When you create an open source project, you gain almost nothing but a PR hit if there isn’t a community built around it. [..]

Just look at the massive community that has exploded around Apache Lucene and Apache Hadoop — Yahoo could of kept this infrastructure project internal, and sure, it might of fulfilled their original goals, but they wouldn’t of ever received the thousands of external contributions, which has turned the Lucene/Hadoop world into one of the most diverse and thriving open source communities of late, giving Yahoo a thousand times return on their investment in Hadoop.

Paul discusses the importance of letting company-created open source projects thrive by fostering a vivid community, and encouraging their use in competitors’ products against what might be considered common business sense.

Consider the contrast between two of Apple best-known open source projects: the earliest, Darwin, never took off the way Jobs had promised (and perhaps hoped for) back in 1999. Projects such as OpenDarwin (which eventually shut down), PureDarwin, GNU-Darwin have always lacked proper leadership and interest and suffered under opaque, unclear, apparently inconsistent policies on Apple’s part.

On the other hand, there’s WebKit: once given a proper website with a public blog, issue tracker and repository and allowing external reviewers, its success exploded — and in spite of the fact that many of Apple’s competitors now use it, Apple, too, reaps rewards. The sum of the contributions simply exceeds the initial loss of control and propriety by a wide margin.

Perhaps this kind of success is only possible with a limited amount of projects, but as a company, you have to be willing to take that risk.

Compared to their Flash-based predecessors, these new video players have various downsides: no full-screen mode, no embedding on third-party sites and, at least for YouTube’s, no play/pause using the space bar. Other than that, this is great: it’s great because we no longer rely on a proprietary mechanism of Adobe’s that was originally designed to display animated vector graphics, not provide a UI and codec to play movies; it’s great because a standards committee (and an experiment-friendly sidekick) have created this technology, and will hopefully drive it forward; it’s great because, in fact, this has benefits in performance (far lower CPU usage; higher likelihood of GPU acceleration), accessibility and other areas.

And it works, right now, everywhere, without limitations.

Ah, who am I kidding.

It in fact works in the newest versions of Safari and Chrome (including Google Chrome Frame for IE), and, if you’re on Linux, Opera. It doesn’t in IE, and — here’s the sad, perhaps surprising part — not in Firefox either.

You may be misled into thinking that the HTML working group standardizing a <video> tag implies them also agreeing on the formats used by such videos, mandating one or more video and audio codecs and container formats to support. In fact, you’d be right that the original proposal looked exactly like that, requiring Ogg Media as the container, Ogg Theora for video and Ogg Vorbis for audio.

The big benefit of Xiph.org’s Ogg-branded series of codecs is their liberal approach — no patents, open specification, no cost, BSD or BSD-style licensing. In other words: pretty much anyone gets to use them if they want. Contrast that to the increasingly common H.264 video codec, which costs money to license and has patents. You’d think the choice is pretty clear: for the consumer and the developer, Ogg Anything means bliss and sanity.

It’s not quite as clear-cut. Apple and Nokia objected to HTML5 requiring browsers to implement Ogg Theora, citing difficulty of hardware acceleration (plenty of chips that specialize in H.264 decoding already exist). Apple added that, even though it is claimed Ogg Theora doesn’t have any patents, there’s no guarantee. Google doesn’t want to switch YouTube to Theora, in part because Flash already supports H.264 (so that’s what much of YouTube’s existing library uses), and because the latter achieves better quality at the same bitrate.

As such, the requirement was dropped from a later draft version of HTML5. Safari 4 ended up shipping supporting whatever codecs your installed QuickTime comes with (which includes H.264, but doesn’t include Ogg Theora unless you install it yourself
), Firefox and Opera with only Ogg Theora, and Google Chrome with both. I said Opera only supports Ogg Theory; as I understand it, Opera on Linux is a special case: it behaves similarly to Safari in that it supports whatever GStreamer happens to have (including, where available, H.264), whereas on other platforms, they instead bundle Ogg Theora.

So here we are: a <video> tag and plenty of confusion as to what it means to the end user. Will my browser play this? Will it not?

Controversial quality comparisons aside, one cannot deny H.264 is very widespread. Apple has been pushing it big time, Blu-Ray mandates it (and the late HD-DVD allowed it), and Adobe Flash has supported it since version 9. For pretty much anything “HD”, it has become the preferred format; the Windows Media-derived VC-1 never quite took off the same way, and Windows 7 even finally ships with it. If smartphones, portable video players, etc. do video, chances are they do H.264. The same simply cannot be said for Ogg Theora.

But perhaps ubiquity isn’t the point?

If you ask Robert O’Callahan, it’s not. Licensing a patent-encumbered, non-free codec is a difficult matter, but that’s not even the big problem. The alternative of having the operating system’s media framework provide the codecs (as is the case with Safari/QuickTime and Opera/GStreamer) doesn’t appeal to him for a number of reasons, including a support nightmare and code maintenance headaches, but most of all this:

Even if a volunteer produces a patch [to make Firefox use Windows's extensible media framework DirectShow for video codec support], I would not want to ship it in Firefox in the near future; let me try to explain why.

Probably most important: we want to focus our energy on promoting open unencumbered codecs at this time.

That was half a year ago. He has reiterated it since:

Users just want video to work. You Mozilla people are such idealists! Yes, that is the reason for Mozilla to exist.

As far as “existing” goes, this may be right. Were it not for idealists, Mozilla may not have survived as long as it did without a successful product. Firefox 1.0 shipped November 2004; Mozilla was open-sourced March 1998. There’s a variety of reasons it took so long (including the questionable decision to rewrite), but there’s little disagreement that idealism helped keep the dream alive.

But the article is less about Mozilla and more about Firefox, and I’d wager to say people in this context read “to exist” as more as “to have succeeded” than “to have been created in the first place”. And in that, I couldn’t disagree more.

