Disorderly Content

I knew I shoulda just stayed home.

My uncle will be turning 90 in a few weeks. And for some reason some relative or other thought that was a good excuse for a party. Which would all be well and good, except that the uncle in question lives in Savannah. In Georgia. As in the other side of the country from here.

So, having procrastinated more than is good for me, I finally got on Travelocity tonight to see what I can find. Things started out simply enough. Starting point: SJC. Destination: SAV. Put in the dates and set her going. The lowest fare is on Continental at less than $400 round trip. And since a nonstop is out of the question, I may as well go with the cheapest flight.

So I choose the flight. And it starts offering me all these hotel package. Problem is that most of them aren't in Savannah. And the ones that are aren't where I need to be. I figure I'll deal with the flight now and then worry about a hotel.

Which gets me my first red flag: the price they quoted isn't really available. But they don't say why. So I back out, pick a different flight combination and end up with the same problem. Choosing a different departing airport gets the same deal. Finally I guess the price difference is a surcharge because of high gas prices. So I go back to the original flights, agree to the new price (about $20 more), enter the rest of the information and book the flights.

Okay, now we're moving. I go back in and look for one of the hotels my cousin suggested. Find it, get a good rate, book the room. And since I don't want to be trapped with my relatives for four straight days, I'll rent a car. Thrifty has the best deal. So I book it.

Or at least I think I do. Because Travelocity suddenly tells me there's something wrong with my flights. And I have to start all over again. Except that starting all over again doesn't work; it won't get me the flights. To hell with them, I say. And go to Continental's site, where I'm able to get the same flights at the same price, minus the $5 Travelocity charges me for the convenience. (What convenience? I hear you say. Or is that me?)

In the meantime I get an email from Travelocity confirming my hotel. And one from Continental for the flights. But nothing about the car. And Travelocity has no record of it. I guess when they aborted my flights, they also aborted the car reservation I was working on. So back I go, reentering all the same stuff a second time. And this time it takes; I get a confirmation email. Oh, and they still have the half broken flight record, which I cancel. With my luck I'll get charged for two flights.

Yep, this web stuff sure is convenient. Except when it isn't; then it sucks big time.

No, it's not a drug reaction; I was and am too much the rational engineer for that kind of problem. No, the trigger for this burst of nostalgia for my college days comes courtesy of iTunes 4.9 and the nerdy folks behind Michael and Evo's Dragon Page, a show that starts out being about science fiction but meanders around to fictional and nonfictional subjects of interest to the cognoscenti. It reminds me of way too many nights in somebody's dorm room having passionate debates of no moment whatsoever. Only with better sound effects. Or maybe of our blogger Meetups, only without the coffee. Come to think of it, I haven't really changed that much at all.

Think Y2K was the last overflow problem we'll have to deal with? Think again! Even as Mac OS X and other Unix-based and Unix-like systems finish their work on the Y2038 overflow, an article on Hohlwelt gives us instructions for modifying Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger for the Y10K problem. Now you can have your year show up as five digits! Why wait until the last minute?

(Spotted by Boing Boing. What would I do without you guys?)

Update 06/29: Okay, it doesn't really work. It's just a fake to add a leading zero to the year. Which means we only have another 7995 years to get this thing right.

I have to give credit to Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing. After writing a diatribe about Apple inserting DRM restrictions into the podcasts it offers with the latest version of iTunes, and then discovering that nothing of the kind actually happened, he left his original words on the blog and crossed them all out. That way we know what he thought and what he knows now. Given how easy it is to change the record (as I wrote about in this post from February), he has my respect for not doing so. I'm not sure I'd be so forthright about my own conclusion-jumping.

(Disclaimer: I do reserve the right to fix typos and spelling errors. Nothing sacrosanct about them.)

A little blank verse from Rosie O'Donnell about both Oprah and Tom Cruise acting like jackasses lately. When she's right, she's right.

