Industrie Toulouse

	Monday, April 22, 2002

1612 Havenhurst
Three good reasons to be alive right now, in order of goodness:

11:55:12 PM blips[]

undetachable snake
Got the ZClass situation semi-unscrewed. My situation is fine now, but I'm worried about the deeper problem. Even more, I'm wondering how best to report it.

instances detaching from their classes.. ..not good.
7:48:35 PM blips[]

Integration Rant, part two
Windows/IE Integration Offers More Benefits Than Stand-Alone Browser, says this Microsoft Presspass article from 1999. To quote::

Allchin explained that Internet Explorer is an upgrade to the operating system, not a stand-alone application such as Netscape Navigator. Whether Internet Explorer is loaded onto Windows by a consumer or by a computer manufacturer, he said, it replaces core files in the operating system that change forever the way the system functions. The result, Allchin said, is a rich set of features that allow users to move seamlessly between the Internet, intranets, and a computer's hard drive, and to combine and use information from these sources in a variety of ways.
"You do understand there is only one way this could happen, which is if we are replacing core operating system files," Allchin said. "There is no other way you could do this."

I think there is another way it could be done, but again - Microsoft does make a good point. There are a lot of common libraries on any operating system that make life easier for developers and users alike. Being able to share this HTML/DHTML functionality across all of their products, from IE to Project to Outlook (jokes about viruses aside, the "dashboard" functionality available with Outlook and Exchange 2000 is a pretty powerful one, and not much different than other dashboard type things found in Notes and Oracle clients, except that it's actually a little bit more open than the others, being based on HTML).

You're not going to get Microsoft to stop integrating browser technology into their operating system. It would be much better to fight the battles on Microsoft's licensing practices, past and present, that enabled them to so easily steamroll over OS/2, GEOS, and BeOS during a time when any of those alternative operating systems could have actually had a chance to compete. It would be much better to fight the battles of the API's - whether Microsoft is being open about its system, or whether it's taking advantage of special secrets to bolster IIS and SQL Server over competing solutions that don't have the same access to the core API's.

On another note is the whole notion of the media layer. Quicktime has been built into the Mac OS since the early nineties, and is considered one of the three graphics layers of Mac OS X (2D = Quartz, 3D = OpenGL, Media = Quicktime). It's a set of core technologies that many applications can be built off of. If Real, or even Microsoft, were to declare this as an unfair advantage over RealPlayer or Windows Media content, it wouldn't be too dissimilar to the IE and Windows situation. Except, there is a bit more of a perceived choice - you can download Windows Media Player to view Windows Media files. However, there is no RealPlayer for Mac OS X (native).

So, as I've said above/around, the IE+Windows versus Netscape fight is stupid. They're bickering over the wrong issues. This makes it easy for Microsoft to spin things the way they do (although, has anyone noticed how many of Microsofts arguments come off the same way a teen might treat his less-tech-savvy parents? 'Get off that computer right now!' 'I can't Mom! If I just shut it down right now, it would do ... and ... *snicker*'. There's that whole "they can't possibly know the details, we can explain this any way we want" mentality that seems to come out of many of Microsofts court statements. Once, while running the sound board at a small concert, I was told "shut it off, it's too loud". My response was "we can't just shut it off. There's lots of expensive equipment up there that might get damaged by the voltage change. I can start turning it down slowly though...". Suckers. I could have shut it down. But I didn't want to, and I had the tech-savvy know-how on my side to come up with a defense. This is what Microsoft seems to do in court, and it has gotten them in trouble with the judge before. There is some merit in some of their arguments, but they add this extra layer of whine and bullshit on top of it all, like "if you take apart windows, we'll be blasted back to the days of the Altair!". Bullshit.)
3:10:02 PM blips[]

Gates, and the integration of IE
A survey from Scripting.com - Is Gates Lying?. The results, as of the time that I voted, were in the middle - either "he is lying" or "he is misleading". There were no votes saying he was telling the truth, and no votes saying he had no real clue.

It's an interesting issue. The concept of an operating system has changed over the years, and not just on the desktop. Integrating technologies has long been a piece of the game. IBM's OS/400 has always had their DB2 database fully integrated into the OS.

Microsoft has gone through great lengths to integrate explorer technologies into the operating system. Windows XP makes this quite obvious - everything looks like a web page. IE's DHTML has become another way to make user interfaces in Windows, although the DHTML generated and used looks nothing like most HTML found on the web. But, it's there. And it's in there deeep. I really doubt that Microsoft could remove this code from Windows very easily.

That said, could they remove IE easily? Maybe. At its most basic, IE is just a shell over all of these core libraries now. But IE and the file system explorer have been increasingly coupled together.