“Free software idealism” may have played a big role in those initial six years of not much visibly going on: alpha geeks enjoyed tinkering with the bits and pieces of code, and tried various approaches (particularly Seamonkey), and eventually settled for something far simpler (which evolved from m/b through Phoenix and Firebird into Firefox). That wasn’t what brought Firefox to the masses, though. The masses don’t care about the license. They don’t care to take a look at code. They do care that it’s free as in gratis, that it works, and that it works better than what they were used to. And what they were used to was awful, because it was IE 6.

Firefox 1.0 was the fortunate (and this is part of what significantly accelerated development those days) situation of IE 6 having a deservedly horrible situation and no proper competition, aside from alternatives nobody cared about, and ones even fewer people cared about. A combination of beta geeks¹ — those folks who fix their friends’/neighbors’/relatives’ computers — and the media made Firefox a huge success, and they had IE 6’s suckiness (particularly in the realm of security, or lack thereof), Microsoft’s refusal to provide new versions, and Firefox including cool features with it as good arguments.

In short, Firefox was a free and for the most part far superior alternative, and people had their beta geek friend to help them set it up. That is why it succeeded. I consider it foolish to believe that free software idealism pushed Firefox to the masses. It merely helped ignite its beginnings.

And therefore, we must ask ourselves which is more important: more idealism that may or may not make a difference another six years from now, or a solution right now that users will be pleased with?

I’ll take Pragmatic Choices For Consumers for $500.

1. Hereby trademarked.

Things I’m jealous of:

• Much nicer e-mail client. It’s (obviously) Gmail-specific, but it comes with so much functionality I sorely miss on the terribly limited iPhone OS’s Mail.
• Better spelling suggestions/correction. Multiple choices presented in a horizontal band as you type.
• Speed and specs. The UI looks much smoother than iPhone OS 3.1 does on my (admittedly now-aging) iPhone 3G. In large part, I’m sure, due to four times the RAM (512 MB vs. 128), and a much faster CPU (the Cortex A8-like, ARMv7-based Snapdragon at 1 GHz, rather than Apple’s custom ARMv6-based chip at 412 MHz). Speaking of specs, a honorary mention goes to the far higher resolution — 854×480 vs. 480×320, which should provide benefits in the long run.
• Background applications. This is one area where I’m curious to see what direction Apple is heading in.
• Notifications. Not shown much in the demos, but supposedly decent. iPhone OS handles them absolutely terribly. One alert on top of another and you’ve got yourself a user-hostile mess.

Things I’m not so jealous of:

• Inferior browser in-page navigation. It’s not just that Android’s default-shipping browser lacks multi-touch zoom; it’s much more importantly that, as the demo video illustrates so nicely¹, double-tap-to-zoom picks a seemingly random area (in this particular case, a portion of the picture) to zoom in on, quite unlike Safari on iPhone OS, which would have shown the entire picture, left to right. Pictures is one thing, paragraphs is another; it appears Safari is much smart about figuring out what you want to focus on.² This may seem like a minor point, but is in fact a huge win in user experience for iPhone OS.
• Ugly text rendering. The fonts look like Linux. Oh, right. Googl eneeds to invest some R&D money here.
• Inconsistent UI. In the demo videos, this is most noticeable with toolbars — or, more generally speaking, the layout of controls within the apps: each of the shown apps appears to have its own idea of where to place the buttons, and what size, shading, background color, etc. they ought to be. It’s far from bad, but it’s hardly good either. iPhone OS, despite having multiple variants of control styles, gives a clear impression of existing overall design guidelines.

Android has been developing at a rapid pace, which puts some wonderful pressure on Apple to hopefully make a nice leap with iPhone OS 4 and beyond, but it’s nowhere near the point where I’d even consider switching.

1. How could someone produce such a video and not notice how little sense this behavior makes?
2. This works so well, in fact, that I miss that functionality on any desktop browser.

I’d be there, perhaps with a class, or with family, and think to myself “okay, this is great — can we go home now?”. I’d have a hard time focusing on what was right in front of me, and it wasn’t because my mind was already looking forward to the next painting, sculpture or other form of creative expression. ‘No‘, I had been convincing myself, ‘it must be that I’m simply not a museum type person, period!’

How wrong. Such failure to capture the true issue.

The xkcd strip “The Problem with Wikipedia” is one of my favorites because it feels so me. I’ll come up with all sorts of peculiarities of life I, all of a sudden, wish to look up in the most random of moments. The iPhone is almost like an evil enabler in this, since it lets me do that even while in the most public (e.g. the tram) and most private (your imagination will have to do) of settings. I come up with one term, and my mind won’t stop craving answers, and Wikipedia, combined with its partners-in-crime on the World Wide Web, will deliver much more than I should care to know, but do care to.

It is in that context that not liking museums makes little sense; clearly, my intellect loves its very own kind of stimulation.

But there’s excuses for that.

Browsing Wikipedia can be done in the bathroom¹ or in other comfortable ways; exhibits, on the other hand, tend not to offer many (if any) options for seating, even.

With the Web, I can click from one link to another faster than a blink of an eye; an art gallery, on the other hand, assumes and expects much more attention to each individual piece.

There are constant chicken-out options of closing the tab or window or even shutting the laptop’s lid, and boy, do I ever make use of those. Alas, for that, no-can-do at the Anne Frank house.

Those are valid reasons. They play a real role in my subconscious decision-making processes. For a long time, I had fail to question whether they were, in fact, sufficient reasons.

But they miss the real point: what do I do while and after finding random stuff on the Web? I share it. I pick out random quotes that are, in their self-contained brevity, weird or fun or interesting or possibly educational. I pick out amusing stuff and make it fit into this month’s Internet meme. Or maybe I just link and wait for someone else’s comment. I do those things.

In short, I give others my piece of mind, for whatever it may be worth, and ask for theirs in return — at the risk of blowing this out or proportion, it’s an exchange of thoughts leading to a greater common understanding. It’s a miniscule role by itself, but it adds up fast.

Based on my experience this week, that is what had been missing whenever I went to museums. Someone I could discuss things with as I saw them.

It certainly seems like an opportunity I’d like to have more often.

