Dreaming Of Beetles

Post from iPhone:

In December, Yahoo announced they were going to reduce the length of time they retain user data to six months. Microsoft also jumped in and said they would do the same and urged Google to follow suit.

This is a pretty slimey, anticompetitive tactic disguised as “protecting user privacy”. See, one of Google’s main advantages is the data they can glean from user activity. Of course, Google can scramble the data as they offered to do in the YouTube lawsuit but that isn’t the point. Yahoo and MS are crippling themselves in an attempt to cripple Google. It is the same tactic used by retailers – “if you find a lower price, we’ll match it”. All this does is freeze any kind of price competition by eliminating any benefits of doing so.

This Yahoo gambit has been going on for a while, years in fact, but it just doesn’t seem to help. It draws privacy group attention and they always say it isn’t enough. Google either ignores them or scrambles the data. Usually if Google responds, it brings the attention of the privacy groups so you see less action on Google’s part.

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Mail Delete Box

This one caught me by surprise this morning as I was forwarding a message in OS X Mail. It seems if you have a threaded message (at least two levels deep) and you click within a nested level, a new delete marker comes up. Clicking the “x” on the upper left of the box will wipe out the nested threads. Never saw this before and have to say I’m pleasantly surprised.

The reason I’m blogging about this is to prove a small point. Whereas Windows seems to be out to get you, working against you at every step; OS X works with you and tries to help at every step. When asked why I use OS X, this is what I try to explain and this is just a small example of that in action.

A couple years ago I was talking to an executive in a fortune 500 company about this. The other day, I found out that I had converted him with this logic and he is now a die hard Mac fan.

Anyway, I have a couple big posts waiting in the wings that need a bit more research. Hopefully I’ll get one of those up today.

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I’ve been sitting on this one for a while as I read countless reports on “Knol vs. Wikipedia”, “Why [Knol|Wikipedia] is dead”, “Knol has failed”, “Why Didn’t Google Kill Knol?”, etc.

I’m going to keep this one short as a) I see that a lot of people already have already come to conclusion I present below, b) I have a raging cold and want to get back to bed. Check out the comments on “Why Has Knol Survived Google’s Ophan-Killing Spree?“, btw I haven’t even read the article, just the comments.

So here is the deal with Knol:

1) Knol allows you to select New Yorker comics to insert into your Knol for free, WTF? If you are a Seinfeld fan, you’ll appreciate the comedy behing how cryptic these comics are. Well, it turns out Udi Manber is a huge fan. Who is Udi Manber? He is the Google’s VP of Engineering, Core Search.

2) Knol is Udi Manber’s 20%-time project. Udi Manber controls the levers operating Google’s empire, this is important stuff. What Manber wants, Manber gets so this project will never get killed (unless Udi kills it).

3) Udi Manber has a small little goal for Google – “human understanding and intent”. How is this done? Semantics and the semantic web. Manber has been involved in search for a long time and has published many papers and written many applications to harness the power of words/computing to make a better search experience.

4) So the point of Knol? Provide a corpus of structured knowledge to experiment with Manber’s search technologies.

So Knol is not about competing with Wikipedia, it is not about making money for authors or Google via adsense. Google couldn’t care less about these things, they (Manber) want to improve search. Once you can crack the “human intent” nut, search is yours for the taking.

image: Google

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This took me about 10 minutes to figure out and implement. I’m surprised how easy it was. The first thing I did was create a new template and called it “dynamic”. Any wordpress page that wants to use the framework needs to be created with this template and the content left empty.

The dynamic template is then called and the $_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL'] is parsed and if the appropriate page resides within the framework, load it all up and serve the dynamic content. If not, throw some negativity at the user.

So the dynamic page acts as the entry point to the framework and passes off the directive in a switch type fashion. Pretty simple and works fine so far.

Has anyone else done something similar or is there a better way of creating dynamic pages? Am I being lame?

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I don’t really advise using suPHP these days when the power and flexibility of mod_php will handle most of your needs. However, for a shared dev environment where you want to specify the apache user in the config file, suPHP works pretty well.

There is one major problem with it though and that is the logs fill up pretty fast and once you hit a 2GB log file, apache will start throwing 500 errors. The first thing people check are the apache log files and see the dreaded “Premature end of script headers”. And since this offers no other useful info, you go search on Google for what the hell this means. Google comes back with the official suPHP site which gives you some mumbo jumbo on CLI versions being installed in the place of CGI versions. But you know this isn’t the case, because you haven’t touched the machine in months and everything was working fine. You panic.

Most of the other stuff Google brings back are threads of people panicking because these 500 errors are being thrown on live sites. Some threads suggest you look at the log files. And this is good advice. However, there are a couple things to watch out for:

1. usually the suphp.log file is the culprit. It lives in /var/log/suphp.log. If this has hit 2GB, roll it and apache will be good to go.
2. there is no suphp.log file in /var/log. In this case, check your suphp.conf file for the location. The conf file is usually located in /etc/httpd/suphp/ or similar.
3. if your conf file is pointing to a log file that is under 2GB, you need to dig a tad deeper. Check out your php.ini file and see if/where you are saving your php error file. Check if this file is over 2GB.

If the above doesn’t solve the problem. You need to take some drastic measures and find all files on your system that are 2GB or larger. The “find” command will work nicely for this.

