Technology

Before I begin the article proper, I just want to note that it’s not my intention to conflate free with open source. Open source programs are often free, but not always (SuSE sells Linux); free programs are sometimes open source, but not always (Internet Explorer, Opera). That said, the open source software I’ll primarily be discussing—browsers and blogging software, because that’s what I have experience with—are generally both.

It’s a simple fact that most people who use open source browsers (such as Firefox, version 1.5 of which has just been released) and blogging software (WordPress, Textpattern) don’t give anything back to that project. In a sense, they—we—are parasitic on it, getting something for nothing.

Without getting heavily into the ethics of it, I think it’s reasonable to claim that some users of this software feel a sense of responsibility; that they should be “giving something back”. I do, at any rate. This raises a couple of questions: firstly, what should people who feel that sense of responsibility be doing in addition to what they’re doing already (using the software), and secondly, do users have a positive impact on that project simply by using the software? A supplementary question might then be, to what extent does the latter—if it exists—fulfill the perceived responsibility?

The obvious answer to the first question is “Help.” However, not everyone can help; we may not have the technical skills, or we may simply not have the time to contribute. Alternatively, one can donate to open source organisations. This is an entirely legitimate and important way to reciprocate, but it doesn’t quite have the appeal of actually improving the code.

Even if you can’t manage either of these things—and many can’t (more of us won’t)—I think you still make a contribution simply by, firstly, using the software, and secondly, by telling other people about it. The first is slightly trickier to make a case for, but only slightly (the benefits of increased publicity would, I hope, be obvious). For browsers, using a (free) open source program means that other browser makers can’t decide they want to start charging for their browsers. It provides competition to the bigger fish, forcing them to improve their programs or lose their customers (which has the knock-on effect of improving the development environment, something I personally have quite a big stake in). In a market, people vote with their feet. Using an open source browser has an effect on the market and, like it or not, it’s making a statement.

I suspect my supplementary question can only really be answered either by outlining a comprehensive theory of moral responsibility, or by saying that the extent to which simply using and advocating a program fulfills one’s responsibility varies from person to person. Having principled doubts about the former (and, more relevantly, being a lazy bugger) I’m going to go with the latter.

Not much left to say, although I will note that there have been some fascinating articles published on the subject of open source software over the years (if I had any links, they’d go here). I have no illusions about competing, but I think these things are worth reiterating and discussing. Hopefully work will slow down slightly at some point in the future and I can help out with something I’m interested in. Making a WordPress theme is probably about the level I’m on, not having any great programming skills; watch this space…

Relicnews has a WordPress backend, and because comments are enabled and you don’t need to register an account to comment, we have an intermittent spam problem.

Most of my time at the moment is spent updating this site, working towards my degree, and developing new sites to help pay the bills (not necessarily in that order). I don’t have a lot of free time to spend messing around with different anti-spam solutions, so until now I’ve just let the default spam words list catch unwanted comments. However, when I saw Akismet had been launched, I thought I’d give it a go. The stuff Matt’s been behind—WordPress, mainly—hasn’t let me down yet, which gave it a bit more credibility than the usual run of plugins and the like. More importantly, it seemed simple to implement, and the numbers looked good.

There was just one catch: I needed a WordPress.com account. A golden ticket arrived in my email inbox a couple of weeks ago, but since I already had a blog, I gave it to my brother (a better and funnier man than I, if somewhat more lazy). No account meant no API key, which meant Akismet wouldn’t work.

I suppose I could have asked him for his key, but he might need it himself at some point. No, what I needed was my own WordPress.com account, so I toddled over to the site to submit a different email address, in hopes of getting a new ticket. And, of course, the site was broken—the front page displayed fine, but trying to anywhere just gave me database connection errors.

That was last night; this morning brought more luck. Specifically, the Flock download, which (once installed) gave me the chance to create a WordPress.com account then and there. Victory!

(A quick note on Flock: it’s just a skinned Firefox, with a couple of blogging and social bookmarking plugins. Still, it’s easy on the eye and hasn’t crashed yet, so I’m trying it out; Eric’s made it his default Windows browser, which is a recommendation of sorts.)

My intention was simply to make the blog, grab the key, and get the hell out of Dodge, but in the end I couldn’t do it; empty textareas call to me with a kind of siren song. The resulting posts are a bit abrasive and less thought out than usual, but some people appear to like that. So, if you want to read me ranting about foolish expectations or the word ‘blog’, head on over to ‘My Own Private Riot’. I suppose we could subtitle it ionfish unplugged.