Fair or unfair? I don't have the experience to say. I'm a long time Mac user and haven't been involved in these games. The IE situation on the Mac is that IE is the default shipping browser, but it's just an application. There are some shared HTML libraries, but I think Office and Outlook Express are the only things that use them. I don't know whether deleting Internet Explorer.app would cause Entourage to throw a fit if it had to render an HTML message or not. I imagine there are some shared libraries around, but they're little used outside of Microsoft apps. I think Apple uses its own HTML engine for the (incredibly slow) Apple Help Viewer.

But Microsoft's whole "can't make Windows modular" argument is a piece of shit. Windows is almost all DLL's and COM components these days. Granted, there are a lot of interdependencies among all of those components, but if COM's been doing its job, in theory one could replace all of the IE/DHTML components and libraries with wrappers around Mozilla libraries. But, I imagine it would be an insane amount of work. And I highly doubt Microsoft would really let people replace those libraries any more than they would let them replace the core window management routines.

So, I think gates is being misleading. Microsoft could add an API to let people replace these core components. But I do think it would break Windows today if the code was just removed abruptly.

I also think it was damn smart of Microsoft to do what they did with IE. Fair? Probably not. But business-wise, it was very smart.

I also think it's ridiculous when Microsoft said "fine, put your own icon in the startup screen", and then whined when AOL made a pact with someone to feature AOL instead of MSN. Microsoft's whine was about "the user should have a choice to go with MSN, and if AOL's featured, we should be too!".

Uhhh....

Both sides of this stupid argument can be absolute idiots sometimes. This Salon Article by Megan McArdle talks about the stupidity of Netscape's claims in the current lawsuit. It doesn't say that Microsoft wasn't a bully, but just that Netscape's claims don't hold water (or, if they do hold water, could be just as damaging towards AOL).
1:30:18 PM blips[]

I have a very annoying itch lingering from a spring skiing sunburn that I gave myself almost three weeks ago. Some windburn later that week probably didn't help.

Oh well, those were beautiful days and I still say it was worth it.
12:13:13 PM blips[]

radio .= registered'
10:28:31 AM blips[]

Radio and Blogging, a few days on
Jon Udell and I had a brief exchange last week, talking about blogs versus the old Byte Newsgroups. I asked him a couple of questions that were vexing me at the time --

Why write when I have so much else to do with my day?

My problem with this was that I first loaded Radio up on my workstation, where I've just got too much else going on to take the time to write anything more than a quick quip. Now that I've moved Radio to my iBook, a far more personal machine, I am writing more. This is partially due to having cable modem at home + airport. I now have the freedom to write wherever I am.

Who's Reading?

Coming into Blogspace can be an immense and lonely thing. I initially had a "fire and forget" feeling, like posts were just being thrown out into a big black hole. But I'm finding some of my Zope stories being picked up by Zope Newbies and a Japanese Zope site as well. I've even gotten a response to my problems with XML-RPC and Zope's authentication, with a link to a product to try out that might solve the issue. Thanks to Nathan Sain for that.
10:10:21 AM blips[]

A little bit of intuition, a little bit of Google, and some problems are easily solved.
8:57:32 AM blips[]

Strange. I crashed Radio while trying to find 'bodytext'. I'm trying to figure out how to display titles and comment links on the weblog items. But, it will have to wait now - too much else to do today.
8:40:16 AM blips[]

I'm in that land between waking up and coffee. It's a large place actually, as the coffee resides at the Cafe next to the office. I have to bike there. Hungry. But the egg and cheese breakfast sandwich is beyond worth it. Followed by coffee.
8:33:25 AM blips[]

EUCCI, luxury spring coming soon
I've had the privilege recently of working with a talented composer and musician, Kate Cheuffer. Strangely, she falls into a bizarre line of artists/writers/dancers I know that are/were computer and even modem savvy at some point in the nineties, but have no real internet presence. It's interesting that some people can be so brilliant yet introverted or misanthropic enough to avoid the great anonymous playground that the Internet can be.

I did a few installation sound pieces for Kate's small music conservatory. I'm listening to one now that...I don't know how I feel about it. It's a beautifully minimal piece, done with Kate herself, a droning organ and wildly misshapen guitar strings. They're synthesized in this version, but it's all based on an actual event. It's fascinating to listen to - it's all programmed using Supercollider 2, a real time audio synthesis language for Mac OS. The modeling of some of the string plucks came out really well. Part of me wants to take it and craft it into a real track, somehow. Kate says to just keep it minimal.

Being geared towards installation instead of headphones and computer speakers, the design dynamics of the pieces I'm going to release online shortly are quite different than a lot of EUCCI material released in the past. There's even less structure. A piece can be any length, and are almost best left ongoing...

There's going to be a big loss of perceptive quality as the delivery mechanism goes from conservatory/gallery to MP3.
1:31:38 AM blips[]

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