My head may explode! First I found myself in agreement with Clarence Thomas over the Supreme Court's ruling in the medical marijuana case. Now I read something Hilary Rosen, former attack dog for the RIAA, wrote about the Supe's Grokster decision. And I shake my head over how reasonable and rational she's being:

"But knowing we were right legally really still isn't the same thing as being right in the real world. We had that euphoria with the first Napster decision. I hope my former colleagues remember that. The result was lots of back and forth and leverage hunting on both sides and continued litigation and then a great service shut down to make room for less great services. And more legal victories didn't bring more more market control no matter how many times it was hoped it would."

The rest of the article is here. But what scares me is that these sorts of things come in threes. And I'm afraid of who I'll agree with next. Dubya?

I'm afraid...

I was wandering around downtown Mountain View yesterday, shooting commonplace objects for possible stock photography uses. And I noticed something interesting after taking pictures of some parking signs. Property of City of Mtn. View, most of them read. I guess some people do more than read or photograph these things.

Which led me to wonder just when that legend started appearing. I've lived here for seventeen years; is this a recent development, or have I just been oblivious all this time? Yogi Berra famously commented that you can observe a lot just by watching. How true that is.

I grew up watching Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff, the creations of ventriloquist Paul Winchell. These days he's better known as the voice of Tigger in all those Winnie The Pooh cartoons. But that distinctive voice has finally been silenced. The Dead People Server tells me that Mr. Winchell died this past Friday. I miss him already.

This'll be my last eBay Live! posting. I promise.

The conference ended with a reception at the Santa Clara Convention Center. We arrived at the hall to face a gauntlet of eBay employees, applauding all the sellers (and sorta sellers like me) and giving us handshakes and high fives as we went down the insanely long receiving line. It was impressive and surreal at the same time.

I was excited by the entertainment for the evening, and in particular by the opening act. Bering Strait is a C&W band from Russia that now makes its home in Nashville. I decided they were blogworthy ages ago, and not just because lead singer Natasha Borzilova is so photogenic. They're just three days from releasing album #2. Guess I'll be checking the iTunes store on Tuesday. Which makes it pretty much like every other Tuesday.

Bering Strait was followed by The B-52s, tonight's headliners. They were in excellent form. And loud, really loud. I wasn't kidding with that title; my ears really are still ringing. But it's all in a good cause, right?

Apologies for the mangled German, but it just seemed appropriate. As I mentioned yesterday, I've been enjoying my first eBay Live! conference. Enough that I decided to go back today, first to take a tour of eBay's campus and second to attend a session on legal and tax issues for small businesses. Not that I'm planning to be such a business; I was sort of curious. And it was a fascinating talk for a bunch of reasons: good presenter, complex subject, fluid state of law. He even brought up the dreaded PATRIOT Act, which has let states discover imported items they can dun you for, including usurous interest charges.

But I digress. The campus tour was kind of ridiculous: a stop at the company store, which isn't as big as the one they had on the exhibit floor; a visit to the cafeteria, which wasn't actually operating; a video on eBay's history, which doesn't need any comment. I saw more than this when I interviewed here a couple of years ago. Oh, and a chance to be photographed in front of the eBay sign. Which I'm told will get you in trouble with Security any other day; they don't let people take any pictures of any part of the campus. So why make the exception now? Or why make an issue of it the rest of the time? It's this kind of inconsistent enforcement that makes the engineer in me want to argue, ya know?

As I blogged last week, last night my friend Barry Eisler read successfully from his latest thriller. I should hasten to say that he was successful not because he got the words right and in roughly the right places, although that's true; the success came from the reaction of the overflow crowd to his reading and the Q&A that followed. For which I'm grateful, having talked a few friends into coming to said event. The last thing I want is to have him crash and burn when I've given him such a buildup. Not that such a thing is likely; Barry's as good a speaker as he is a writer.

The Kepler's reading was the first stop on a tour around the country. Check his site for locations and dates. Oh, and if you do make it to one of his appearances, tell him Hank sent you. I'm still trying to push him into succumbing to the power of the blog...