When Apple first announced their partnership with Motorola on an iTunes-equipped phone, a spirit of hope was abroad in some quarters. Apple was obviously leveraging Motorola’s handset technology and connections in the phone industry to create a co-branded phone: the “iPod phone”, as it was then almost universally known, would do for mobile phones what the iPod did for portable music players, injecting some much-needed design sense into a market packed with horrible interfaces and obese feature sets.

It was not to be. The Motorola ROKR turned out to be just another phone, albeit a phone with iTunes on. Sure, it’s another step on the road to what Khaled refers to as “the Digital Swiss Army Knife”, but it’s no more than that—a step. The ROKR raises more questions than it answers.

Why did Apple go down this route, of simply adding iTunes functionality to a phone that is otherwise entirely Motorola’s? Was it never part of the plan to make their own phone? Steve Jobs told the Guardian that Apple were “dipping our toes in the water”, which makes it sound like the ROKR was an experiment, but what were they testing?

The usual argument about the iPhone, as I suppose we’ll have to call it, goes something like this: the iPod dominates the portable music player market because of its manifestly superior interface and brilliant design. Apple are perfectly placed to do the same thing in the mobile phone market, or even go further and create an all-in-one device that does pretty much everything the plethora of portable electronic devices we cart around currently do.

I question the credibility of this claim, not because I doubt Apple’s ability, but because the current mobile scene is a very different place than the portable music landscape at the time when the iPod was first created.

The road to iPod domination

The iPod revolution took advantage of a profound shift in the portable music player market. Since the Walkman, portable music players—whether the medium was cassette, CD or MiniDisc—were designed around playing ten or twelve songs, accessed in series, and the interfaces reflected this. Play, pause, fast-forward, rewind—all were much of a muchness.

With the advent of hard drive-based music players, the market was changed utterly. Now one could have hundreds, even thousands of songs on a single device, with no need to change tapes. Moreover, access was no longer serial; one could skip around the contents of one’s music collection with far more agility than older devices allowed. Lastly, the broad acceptance of the mp3 standard and the proliferation of personal computers gave this new platform a huge potential userbase.

Apple’s attack on the market came on two fronts: the interface, and the beautiful design. The intuitive nature of the wheel, and especially the later click-wheel iterations, has been much praised elsewhere, and for good reason; it’s simply the best out there, a mile ahead of any competing device. Industrial design has always been a strong point of Apple’s, and the iPod is the perfect example of why design isn’t an optional extra, it’s a necessity. The iPod is iconic, in striking white and chrome, well-proportioned with subtle curves and textures.

Talk of two fronts is, in a sense, misleading; what really sets the iPod apart is the unity of form and function. You can play a few games on it, or add contacts or notes; even view photos. But what the iPod really does is play music: it’s a single-function device, and it performs that function superbly.

Phones are different

Speaking blithely of digital Swiss Army Knives is all very well; to make one is quite a different matter. Modern mobile phones perform a large number of tasks, not always well: sending and receiving phone calls and text messages; taking photos; browsing the internet; email. So, let’s say for argument’s sake that Apple was going to make a mobile phone that did all those things, and also played music. What would the problems be?

To begin with, there is a preexisting design paradigm: the 12-button interface. Originally designed to make phone calls easier, given our base-10 numerals, this design has proved remarkably robust, if not a little because of its familiarity. So, what to do? As far as I can see Apple have two choices: augment or modify the 12-button interface, or replace it altogether.

Modification is the most obvious choice, and as we can see from this leaked picture of a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, it’s what companies trying to pack all these functions into one package are currently going for.

Despite this, the latter option isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. When you call someone, do you use the number pad usually? No; you have their number saved, and simply select it from a list. I certainly wouldn’t mind using a click-wheel as a way of scrolling through people’s names. (I don’t mean that Apple could simply port the iPod interface to a phone; I’m simply demonstrating that there are alternatives to the current standard interface.) However, there are fundamental problems with the replacement approach.

Firstly, a phone is going to be rather crippled if you can’t add numbers, manually, without plugging it into a computer. Moreover, one needs this method to be quick and efficient; what if you’re in a club and want to take down someone’s phone number? Scrolling through digits and clicking on the right ones (a potential way to add a number using a click-wheel) just won’t do.

One alternative would be to use local, device-to-device connectivity like Bluetooth to add phone numbers. Just met someone? Search for phones within range, and issue an invitation from your phone to the one that belongs to the person you’re talking to. They then accept the invitation, and voila, contact details are exchanged.

The problem is backwards compatibility, and adding numbers on the fly for phones which are not physically proximate (for example, land lines). It looks like we still need those twelve buttons.