1. Someone had to say it?

changeset:   4:8d2ac374a722
tag:         tip
user:        Sören Kuklau 
date:        Sat Dec 12 16:50:25 2009 +0100
summary:     pre/code: add Menlo; no need to make it larger any more; no indentation

changeset:   3:dd105c8d8777
tag:         tip
user:        Sören Kuklau 
date:        Sat Dec 12 16:02:48 2009 +0100
summary:     No more columns; 32em instead of 25em; 18px instead of default (e.g. 16px); centered for now

changeset:   2:c1d03afcbb24
user:        Sören Kuklau 
date:        Sat Dec 12 15:43:06 2009 +0100
summary:     Remove the header link for now; was never properly implemented

changeset:   1:741937fb2884
user:        Sören Kuklau 
date:        Sat Dec 12 15:31:50 2009 +0100
summary:     Restore double-em style

changeset:   0:10dd0d874700
user:        Sören Kuklau 
date:        Sat Dec 12 15:28:41 2009 +0100
summary:     Initial

Kudos to Peter Hosey for Lazytwitter-style help with uploading a de-repository’d copy of the WP theme to the Web server via SSH. Looks something like this:

hg archive -t tar -p 'yourtheme' - | ssh example.com 'tar xf - -C ~/path/to/wp-content/themes'

As I’ve noticed with lil’ side projects such as Denis’s all-new Ruby-based CyanChat relay, working with a distributed versioning system feels ridiculously liberating to a developer. I can see what all the fuss is about. I just still question it would work well in all kinds of environments where Subversion does.

It was long enough that it left me with plenty of impressions; short enough that it left me longing for more; different enough that there’s no stereotyping it. It had all the inevitable periods drama and of silence; of idiosyncrasies and of joy; of impression and of reflection. As much as I would have loved for it to be longer, such change would have destroyed its nature.

While I only met Marein very briefly, I very much enjoyed his company (and thanks for the hat! →). It’s a rare moment for me to meet other Myst fans / like-minded thinkers, so I shall treasure it.

I’m getting ahead of myself, however.

You see, going on this vacation hadn’t been an easy decision to make. It seems I have a very, very limited range of activities that I enjoy, and only under specific circumstances. I’m still in the very early stages of exploring that, but I do know I’ve had my share of experiences that, by society’s standards, I ought to have taken delight in but did not. I don’t blame anyone for that simple fact, nor for trying hard to force me to “have fun” (even when I don’t show it, I do appreciate the attempt), though I do hope for more understanding in the future that I’m mostly not ‘like that’.

I don’t want to say past vacations have left me scarred, but they ended up making me afraid to take some time off from work, and they made me wary and hesitant when vaaht offered — to the point where I hoped I had school that week so I’d have a proper excuse not to come. No such ‘luck’.

I have those sudden rushes of self-coercion, however, and one of them made me buy the train ticket there (the fact that it was surprisingly cheap helped!); then followed a week of two of random worries and mental explorations (my ID had expired; would I manage to kick my bottom and get a temporary one in time? would I manage to buy the ticket back? would I actually go, or decide last-minute that, despite the effort and payments, I’d just chicken out and stay right here?); then, an odd untimely breakdown the weekend before; finally, the decision to stop thinking and do this.

And I just love the stop thinking and do this moments, for they play a large role in pushing me forward.

I find it fascinating, disturbing and disturbingly fascinating (or fascinatingly disturbing? Uh, never mind.) how the current state of mind can feel perfectly rational one moment and, as it changes, absurdly irrational the next. I can go from it making perfect sense not to “risk” going on a vacation for hours to it feeling incredibly foolish, childish and, as kids these days say, lame, man.

So I took the train to Bremen, and I took the train to Osnabrück (which, despite being an ICE, and me sitting at a table, had me fail to find any power outlet), and the IC to Hilversum (much older technology, much less fancy, but… power outlet!). And, eventually, the weird-looking Dutch IC to Amsterdam.

Somewhere on the way to Hilversum, there was an odd announcement I failed to properly listen to, despite being in Dutch, English and German (as far as I recall). I immediately began to regret not listening, because some confusion and worrying followed. It turned out they must have merely said that we’re crossing the border, which explains electricity briefly going out, change of staff (I think?), et cetera.

That, I suppose, was the most worrying part of the trip. Until, that is, I arrived in Amsterdam. I seem to have a propensity to end up in Amsterdam

• looking to meet someone,
• failing to find them within the don’t-worry-about-it span of time.

Add to that my dumb decision the night before not to properly say good bye to mentioned involved parties and go absolutely sure we had agreed on where to meet, and there I was at a train station that, in my stress, seemed much more humongous and confusing than it did on my way back Thursday evening. An eery reminder of me in Schiphol, the summer of 2003, trying to meet someone I had never seen before and of whom I wasn’t entirely sure what he looked like.

Following the futile attempt to walk down what seemed like an entire mile length’s worth of platform 13/14 (13? You can’t make this up!) — I had arrived at 14b; Marein, I believe, was supposed to have arrived at 13a, I descended the stairs only to be overwhelmed, but eventually succeed to find the Starbucks. But not vaaht.

It didn’t help that Amsterdam Centraal has odd gates with little stop signs that make it look as though you need tickets to go through, but as Marein explained, this is apparently a system that they haven’t fully finished developing. Welcome to the world of software development?

After several attempts to partially walk in the Starbucks, not see her, walk back out, and keep walking back and forth, I sighed, resigned, and stood up with my back against a pole. That’s when Marein showed up in front of me. His train got canceled, so he was late. Having spent some time searching for vaaht together, we eventually found each other. Her flight had gotten delayed by an hour.

On Thursday night, though, my dad would tell me a story of how he ended up in a small French town waiting to find friends of his for something like 7 hours, so I suppose I should consider myself lucky — as terribly as the panicking I had felt, it must have taken 15 minutes, if even that, to be resolved.

What followed was the true part of the vacation.

Monday night: going to Subway with the two of them, then to the hotel, unpacking and chatting for a while, Marein eventually having to catch his train back home, and so on. His journey was almost twice as long as the time he got to hang out with us, but it was a rare moment of quality time.

