PushingJelly

OK, as promised, I have joined MySpace:

( http://www.myspace.com/macanalyst )

First impressions?

So far I have become “friends” with several bands and singers and a lady who purports to post “erotic pictures” of herself, who I suspect is just a ringer to entice people onto a smut site.

There is LOADS of advertising on there – much more than I expected, mostly for News Corps related companies like Sky.

Lastly (and probably most disturbing), I have been propositioned for work by a Nigerian guy. I gave him a don’t come there’s no jobs speech but he didn’t seen purturbed or put off however and asked if he could still be my friend.

So all in all a strange few days.

Today is the first day of my summer holiday. Two weeks of no work.

As is typical, nature has chosen this time to replenish our resevoirs and aquafas.

No matter, its the R&R that counts.

Hmmm Holiday.

Imitation is the sincerest form and all that stuff.

I love the spoofs of Apple ads that go around from time to time.

I just found this one at YouTube.
The guys at TruNuff that did it, have a website with the ads and be sure to check out their cartoon strip too.

Very good.

David Pogue, always the rabble rouser posted this article about Apple in the corporate environment.

As a Mac tech at a newspaper with 4000 PCs and 500 Macs, I think I am as well placed as anyone to comment on this so I started to jot some musings and it turned into the text below. I didn’t want it to get truncated on Mr Pogues site so I have continued it here.
I am a great Mac advocate but even I can see that the priority Apple put on their development is to make Mac OS X the best consumer OS they can at the expense of all else.
Despite all the normal bigotry and blinkered vision, I think the biggest problem facing us as Mac integrators is that OS X just is not suited to big installations, it seems to have been designed to fit in in minority.

Where Windows, through necessity, has grown to scale with server clustering, remote management (don’t get me started on ARD and OD), auditing etc. Apple choose to make sure the cases look nice and the dock does that pretty zoom thing.

We once had the head of Apple UK come to our office and I told him that in my opinion the reason Apple will never gain huge market share is that they are concentrating on the home. If I was a “normal” user, I sure wouldn’t want to use a PC at home when I have already learnt how to use my PC at work. Why learn another system that isn’t compatible? People buy wintel PCs for home because that’s what they know. They know wintel PCs because they use them at work.
More corporate Macs would mean more hearts and minds and more market share.
Apple don’t seem to listen to their corporate users very much but if they did I would suggest:

1) Face the fact that its all about the software and always has been. Any schmo can make a PC these days. No-one else has Mac OS X.
Licence the OS to all and sundry. They will bite Apple’s arms off to use Mac OS X on their machines, especially if the OEM licences are better than Redmond’s.
Its a no effort move, it just takes commitment. Invent some kind of OSX certified specification stamp, OS X already runs on most generic PC hardware you just have to state what stuff it runs on.
There’s a guy at work that swears the his Dell laptop is the best Mac he has ever had.
If you feel you need to stay in the hardware market, becuase of the extra value you provide, fine but don’t be supprised and hurt when the OEMs under cut you like last time.
Set your licence price at such that it will be economically viable for them to use your software but covers your profit on lost hardware sales.

2) Make OS X more dependable (see earlier post re. copying). It’s getting better. User beta testing will help here.

3) Make a new Pro version of iWork that is better than Office 2004 for all the stuff we normally do, making it compatible, easier and shareable. Sell it for less than Microsoft Office and make the licensing simple. I know it will cannibalise Microsoft’s market for Office, but business is war after all and all’s fair… Give MS some competition for the first time.
Competition is healthy, it makes everyone try harder.

4) Face up to the simple fact that people like us use file servers, lots of them. Apple doesn’t seem to get this at the moment. There is no coherent way of managing server connections in Mac OS X and it sucks badly.

5) Make OS X Server SCALE and provide redundancy. Improve clustering for file and mail services and sort out Print serving. Try to remember that not everyone uses OS X server to host web sites, not everyone streams video, but everyone uses files.

