The Fishbowl

I have a theory about Apple. Like all good Apple theories it superficially fits the facts, is an entertaining mental exercise but is probably wrong.

Apple does not believe in mice.

For a company that excels at hardware design, the mice they’ve released since the return of Steve Jobs stick out in their catalogue like sore thumbs.

The hockey puck mouse from the original iMac was clunky and uncomfortable. The Pro Mouse was smooth and comfortable if bare-bones and uninspiring, but every first-time user had to have the “it’s all one button” design explained to them. Every feature of the Mighty Mouse (accidental-squeeze-buttons, gungy trackball, easily confused click-surface) was broken. The Magic Mouse felt like a promising tech demo that escaped the lab too early. And now Apple have released a multi-touch trackpad.

I’m sure I’m not alone in that the first thing I do when I buy a new desktop Mac is replace the mouse, although my current choice in pointing device may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

My theory is that someone high up in Apple’s hardware design pecking order, maybe Jobs, maybe Ive, maybe their whole hardware brains trust, does not believe in the mouse. Sure it works, but it’s not the right way to solve the problem of manipulating things on-screen. It’s indirect and unintuitive. It tends to sprout more and more buttons. It’s just... wrong!

You could hear it in Jobs’ voice when he introduced the iPad, extolling the joys of having the web “at your fingertips”. There’s no place in Apple's world view for clumsy intermediaries like mice or styluses. There must be a better way! But for the life of them, these visionaries, designers and engineers can’t work out what that better way is for your desktop PC.

Typically when Apple find themselves in this situation, they sit on the problem until they have a solution. That’s why we waited so long for the iPhone and iPad and why we were so blown away when they were finally released. With pointing devices, they don’t have the luxury of procrastination.

You can’t make a great product if you don't believe in it, but you can’t sell a computer without a mouse.

This morning, Blizzard (publishers of the popular Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo game franchises) announced plans to require contributors to their online forums to post under their real names. Predictably, this caused the forums to go nuclear.

This is phase two in a deliberate campaign. Phase one was the deployment of Real ID, a feature that allowed players of their games to exchange messages and online status, but only if they also shared their real names and email addresses. There was no technical reason why this had to be the case—no other popular Instant Messaging service requires such disclosure—the messaging and presence features were bait on the “Real Names, Please” hook.

Responding to user feedback, a Blizzard poster on the forums added (emphasis mine):

We put a lot of thought into this change and have a long-term vision for the Real ID service and wanted to make sure that we communicated ahead of time and very clearly as to what will be changing and how.

Neither of the imminent releases of Starcraft II or World of Warcraft: Cataclysm are “long-term” by any stretch of the word. This isn’t the end of the plan to expand the reach of Real ID in Blizzard's online services. It is a grand ongoing experiment, and a big gamble at that. The evils of anonymity in gaming communities are well-documented. Blizzard are aiming, as far as I can tell, to use a series of small but ever-encroaching incentives to make their Battle.net service the first such community where anonymity is the exception instead of the rule.

A few years ago I'd have said this was impossible. A person’s right to keep their online existence separate to their “real life” was not questioned, and in many cases considered a necessary defence against real-life enemies like draconian hiring managers who don't understand that weird Internet thing. Nowadays the overwhelming success of Facebook suggests that the bulk of Internet denizens don't care if their their real names are splashed across The Googles, and don't care that their on– and offline lives are hopelessly intertwingled.

It's a generational change, and while I don’t doubt Blizzard have called it right, perhaps they might have called it a little too early.

For the past couple of months my blog has been stuck in a wait() loop, pending the completion of my promised iPad reviews. Which I never wrote, because in the week or so between promising to write them and actually having an opportunity to do so, pretty much everything I wanted to say had already been said by others.

At some point you've just got to give in to the inevitable.

Normal service will now resume.

A couple of weeks ago, Donna and I were trapped in Dulles airport waiting for a delayed connecting flight to LA. Passing a booth selling software that promised to teach you a second language elicited the following conversation:

So yes, cards on the table, I'm an Apple fanboy and you can clearly dismiss anything I might have to say about the iPad as the deluded ravings thereof.

Another point of view would be to say that if you look at the string of wildly successful products Apple has produced since the original iMac, the way they turned from resigned “When are they going to die?” to breathless “What are they going to do next?” in the course of a decade, anyone who doesn’t at least have a grudging appreciation of the company and its products deserves to have their judgement questioned.