Tuesday: lots of walking; mostly along the street market. Also, food.

Wednesday: Van Gogh museum, and more and better food.

Thursday until the afternoon: Anne Frank house, but perhaps not enough food.

All of those days? Talking. Lots and lots of talking. It’s a rare, relish-worthy moment when two people who have so much to say to each other meet. This is literally invaluable; you cannot put the worth of this into materialistic measurements.

Starting Wednesday night, I felt regret for it having been so brief. And yet, at the same time, I think the shortness forced us to make the most of it. The deadline didn’t feel liberating, but not stressful either.

I had said to someone that I cannot decide whether I should be elated that I’ve met someone who understands me, or concerned that this never seems to happen to me in Germany. That’s a bit of hyperbole, though: as much as I wish I’d have such fine moments in life more often, I’m truly happy this one did occur.

In other words: it’s been a great opportunity, and I used it. That counts for something.

Now, on to the quest of finding more.

What are these add-ons?

The two add-ons are related in that they both ship as part of .NET Framework 3.5 SP1¹, but unrelated in their purpose.

• The .NET Framework Assistant allows ClickOnce applications to be installed (into a sandbox) and launched from Firefox. ClickOnce is comparable to Java Web Start, except that it works for applications written for .NET, not Java. Without the “assistant”, you can still download the .application manifest file (an XML-based file format including a digital signature and a URL pointing to the actual application binaries and resources) and launch it afterwards, but if the name wasn’t a giveaway, seamlessness is the very point of ClickOnce.
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is the new GUI toolkit for .NET, replacing Windows Forms. A subset of WPF wrapped inside a sandbox was originally known as WPF/e (for “everywhere”) and later on branded as Silverlight. This plug-in, however, is for the full WPF, except also for applications running in a sandbox. It’s as confusing as it sounds.

The latter is where the vulnerability occurred; due to the existence of the plug-in, it affected Firefox.

Why do I have those add-ons? Why can’t I uninstall them?

In a controversial move, they were bundled with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. There is no way of customizing the install² such that you skip those add-ons.

As for uninstallation, the story is once again different for the two:

• The original version of the .NET Framework Assistant can’t be uninstalled from within Firefox due to its method of installation. Reasonably, it is installed system-wide (just like .NET itself is system-wide). Unfortunately, while Mozilla provides a developer-level guide for doing so (using the Windows Registry), it doesn’t provide a user-level one for undoing so. Presumably, Firefox would have to provide an external application that is launched with administrator privileges (and therefore, an user rights elevation dialog to launch it) in order to change or remove the installation. The button isn’t missing for some conspiratory reason on Microsoft’s part, but because of what is arguably a missing capability in Firefox. Uninstallation could be done by manually removing the Registry entry.

  In a later update, Microsoft changed the extension to be installed per-user. This allows uninstalling (although only for yourself!) from within Firefox.

• As Windows Presentation Foundation is a plug-in, it cannot be uninstalled from Firefox at all. Again, this is something Firefox doesn’t support, not something Microsoft went ouf ot their way to prevent.

So, what now?

The vulnerability has been fixed, but only two days before Mozilla decided to blacklist the extension. Problematically, many users are known to wait days, months or sometimes millennia³ to install patches, whether out of a (sometimes rational) fear that they will break other things, because they don’t have permission or knowledge to do so, or for other reasons.

Unfortunately, even if you do have the patch installed, the add-ons are still blacklisted. As I understand it, the add-ons’ versions⁴ haven’t changed from the patch, so Mozilla is unable to verify that you do in fact have them patched. While it is possible to query Windows Update for what patches are installed, such code would presumably require an update to Firefox itself.

Two things trouble me more: from what I can see, the first add-on did in fact not have a vulnerability at all, so ClickOnce support is currently broken in Firefox for what appears to be no actual reason. Second, Mike Shaver claims that “Microsoft is recommending that all users disable the add-on.”, but my reading of their blog entry suggests that, as long as you have the patch installed, you don’t need to disable the add-on at all.

1. Which should have been named 3.6, as it adds some completely new features, such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework.
2. To my knowledge, that is.
3. Hyperbole included.
4. Or the UUID?

I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know a broad range of viewpoints through school and my surroundings. That becomes self-perpetuating after a while: once you realize that, in many situations of life, what you assume to be true — because your parents / teacher / friends all have been saying it is — may be far less black and white than that, you learn to leave the circle-jerkfest, gather information, analyze it and form your own thought. I know this. I try to challenge the status quo all the time. And yet, there are things so obviously true and self-evident that I don’t question them. What a mistake.

One such thing assumed to be true: that I’m not good at presenting. Why would I think such a thing? Because whenever I tried, I felt that utterly sucked. And when I asked others, they agreed. Sure, I was encouraged to “practice”, but the unspoken, implied vibe I always got? That I’ll always be mediocre at it. There is lots of common valid wisdom about how to improve your presentation skills. Avoid putting too much on your slides. Make eye contact with your audience. Always hold something in your hands. Never stare at the projection canvas. When making pauses, emphasize them to give everyone — not just yourself — a chance to think about what you’ve just said. All sound advice, and much of it is conveyed at school. But one thing isn’t: pick a subject you’re passionate about.

It doesn’t matter how much you royally suck at telling your classmates about how the assassination of Franz Fredinand of Austria ultimatley led to World War I, because even if you’re a history buff, chances are you don’t find that subject any more exciting than your audience does, and acting as if it is just isn’t gonna work well. Seriously, it won’t. Acting and speaking are two entirely different things.

As I said, I’d been suspecting this to be true for a while. But when I held a presentation on relational databases to a class on Wednesday, for 35 minutes, with most of the students intently listening, several telling me afterwards that it was fantastic, and one going so far as to say that he’s never had someone explain it so well, I finally knew.

You’ll still be nervous ahead of it. You’ll still want to avoid throwing up. You’ll still feel relieved afterwards. But believe you me, as long as you love what it is you’re talking about, you can blow everyone’s socks off. And you might even look forward to the next time.