Update 06/24: Here are second and third opinions of the event, courtesy of my blogger friends. Just in case you doubt my objectivity in such matters.

The it in this case is eBay, which is holding its annual eBay Live! conference in San Jose as I type. I decided to attend on a whim, having done a little buying and a little selling on eBay over the past few years. It's been a long time since I've enjoyed a trade show. I miss my earlier days in the computer biz, when a show meant more than bad food, aching feet and, if I'm very lucky, a world class hangover.

No hangover at this one. But other than that, I've had a great time. And a useful one too. Not relative to eBay, at least not yet. But I found several solutions for photographing small objects, which might prove useful in my stock photography activities here, here and here. So I've already gotten my money's worth. And that's not counting a free trip to Great America, our local theme park. Oh, and in case you're wondering, that is indeed me in the picture at right. I'm the one on the left.

This morning when I tried to use my PowerBook I had a small surprise waiting for me. First symptom: the scroll wheel on my mouse wouldn't. Scroll, that is; it wheeled just fine. I discovered that on a too-long page in Safari. And then discovered symptom number two: on a page with both vertical and horizontal scroll bars, the wheel was now scrolling the latter rather than the former.

It got stranger. In Excel, clicking left on a spreadsheet's tabs got me a click and an indication that the new tab was selected. But the display was still of the original page. And trying to select a cell selected a region instead. Fortunately, the right mouse button got me to the right tab/cell, albeit while also displaying a contextual menu.

Think. Think! Clearly the problem was in my venerable Logitech mouse. And unplugging, once I figured out which plug was the right one (too damn many USB devices), and replugging got things back to normal. But I wonder why my mouse suddenly started generating Shift key behavior after all this time. More to the point, I wonder if it'll start doing it again. Time to replace the rodent?

A post on Engadget talks about the Osborne Effect, where a company announces a new product before it's ready to ship, kills demand for the products it has and goes out of business. Problem is, they explain, that's not what did in Osborne the company. According to a piece at The Register, Osborne had already survived the drying up of its sales and was selling and shipping the new product in good numbers. And everything was going fine until a VP discovered some motherboards from the previous model and had the brilliant idea of turning them into completed systems. The value of those motherboards: $150k. The cost to turn them into products? $2m. As in million. As in enough to break the company.

There goes another object lesson. Osborne not destroyed by the Osborne Effect. Ben Franklin never flew the kite. What'll be the next story to bite the dust?

I've been using Indeed.com to comb job listings for potential employers. In addition to collecting all the listings from all the other sites, Indeed lets you set up RSS feeds for your searches. One of mine is for the word evangelist, which is generally prefixed either implicitly or explicitly with technology or product. But not always, as this opening demonstrates:

Job Description: MUST BE FLUENT IN KOREAN. Lead bible studies and fellowship activities. Oversee religious education and outreach programs. Conduct religious worship and perform other spiritual functions. Provide spiritual and moral guidance and assistance to members. Confer with clergy members, congregation officials and congregation organizations. Work Schedule: 9AM-10PM; Sun- Tue-Wed-Thu-Fri-Sat (35 hrs/week). STAFF MUST SEE COMMENTS FOR REFERRAL INSTRUCTIONS.

The location: Bayside, New York, where I grew up. The employer, believe it or not: the State Department of Labor.

What a pity that I don't speak Korean.

While checking my web access logs tonight, I noticed some bad accesses from a site called Study On Net. The problem is that they linked to a Java Q&A page I wrote back in the dark ages of the web. Which wouldn't be a problem, except that for some reason they decided my HTML page is actually an Active Server Page. Which it isn't. And it never was. And which I'd be happy to tell them. Except for the small problem that there is no contact information on their website. Or if there is, I certainly couldn't find it.

I wonder how many other people's URLs they got wrong...

