Category: Commentary

Om Malik has a good article on “Living a Cached Life“.

I used to while away the boredom of being on a Mac help-desk (there were never many calls and yes, there were nearly a hundred users..) by looking things up (wasn’t Altavista the rage back then?).

I used to be the top hit in Altavista. Put my name in and there I was. These days, in google, I have to add a geographical limit to get something that even resembles me. My name is obviously the most common name out there.

Now, it was freaky enough to see the information I could find out about me. It’s freakier seeing the information you can find out about other people. Add that to the areas of the world which are well covered by Google Earth and you’ve got a bird’s eye view of just about everyone.

Om Malik calls out for some recommendations of privacy tools. The only one I can think of is the built in FileVault but, frankly, I have neither the inclination nor the trust (and certainly not the disk space).

Chanced upon this blog entry about “why you shouldn’t put up with a job you hate“. The hosts friend believed he would “never be happy unless I’m making a living as a musician”.

Her reply to him was:
“Well,” I said, “you might as well go for it, then. The worst that can happen is that you’ll fail, and be only as unhappy as you are now.”

Abso-fricken-lutely.

“The internet experience for the average Mac user is a little different than for the average Windows user.

For a start, Mac users have tabs, which sit on top (or at the side) of the browser and take up space without being truly useful. Mac users like to talk about their standards compliance, and something called “Style Sheep”. However, what they don’t have is a browser that works with all the best web sites, especially those provided by Microsoft friendly banks and utility companies. Oh yeah, and their browsers don’t make that really cool “click” sound just to let you know you’ve clicked on something.

It occurred to me that this might be one reason why Average Joe sticks with his PC.

So, here it is – my bright idea for today. A web browser for Mac that simulates IE’s standard of browsing. I think it’ll be an instant success, right down to the extra special freezeKeyboardAndSleep60ThenBlueScreenOfDeath() function.”

…. normal service to resume momentarily ….

Writing software is a craft. Ask any developer you respect what they think, and the majority will say it’s more art than science. Take any ten good coders, and they’ll all work in different ways, create code that looks and feels different. Authors find their ‘voice’ after they’ve written a few books – I think coders do too.

I seem to write my best code in the wee hours of the morning. Maybe it’s the quiet and the solitude. Maybe it’s the fact that the only thing keeping me awake is the electron radiation I’m getting from the screen. Whatever it is, I seem to have had all my major breakthroughs around 3am.

This morning there was an electrical storm around 2:30am. The thunder woke me, and I got up to close the windows in the house, before louder claps might wake the kids. By the time I got back to bed, I was pretty certain I wouldn’t get back to sleep, and I didn’t. So, I got up and started reworking the code I’d written a few weeks ago, from a completely different angle. In four hours, I’d reproduced everything I’d done to date in a more elegant, more thoroughly tested fashion–I think I felt more refreshed getting in to the shower at 7am than I normally do when I get up in the morning.

I brought up the early morning code thing with a colleague at work. He spent two years writing a computer game in his spare time, and says all the coolest ideas he came up with were all after 2am. I don’t know anyone who says they write their best code in mid-afternoon 🙂

Paul Graham has a great essay right now titled How to do what you love. There’s a bit two-thirds down which says the following:

if you asked random people on the street if they'd 
like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most 
would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." When 
people say something like this, it's more a statement 
of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. 
Because the fact is, if you took a random person off 
the street and somehow got them to work as hard 
as they possibly could at drawing for the next 
twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. "

When I started writing “The 23rd Letter”, there were some people who were absolutely floored by the idea that I’d even started writing. By the time the third book was out, they’d dispelled their disbelief and some had even been inspired to start writing.

My son is a big fan of “Bob the Builder”. The kid is barely old enough to talk but he can sing along to the theme tune. I like kids TV series like “Bob the Builder” and “Thomas the Tank Engine” which promote such positive thinking. The theme in Bob is always “Can we do it? Yes we can!” and the trains in Thomas are really concerned about being “useful”.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t think we’re indoctrinating our children into bad habits. I want my kids to look out in the morning and wonder what great thing they are going to do that day. If my daughter wants to go to the Sorbonne, no problem. If she wants to go to Berkeley, fantastic! If she wants to study Byzantine Studies at our local university, brilliant. And if she wants to just sit at home and raise her children I’ll be the proudest granddad in the world.