Daniel Eran Dilger is the author of “Snow Leopard Server (Developer Reference),” a new book from Wiley available now for pre-order at a special price from Amazon.

I don’t find it unreasonable to expect someone who writes such a book to strive for a certain level of accuracy. Having said that, let’s go:

Open source?

More importantly, Apple is providing its users with additional options that benefit both Mac users and the open source community.

What additional options for the open source community does Snow Leopard provide in the PIM area? A quote later on provides a clue what Dilger apparently thinks Apple has added:

Because Apple makes its money almost exclusively from selling hardware, it has opened up its own Snow Leopard Server applications, Address Book Server and iCal Server, as open source Darwin servers that can be compiled to run on Linux.

10.5 Leopard introduced the Apache-licensed Darwin Calendar Server, a subset of Leopard Server’s iCal Server, and this has been continuously updated (Snow Leopard Server ships with version 2). But while Snow Leopard Server ships with the new Address Book Server, there doesn’t appear to be any open source project for that. Marketing-wise, the iCal Server page mentions:

To further the widespread adoption and deployment of these standards, Apple has made the complete source code for iCal Server 2 available through the macosforge.org website.

No such thing for Address Book Server. Maybe they’re planning on it; maybe they’ve even said they are — but so far, this looks quite untrue. Dilger goes on:

That means Apple is essentially giving away both the client (to Mac users) and the servers (to the community) in order to encourage the use of open standards in messaging and collaboration.

No, the clients (Mail, Address Book and iCal) are most certainly commercial, closed-source software. Of the servers, all three are commercial and closed-source, although a subset of one is available in an open-source fashion. Which, by the way, is great on Apple’s part — but let’s not deny that a good configuration interface adds plenty of value, and Apple does not provide that for free (or otherwise openly).

Outlook not needed?

Next up, Dilger compares Apple’s trifecta of client apps to Outlook, with rather bold claims:

Integrated support for Exchange beginning with last year’s iPhone 2.0 means Apple’s mobile platform simply doesn’t need an Outlook client. Now Snow Leopard can also get by without Entourage/Outlook, thanks to new and improved baked-in support for Exchange in Mail, Address Book and iCal.

Microsoft has responded with the announcement that it will now be delivering a real (but still scaled back) version of Outlook for the Mac again

Now, unlike many, I’ve always been a fan of the separation into three apps. But even in 10.6, they are a far cry from Outlook being “simply not needed” or possibly to “get by without”. Public folders, anyone?

The Microsoft Bashing Tangent

With Snow Leopard and the iPhone each now providing their own client layer for accessing Exchange Server, Apple can now offer its users alternative access to other server products as well, from its own MobileMe and Snow Leopard Server offerings to web services from Google and Yahoo. This effectively turns Microsoft from a direct seller into a wholesaler that has to deal with Apple as a middleman retailer.

I’m sure this made some vague sense when it was written. It doesn’t when it’s read. The entire section goes on about Sears, CompUSA, Netscape, IE, IIS and off-shore wind energy. Actually, that last one was a lie. But a discussion of PIM client/server solutions this is not. He could have discussed Netscape’s brief ill-fated journey into the groupware market, but he didn’t. Instead, he’s talking about Microsoft’s evilness, implying a dominant position IIS has never had (”Microsoft first took control of the client with Internet Explorer and then began tying its IE client to its own IIS on the server side with features that gave companies reasons to buy all of their server software from Microsoft.”), and then switches over to everyone’s savior Apple with their open sourcing of Address Book Server, which hasn’t in fact happened. Finally, Snow Leopard Server apparently includes a “Push Notification Server”, which Apple knows so much about, nine out of the top ten results from Google are all articles of his, or links to them. So let’s skip this entire part.

Protocol confusion

Apple’s support for Exchange and its promotion of its own Exchange alternatives are two sides of the same coin, in the sense that they use the same technologies.

Well, this certainly is exciting news for Microsoft, who didn’t even know until this point that their very own Exchange Server has support for CalDAV and CardDAV built right in. (To be fair, it does for IMAP and LDAP, although it’s typically disabled.) Wouldn’t you love it if your developers don’t even have to build features, your marketing doesn’t even have to promote them, and yet you get to offer them?

Apple built its support for Exchange using WebDAV

No…

, the open specification that Microsoft supports on Exchange Server as a way to deliver messages to mobile clients.

…and no.

While Exchange Server has support for WebDAV, and WebDAV is very much an open specification, it’s such a broadly-specified protocol for file transfer and versioning over HTTP that it isn’t intended for mail, contacts, calendars, etc. in particular, so Microsoft has had to layer plenty of proprietary additions on top of it.¹ Yes, it uses WebDAV. No, that’s not all there is to it. It’s about as vague a claim as calling XML or CSV a format. For transferring files, WebDAV is a sufficient specification; for storing mails, contacts, calendar events, notes and more, including a ton of metadata, it’s incomplete — by design.

Apple did not license Microsoft’s Windows-only “Exchange Active Sync” software; it merely licensed the rights to implement a compatible EAS conduit with Exchange. Apple owns the Snow Leopard software that talks to Exchange.

This may be, but given that it’s in the same paragraph, I’m skeptical, and also question the relevance. It seems a poor and unnecessary attempt at making Apple look independent. Maybe they didn’t pay a licensing fee; instead, they had to pay their developers to develop client code of their own. So what?

The client applications Apple has upgraded in Snow Leopard to connect to Exchange, including Mail, Address Book, and iCal, also use WebDAV to talk to Apple’s own Snow Leopard Server applications.

The latter part is correct insofar as that CalDAV and CardDAV are extensions to WebDAV for calendars and contacts, respectively. They’re entirely incorrect for Mail (there is no WebDAV-based mail specification aside from Exchange Server’s proprietary method), as well as for Exchange.

This all leads to an entirely wrong conclusion:

This effort to support everything from integrated client software owned by Apple makes Snow Leopard’s support for Exchange of use to everyone, even if they don’t use Exchange. The client work Apple has invested in making Macs Exchange-friendly also improves the features available via MobileMe, Snow Leopard Server, and even some other third party services such as those from Google and Yahoo.