Today was the last musical in the Best of Broadway series my friend Carol and I bought last year. Which is a misnomer in the case of The Mambo Kings, since it won't actually arrive in New York for another couple of months. The Golden Gate Theater was the out of town tryout for this play-from-the-movie-from-the-novel. And although I enjoyed the music and the staging (the insertion of the two leads into an episode of I Love Lucy was rather clever), I have to say that the story was paper thin and overloaded with clichés. It'll be interesting to see how it does on Broadway. Like The Examiner, I have my doubts.

Update 06/29: And apparently, so did the producers. Today's Murky News reports that Mambo Kings' Broadway arrival has been cancelled. I guess they finally decided the show was beyond saving.

A piece on the PressThink blog about the Downing Street Memo and the failure of the press to pick up and run with the story, makes a strong case for the blogosphere as a sort of court of last resort for news that didn't get the attention it deserves. Whether through malicious intent, incompetence, fear of reprisal or just exhaustion, the mainstream media doesn't always get it right. Heck, sometimes they get it horribly wrong. But now there's a place for a story to build, one which doesn't rely on people who have already rendered judgment and who, being human, hate to admit they missed something important and would rather wait for it to go away.

So we bloggers (and in including myself I take a tiny share of credit which I don't deserve, at least not yet) really do represent a change in the rules of the game. When those in power lie and manipulate, and when those others in power who are supposed to catch the others in those lies and manipulations fail at their job, there's still a chance for the truth to come out. As Winona Ryder said in Heathers, there's a new sheriff in town.

The folks at SoundSpectrum were kind enough to offer me a license to their G-Force visualizer for iTunes and other lesser music players. They seem to be under the mistaken impression that I might have influence over potential buyers, whereas you and I both know the truth. But hey, free software is free software. And those of us who weren't in the right place back in the drug era have to get our psychedelic experiences somewhere, right?

So what's G-Force like? It's hard to describe. A static image like the one on the right can only hint at the complexity of the patterns it generates from the music you play. You'll have to try out their trial version to fully appreciate it. But I'll tell you that it does add an interesting dimension to the listening experience. Especially if you start with some off the wall music, like the Stephen Lynch album I used for my own trial. As I listened to the song Special and watched the intricate interplay of lines and shapes on the screen, I could feel my own intellect dribbling away.

Thanks, guys; I was beginning to realize that a high IQ was just getting in the way.

I'm not sure how, but a while back I ended up on some NBC mailing list. Every now and again I'd get a request to participate in a survey. And if I'm sufficiently bored, I might actually fill it out.

Which is what happened today. Survey arrived in my email. I clicked over to the site. It asked my gender and gave me a selection of age ranges. I answered honestly and clicked the Continue button. Whereupon I was thanked for my participation and offered the opportunity to invite others to participate.

Guess they already have enough old white men in their survey. Or should I say old men; they didn't ask about the white part.

Best. Meetup. Ever.

Our twice-monthly blogger Meetup was last night. And as occasionally happens, all the stars were in sync, all the drugs peaked at the same moment, and a good time was had by all. Why "Naked Bea Arthur"? I hear you cry. Elkit has attempted to serialize the events that led to that phrase becoming the theme of the evening, from her reference to Harold & Maude, which led to my mention of the other Maude. Which someone, I won't say who, prepended with naked, leading to searches for available domain names¹, searches for images and eventually the creation of the first song by that soon to be superstar group, Antwon & The Antwonettes. No, it doesn't make sense. And no, it didn't make sense at the time. That's what was so great about it.

1. We determined that nakedbearthur.com is indeed free for purchase. As is nakedgoldengirls.com, although there were some concerns about alternate interpretations.

Update 06/19: It is with great pride that I note that this very blog entry is now the first and the second result from a Google search for that particular phrase, with my partners in crime claiming the third, fourth, sixth and seventh slots. Then again, I'm easily impressed.

