HTML had managed to screw up. You could do a lot more, and with Flash the Web experience began to approach the quality of experience people had in other parts of their computing lives.

Macromedia and later Adobe seemed to go out of their way to prevent Flash from taking over the Web. Creating Flash became ever more complex and ever more expensive. Nowhere was the simple “baby Flash” that Joe Amateur could use to build a nice site without first getting extensive training and shelling out a few hundred bucks for tools.

Meanwhile, Flash designers didn’t help in those early years, either. So much Flash became “look what I can do” rather than “look how I can make your visit to my Web site better” that Jane Surfer started resenting Flash. “I waited 60 seconds to download this?” A good example of that sort of waste is at the top of this page, in fact. There are a couple of fun things in the banner, but they don’t enhance the Muddled Experience very much.

Now, the world is shifting again. If you’re reading this site from your iPad, you don’t see the banner at all. No Flash in iOS. This is something the other tablet manufacturers have made a big deal of—but maybe not for very much longer. Microsoft’s next tablet OS won’t support Flash, either.

HTML, the platform I get paid to dislike, is becoming HTML, the platform I get paid to deal with. HTML5, CSS3, full SVG support, and robust JavaScript libraries make possible just about everything Flash can do, without Flash. That’s a lot of things to learn and manage to get a job done, however. Before, a designer could just master Flash and be confident that their work would look right wherever the Flash plugin was installed.

What’s needed is a tool like Flash that, after you’re done designing, outputs your masterpiece in Web-standard format, with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. When something like that comes out, the handwriting will be on the wall for Flash.

And here it is. Adobe, makers of Flash, have announced Edge, the animation tool that will eventually replace Flash. It looks pretty good. It doesn’t do anything remotely close to what Flash does (no mention of audio that I’ve found, for instance, so my banner would have to forego the theme song, and interactivity will have to be handled outside the tool as well, as far as my first glance tells me), but it does a great deal, and when you’re done the product will work in all modern browsers, including mobile ones. Adobe has applied their long, long experience making animation tools to make the user interface slick and clean (though you will want a really big monitor).

Flash will be around a long, long time yet; it still lets a developer build Web-based user interfaces that would be a pain in the butt to create from HTML and the rest of the alphabet soup. That gap is narrowing, however, and as Edge gains in features (and, alas, complexity), the marginalization of Flash will accelerate. I’m impressed that Adobe said, “If Flash dies, we’ll be the ones to kill it.” They really are the right people for the job. Now all we need is “baby Edge.”

Most software companies would have labeled this release 4.3. The Firefox team has eschewed the first dot and has decided to make any release with a feature change a new major release. There is no n.1; the first decimal digit is entirely vestigial. There was no 4.1. There was no 5.1 or 6.1 There will be no 7.1, just 7.0.1. This might sound stupid, unless you have Inside Information. Which I have, thanks to Wikipedia.

The Internet Explorer team at Microsoft, sworn rivals of Firefox, are nonetheless ok guys who want to make this whole Web thing work. Back in the day when the Firefox team kicked the ass of the web world and released a browser that not only defined standards but provided the tools to help Web developers code to those standards, team FF were the guys to beat. On the release of FF3, the boys at Microsoft sent the team a cake. Firefox 4 was similarly honored. And FF5. And so on.

And now we see the real reason behind the accelerated numbering. Each major release gets a cake. If I was in charge, there’d be a new major version every Thursday.

* The firefox team joked about sending a cake to Microsoft to honor IE 8 (or 7 or 9 and you shouldn’t ask me to remember shit like that), but they would send the cake along with the recipe. Open-source cake. But (as far as history records) they didn’t. Would’a been funny. There’s talk and there’s action, and seriously you don’t want to be on the losing side of that with Microsoft.

Ask yourself this: at the company where you work, would they offer grief counseling if your former CEO died? You’ve probably read plenty about Steve Jobs’ accomplishments in the last 24. I hesitate to add to that, but I think a lot of pundits and journalists are missing the mark on what made Steve great.

Steve didn’t invent personal computers. He didn’t invent the Graphical User Interface. He didn’t invent smart phones or tablet computers or mp3 players. His genius was making all those things useful. He’s been called a visionary, and I’m not going to argue that, but his vision was “If this stuff was intuitive to use, it would be a hell of a lot better. And I can fix that.” Macintosh was “the computer for the rest of us.” It was the first personal computer with a GUI, with point-and-click and drag-and-drop, the first computer that made an effort to make tasks you accomplish with technology more similar to things you do in the physical world.

He stole that idea (with permission) from Xerox. Xerox had, to paraphrase some pundit whose name I can’t recall, spent huge amounts of money to see the future. Then they gave Steve a tour of their facility, and he went and made their ideas useful. Steve himself has regrets about that fateful day; he was so blown away by the GUI that he didn’t appreciate the network and the new approach to programming Xerox had developed.

Xerox gave Steve Jobs a peek at the future of computing, and he was just the guy to take that glimpse and revolutionize the way humans and machines interacted, and just the guy to bend a successful company to his vision.