On top of incorrectly believing that Snow Leopard interfaces with Exchange Server through WebDAV, Dilger apparently goes even further that, since CalDAV, CardDAV and his imaginary MailDAV² are built on top of WebDAV and Exchange uses WebDAV as well, Apple is saving duplicate effort. That would be great. It’s also entirely off. First, Snow Leopard communicates with Exchange Server through the much newer, SOAP-based Exchange Web Services protocol. That’s why it requires 2007 Service Pack 1 Update Rollup 4; this entire interface is lacking in 2003 (and in the original 2007 release). Second, even if they were to use WebDAV, this wouldn’t help them much at all.

Imagine two CSV files, one with the columns Surname, Name and Birthday, and another with the columns Last name, First name and Phone number. Superficially to the human eye, they both clearly contain contacts. To the computer, they’re entirely different formats. One column is missing from each other’s format, and while two out of three columns have the same contents, they’re differently named. You’d have to write a converter to make them match. You have the same situation with different XML formats³, and with two different takes at implementing, say, calendars on top of WebDAV. And given that Microsoft is moving away from WebDAV, citing lack of efficiency, they probably won’t implement CalDAV any day now.

The App Store Tangent

App Store? Really? What does that have to do with anything?

The success of the iPhone App Store has benefited both developers and users by establishing a competitive market based on meritocracy. Snow Leopard’s support for Exchange, because it opens up equal access to alternative competition, similarly creates an iPhone-like market for desktop messaging services ranked by merit, not the vendor’s current market position.

Yes, vendors like, say, Microsoft. Also, software companies located in Redmond, Washington state. Can someone explain to me how an interface to a proprietary PIM protocol “creates a market ranked by merit”?

This will provide Snow Leopard users with not just the ability to talk to corporate Exchange Servers, but also the ability to access Apple’s own offerings and other third party services.

I’ll get right around to implementing Exchange Web Services in my own groupware. Surely the specification is somewhere on ietf.org. Oh, wait.

1. That’s not a criticism; it’s just a fact of life.
2. MessageDAV? LetterDAV? Running out of corny specification names quickly.
3. Consider Atom vs. RSS.

For updates you don’t care to hear about again, Windows Update provides you with a “Hide update” function. One of those updates would be Silverlight, and I’d like to not have it installed; not because of some irrational hatred towards it¹, but because I currently have no need for it on what is a virtual machine purely for development purposes. But while the hide function works fine on other updates (language packs, for instance), it doesn’t appear to for Silverlight: seemingly, Silverlight re-appears a few minutes later. Try again, and it re-appears again.

I’ve finally taken the minute to figure out why this is. Don’t attribute this to malice on Microsoft’s part; Silverlight is not exempt from hiding. Instead, what’s really going on is that as you reject the newest version of Silverlight, you get the previous one. Reject that, and you get another older one. In total, you have to hide six updates to get the desired effect² — and you can’t do them all in one batch because the respective older one will only become available as the newer one has been hidden.

I’m glad they’re not trying to force Silverlight down our throats, but you’d think they’d have figured out a way, by now, to really hide an entire group of “updates” altogether.

1. Nor because it is very much a completely new component, rather than an update.
2. You can easily verify this yourself by taking a closer look at the different knowledge base IDs after each hidden update.

Now I’m wondering what to do about the international versions. The English version, while low-traffic, has a steady stream of both readers and contributors, and has developed into the vast resource of information I had hoped it would become. The localized versions, however, are still far too unpopular. Unfortunately, MediaWiki requires a separate installation for each language², so the maintenance effort is absurdly high. If you enjoy the Dutch or German version of MYSTlore, or if you’d like to start off another language version (French, anyone?), please find more readers and contributors!

1. Who hasn’t blogged in almost a year! Tsk-tsk.
2. Or at least it used to — perhaps they have fixed this?

TextMate development is going strong: TextMate 2 isn’t done yet, but progress is steady, it is starting to take shape, and the end is in sight.

[..]

It feels to me like most of the modules are getting close, say 90%. But as they say, on the horizon, mountains look small. While I use 2.0 for my own work, day-to-day, and the basic infrastructure is pretty solid, much of the front-end still needs work, and for now it’s all lacking the spit and polish of a finished app.

Terrific! And in other editor news, elastic tabstops, arguably one of the most important (and long overdue) innovations in text editing of the decade, are starting to gain traction. (Thanks Denis!)

It looks like I will be able to implement elastic tabstops in Visual Studio after all, since VS 2010 should allow me to set non-uniform tabstops on different lines.

For better or worse, I’ve been using Visual Studio a lot in the recent close to two years, so I’d love for this to happen.

CocoaHeads is a group all over the world¹ meeting up every month and discussing Cocoa (and Cocoa Touch), Apple’s primary development framework for the Mac and iPhone platforms. Alexander Repty (perhaps best known for his neat Lab Tick utility) took the initiative in launching a chapter for Bremen. We² met for the first time on Thursday. About a dozen people came (we were hoping for four, maybe five), and it turned out to be a great two and a half hours in a café.

Like In The Old Days

It struck me when explaining this event to someone else how oddly this must come across: as more and more social activities of our everyday life — both leisurely and professional — takes place over the Internet, with chat rooms, discussion forums, blogs, and other fast-paced media, here comes what amounts to a perfectly old-fashioned hanging-out over coffee and cake. I first met Alex in #macsb (for Macintosh Software Business), an IRC channel on FreeNode focused on running independent Mac development studios. It’s one of the stranger coincidences in life: despite being an international chatroom hosting only several dozen people, we actually grew up less than a mile from each other. And yet, we never met in person until Thursday.

So why, when you can use CocoaDev to look up API commentary, Stack Overflow to discuss problems that have you stumped and Twitter to follow what others are cooking up, would you really need to attend anything in real life³ any more? It is perhaps downright antithetical to the stereotype for a software developer to do.