After almost seventeen years in Silicon Valley, I finally decided to pay a visit to a local landmark. The Winchester Mystery House is right in the neighborhood; I've probably passed it a hundred times on my way to the local mall or one of the better movie theaters in the area. But I was in the mood to photograph something new. So today was going to be the day.

This entry isn't about the Mystery House, which is interesting as a historic oddity but not for much else. (The furniture is all replacement, since Sarah Winchester's will gave the original stuff away. And there aren't many contemporary photographs, so they don't know all that much about what used to be there. But I digress.) No, it's about a little photographic incident. Somewhere in my picture-taking, something got added: an unpleasant little blotch right around twelve o'clock. I didn't notice it until after the main tour, while I was waiting for a behind the scenes tour to begin. And an examination of the lens and filter didn't reveal anything. So I gave up on the idea of taking any more pictures that day and faced the sad prospect that my beautiful digital SLR was going to need professional help.

But first I wanted to know where the problem lay. So I tried swapping lenses, to verify that it was the camera and not the lens that had developed the tumor. (It was.) Then I found the Mirror Lock-Up option, which pops the mirror out of the way so I can see the image sensor. And there it was: a big dark splotch of something. Well, big in terms of the sensor; it was probably less than a millimeter in diameter.

Now what to do? I didn't want to risk damaging the sensor. The smart solution was to send the camera back to Nikon, pay $50 and wait a couple of weeks (or longer) to get it back. But, not being that smart, I decided to make one attempt on my own.

Doing a little research on the web, I found a page that described various techniques for cleaning dust off a sensor. It advised me to abandon my first thought: compressed air. That offered too much risk of permanent damage. And it didn't have any suggestions that looked good for dust, although my splotch is a lot bigger and perhaps more tractable than that.

Remembering the advice I'd received at a Nikon seminar I'd attended a few months ago, I went to my local drug emporium in search of the suggested tool. But no luck; the only such implements they had were already loaded, if you know what I mean. So it was off to Fry's, source of answers to all the world's problems. Where I found a six dollar squeeze blower that was actually intended for photographic use. A couple of puffs later, my sensor is unblemished and I'm back in business, image-wise.

As for the Mystery House, I may stop back to wander their gardens and get a few pictures of the outside of the building. Fortunately, they don't charge for that.

They're predicting rain for the end of the week. But that has nothing to do with the title of this entry, which is about a lunch get together with friends from one of my less successful employment situations. One of the attendees was my friend Barry, author of the highly successful John Rain thriller series. And at lunch I got my copy of Killing Rain, the soon-to-be-released fourth Rain book. If you like taut novels with morally ambiguous characters, exotic mostly-Asian locales, an eye for detail and a whole lot of attitude, I'm betting you'll like them. And if you happen to be around Menlo Park, California at 7:30PM on June 23rd, stop by Kepler's Books for a reading and signing. Barry does both exceedingly well. And I'm not just saying that because I get my copies for free.

But if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, I'd bet my money on it being a duck.

What am I talking about? Take a look at this piece at Talking Points Memo, which tells the tale of a defense contractor who bought the home of a San Diego congresscritter for more than a million and a half bucks, and then later selling the same abode for $700,000 less than he paid for it. But not to worry; said contractor has been doing very well on contracts he received courtesy of that very same congressbeing. What an amazingly fortuitous coincidence, don't you agree?

Feeling particularly bored on this sunny late spring day, I decided to take a drive south. I wandered aimlessly for a while, eventually deciding to stop at Casa de Fruta in Gilroy. I was in the mood to photograph something, and they have a lot of old farm equipment lying around that might do. But when I pulled up to the entrance, I discovered something much better than tractors. Turns out this was the weekend for Civil War reenactors to do their thing. Colorful costumes, rifle fire, cannons. Just like the real thing, except for the death and destruction and the smell.

I put a few pictures up on flickr. Oh, and if you're wondering about the shot at right, turns out that every now and then a cannon blows a perfect smoke ring. A trick, by the way, I never learned in my pipe smoking days.