6) If Apple insist on remaining a hardware company, add a corporate column to the product matrix. Please make some really cheap plain $300 boxes that are “good enough” and are expandable with a couple of normal PCI slots and loads of USB, use cheaper plastic cased screens, have lots of RAM and small hard drives. We don’t care about gigabit, FireWire 800, optical audio, DVD-RW DL, and all the other lovely stuff that pushes up prices. It will sit under the desk or under the screen and run email, Web, WP and maybe VMWare/Citrix/MSRDC.
The Mini is still too expensive and its too small. I showed it to my IT director and he said that we couldn’t have them because people would walk out of the building with them in their bags and coats. Who wants to add $150 to the cost for a security bracket?

7) Make servers that look like crap (no one sees them anyway) are bigger than 1U with lots of drive bays, slots and redundancy (Yes I know the PSUs are redundant on the new XServes.)
Include 3 yrs. onsite in the corporate price (or at least provide it as an option for under $100) and support server spares for longer than 3 years (jeez that’s so annoying)
Provide all your products with good tech documentation, especially the server – No, the software not easy enough to just use and even if it was it wouldn’t matter, we love documentation. No the pamphlets you provide are not good enough.
We need good, in-depth, nuts and bolts, plist and unix file documentation.
Look at Microsoft and Sun’s documentation and make yours as good or better. If IT people can’t get inside, they won’t trust it and if they don’t trust it they will not recommend it.
Its not the managers that spec the systems, its us techies. They just sign the paperwork.

9) Set up a Mac IT Pro site like the developer site with registration and give information to those who need it. We look after more Macs than most Authorised service centres, we need that info. Why do you think there are so many web-sites like MacEnterprise and AFP548, nature abhors a vacuum. Create a pro forum to share views and information.

Finally
10) You should be getting involved in how we work and think and listening to us – your customers.
Set-up the CSQ programme again and involve corporate clients with beta testing.
Using “developers” to beta test software is too passive and restricted. Providing beta’s to developers is tantamount to saying, this is what you are getting, make sure your software works with it. It is too dictatorial. The software needs to be used and integrated into a real environment. This is why we are just getting a stable (ish) 10.4.7.
The average developer doesn’t have the heterogeneous back end we have to deal with or test against. We are an asset, use us.

… Just to get up Apple legal’s nose!

Once again Apple’s legal beagles make it hard to defend ourfavouritee fruit company with their feverish persecution of users of the word pod.

London’s Finacial Times has this article regarding the latest alleged infringment

Someone really needs to let them know that the word pod was around a long time before Apple and they don’t have a legal claim to it. If the word in question was “iPod” then maybe, but pod has a number of meanings –

Wikipedia lists these meanings of the word:

A method of propulsion for ships, also known as Azimuth thruster

The seed-case of a flowering plant, particularly of the pea family Leguminosae, and most often of the edible pea

A social group of cetaceans
Pod, Germany, a district in northern Germany, near the town of Wismar
Pod, Bosnia-Hercegovina, a location in the upper Vrbas River valley in Bosnia-Hercegovina where settlements of a Bronze Age people identified by some archaeologists with the “Proto-Illyrians” have been found

Pod (album), a rock album by The Breeders

The Pod, a 1991 album by Ween

A Welsh poet, real name Arwel Roberts

Cannabis, as referenced in William S. Burroughs’ novel, Naked Lunch

A tripod

A slang term used to describe a building used to house Inmates

Synonym , A term used in the vernacular to mean: body, capsule, case, container, frame, framework, hull, husk, mold, shell, skeleton, structure, vessel, and the like

A short video, usually non-professionally produced, also known as Viewer Created Content on the TV network Current TV

An Apple iPod

A packet of fine coffee grounds packaged for use in espresso machines

A footwear brand

An aerodynamic container to be mounted under an aeroplane, containing, e.g., electronic equipment or rockets

“Pod” a futuristic racing game

A paintball container used to reload during games.

Pod: a slang term for an entity living as a human, but unable and/or unwilling to conform to societal and cultural norms and mores. There are a disproportionate number of IT professionals and math teachers who live as pods. The term was first used on the Seinfeld television show when Jerry Seinfeld told Cosmo Kramer that he (Kramer) was a pod.

Note that only one is copyright Apple Computer.

What’s next, are they going to go after Manfrotto for calling their products tripods and monopods or George Lucas for calling the racing vehicles “Pod Racers” in Star Wars?

If Apple wanted “to protect the iPod’s good image” they are going about it completely the wrong way. This suit against Mach5Products has caused Apple so much bad press, they just look like foolish bullies.