Truth be told, the benefits are hard to describe exhaustively. As far as resources go, the Internet is absolutely unparalleled. And yet, because we aren’t forced to interact socially, we tend not to. Forums and even twitter are far from real-time anyway, and as for chatrooms, we tend to lurk for minutes or even hours, only sticking our heads in when we feel like it. A café doesn’t give us that option, and while it honestly isn’t something I’d want to experience every day, it is a refreshing contrast to the usual. So, immediacy places a role. Those who are there are actually… there.

There’s a quality to actually meeting that perhaps roughly matches what Rands calls The Pond; a shared, mutual breeding place for ideas that just cannot with our current technology be replicated or even closely imitated with telecommunication. I’ve witnessed this myself with the occasional work from home (or elsewhere) I do; sure, everyone’s reachable, but that’s a stark contrast to everyone being around. Got a problem and can’t figure it out immediately? In the office, you’ll ask your neighbor to take a look (and, typically, just the advantage of two additional eyes solves things fast). Elsewhere, you’ll hesitate to instant-message around, call anyone up or even write an e-mail, and will for no good reason be more inclined to solve things yourself.

Finally, perhaps the decidedly low-tech nature of this — though, to be far, some did show apps that they’ve written or are working on around — is simply a refreshing change.

I had never been to anything like this before — I’ve been to expositions, and I’ve done demos for current and potential customers, but conferences, not so much. One reason? I had regarded the very idea of meeting up in person as somewhat outdated and superfluous.

Now, not so much, because clearly, the benefits of socializing with others who share your profession go way beyond the obvious intoxication and “networking”.

Post Scriptum

I thank (again) Lexx for organizing, and everyone else for attending. For those in Bremen or nearby, we plan to meet the second Thursday of every month. If anyone wants to join in or perhaps even present something, please do!

1. Though Africa is feeling rather lonely right now, and South America even more so.
2. To my own astonishment, that includes yours truly.
3. It feels funny to stress this.

In addition to the obvious, well-known disenchantment with politics, I blame a lack of understanding how European politics affect its member states — many didn’t have the necessary education to understand the (somewhat nascent system), and on top of that, you hardly ever see the effects directly. As one voter put it succinctly: EU politics are quite abstract.

Duty

I helped with this election, as I did with the one in 2004. When you vote, they hand you a list to sign up as a helper; very few people (in my district, anyhow) ever do, but back in 2002-ish, I once did. There’s little I do in the way of voluntary work for the community, so it seemed right.

There’s two parts to this job. Voting took place between 8 AM and 6 PM, so we split up into two five-hour shifts. Every voter passes by you before they get to go to the booth; they either hand in their notification letter (which you get from your municipality a few weeks earlier), or an ID. One helper ticks them off in the list of eligle voters; one (me, as far as today is concerned) simple counts voters; one hands them the slip with checkboxes¹. There’s supposed to be four people, but so few people volunteered that we only had three in the second shift, though with the low turnout, we really could have done it with two. (I do realize this is a means of mutual verification. )

And then, at six, you shut the doors (symbolizing that voting is no longer allowed), then reopen them because counting is public (though, typically, nobody ever does show up). Next, you empty the ballot box, count all slips, compare them to the amount of ticked off eligible voters, and compare again to the amount of counted votes. Then, you start to count by party, sum that up, and compare again. Finally, you make each one package for the major parties, and another for all minor parties combined.

There’s candy, coffee, and of course a huge amount of smalltalk — especially when as few people as today show up. At times, nobody came in for twenty minutes.

Pirate Party

I am disillusioned, if not frightened, by the politics of the major parties when it comes to protection of privacy, the long overdue modernization of copyright and patent law, and other matters. And lo and behold: not only is there a party focusing on exactly these matters; it also happens to have an amusing name and is largely staffed by people from my very industry, IT. So, this time, I decided to make a voting choice that’s statistically unlikely to make much of a dent, but perhaps just enough to at least express, nay, shout out, the existence of serious issues.

And hey, in Sweden, their country of origin, they’re already the third largest party by membership count. I’m not kidding. This isn’t a fringe group, nor is the name intended to suggest a lack of interest in serious solutions. If anything, it is one of the few parties interested in revolutionizing the way we think of protecting that which we create. It’s a huge challenge, but it is one that, when major parties have addressed it at all, they did so by listening to the lobbies of the content industries, rather than to individual creators.

As developers of software, composers and performers of music, designers of graphics, websites and typefaces, actors and more, we owe it to ourselves to find something that’s actually compatible with the new ways of obtaining and distributing media, free from the shackles of tradition and commercial greed.

1. With a whopping 31 choices this time.

• It runs risk of essentially becoming a 21st-century version of the ‘groupware’ concept. And we all know how well that worked out for, say, Lotus Notes. Anyone who hasn’t should read Groupware Bad, for it is one of the most insightful articles on some of the things that went wrong with 1990s-era software development. Granted, Wave is a lot more user-centric than previous attempts at this (which were tainted with corporate/”enterprise” orientation) — but the complexity of trying to solve too many problems at a time remains.
• I’ve seen it suggested by several people that “this is why Google didn’t buy Twitter”, or “just like with Gmail and Maps, Google gets this one right”. But Twitter, Gmail and Maps all have something Wave does not: they’re just the right amount of simple. (Arguably, Twitter takes simple to the extreme.)
• The complexity also means it’s non-trivial to comprehend and dive into. Yes, you can start off just creating a new “wave” and not use most of the other features, but do you even understand at that point what a wave is? Is it a document? Is it a conversation? Definitions include: “In simple terms Google Wave can be thought of like an ajax spreadsheet over XMPP.”, “a web application and computing platform designed to bring together e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking, with a strong collaborative focus, mixed with spellchecker and translator extensions, which are able to work in concert, in real-time.” and “a new model for communication and collaboration on the web.” None of those strike me as explainable to someone in plain English over coffee.
• It’s technologically impressive, and I’m glad they’re implementing almost all the features in HTML 5 (one feature, as mentioned in the demo, requires Gears, though it has been submitted for standardization consideration), rather than Flash, Silverlight or worse. But whereas Google unsurprisingly considers the fact that it’s all a Web app a good thing, I for one would much rather work with something native. Technology aside, the browser by design limits the way I can interact. A native app could provide a status item in the menu bar, could notify (say, through Growl) of new or changed waves, etc.