Almost immediately after the Mac was introduced, Steve was wedged out of Apple. The two events were probably related; to say that Steve was brutal on the development team would be an understatement (“Insanely Great” was his mantra; his unwillingness to compromise on the little details his curse), and he was neglecting the very successful Apple II. But the Apple II was the past. Computing the way it used to be done. Mac was a world-changer. Steve knew that. The board of directors wasn’t so sure.

After his departure Apple continued to refine and improve on his vision, and try with increasing futility to protect those inventions from imitators. To this day, Apple is ready to throw down a lawsuit at a moment’s notice, but the biggie, the one that got away, was the one against Microsoft for copying the windowed operating system. Losing that one almost killed Apple.

Then Steve came back. FiRST step: quit refining the OS and overhaul it. The competition was improving quickly. Next step: follow the power. The computing power, I mean, which was moving into smaller and smaller packages. I was pretty excited about Mac OS X, but I was dead stoked when I heard the phrase “A thousand songs in your pocket.” I bought one of those first iPods, and on airplanes and in bars people would ask me about it. The thing was, in a word, awesome. (“Insanely Great” has long been retired. The phrase is kind of like the Great Wall in China, I think – much more fun for people who don’t remember the cost.)

I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the first digital music player, but when it came out, something fundamental changed. This was the first player that was useful, that carried enough music, that you could fill up almost thoughtlessly, that was simple to use, often without looking. All the details were right, the little things that others compromised on. That was Steve’s genius. Do it right. He had the unwavering belief that he knew what right was, even if no one else did. Do it right, and people will agree with you in retrospect. I cringed when Apple got into the phone business. Don’t they know what a cutthroat, small-margin business that is? They did it right, and I stand corrected (provisionally).

I think this is why I enjoy working at Apple so much. Most of you out there will never see the fruits of my labors (except perhaps as a microscopic price reduction in Apple products), but always I strive to put that little bit of extra rightness into everything I make. It’s noticed here. The spirit of Steve, his uncompromising attitude, is still alive.

God: Welcome, Steve. Did you enjoy the heavenly choir?
Steve: They were awesome! Really stirring. But…
God: But what?
Steve: What if everyone could hear their own music? I mean, not music they wrote, but music that was perfect for them, right at that moment.
God: That’s kind of what we do…
Steve: Let me handle this.

In Internet terms, the honey is a seemingly-innocent email address placed on a Web site, invisible to humans but easy for robots to find. When the spam harvesters scrape the email address off the site and use it, both the harvester and the spammer are caught and blacklisted, which reduces their ability to run robots and get their mail through.

The more people who participate, the more trouble spammers have spotting the honey pots. How can you help? Even if you don’t have control of your site or run a blog through one of the major services, you can pitch in. Go to Project Honey Pot and sign up. You can provide invisible-to-humans links to honey pots on other sites, if nothing else, and it doesn’t cost you diddley-doo.

If you click on the “swag” link in the header, you will see that they could also use a graphic designer. I imagine a spam-bear with his head stuck in a honey pot. How you communicate that it’s a spam-bear and not an ordinary bear I leave as an exercise for the visually talented.

Once Project Honey Pot compiles its list of villains and ne’er-do-wells, what happens next? Many major services use the list, and I also use a program called Bad Behavior which blocks blacklisted bots and spammers from reaching my site. Recently I added another layer called CloudFlare which is awesome enough for me to devote a separate episode to it. So, you have that to look forward to.

In the meantime, I encourage you to join the crusade to make life more difficult for those who want to use the Internet for evil.

Last night I installed the latest Mac operating system (‘Lion’) on my work machine. We’ll see how that goes before I put it on anything more important. A couple of things struck me immediately, however, that I think may be indicators of where Apple is heading.

1) No scroll bars. Well, barely. There’s something scrollbar-like that appears when you move stuff around, but there’s a fundamental shift in the UI going on here. In the past you worked the thumb on the scrollbar to move the content in its window. When you worked the scroll wheel on your mouse, you were in your mind moving the scrollbar thumb. Now, in your head you grab the content of the window and move it around – which goes in the opposite direction as the scroller thumb. So the wheel on your mouse works ‘backwards’ in Lion; before you were moving the scroll thumb down, now you’re moving the content down, which moves the thumb up.

Opinion: I’m ok with this overall, but there are times when there is no indication that you can scroll. There are also cases where there’s no indication that the corner of a window can be dragged to resize the window. I’m not comfortable with designs that presuppose you know stuff.

2) Bold prediction: the magic mouse is Apple’s last major mouse. It’s a mouse/touchpad hybrid, bringing people closer to the touchpad replacement. The company that brought the mouse to the consumer will also be the first to take it away. Interestingly, the company that only put one button on its mouse will be hanging its hat on a very complicated set of finger gestures and combinations. They can do a hell of a lot, and they’re intuitive, if you already know them. (I just accidentally discovered the gesture for switching tabs in my browser — only, shit! It’s not switching tabs, it’s like using the back arrow. And there’s a bug! I almost lost this entire episode!)

Opinion: with the iPad and whatnot, multiple-finger user interfaces are here. I should have applied for a patent fifteen-plus years ago when I thought about making touch screen interfaces with actual knobs to turn and stuff like that. If I’d had this blog back then it would have shown up in the Get-Poor-Quick pages. But I didn’t, and now that invention belongs to other people. Because they built it, and I only talked about it.