I'm a fan of Roger Ebert. Even when I disagree with him (which seems to happen more and more; either his taste is undergoing a transformation or mine is), I admire his ability to articulate a point of view; the man writes so well.

Part of my every-other-Sunday-morning ritual is to read the latest entry in Mr. Ebert's Movie Answer Man column. I enjoy the Answer Man even more than his reviews, perhaps because I often find a metadiscussion of film more interesting than any one particular movie. Anyway, today's column included a letter questioning Mr. Ebert's awarding of three stars to The Longest Yard, especially given a review that was tepid at best. And although he has often posted that "A film isn't about what it's about, but about how it's about what it's about", this particular review doesn't seem to provide enough evidence of the how to explain a high rating. But it's entertaining to read the review and then ask yourself, to paraphrase Howard Baker, "What did he think and when did he think it?" More entertaining, I suspect, than the movie in question.

In one of those strange coincidences that ought to have conspiracy theorists bouncing around their easy chairs, the Dead People Server reports on the death of Michael Billington on June 6th, followed two days later by that of Ed Bishop. If those names are vaguely familiar, you would have to be a fan of UFO, Gerry Anderson's live action (but just barely) science fiction series from the 70s. Mr. Billington and Mr. Bishop played Colonel Paul Foster, the young heartthrob, and Commander Ed Straker, the hardbitten leader of SHADO, the supersecret alien invasion defence organization with the most excellent logo.

So long, guys. Thanks for the memories, cheesy as they were.

Of all the attempts to infect my computers, I am most amused by the "social" diseases. These are viruses that don't infect directly. Instead they try to get me to do something stupid, in effect to infect myself. Like the well meaning friend who passed along a message about a Trojan Horse that was assaulting Windows, including instructions for tracking down the problem file and deleting it. Except, as I informed her, that file was not an attack; it was a necessary part of Windows. The attack was in the message, and in the credulity of its recipients.

What brought that incident to mind was a message I just received, purportedly from the antivirus people at Symantec. I include the text of the message for your edification and/or amusement:

The sample file you sent contains a new virus version of buppa.k.
Please update your virus scanner with the attached dat file.

Best Regards,
Keria Reynolds

I might have been fooled, except for the fact that I sent no such sample file, do not run any Symantec software, and do not have an infectable computer (i.e. one running Windows). Even if any or all of these were true, I can't imagine being foolish enough to install the file provided by this kind Ms. Reynolds. And even if I were, would I really trust a file called "signature.zip"? Is anyone that gullible?

Yes, that was a rhetorical question.

From the So Wrong It's Right department comes this iPod cozy that's been knitted from chain mail. Just the thing for riding into battle on your trusty steed, white earbuds hidden inside your helmet. Or at least for the local Renaissance Faire, where those humorless SCAers can have a good snicker at your lack of authenticity. Of course, we'll be checking their costumes for bits of velcro...

Thanks as ever to Boing Boing for spotting this one.

I've been having a wonderful time ODing on British series lately. First it was the first two seasons of Danger Mouse, a wonderfully quirky cartoon I discovered on Nickelodeon back in the 80s, and which is every bit as goofily amusing now as it was then. Maybe even more so; my sense of humor is getting less sophisticated in my declining years. Or maybe these are my reclining years, my posture being what it is.

I followed up the World's Greatest Secret Agent with the highland charms of Monarch of the Glen, a series I discovered on one of my local public broadcasting stations. (Sadly, I can no longer get that station. Damn cable company!) Monarch of the Glen is quirky and Scottish, or is that redundant? It has amazing scenery, fine performances and a combination of comedy and pathos that we Murrkuns don't do nearly so well. Can't wait for season four...

I never, ever thought I'd see the day when I would agree with Clarence Thomas over a majority of the Supreme Court. But read the following and see if you aren't just as stunned as I:

"Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers."

Thanks to Don Marti and his free live nude Linux warez chat blog. Yep, that's what he calls it.