As long as she never thinks she can’t do something and as long as she is happy.

The main reason, in my mind, behind not pre-advertising the various products we’re working on is that they aren’t finished yet. While it’s unlikely that someone with more time and resources will stumble across our ideas and do them first (although that’s still a possibility), we don’t want to just blow smoke without first having a substantial fire (like the mixed metaphor?).

Secondly, the first product we’re releasing is going through the “strategic” development phase. This means we’re putting in all the stuff we know is 100% essential, just to get the bare minimum working. What we don’t know at this point are things like:

• Final feature set
• Final name (although we’re almost sure of this one)
• Licensing structure
• Pricing
• Whether there will be a public beta
• and so forth …

Our energy is very much focused on two things:

1. Developing the brand awareness through contributing to the community via:
   1. these blogs / this site
   2. enhancements to open source projects that we use
2. Getting our first product ready for public consumption

Once we’ve done both sufficiently, then we’ll be ready to launch. In my head, this will be sometime around April, assuming nothing startling happens.

So, what are we doing here?

Can’t tell you. Not yet anyway. We’ve discussed it and decided to hold off until the development is a little further on. Not long though. Look for Aidan to comment. We just want to do it right.

Does it seem weird to not be shouting about the product? Well, we don’t have the budget to do a “1984” style advert. And Ridley Scott didn’t return our calls asking him for a freebie.

“On blah blah blah, Infurious will introduce CENSORED. And you’ll see why the day after tomorrow won’t be like …uh….Thursday?”

Patience is a bitter root, whose fruit is sweet.

As you can see (unless you come here via RSS), we have a front page which is the start of an identity. We have to re-skin the blog page to fit I guess….

MUCH thanks to Mike Griggs, our very own Guinea Pig, for his work and friendship over the years. Cool designer and all-round nice guy.

I think it’s just super!

I’m well aware the reader doesn’t know anything about us with the exception that we use Macintosh (my entries and Aidan’s entry about RubyCocoa might give that away) and we have a blog. We’ll get to the rest later. For now, we’re going to discuss the brand. Using Guy Kawasaki’s recent blog post as a template:

1. We want to make Macintosh a serious alternative to Windows in business. This is about improving the Mac through software. This is about having the option to put a Mac infrastructure in place.

2. If I had to pick a message, I’d like us to epitomise all software that feels good to use. It’s a user interface thing, a stability thing and I guess, if it allows Macs to be used in business, then it’s going to make people happy.

3. “We want to make it is easy for to use a Mac all day rather than just at home.”

4. I think we qualify here, assuming for the sake of this point that Mac is the opposite of Windows.

5. I can guarantee that every single employee is on the ball with the message.

6. I think to a greater degree, the blog qualifies. I think it’s important to show what you are thinking during the design process. As progress on the coding side starts to clarify matters, we’ll discuss the detail, the process and we’ll see if we can create a masterpiece.

7. This depends on the product. Some great products you never see. Some poor products you want to use every day. I’d rather have a great but invisible product.

8. From my writing days, I know how this is. Sometimes people will take something you write and come and tell you what they thought about it. Some authors spend time telling you their vision, some even insist upon their vision. I think it’s great when people are inspired to innovate with an idea.

Talking to some knowledgeable folk this week about exactly how universal Mac OS X is going to be. Some theories were that it would just be the applications, but in truth their aim is to make a truly universal operating system: to wit, you will be able to take your hard disk out of a PPC-based Mac, slot it into an Intel based Mac and the machine will boot.

mongoose:~ mj$ lipo -info /bin/cp
Non-fat file: /bin/cp is architecture: ppc
mongoose:~ mj$ lipo -info /Applications/iTunes.app/
    Contents/MacOS/iTunes
Architectures in the fat file: /Applications/iTunes.app/
    Contents/MacOS/iTunes are: ppc i386
mongoose:~ mj$ lipo -info /usr/bin/acid                             
Architectures in the fat file: /usr/bin/acid are: i386 ppc

On an intel-based Machine running 10.4.4:

$ file /bin/ls
/bin/ls: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/bin/ls (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
/bin/ls (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable ppc

It’s going to be universal all the way. Isn’t that nice? And if you’re using XCode (duh!) then it’s going to be simple enough to get your app running. Put another way: if Quark can get a product out there, anyone can.