Speculation

Having outlined some of the problems Apple would face if they decided to get into the mobile handset game, here are a few speculations of mine. To begin with, Apple may not even want to get into the mobile phone game. An iTunes-equipped phone may be, to them, simply a way to safeguard their revenue stream and keep their options open. The revenue stream argument isn’t one I find particularly convincing, since the iTunes Music Store is basically a way for Apple to sell iPods, but who knows.

One way that Apple could streamline the phone interface is by having a nice big touchpad screen, as well as some more traditional button controls. They could then employ a ‘virtual’ 12-button interface that only appeared when you had to type in a phone number. The rest of the time, you get a nice big colour screen to… view photos on? Watch videos? The list goes on, but the question of whether the technology is there yet remains. Probably not, I’d judge, or at least not at a low enough price; if it were, I imagine someone would have done it by now.

In conclusion, then, the current mobile phone market is a very different place to the burgeoning portable HDD/mp3 player market Apple stormed onto with the iPod. There are plenty of problems and challenges to be overcome by someone, and a lot of money to be made. Whether that someone turns out to be Apple, we’ll have to wait and see.

So, iTunes 4.9 has podcasting.¹ Some people love this addition; others hate it. You can put me in the former camp, but (since it wouldn’t be me if this weren’t the case) with reservations.

What’s good? It’s an all-in-one solution for audio-only feeds; radio shows, basically. Brent Simmons thinks there’s still a place for standalone newsreaders like NetNewsWire, and while would expect the creator of such a program to say that, I’m still inclined to agree. A feed that mostly consists of other content, with the occasional audio piece, isn’t suited for iTunes (which is, let’s not forget, a music program, not a newsreader or web browser).

Obviously if, like Sven-S. Porst, you “hate radio”, then the attractions of podcasting will be rather less than if, like me, you’re a radio junkie. It may well be that Herr Porst is simply unfortunate in this regard, having not been exposed (like the luckier souls among us) to Radio 4 from a young age. The BBC is currently in the midst of a download trial that includes not only the free downloads of the BBC Philharmonic’s performances of Beethoven’s symphonies, but also podcasts of some fantastic radio programmes. Immediately after installing iTunes 4.9, I added three of these feeds: In Our Time, Today, and From Our Own Correspondent. I should note that these three programmes are superior to pretty much anything you will ever see on television on the subjects in question. Despite the ascendency of the idiot box, radio—due to the absence of distractions, the need to find ways to interest the listener other than flashy graphics and attractive people, and the BBC’s commitment to incredibly high-quality public service broadcasting—is able to, on the whole, do debate, political commentary, and indeed reporting in general, much better than television. I would far rather listen to Today or PM than watch any television news programme, even the superior Channel 4 News. I would far rather listen to Start the Week, In Our Time, or Front Row than any supposedly highbrow programming on TV.

With these tendencies in mind, it becomes obvious why I like podcasting: it allows me to listen to shows I’ve missed, for whatever reason, with the fine-grained control one gets with a download but not with “internet radio”, i.e. streaming media files. Moreover, I can keep the downloads. Storage is cheap, and given that fairly often I want to refer back to something I’ve heard on the radio, I can now do so. Perhaps not with the greatest of ease, admittedly, but at least it’s possible.

Given, then, that I’m on board with podcasting, at least insofar as it applies to BBC radio programmes, why iTunes? There are two answers to this. Firstly, as an iPod owner, I organise and listen to all my music with it anyway. Secondly, it’s convenient: it’s an all-in-one package. I don’t need an aggregator and a media player, and I don’t need to fiddle with things. It’s not quite one click, but it’s close. Obviously I’d heard a fair bit of yammering about podcasting before this, but quite simply, I couldn’t be bothered. Now, two things have happened: the content I want is there, and the software I want is there. In both cases these are not perfect situations: the BBC download trial is quite limited, with only a few programmes on offer, and iTunes implementation of podcasting could (as others have noted) definitely be improved. However, they are good enough.

Briefly, then, the problems. Firstly, and bizarrely, you can’t remove the podcast option from the ‘Source’ menu in iTunes. All the crap that menu is infested with when one first installs iTunes can be got rid of, except that. Not a problem for me, as I’m using the option, but I have no doubt it’s immensely irritating for those who aren’t. What else… well, the icon is pretty stupid. As a Windows user, however, I’m of the school of thought that a silly icon does not a bad program make. Porst discusses a number of problems, but being a horribly lazy person I’ll just let you read his essay for yourself and work out which criticisms are valid and which aren’t; as far as I’m concerned, while Apple clearly have some work to do, iTunes’ podcasting feature does not die a death from a thousand cuts, but your mileage may vary.