Edit: I originally promised further reviews here, but pretty much everything I wanted to say about the iPad has already been said by others, if not better than I planned to then at least close enough that I can't be bothered making the effort. Management apologises for the inconvenience.

Quoted verbatim from the World of Warcraft official forums:

If you think the balance of trees will be better than it has in the past 5 years then your diluted.

One side-effect of the rise of the Internet has been the birth of a post-literate generation.

In my un-networked youth, writing was something you did for teachers and families. You wrote school projects, stories and essays. You wrote postcards, thank-you notes for presents and the occasional paragraph at the end of a letter. When you did so you made as sure as you could that you got all the words right because an adult was watching, and would usually correct you if you got it wrong.

With the popularity of text-messaging, email, blogging, Internet message-boards, everyone has become a voracious correspondent all at once. The recipients of the messages are peers, not superiors. The feedback loop is broken and anyone who objects is a grammar nazi. When in doubt, it is far more efficient to transliterate what you would say out loud and hope the letters line up than it would be to check if it is correct or not.

Of course we rail against it and hope that by the time people enter serious study or the workforce they are able to write in a way that doesn't embarrass. On the other hand spelling, like pronunciation, has always undergone seismic shifts despite the efforts of purists and dictionary-worshippers to capture the language and encase it in amber.

In short, it might be time to end my almost two-decades-long battle against the confusion of ‘lose’ and ‘loose’.

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind. – Stephen Fry

Some poor sod at Westpac (with whom I've banked since 1992) demonstrates why it's a bad idea to post to both your personal and corporate Twitter accounts from the same client:

The tweet was deleted about 40 minutes after it was posted, which was even more silly than posting it in the first place. If you screw up in public, you recover in public. Don't just try to pretend it didn’t happen.

I've always used this story to illustrate why we shouldn't assume that ‘real people’ understand or care about website URLs. Unfortunately the story is ten years old and it's easy for people who disagree with me to try to explain how much has changed in the last decade, and how web users are so much more sophisticated now.

ORLY?

It is a staple of Science Fiction that once a computer (or computer network) becomes sufficiently complex, sentience is inevitable. And big sentient computers can be bad news.

As both the owner of what is almost certainly the world’s largest general purpose computing cluster, and our self-nominated bastion against evil, I really hope someone at Google is keeping an eye on this.

A helpful co-worker pointed out that one of the links in my previous post that should have pointed at an old article instead pointed to Wikipedia, so I went to Google to track down the correct URL.

Two hours after I wrote it, my blog post is in the index and showing up in search results. That’s just a little uncanny. It’s not even as if I update my blog that often any more.

The Principle of Charity is a rule of debate that states you should always address the strongest possible form of your opponent's argument.

I've touched on this before.

Say you're arguing with someone and there is a flaw in their reasoning, but you also know that their argument could be reformulated to avoid that flaw. If you attack their argument as is, you'll either win a hollow victory with an argument that you know is faulty or you'll just prolong the debate as your opponent makes the obvious adjustment. It's the kind of thing you do when you're more interested in scoring cheap debating points than actually advancing the sum total of human understanding.

Not that there isn't a time and place for scoring cheap debating points.

Beyond straight argument, the principle of charity can provide a nice set of assumptions that help streamline interactions with other human beings.

1. Assume intelligence. The person you are talking to has a brain, and knows how to use it.
2. Assume honesty. The person you are talking to honestly believes what they are saying.
3. Assume diligence. The person you are talking to, when given a task, will approach it with rigour and attempt to complete it to the best of their ability.

You could be wrong on any of these, that's why they're called assumptions. Ultimately, however, you're better off assuming the best and then adjusting your behaviour if you are proven wrong than you are starting off believing people are stupid, dishonest and lazy.

A very simple example. Someone else is working on a problem, and I think of a very simple solution. Do I walk over and ask “Did you think of X?”

If I do, I've just violated assumptions 1 and 3. If I could think of a simple solution, then someone else who is both intelligent and already diligently working on the problem is likely to have already thought of that answer and discarded it for some reason. Chances are I'm not even the first outsider to have suggested it.