They aught to drop the case, apologise to the Mach5Products and try to forget the whole event as a bad idea.

As an Apple advocate, I want them to continue making great products and quashing Chinese knock offs not persicuting small manufacturers that are not infringing any copyrights and don’t have the financial and legal backing to defend themselves against a $7B corporate budget.

The only winners here are the lawyers.

Ahh, that feels better.

In my travels as a roving Mac technician I was recently helping a VIP customer with their iBook and discussing websites. The subject of MySpace came up (for reasons I can’t say) and I rather unwisely described it as chavvy. Now for the few readers that are outside the UK, the word chavvy is used here to describe primarily lower class people who dress in a selected range of brand name clothes, wear baseball caps and oversized jewelry. It has also grown to mean something that is generally over popular despite being a bit rubbishy and it was this meaning I was implying about the site.
Now, concidering who I was speaking too, I REALLY should not have said this. I think it was because they were so nice to me, I was lulled into a sense of false security. I stand by my impression of MySpace. All the pages I have looked at are naff to look at and have little content. Perhaps I am missing the point however, perhaps its just about the people not the content. Why use MySpace and not a blog site. Is MySpace blogging for people who have nothing to say?
It’s been playing on my mind since (not least because it was a career limiting event), and although I have kind of notched it up as another example of why I’ll never suceed in life, win friends or influence people (its a long list), I think I need to qualify the statement which was made without due concideration.

Over the next week I am going to look at MySpace and try to discover why a hundred million people call it home and why NewsCorps paid all that cash for it.

Well the cold light of day is shining and the digestion of Keynote morcels is churning away in our guts so lets look at the announcements.
As ever with these matters its not what was said but what was not said.
I have to agree with some of the pundits, Steve did look a little off – was it just me or has he lost more weight. Hmm, hope for Apple’s sake (and therfore mine) that he’s OK. Mercenary I know, but you have to look after the breadline don’t you? And if it means we look after Mr Jobs to boot then thats just fine.

Hardware releases- Pro Intel, Xserver Intel, fast as hell, cheaper than Dell, better than Dell. Dell worried and reduced their prices of comparitive products.
Nuff said.

Now waiting for Paris for the consumer stuff. Not long to wait.

Leopard client:
Doctor What? – Time machine is Apple’s solution to file deletion and overwrite woes that effect us poor computer users. Using a fancy interface developed in the new Core Animation engine, Time Machine allows one to backtrack movements of files over time and instantly (on Steve’s Mac anyway) restore the file to its rightful place back in your folder structure. I can only guess it uses some extension to the journalling system found in HFS+ for some time. The UI is wacky with a wormhole and a (seemingly) infinite number of monkeys, sorry Folders. You can then either manually flip through time until you find the file you are looking for and can go on your way, or you can let the machine best guess the time your precious file was available and had the correct info.

Mail – HTML templates – nice, more HTML spam. Notes – good idea, I do this already by sending myself a mail, no more will I have to. Horrid font though, marker script – yuk! and lastly a system wide To-Do service. Nice idea, just need third party buy in.

Spaces – a nicely implemented version of UNIX virtual desktops (yawn)

iCal – See iCal server below – more new stuff to come allegedly.

Accessibility – Being able bodied (ish) I don’t really think much about this part of the OS, however considering I am mostly blind in my right eye (I’d give my right eye for a new right eye), I really should pay attention a little more. I guess I am in denial still.
The new voice, Alex, is really good. No more Steven Hawkins impressions.

Core Animation – Wolf in sheep’s clothing this one, I think. We won’t know much about it really until the dev seeding comes up with some examples however the album covers demo at the keynote which simulated the recent iTMS advert in realtime was very cool (the ad was done the hard way on Film and probably ILM). Very much a wait and see but I expect some experimental spatial UIs to be forthcoming as a result.

Leopard Server:
Not a lot said in the keynote about server 10.5, more on the web-site.
Turn it on – Set-up is easier, blah, new perfmon, blagh, auto client set-up, bit – what? OK it binds new machines to OD automatically apparently and configures some of the applications for users auto-magically – iChat, mail, iCal etc. Hmm, I wonder if that process has an open API?