First, an apology: of late, I’ve had little time for writing, less inclination, and next to no ability. Perhaps I wrote myself out in my exams; perhaps I’ve had to expend all my energy just recuperating from what has been a draining year; perhaps I just wanted a break from scribbling. Whatever the reason, updates here have been a lot less frequent than I’d like, and for the last three weeks, completely nonexistent.

The computer problems I alluded to in my last post but one have been all but resolved; in a nutshell, I formatted my computer to fix one problem (an inability to upload files to FTP servers), and in doing so, created a tentacled mass of others, including hard drive corruption (I lost documents, movies, and a large chunk of my music collection), memory problems (I installed 1GB of new RAM, which didn’t play nicely with my existing memory; essentially it’s a motherboard problem, it doesn’t like having all four slots filled), and sundry other annoyances like the loss of all my emails (I backed them up, but the file corrupted).

Resolving my sundry difficulties has cost me a not inconsiderable amount of money (I bought a new graphics card, a new hard drive, new memory, and a new power supply), and a lot of time and irritation. That said, at least it’s fixed, and at least I seem to have salvaged a good deal of my important data (website files, for example).

So, exams are over, and the University year will soon be too (I have to dash back to Bristol to sign up for classes). My computer problems are basically fixed. Lastly, Glastonbury will soon be upon us once more. My yearly pilgrimage there is, in many ways, the only real holiday I get these days. Once I’m back from that, I’ll have to put my nose to the grindstone: I have five websites in various stages of development, a Finals essay on Epistemology to plan and write, and various short stories to complete (more on this at a later date).

The future looks busy, but that’s ok; busy, I can handle. At any rate, I should be writing again, and my five (or is it six?) visitors can once again groan at the excessive verbosity and lacklustre musings that characterise my posts.

After two days of computer wretchedness, there are some questions I’d like answering. These questions are, of course, both angry and rhetorical; I expect no answers of any substance (of course, if people can provide them, that also would be appreciated). Firstly: why don’t email programs, or music programs, provide all the data they keep in a handy single file or folder that can be easily transferred between program instances?

To illustrate: I formatted my computer. To back up my iTunes library I had to export an XML file (which was promptly corrupted). To back up my Thunderbird mail, I had to transfer the entire contents of my profile onto a different drive; on attempting to restore it, I managed to get the profile working, but the mail was nowhere to be seen. Indeed, the program seems actively bent on not reading it; it keeps creating new folders with “-1″ suffixes so it won’t have to use the old ones, with all my emails in!

So there’s that. There’s also the perennial “why is Windows so terrible?” question, but it’s not one we should concern ourselves with. I content myself with the thought that, as far as my needs are concerned, the alternatives are either worse or out of reach (at least for the moment). One good recent upgrading experience was WordPress, which I updated to 1.5.1 in not very long at all. Totally painless. However, I still want to know when someone’s going to make a version available with multiple blogs, because I need it for an upcoming project.

Of course, if you want a really usable product you should head over to 37signals and sign up for Backpack, which has received attention of late. They also have a blog, which is well worth reading if you’re into the kind of things they’re into, which you’re probably not, although everyone likes a beetle.

Tom Coates has redesigned Plasticbag.org. A fan of the old design, I’m not yet convinced by the big-text minimalism that seems to be the new vogue (see also: Signal vs. Noise).

Other Brits will be happy to know that we get Google Maps too; they even have my road. Now all we need is satellite imagery…

Of course, the big news this week (apart from that Pope thing) is Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia for $3.4billion (£1.8billion). The daring John Gruber translates the press release for us mere mortals, while Dave Shea neologises with “Macrodobia”. Link junkies should head over to Kottke for a more thorough roundup.

I made a kind of unconscious promise to myself that I wasn’t going to blog about politics, which makes me slightly resist the urge to link to the Liberal Democrats’ election blog, which is powered by WordPress and hasn’t had much changed from the default Kubrick template (via Matt Mullenweg). This is what they have to say for themselves:

This weblog has been set up to provide an inside view of the General Election campaign in the UK in 2005.

It is being written by members of the team who will be working with Charles Kennedy, Leader of the Liberal Democrats.

We hope to cover all the events of the campaign up to polling day with some insights that might not come through the main news media.

I like the fact that they’re upfront about their comments policy, too. I’m going to be upfront too and say that I probably wouldn’t have bothered linking to it if I didn’t intend to vote for them. Here’s the constituency information for my constituency, Twickenham, courtesy of the BBC. Our MP is Dr. Vincent Cable, the Lib Dems’ shadow chancellor; if they win the election (bookmakers had it at 100/1, last I heard) he’d be taking up residence in 11 Downing Street. For more commentary you could try the Guardian election blog, and the BBC’s issues guide gives an overview of the various parties’ positions on key issues.