If I rephrase the question as “So why didn’t you go with X?”, I’ve gone from assuming ignorance on their part to assuming I'm the one missing something. If X turns out to be something they didn’t think of after all, it’s a surprise for us both, and I sound a lot less condescending.

Now all I have to do is remember this sort of thing in practice.

It's 2009. You're an American-owned packaged food company, but all is not well Down Under. By accident of acquisition you happen to own an iconic Australian brand which in recent years has seen its popularity wane, especially among migrants (euphemistically, ‘New Australians’).

Vegemite is very much an acquired taste; strong and salty. Those of us who love it tend to have either been indoctrinated as children or convinced by friends or family to work through the initial ‘what the hell is THAT?’ reaction.

After some research you come up with a new product that you believe is friendlier to the unfamiliar palate. You hope that this product will bring you new customers, and maybe even act as a gateway to lure people to try the original flavour. So how do you get people to notice?

Some publicity is a given. Any update on a product that is in some ways synonymous with Australia will make it into the nightly news bulletin and the daily paper. If you grease the right palms you might even get a longer segment on a week-night current affairs show. But you're ambitious. Can you make your product launch occupy not one tiny corner of one news cycle, but a whole week of headlines? What about a month of them?

Well, this week we found out.

1. Hold a competition to name your new product. That will get you on the news on release day, then a few mentions throughout the competition.
2. When the competition ends, choose the worst name possible
3. For extra points, pick a name that will be annoy people on the Internet, because ‘people on Twitter are upset’ is a flavour-of-the-month story
4. For extra extra points, play on nationalistic outrage by announcing your new name for that most Australian of products during the Australian Rules Football grand final
5. Once you've wrung as much attention as you can out of the “naming debacle”, apologise profusely for your “mistake” and announce a new competition to pick the real name from a pool of obvious candidates.
6. Finally, announce the new name

‘iSnack 2.0’ was so obviously a name for the week, not a name for the ages. What I find most amusing is that the current generation of consumers are, at least if you ask them, so much more cynical of marketing ploys. We're more clued in to how the media works and the Internet has taught us to mistrust authority and question everything we read.

Yeah, right. Someone in Kraft marketing is on track for a pretty big bonus this year.

• Return time machine to rightful owner.

The more I look at Google Chrome Frame, the more I'm struck by how clever it is.

For those coming in late, Google Chrome Frame is a plugin for Internet Explorer that embeds the entire Chrome web rendering engine inside IE. Site authors can include a simple meta tag in their HTML that will tell the browser to use Chrome to render the page instead of IE.

(Let's ignore for a moment that when Microsoft introduced a meta tag that changed IE8s rendering mode, the web went apeshit.)

Ask any web developer and they'll tell you the biggest millstone around the neck of the web is Internet Explorer 6. Ask browser users, and they'll tell you the overwhelming reason why they can't upgrade to a more modern, standards-compliant browser is because their work won't let them. Ask IT departments why this is the case and they'll point to the six- to seven-figure costs of upgrading turn-of-the-century Intranets written to work in, and only in, Internet Explorer 6.

Google have provided a way for websites to opt out of IE6 (and even IE7) support without requiring enterprise-wide, Intranet-breaking browser upgrades, something Microsoft occasionally promised but never managed to deliver. In doing so, they've cheekily cut Microsoft out of the upgrade path of their own web browser.

Dear corporate IT departments. Your last tie to IE6 has just been neatly routed around. At my most conservative estimate you have twelve to eighteen months to either bite the bullet and adopt a real modern browser, or make Google Chrome Frame part of your default desktop image. Beyond that, I guarantee large chunks of the public web are going to stop working for you.

Woke up this morning to found the entire city shrouded in creepy orange fog. These photos are not corrected in any way, the colours are exactly as they came off the camera.

‘They’ are trying to keep us calm by telling us it's a dust storm, but I'm not so sure…

Next day, the dawn was a brilliant, fiery red and I wandered through the weird and lurid landscape of another planet; for the vegetation which gives Mars its red appearance had taken root on Earth. As Man had succumbed to the Martians, so our land now succumbed to the Red Weed. (*)

Back in 2002, I wrote the following about the proposal for an ‘enhanced for loop’ in Java 1.5.

Foreach takes probably the most common use of Smalltalk blocks, the internal iterator, and creates a syntactic special-case for them. Once again, it's a band-aid solution. Foreach removes the annoying duplicated syntax for the simplest case, but it does nothing to give programmers the chance to remove duplication on the more complex cases.

