Flux, Flex, and Other

“Hallo!  My name is Inigo Montoya.  You send me mislabeled crap.  Prepare to die” …

I’m not a Microsoft fan. I think the combination of their relatively crappy product(s), assuming their non-commercial customers are criminals and/or mindless drones, and the inaccessibility of their support system (I’ve found it far easier to Google for Microsoft support issues rather than using Microsoft’s support search site… and can you find a phone number on there anywhere?) make them a good candidate for technical hatred.

But the thing that really gets me is the lack of even remotely honest labeling. There was the instance where they upgraded everyone to the new (crappy) Internet Explorer 7 via the “Critical Updates” section of Windows Update… Which then followed on with future (actual) critical updates to fix the holes in IE7…

And now, this… I needed to sign up for Windows Messenger MSN Messenger Hotmail Windows Live whatever they’re calling it now since we use the Microsoft messnger at work.  It gives you a hotmail address, so now I have a hotmail address.  Fabulous.  I never use the Hotmail address, but occaisionally my messenger pops up an alert telling me I have email in my inbox.  It’s always marketing crap from Microsoft, so I found my way into the preferences to turn off all communication from Microsoft, other than the required “Updates, changes to the service, or information vital to the service.

I’m okay with that…  “We have a security flaw”, “Your storage just got upgraded to X gigabytes”, “Here’s your lost password” — all relevant and useful information that I am totally willing to accept.

Then this arrived this morning…

Now, I’m sorry, but I seriously doubt that getting Spooky haloween packs, Getting Sweet Stuff Now, and getting marketing emails for Windows Live OneCare counts as “Updates, Changes, or Information vital to the service”.

I think it’s especially telling that they REMIND you that this email is being sent under those pretenses, and that if you don’t like it, don’t let the e-door hit you on the e-butt on the e-way out.

A coworker of mine forwarded this along to me today, and it was really inspirational. I love it when technology, an idea that probably got laughed at, and a little effort can give a big middle finger to the forces of oppression…

Most people have heard that China maintains the Golden Shield, a state firewall run in order to censor unapproved websites from the Chinese people, and to survey who is trying to access them.

Picidae is trying to change all that, with a very interesting, and relatively simple idea.

• A person in China surfs to a website run off of a pici-server — a computer running Mac OS X, which is outside of the Golden Shield. The URL to the server could be found by talking to someone outside of China, by word of mouth, etc.
  • There’s a whole network of these, and the network can be grown by adding an inexpensive new computer anywhere in the world, so it would be nearly impossible and massively labor intensive to Shield them all
  • The individual servers do not know that any other servers exist, nor does the main organizer keep a list, so literally anyone, anywhere could be running one of these, and there’s no away to find it.
• That website has a simple text box and a button.
• The person enters the website they want to see, that may be censored.
• The page, locally on their computer, encrypts the URL so snooping eyes can’t see what they are requesting.
• The pici-server decrypts the data, surfs to the requested website, and generates a single image of it — one huge JPG. It also looks where links are, and maps those areas of the image to be clickable, linking back to the pici-server. It’s called an ImageMap, and has been around forever…
• The image and its maps are sent back to the person — nothing incriminating other than a JPG image that the firewall can’t read…
• The person reads the information off of the image, clicks an area of the ImageMap, and the cycle continues

Here’s a link to the main site.

Here’s how it works.

Here’s what the user in China will experience. I tried it on this blog and it looked identical - you’d never know unless you looked at the code behind the page…

Obviously content shown in Flash (Flex) or any other dynamic content (Javascript, AJAX, video, etc) will not work on this type of network, but hey, a big fat hole in censorship in a great thing.  It also looks really easy to set up your website to proxy to a server or to use your webspace as a server if you’re so inclined — you can even use your Mac to run the server over your cable or DSL connection!