This post on SimpleBits reminds me of the point in time when I briefly surrendered to a mousepad obsession; mulling over reviews, specification sheets and user comments, I spent about a week weighing up my options. Then I bought a RatPad and have barely thought about the subject since.

Focusing on a particular thing like that, for a short period of time, is an extremely effective way to make decisions. Do vast amounts of research, weigh up the options, make your choice, and stick with it. Then you can get on with life, secure in your choice (unless you have cause to regret it; however, minimising the chances of this is what the brief obession model is all about).

It’s been a few years, and the RatPad is slightly warped, the label is half rubbed off, and some of the rubber feet have been lost. However, it remains far and away the best mousepad I’ve ever owned. Doubtless at some point I’ll replace it with a new one, but for the moment it remains much as it was when I bought it: slick, durable, utilitarian. Every so often I take it downstairs and wash it (as you’d wash a plate, essentially—washing-up liquid and hot water).

I have a number of things like this: useful but almost invisible. Compaq keyboard (just the right size, just the right stickiness and sounds of key); pad of super sticky Post-it notes (actually stay stuck to things); Uni-ball Micro pens (thin black lines, a great feel). These small items shape our world without us noticing, allowing us to perform the tasks assigned to us that little bit more easily, lightening the load just enough to make it bearable.

After several years without a portable music player (my ailing minidisc player suffered a catastrophic fall from the top of a chest of drawers), the end of January brought me an iPod Photo. As it turns out, it was probably a fortuitous time to buy one: I was able to acquire the now-defunct 40GB model, with all the accessories that the new models don’t have, including a Dock, A/V cable, and Firewire cable. Sure, it cost a bit more, but when you buy something as expensive as an iPod it’s hard to justify spending loads more money on extras. As it was, I could simply get the product I wanted, with the accessories I wanted, without getting that sinking feeling of “accessory guilt”.

The Firewire cable is, I’ve found, far quicker at transfers than the USB one, and having the Dock is fantastic. It just sits there, on my desk, waiting for me to jam in the iPod to recharge and synchronise with my iTunes library. Moreover, I can simply remove it and take it downstairs, then plug it into the stereo system when I want to listen to some music while I work (I usually get more writing done when I’m away from the computer). I’ve not had occasion to use the photo A/V cable yet, but I suppose I might; one never knows.

The one thing I did splash out on was headphones. Although I couldn’t afford the Etymotic Research ER-4S earphones ($330 is a bit out of my league), I did get some very nice Sony MDR-EX81 earphones ($70, or under £40, including shipping). The only caveats I have are these: if you have small ears, as I do, you may have some problems getting the loops to stay in place easily. They can also be a bit overwhelmed by exterior noise when on low and medium volume: the noise cancellation is noticeable, but not as effective as real in-canal earphones like the Etymotics. Of course, while on the one hand this makes it slightly harder to shut out the rest of the world, it does make it somewhat safer to cross the road. In any case, given the tinny sound of the stock white Apple ones, buying some decent earphones was a very worthwhile investment, one I’d recommend to anyone getting an iPod.

It’s certainly changed my journeying a lot: killing time is easier, especially when I can stomp around Reading station in the freezing cold listening to Blonde on Blonde very very loudly. iTunes is a great piece of software, and I’ve been slowly making sure all my mp3s have the correct metadata, adding album art and so on (having an iPod photo makes this a worthwhile experience, as Khoi Vinh notes—his suggestion of using Walmart’s music section to get album art is a sensible one, too).

Perhaps more importantly, it’s changed my music listening more than anything has since… well, since I got the minidisc player. Listening on journeys, especially, when one can simply concentrate on listening to the music, has afforded me an opportunity to return to old favourites and encouraged me to listen to new music more than I have for some time. Recent purchases include PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, Thea Gilmore’s Rules For Jokers, Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm (I’m nothing if not a bandwagon jumper) and a 22-track Yardbirds best-of entitled Shapes of Things. More reports on these and other noises to come, possibly.

A quick note on an unrelated subject: if you’re a LiveJournal user, you can pick up the syndicated feed of this blog here; I’ll try to keep an eye on comments there as well as here. Still, it’s really not that hard to just register a username and start commenting away here instead! Blogging is becoming even more of a distributed activity. Hopefully I can keep up the work on the templates, and get this place somewhat more shipshape.