So it seems now for Java 7, closures having been dropped from the roadmap, it's time to apply the next band-aid. This time the recipient is the next in the line of usual suspects, resource management:

Absent a language change, you must close resources manually. That is why Java’s competitors have automatic resource management constructs (C# has using blocks and C++ has destructors).

Back to me from seven years ago:

Once foreach is implemented, the precedent has been set: whenever the lack of [closures] causes us to lag behind C#, don't fix the underlying problem, work around it with a variant on what we have already.

The funniest part, of course, is that C# 3.0 has had closures (or at least succinct lambda expressions with type inference) since 2007.

Whenever you use any online service, especially one without a proven business model, you should always ask yourself “is the benefit of using this greater than the cost of it vanishing in a year’s time?”

Can we get an export of our DATA, eg. which tr.im urls goto what fullsize URLS?

So that I can rewrite the thousands of links in my blog which point to tr.im soon to be nowhere.

— A comment on the blog post announcing the closure of tr.im

I’m pretty sure this isn't the last URL-shortening service to be closing its doors over the next year or so.

There are three stories in IT journalism:

1. New product is set to unseat market leader
2. Company is about to be bought by another company
3. Apple might be doing something cool, but we don’t know for sure

All other stories must be spun until they fit one or more of these narratives.

“We reject the view that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works.” — Steven Metalitz, legal representative of the American motion picture and record industry associations, in a letter to the Copyright Office.

Required? Of course not. But both Apple and Amazon prefer DRM-free content in their music stores as consumers learned repeatedly that any music they bought could stop playing just because the company they bought it from lost interest in the market. That same lesson is now being relearned by early adopters of electronic books.

Required? No. But if you don't sell products people want to purchase at a price they’re willing to pay, you’re going out of business,. Unmourned.

Every so often there's a meme that goes around inviting bloggers and diarists to pen a letter to themselves as a child or a teenager, telling themselves all the things they now wish they had known at that age. Some are well written and poignant, like Stephen Fry’s contribution to the genre, but most I’ve read boil down to “Cheer up, it’s not nearly as bad as you think, avoid [some big mistake] and learn a musical instrument.”

I've always balked at writing such a letter myself because, after stumbling through my borderline depressive self-loathing 20’s, I've managed to turn against all odds into somebody I'm quite happy being. There are all sorts of things I could have done better, mistakes I could have avoided and different directions I could have taken, but all the things I've done wrong contributed as much to who I am today as the things I did right. If I changed them I'd be somebody else, and I don't want to be somebody else any more.

Sure, I could go back and tell my teenage self not to give up playing the piano, but would that just leave me in my 30’s dreading another gig in the bar of some hotel waiting for the inevitable tooth-grinding moment some drunk tourist requests ‘Piano Man’ for the sixty thousandth time? Would I hunch over the keys, bang out those first chords and wish to my core I could go back in time and advise my teenage self to teach himself Perl?

So I pondered. And I thought. And I finally came up with the one important, nay vital bit of advice I would give myself if I had the chance.

Charles,

This is your future self. I'm 33 now and I've been given the opportunity to reach back in time and give you one piece of advice. You won't understand it today but if you hold it close to your heart you will one day thank me for it.

Whatever you do, prefer composition over inheritance.

See you in 17 years,

Charles.

A recent story on Mashable reported of a Facebook user discovering their photo being used in an advertisement for a dating site. After much to-ing and fro-ing it was determined that while Facebook do reserve the right to use your likeness in advertising, this particular ad came from a third party network.

Colour me not particularly surprised. A couple of days ago I spotted this advertisement gracing the right-hand side of my Facebook page:

“Wait a minite!” I thought. “That fellow in the picture looks remarkably familiar. I wonder if I can find something like it on the Internet?”

If you were playing at home, you’re absolutely right. It's Edward Norton playing a skinhead murderer in the movie American History X. That little black blob carefully cropped out of the frame? A swastika tattoo.

Oh dear.

Reputable sites often run disreputable adverts, but generally they blame their provider and take steps to avoid the offending ads appearing again. Facebook, though, is the provider. The fact that this sort of thing is a par for the course on the site is a bad sign. It suggests Facebook is so desperate to get anyone to advertise that they can’t afford to exercise any quality control.