Wiki – Wiki wild wild vest, Yep they have included a Wiki software, however Apple being Apple have made it all jazzy and resource hungry by the look of it, the result is more like a poor man’s SharePoint. The killer will be the templates they provide for it. The example picture looks more like an iWeb page than a professional groupware site, get with the Pro theme Apple – One to watch I guess.
Interestingly, on the macosforge.org site, there is mention of an “Apple Teams” product and in the blurb on the main site about Wiki, it refers to the Wiki as a product for “teams to create and distribute information”. I wonder if they are talking about the same product and if so, why would the Wiki need access to the CalDEV server?

Spotting a Leopard (server) – At last we will have the ability to search a server’s spotlight metadata. All we need now is an indexing agent for third party servers such as Helios Ethershare or ExtremeZ-IP. Some enterprise customers (us included) still are not willing to entrust all their data to the Xserve despite their uptimes being better than the Solaris/Ethershare combo. I guess they just don’t cost enough to matter.
Oh yeh, Boolean searches! So there. (hold on, were they not an undocumented “feature” in an early version and then taken away rudly when a patch was released? My memory must be failing me)

Podcast Producer – now there’s a thing. I have been doing a lot of work with our papers recently preparing for the online push, especially for audio and video. Details are sketchy but there seems to be some form of workflow using FTP and XGrid (ah a use for XGrid) to take summisions and RIP them into shape for online broadcast/download. Again there’s OD integtation for permissions – nice.

There’s also some really interesting stuff for the Enterprise:

iCal server – At last, an Apple group calendaring solution! It uses a new open protocol CalDAV – an addition to the WebDAV standard used widely and of note by Apple’s own iDisk service to host calendars and one assumes, provide free busy etc.
From the diagram on the webpage and information from the new OSS site, iCal server will support cross platform clients like Mozilla Sunbird and MS Outlook to boot. Apple have joined a consortium called CalConnect which promote open calendaring standards so no propriotory protocols. Lets hope its not a lowest common denominator as many of these “standards” are which are then patched with extra functionality by developers.
Another interesting tidbit for the enterprise crew is that the server will be scaleable with support for clustering and Apple’s XSan as a robust storage back end. This is one of the first Apple applications outside video targetted at XSan and the fisrt I can remember to tout the system as a high availabilty system.
Lastly it is also promising that iCal server is integrated with Apple’s OpenDirectory LDAP service and third party products such as Active Directory, at last a recognition by Apple that directory services are for more than user authentication.

iChat server – the updated version of this service looks like it uses a more feature complete version of the Jabber server including IM federation to link to outside services such as GoogleTalk. Other dainties include automatic buddy lists, single signon using Kerb (at last), Central chat logs and better security for multiple user chat and server to server comms.

Mail server – Clustering seems the order of the day, obviously high on the wish list for the average IT department and mail server doesn’t dissapoint with Active/Active clustering when using XSan, Vacation notification and improved performance.

Web Service – Apache is now pre configured with MySQL and PHP, plus a load of very important other OSS software updates which I can’t be arsed to list because there are too many TLAs and FLAs. Its all good, trust me.

File Services – Secure NFSv3 using Kerb and AutoFS – no mention of AFP or SAMBA yet. Wait and see..

XGrid – Although not of interest to normal humans who don’t speak CoBOL or have 1100 cluster nodes in their server room, it is interesting to see that there are still developments happening to XGrid, mostly on the management of process distribution (yawn). Come on Apple, what about XGrid for the rest of us, I want an open API that Adobe can make a plug-in so that PhotoShop runs like water and iMovie renders in realtime because I have 4 Macs at home and they just add to the grid.

Darwin is dead, long live macosforge.org!
Apple is opening the new kernel (xnu), Collaboration services (read iChat server – more in a mo), Bonjour, Launchd and WebKit.
Curiously it has released all these under the Apache 2/0 licence as opposed to BSD or GNU. Odd, I wonder what it was about the others that made them go with Apache? Not ready to lose control perhaps.

So thats almost it.

One more thing – Hey, Steve didn’t say it this time so I thought I’d oblige.

B.

P.S – I’m not interested if there are gramatical or spelling errors in the post. Nor do I care if you like my writing style. If you don’t, then leave now because I am not changing at this stage in my life.