Apple just announced a bunch of new features for Leopard today.  Like I already wasn’t having enough trouble NOT buying the iPhone…

Special standouts for me:

1. Automator will record actions in any app — nice.  It looks like creating a Photoshop action, which I use all the time at work.  I’ve used Automator some, but it never QUITE did what I wanted it to do.  This will make a big difference.
2. RSS in Mail.   I want me some of that.  I read a lot of RSS feeds from the developer community  and having a good central place to see them looks good to me.  I currently use the RSS Ticker extension for Firefox at work, but am mostly Safari user at home…
3. Stacks in the dock… QuickView in Finder.  I like the ability to find your stuff without having to open everything.  And from the looks of it, you can see the whole document, scroll, etc.  A lot less time worrying about applications and a lot more time using your information.
4. iChat presentations — nice.
5. Time Machine: extremely nice.  Especially with our iTunes and iPhoto libraries getting huge.  Good to have an integrated backup system.  I’ve been using SuperDuper! and really like it, but the built-in system is so much better of an idea.

I can’t wait.  And with Patty’s student discount, the upgrade will be cheap.  Sweet.

Patty and I are currently Verizon Wireless customers. We got a discount from my employer, and have done okay with it over the last few years. Patty’s been having difficulties with her phone recently, and they keep replacing it with refurbished phones that seem to have the same issue. Not so great on the customer support and generally feeling like we need a change.

If anyone from the cell phone industry ever reads this: Why do I feel like I’m buying a used car every time I go into one of your stores?

So anyway, we decided to give Cingular AT&T a try - people we know have generally liked them, and we also get a discount for them from my job. Plus, all the phones (even the pretty nice ones) are free or like $10 when you sign up as new. Cool.

I currently have a Treo 700W - runs Windows Mobile, Mobile Office, syncs with Outlook, all that good geeky stuff. But also pretty expensive, and requires a monthly data plan. My good ol’ SuperEgo popped in the other day and helped me decide that I really don’t use those features that much, and should just opt for the free/cheap phones they offer when we sign up. I felt good. Like after you take a bunch of recycling to the recycle center.

Clean.

Right with the world.

Responsible.

All grown up.

And then the other shoe dropped. AT&T is getting the iPhone at the end of June… Hmmm…. And Patty (very sweetly) chimes in with “Well, if you’re going to get a new phone AND you have mentioned you want an iPod, it’s just about the same cost…”

Remember the crazy long armed monster in the Bugs Bunny version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

yeah. that guy.

That’s my Id going “I want it I want it I want it I want it”. I swear, that’s what my Id looks like. Replace Bugs with me, and the axe with an iPhone, and you’ve got my psyche right now.

SuperEgo pipes in: “It’s the first generation. Let them work the bugs out”
Id: “Shiny Shiny Shiny Shiny Shiny”
SuperEgo: “Plus they’ll come out with a new model with a lot more storage in 6 months or so”
Id: “Precious Precious Precious Precious”

And that’s pretty much where I am right now. No real reason that I can’t wait to get it for a while (and I probably should wait, thank you very much)…

… but did you see the new ads? (shiny shiny shiny shiny)

I’m a mac user, and liked the idea of the Dashboard — a place for small utilities to be brought up at the touch of a button.

I’ve got weather radar maps, calendar entry viewers, calculators, and my NetFlix queue. Nothing I couldn’t live without having at the tips of my fingers.

I did download 3 widgets recently that have served me well, and are nice to have ready to run at a moment’s notice:

Application Update: searches your installed third party apps and lets you know when newer versions are available. Cool.

Amazon Album Art: iTunes tried its best to download all my album art, but missed a lot of them. Select a song in iTunes… bring up the dashboard, and puch a button. It copies in the song info, presents the album art it finds (including a panel of multiple candidates), and then gives you a button to push to Set As Album Art for the selected song (and it ripples to all other songs with the same album name).

Houston Transtar Traffic: Whoever designed the road system in Houston was drunk or had a bad sense of humor. This widget shows the realtime updated traffic map of Houston. Nice.

I’m diabetic — have been for 32 of my 33+ years. A lot of promising work has been done over my lifetime to get us, hopefully, closer to the cure that has always been “just 5 years away”

Still waiting, folks…

I wear a Medtronic-Minimed insulin pump that makes my life a lot easier, but man the things are clunky looking and non-user friendly in the days of iPod and cell phones that can launch rockets.

Shelby sent me this blog entry — a woman’s open letter to Steve Jobs (”his Steveness”) of Apple, asking for his design team (the ones behind the iPod) to get into the mix and help medical quipment companies better design their products for their users.

There’s a nice link in the comments section to Digg a TechCrunch article that got written about the letter, which it looks like people are doing. If you like, go Digg it too.