On the positive side:

• The use of XMPP should make native clients very feasible.
• Anything that pushes HTML 5 further into the mainstream is good. Flash and Silverlight cannot die soon enough. JavaFX thankfully hasn’t really ever left its womb.
• Firefly references.
• Google’s t-shirt designers manage to make a drop shadow look like sweat. I will pretend to assume this was deliberate.

Others’ views:

[P]ossibly the most Microsoft-y thing I’ve ever seen come out of Google. This is not intended as a compliment, by the way.

Tweet by Jeff Atwood

I don’t understand what it is. It seems not just technically complex but also conceptually complex. Communication systems that succeed are usually conceptually simple.

Post by John Gruber

P.S.: I cringed when everyone ooh’d over the collaborative text editing demo. Not just because everyone should have realized that this has been possible long ago, as proven by SubEthaEdit and similar apps like Gobby — but also because I really wish such technology would be more standardized by now. There is no good reason IDEs (Coda aside), for instance, still don’t have such a feature.

Now, I like their attempt at making credit cards more consumer-friendly, but I have to wonder: would it do any good? Did Nutrition Facts labelling really help much? Sure, there are people who take a closer look at what they’re eating, and a standardized chart makes that easier, so that’s good. There’s also those who are encouraged by their doctors to watch their diet more closely, and/or those who need to look at, say, how many carbs the food they buy contains. But on a large scale, would the obesity problem have been measurably worse than it already is without these charts?

Likewise, would those who’ve made plenty of financially unwise decisions in the past be more aware of them just because of a chart that comes closer to pointing them out in black and white?

Beyond that, their Credit Card Facts chart also suffers from one thing compared to Nutrition Facts: it has no notion of recommendations. With food intake, you can give people a rough sense of how much they should be eating; with credit cards, we don’t really have any industry to tell us what interest rates and fees are still considered “healthy”.

And Riveal, too, is just a tool. What you do with it is up to you: you could explore the vast amount of art in the games, you could put some of the music in your library, or you could put it all on BitTorrent and share it with others. The implications aren’t for Riveal or its developer to deal with. It’s a good tool that can arguably be used for “bad” purposes — and even in the worst case, the harm done is limited at best. Because of the potential harm, though, author Ron Hayter was mindful enough to put up a disclaimer:

Don’t steal music. Or sounds or movies or pictures.

Much of the content extracted by Riveal is protected by copyright. Your journals, KI images, and avatar portraits belong to you but the rest does not. Please respect the rights of the copyright owners and do not redistribute their work without their permission.

Little did he know this would one day be interpreted exactly the opposite way as intended by someone. In the deleted, mirrored, now reinstated thread, Artic_Wagon passes on the news of a new version of Riveal, now supporting the iPhone/iPod touch port of Myst. But veralun locks the thread, citing the above disclaimer and then a forum rule:

Copyrighted material – No posting of copyrighted material. Links to copyrighted material should only be to the copyright holder of that material or a sanctioned holder.

For anything further, though, I’ll let SFT speak:

I’ve seen you stupidly lock threads that don’t deserve it, but your locking of the Riveal thread takes the cake. Riveal contains no copyrighted material. It lets you listen to sounds or look at game images for your own, personal, fair, legal use. It can’t even be used to directly infringe copyright; it simply gives you access to things that you can subsequently use to infringe copyright with completely different tools.

And speaking of “tools”, you, veralun, either are massively ignorant and lacking in common sense or are maliciously complying with the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit in an effort to grandstand and show your importance. I don’t know which of the two it is, but it needs to stop.

Please.

SFT

This sort of stupidity is comparable only to Apple rejecting an eBook reader because you might read the Kama Sutra with it. Just like you could with, say, the built-in browser.

1. Or with emacs.

• Two usability goofs so far. iTunes asks me to register (optionally), but wants my iPhone’s phone number at a point when I don’t actually have it yet. Not a big deal, but somewhat odd nonetheless. And second, also related to the phone number: it is first presented as a weird pop-up message that’s apparently neither an SMS, nor a voicemail, nor anything else I could find. By the time I had my address book open to put the number in, the screen went dark, but upon pressing the home button, the message goes away. I searched back and forth throughout the UI for the number, particularly in Settings → Phone, where it initially did not appear. Then, after a few minutes, it did.
• Not unexpectedly, Google Earth delivered the biggest wow effect thus far. I typed the first few letters of a friend’s address into the search field, and because my contacts had already been synced, it recognized the friend’s location and zoomed in there.
• Setting up my workplace VPN mostly went fine, except DNS resolution doesn’t appear to work (this is probably our setup’s fault, though), and, perhaps related, I can’t access our Exchange-based mail server. “Cannot Get Mail: The connection to the server failed.” is not, by the way, a very useful error message. How do I debug this? I can use Remote Desktop Lite to access that very machine’s RDP server, so I assume that means the machine is generally reachable… Fixed now. Still, the error message should have been more helpful.
• AIM and Skype are actually decent apps. With every Skype test call, I get some random skips. The big issue, however (and 3.0 will largely resolve that) is that you’re essentially offline as soon as you leave the app…
• Remote is nice, but even nicer would be to use my iPhone as a speaker, i.e. simply access a remote library but control and play it on the iPhone. Or… can I do that?
• Location tracking works almost creepily well.
• There’s something crazy-cool the way Safari renders websites just about perfectly the way you’d expect from a desktop OS, only smaller.
• Boy, this feels futuristic.

• That it’s essentially for Twitter posts drafts (140 characters and you need drafts of that?),
• that it’s $3.99 (wait, I’m not getting any money to use this?),
• that its screencast is really more of an absurdly self-mocking promotion video,
• or that John Gruber has an objectoerotic crush on it? (I kid.)

Whichever it is, Birdhouse is getting rave reviews all over the place, and hey: with the attention to detail they put into it, it deserves no less.

Now why didn’t I get to beta-test this? Grr.