You have to love this one. According to a piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune, the photo lab at Walmart.com is refusing to print digital images if they look insufficiently amateurish. They're so concerned with any potential for copyright violation that they will reject photos on the grounds that they look like a professional might have taken them.

Beyond the incredible stupidity of telling customers they don't suck enough to shop at Walmart, this should give pause to anybody who believes that draconian copyright laws aren't a danger. Why worry?, the argument goes. After all, no one would try to abuse a law just because they can. But here we have an example of prior restraint and the chilling effect it can have on our rights to do what we like with our own property. To quote from the article:

"We can't release the pictures to you without a copyright release form signed by the photographer," the clerk replied, according to Helmick.

The clerk said the photos looked like a professional had taken them, Helmick said. And no matter how much Helmick protested that she, an amateur, had snapped the shots of her son, she said the clerk wouldn't budge.

Helmick didn't have a copyright release with her, so she offered to write a note stating that she had taken the photos. She said Wal-Mart refused even that.

Talk about guilty until proven innocent. The mind boggles.

I guess we have George Lucas, Burger King and Macromedia to thank (yeah, my mind is boggling over that last phrase) for the entertaining and Flash-based Twenty Questions With Darth Vader. Darth is one for two with me; he figured out opals but got all confuzzled about kiwifruit.

No Natalie Portman in this one, I'm afraid. But I'd still rate it higher than Sith.

I'm still in shock at the news that Apple really, truly is abandoning the PowerPC for Intel's processors. And I wonder what effect the move will have on people like me, the folks who have been Mac owners for a long time (since 1987 in my case) and who have stuck with the company through thick and thin.

One big concern is how quickly developers will stop supporting PowerPC in their binaries. I'm more than a little leery of claims that having an efficient application (to whatever degree anybody makes efficient apps these days) for both processor architectures is a matter of changing a handful of lines of code. If it's more than that, I can expect developers to reduce their efforts for PPC as soon as a reasonable number of Intel-based Macs are in the hands of customers. Heck, even if it isn't. Because just as with Java, it's not "write once, run anywhere"; it's "write once, test everywhere". And I notice that His Steveness demonstrated PPC binaries running on an Intel Mac (of what configuration, I wonder); he didn't show an Intel binary running on a PPC. And as soon as Intel-only Mac binaries start shipping, and they will, the software options for my Cube and PowerBook are numbered. What that number is, that's the big question.

There's a second issue as well. What will Apple do to keep Mac OS X from running on everybody else's Intel hardware? And how well will those attempts at control work? Because even if Apple is price competitive with all the other computer makers, the sheer number of hardware platforms and the size vs. features vs. price differences will make Apple just one choice among many for anybody looking for a box to run their OS. If Steve Jobs hated Mac clones the last time, he ain't see nuthin' yet.

Update 06/06: And suddenly that incredible compatibility doesn't seem so incredible. Or compatible. According to MacSlash, here are a few classes of apps that won't just recompile for Intel Inside:

• Applications built for Mac OS 8 or 9
• Code written specifically for AltiVec
• Code that inserts preferences in the System Preferences pane
• Applications that require a G4 or G5 processor
• Applications that depend on one or more kernel extensions
• Kernel extensions
• Bundled Java applications or Java applications with JNI libraries that can't be translated

As always, ya gotta read the fine print. Damn fine print...

My attempt to transition from drag on government coffers to productive member of society took me to Seattle last week where, in addition to convincing potential employers of my personal and professional wonderfulness, I took a little time off to play tourist. Wandered through Pike Street Market, which is half fresh food and half craft fair. Rode the monorail ("Monorail... monorail... monorail!" "Mono.. D'oh!") over to the Space Needle, which isn't nearly as impressive as its brethren in Toronto, Sydney and Auckland, but still provides some nice views of the city and its environs. And, as the gray overcast of the morning turned to a lighter gray and even showed little bits of sun, took a cruise around the harbor.

