It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again
"You could probably waste an entire day on the preceding links alone. But why take chances? We also give you Paul Snively..." — John Wiseman, lemonodor
CodeCon!. The long-awaited CodeCon (Advogato, The Register) starts today at jwz's DNA Lounge. CodeCon, started and run in large part by... [Aaron Swartz: The Weblog]
Somehow this didn't show up on my radar until it was too late, otherwise I'd have made the 400+ mile drive for the weekend. Next time!
10:32:06 AM
David Brown:Radio as a Python IDE: The Python Tool allows Radio UserLand to be used as a Python IDE. Radio's integrated outliner turns out to be a wonderful tool for Python editting, and the Tool provides an efficient way to write, debug, and deploy Python code. - Cool! [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
Given my love of outliners, why didn't I think of this? Good work, David!
10:30:13 AM
PayPal: IPO Omen or Anomaly?. Disproving the skeptics, online-payment firm PayPal pulls off an initial stock offering and actually does very, very well in first-day trading. Experts say it's a tentative sign investors are warming up to Internet firms. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News]
Talk about backing the wrong horse.
10:28:28 AM
Apache XML Security 1.0.0 released. The Apache XML Project have released the first stable version of their XML Security project, implementing Canonical XML and XML Signature. [xmlhack]
This is excellent news, with immediate applicability. Very pragmatic and very welcome.
10:26:05 AM
CodeCon Source code for "ZeroKnowledge Systems"' discontinued anonymous Internet service has leaked onto the Web, apparently with the blessing of ZKS' Chief Scientist Ian Goldman.
The announcement was made on Goldman's behalf at the CodeCon conference by Len Sassaman, co-organizer of the three day grassroots P2P and crypto conference .
[ ... ]
According to the README, "Zero-Knowledge is releasing this code under an RSAREF style license, to encourage academic research and other non-commercial use." Other licenses are respected, and the release is entirely unsupported.
The main tarballs is a 12.5MB download, PGP encrypted with the "traditional magic words" (one of which is a big bird). You can find it here
Excellent! I wonder if the community can make Freedom robust against the attacks that Wei Dai came up with? I see that one of the requirements of the attacks is either a global observer or the cooperation of at least one of the routers. Perhaps Michael Reiter's work on Rampart would be helpful here. Of course, we could just revise Freedom to use Dai's PipeNet protocol, at least in theory.
10:24:29 AM
This is a real question for Apple these days. They're so focused on the home market that corporate IT seems to be getting nothing.
Sorry, I just can't buy that this is a "real question." A real question would be why we users allowed the personal computing revolution to degenerate into "I need the same system at home as I have at work so I can turn my home into an extension of my office, where all I do is word processing, spreadsheets, and solitaire" within the span of a single generation. Thank God that at least Apple realizes that there's more to life than Office.
In the early 90s, Mac OS prior to X was like a complete alien being. I know from first hand experience that I and anyone else involved in sys admin work didn't want Apple systems anywhere near our networks. They used different everything, even the files couldn't be easily moved around. Blah, don't want them, don't need them.
I've heard this cant before, and it doesn't hold any more water now than it did then. By the late 1980's Macintoshes had AppleTalk (the first self-configuring networking protocols; TCP/IP wouldn't get BootP/DHCP for several more years), Novell's IPX protocols were available straight from Novell, and thanks to Apple's admittedly accidental prescience in creating the Apple Consortium of Universities, TCP/IP was available for Macintosh, typically for free, in an era when DOS/Windows users who wanted it had to buy a stack from someone like Chameleon.
As for files, most files created by mainstream apps like word processors could be moved around just fine apart from the fact that the user may or may not have chosen to give them a file extension, because the Mac was smart enough not to use the file extension to identify the type of the file, or which application should open it. Once in a while, a Mac application would give one of its data files a resource fork, and yes, that would complicate migration. The solution would be to either pressure the developer to change their software or pick another application.
The modern Mac and Mac OS X is a whole new ball game. It's not Mac OS, it's UNIX.
MacOS X demonstrates that the two aren't mutually exclusive; it most certainly is MacOS, both to the user and to the developer. And it most certainly is UNIX, but here's the hitch: to the developer if they want, and not at all to the user unless they choose to master that weird Terminal application. :-)
It's not alien anymore, and in fact connects far better to various systems then even Windows does. You can drop it into a Windows network, or a linux network, or a Solaris network and it will mostly behave now.
The only sense in which this is any more true for MacOS X than for Classic is that MacOS X has the SMB file sharing protocols built in now.
I say mostly, because it has a very bad habit of writing .DS_Store files to mounts. But that's a minor issue compared to the Mac of old.
Which did what, exactly? I never have heard a cogent explanation of just why the Classic Mac was so "unfriendly." All of the explanations I have heard could be summarized as "the Mac isn't UNIX or DOS; it improves on them too much."
It might be another year or two, but I think we'll see Apple starting to put some of the missing pieces into place. I don't for an instant think it will displace Microsoft on the corporate desktop, but I do believe it will become an increasingly viable alternative. Especially in the more technical areas of a company, a place incidentally, that would have never seen Macs in the past.
Unless, of course, you count places like Cray Research and Applied Biosystems as "technical areas of a company." The Mac has long enjoyed popularity in technical arenas in which visualization is an important component. Cray, back in the day, used the Mac as a terminal to the Vax that served as the front-end processor to a Cray supercomputer precisely because the Mac connected better and more easily to the Vax than anything else did.
It's nice that MacOS X has so much backward-compatibility stuff built in. But saying that you couldn't do any of it with MacOS Classic or that MacOS Classic wasn't useful in a technical environment is just incorrect.
10:13:50 AM
What a runaround. Google appears to have a core of people who love the Internet. Their PR people have always been helpful and enthusiastic. But try to find someone at Google who can talk developer stuff, and you're in for quite a trip. I post this here as a possible way of cutting through the maze. [Scripting News]
Dave, you may wish to contact Peter Norvig at Google directly. You can find his contact info etc. on Peter's web site. Peter is their Director of Machine Learning, an incredibly sharp guy, and quite approachable.
9:42:51 AM
Good work, David!