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I have to admit that I’m an Apple fanboy. I’m not one of the switcher fanboys, but one of the longhaul fanboys. My first exposure to a computer (well, after the teletype my father brought home) was our family’s Apple IIe and my first programming was done in Apple basic. I had an Apple sticker on my bedroom door when I was 10.

When I first saw a Macintosh, I was blown away. I knew right there and then, the WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing) interface was the future. I got my hands on one in the computer lab and was infected.

I’ve never owned a Windows box. My brother got one when I was in high school and this is what I used to check out the Internet while Netscape was still in beta. I hated it.

I went off to college and gained quite a bit of experience with Unix (and VMS). Indiana University is one of the top most progressive schools with technology so often times we were forced to turn in our homework via ftp on Unix. I was intrigued. I guess it was the days of Adventure and Zork and Apple Basic that made the command line something comfortable, not frightening. So I became as profficient as possible with the command line, but not gaining root hampered me a bit.

When I got seriously into computing, I bought a PowerBook 5300ce, one of Apple’s most infamous products. I suffered through all its problems, but it worked well enough for me to learn. And that is what I did. During this time, I wasn’t really a fanboy though, I didn’t know who Michael Spindler was or who Gil Amelio was and I didn’t really care. OS 7.5 and all its elegance was what mattered.

Skip ahead a few years, and I’m riding high on OS 8/8.6. I started following Apple religiously – their stock price, the hardware, the software updates, third party support, etc. I was very happy to see them buy Next rather than Be and kind of laughed when I heard that Steve would be a special advisor to Gil. I knew this arrangement wouldn’t last very long and it didn’t.

I’m not going to recount the story of Apple’s re-emergence from beleagured computer manufacturer to dominant media company, everyone knows that story. It’s the stuff of legend.

I’m happy I was able to see Steve Jobs speak twice, but kind of bummed I never got to meet him. I haven’t met Gates either, but met Ballmer and that was no fun.

While Steve enjoyed the limelight and kept the inner workings of Apple top secret, he is not an idiot. He brought in the highest caliber people possible and instilled in them the Apple spirit and these are the people that run the day to day of Apple. With Steve out of the picture, I’m sure the pipeline is not going to dry up – just read the story of Jony Ive coming up with the 2nd gen iMac. And Jony Ive is a pre-Jobs fixture at Apple. (I got to see him in the first Apple store in Tokyo).

For a while Steve was CEO of both Apple and Pixar, how could they BOTH do so well. Surely it wasn’t Steve micromanaging 24/7, it was his brilliant ideas like putting the Pixar bathrooms in the middle of the building so everyone crossed paths eventually.

I’m not worried about a post-Jobs Apple and will remain dedicated to the best OS and software ever produced (hardware is a different story). So when I start going Apple Fanboy in my posts, I’ll point people back here for reference. I’ll try to keep my Apple slant out of my writing though.

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With the Palm Pre announcement, the media reacted as if this device was the second coming. Wall street also reacted in a similar way, shooting the stock up 35% immediately. Since then the stock is up around 75%, an amazing turnaround for a company swirling in the toilet. But what is so amazing here?

I have not used the device, but watched the announcement, plus other videos of the device in use. Sure there are some neat features:

• Integrating the “cloud” (I hate that term) into the device to group data from different services into one convenient location (nothing groundbreaking)
• Multitasking with a new paradigm based on a deck of cards (cool)
• A gesture area below the visible screen (only innovative thing really)
• Capacitive multi-touch (doesn’t Apple have patents on this?)
• Copy and paste (whoopee)
• Replaceable battery (whoopee)
• An API based on HTML, javascript, and CSS (hmmm…)

It is this last point that has me confused. Palm touts it as expanding the developer community from a couple hundred thousand Palm developers to a couple million web developers. Wasn’t this Apple’s strategy from the early days of the iPhone – an AJAX “SDK”? Palm states they will not make the same mistakes as Apple (not in those words) and that their Mojo IDE will be different by allowing javascript access to low level areas of the underlying OS (some variant of GNU/Linux).

Well then, I see three huge problems with this:

1. Web developers will not be able to get off and running in no time as Palm wants you to believe. There will be additional APIs that must be learned to make your application semi-useful. I’m sure Mojo will make this easy on you, but there will STILL be a learning curve.
2. HTML, javascript, CSS can produce some interesting effects, but these technologies are still extremely limited. Look at the web apps we got for the iPhone. The best of the bunch being facebook or bejeweled. Palm is eating their own dogfood and producing the native apps based on these technologies, but watch the demos closely and you’ll see that the interfaces are crap. This leads me to the third point.
3. What about games? Let’s see Centipede done in HTML, javascript, and CSS. There will have to be some sort of animation engine baked in for these types of games to even be possible. Flash? Silverlight? OpenGL ES? Whatever route is chosen, Pandora’s box will be opened and this base of a couple million web developers will be dramatically reduced.

Why aren’t these questions being asked? Why do we get dead silence when Jobs announces this strategy and Wall Street going nuts when Palm is trying the same thing? And don’t get me going on the security nightmare this could be.

Anyone know something about this I don’t?

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Checking out the Wordpress iPhone app to post this. Many have given this app horrible reviews. While it doesn’t have every feature, it is quite solid and seems to perform it’s main function well. I applaud Automattic for open sourcing this app even before the NDA was lifted. Also, happy 25th Matt!

Well, that crash kind of sucked and that one. Maybe this app does have some problems. I’m going to dig into the code a bit.

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