Nice place, Seattle. Wonder what it would look like with blue skies.

...must work in tech.

The tech boom and bust seems so long ago. But it's not; we're talking about five years since brilliant excess went all meltdown-y on us. And not that I'm one to dwell on the past (well, I am; but let's pretend for a moment, shall we?), but there's wisdom to be gleaned from those not so distant events. And if not, there's certainly entertainment value.

Which brings me to Steve Baldwin and Ghost Sites, a website I discovered more than a year ago and which itself went into a sort of hibernation, or at least a low ebb of creativity and effort. But it's back, at least for the moment, to regale us with 20/20 hindsight about what should have been obvious at the time.

SF writer Theodore Sturgeon famously observed that 90% of everything is crud. (Which is usually misquoted as "crap". Which tells us something useful, although I'm not sure what. But I digress.) On the web he's probably being optimistic.

Engadget has a story today about how the trend to wireless-only households is slowing rapidly. Hardly a surprise to your humble blogger; living as I do in a cellular dead zone in the heart of Silicon Valley, and having absorbed the wisdom of a leader in wireless that to expect good service is to be a fool, I can't imagine anyone so brave as to cut the cord. Guess that'll have to remain a dream, like flying cars or honest politicians.

The legal system moves with almost geologic slowness, so much so that it often doesn't seem to move at all. The world of tech is the opposite, which is one aspect of its appeal. I can't imagine working in a field where everything works now the way it did then and will continue to work long after I'm gone. Which may be why I rarely find legal conflict all that interesting until it's over.

There are exceptions of course. The Watergate hearings, which were history coming to me as it happened. The combination of amazing revelations and high stakes made it all too fascinating. The Microsoft antitrust trial. And lately, the SCO vs. Linux, Open Source and a whole bunch of other folks.

What's amazing about the SCO case is that so many people believed that there must be a case there despite a shocking lack of public evidence. SCO managed to scare a lot of people in the tech world. And people who are scared and who then discover over time that they were really being manipulated, those people tend to lash back. That's been fun to watch.

If you haven't been paying attention to SCO vs. Linux et al., there's a pretty good summary called There's No Business Like SCO Business on the site IT-Analysis.com. Like reading about Watergate after the fact, it can put events into a context that wasn't so clear as they occurred. Best of all, what we gain in understanding we don't give up in entertainment or outrage. Just in case things end with a whimper rather than a bang, you know.

The Huffington Post points to a Washington Post article in which Bob Woodward tells the story of his first meeting with Mark Felt and how he went on to become the most famous anonymous source of our age. Having grown up with Watergate (the hearings coincided with the summer after my freshman year at college), I remain fascinated with that time and still have a belief that politics matter and that politicians can sometimes do the right thing. It's a mark of how far we've come that what Nixon did in secret, knowing it couldn't stand public scrutiny, our current administration does openly, even contemptuously. The times they are a-changing. And not for the better.

It doesn't happen often, but every now and then science fiction writers get the future right. Think Arthur C. Clarke and geostationary communication satellites in 1945. Isaac Asimov and the pocket calculator in 1951. Murray Leinster and the Internet in 1946.

Murray who? Despite being one of the earliest and among the most prolific of the Golden Age SF writers (his first story was published in 1919; his last in the late 60s), I can't recall a list of SF greats that ever mentioned him. And yet I can remember reading and enjoying several of his novels and short stories. Leinster (real name Will F. Jenkins) had a deft touch for dialogue and a comic sense of timing that reminds me a little of Keith Laumer's Retief stories.

Which is why I picked up a copy of A Logic Named Joe, a new collection of his work, when I was browsing in Borders recently. And was stunned by the title story, where Leinster draws the broad strokes of the World Wide Web. Not so much the technology, although he's kind of in the ballpark. But the implications for business, news, entertainment, communication and some aspects of society we haven't yet seen play out. And to think, it's only taken us sixty years to catch up.

Of course, his version is funnier than the real thing.