And They Said The iPad Didn’t Print!

There, I Fixed It posted this wonderful photo of an iPad on a copy machine as a joke for a printing solution.

Although this was clearly intended as a joke, it begs the question about why today's portable devices can't print. Lots and lots of portable devices have Wi-Fi network access. It's not that hard to scan for and send to a print server or a network-attached printer.

Now, you obviously don't want to load your phone up with large amounts of printer drivers. That would bloat the system and probably make it unstable. But there's no reason why you could ship with two or three generic drivers - plain text, PostScript and maybe PCL. With PS and PCL, you'd be able to reach most laser printers, and plain text would reach almost everything else.

And if you don't have a compatible printer at home, you can set up a computer to be a PostScript print server, translating the content for printing. Linux and Mac OS X have this capability built-in via the CUPS printing system. Windows users can use Ghostscript to create a virtual PostScript printer to do the job.

While I wouldn't want everyday users trying to manually set up a Ghostscript print server, there's no reason why a phone/PDA vendor couldn't make a convenient installer available as a free download.

How stupid do scammers think you are?

For some stupid reason, I decided to read a message in my spam folder. You've got to be the dumbest person on Earth to fall for this scam.

What if Flash became an open standard?

John Gruber's excelent Daring Fireball blog has an article entitled What if Flash Were an Open Standard?. In it, he cites a Dave Winer article, which (among other things) proposes that Adobe open up Flash for all to support and implement

Gruber rejects that possibility, writing:

That’d be an interesting move, and it would certainly shake things up. But what if the source code to Flash Player is — as many would wager — a huge steaming pile of convoluted C++ horseshit? It’s sort of like what if Microsoft open-sourced the Internet Explorer rendering engine. It’s not like anyone who is now using WebKit or Gecko would switch to that just because it was opened — or that WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera would suddenly be obligated to or even interested in adopting IE-specific web features.

I think this makes a strong point, but it should be noted that this wouldn't be the first time. When Netscape decided to release their code into open source, forming the Mozilla project, that code was also a tangled mess and very difficult to maintain. But there was a hard-core team of developers dedicated to improving it, and they did just that. They ripped out and replaced most of Netscape's own rendering code, creating the Gecko engine instead. They replaced the UI code with the Chrome/XUL system that allows almost infinite flexibility with the UI skins, etc.

I think that for something as popular as Flash, the open source community would make a similar effort to improve Adobe's code, eventually producing something with more features, more utility, more speed, and better maintainability.

As for Apple, it could choose to be a part of such development, or it could choose to strike out on its own, using the specs of the SWF format. Apple could develop its own SWF player in the way it feels is best, either releasing the code to open source or keeping the source closed.

In theory, Apple could do this today, since Adobe already publishes the SWF file format spec, but to do this now would be a losing proposition for Apple. Today, Adobe doesn't release these specs until after they ship new versions of Flash, so Apple would forever be playing catch-up. And Adobe is not going to document their bugs - places where they violate their own standard and may or may not ever get around to fixing the code.

But if flash becomes an open standard, then the spec doesn't get modified behind Adobe's closed doors. Instead, there are working groups and mailing lists. Apple (and anyone else who is interested) can join the working group and stay informed about new features. Apple can ship new features in its SWF player at the same time Adobe and everybody else ships players with those features.

I think this can be a win-win scenario for everybody involved. Even Adobe - they might lose their Flash monopoly, but with Flash becoming almost entirely marginalized in the mobile device market, that monopoly is probably going to lose its value pretty soon anyway. Better to take a leadership role in the new market than to sink into oblivion with the old market.

iPad: One step closer to Star Trek

Gee, Apple's new iPad looks a lot like something out of Star Trek, doesn't it? And I think it actually looks better than Trek's PADD.

Unsafe water or just not enough taxes?

The New York Times writes a very interesting article about water safety. It starts out with the attention-grabbing headline that millions of Americans are drinking dirty water. It then goes on to point out that only 6% of water-safety violations have resulted in fines or other government punishments.

What it does not say, however, is how many of these municipalities, after learning of the violation, went on to repair their system and later become compliant. After all, as far as public health is concerned, the important issue is that the water is cleaned up, not that somebody is forced to pay a large fine.

Unfortunately, the only references to this in the article are vague handwaving terms like "hundreds of other systems" (out of how many? A thousand? A million?) and "many". What percentage of systems were fixed quickly? What percentage were fixed after a long delay? What percentage have not been fixed after a long time? That, we don't know. It could be 0.01%, 5% or 95% without affecting the text as-written.

So what is really going on here? Do we really have a crisis of people drinking contaminated water? Or do we just have some Congresscritters looking for another scare tactic to blame the Bush Administration for (which the article explicitly does)? Do they think cleanup is lacking or do they just want to impose more fines?

Unfortunately, the New York Times will be of no help answering these questions.

Administrivia: Captchas and comment moderation enabled

I don't like making people jump through hoops in order to post comments, but it appears that the spammers have finally found my blog. Rather than have to log in every day to delete spam from my message comments, I've enabled the use of captchas (where you need to type in a key word in order to proceed) and moderation (where comments won't appear until I approve them.)

I apologize for the inconvenience. I wish I could do something more satisfying, like slowly torture the spammers to death, but I don't know where they live, so I don't think I'm going to be able to exercise that option.

Finding Common Ground on an Open Internet - a joint statement from Lowell McAdam, CEO Verizon Wireless and Eric Schmidt, CEO Google

This message was posted to a popular internet tech blog and appears to be genuine. You might also find it of interest.

From: David Farber
Date: October 22, 2009 7:27:48 AM EDT
To: "ip"
Subject: [IP] Finding Common Ground on an Open Internet - a joint statement from Lowell McAdam, CEO Verizon Wireless and Eric Schmidt, CEO Google.

A Technology and Telecommunications Policy Blog
Thursday, October 22, 2009

Finding Common Ground on an Open Internet

The following is a joint statement from Lowell McAdam, CEO Verizon Wireless and Eric Schmidt, CEO Google.

Verizon and Google might seem unlikely bedfellows in the current debate around network neutrality, or an open Internet. And while it's true we do disagree quite strongly about certain aspects of government policy in this area--such as whether mobile networks should even be part of the discussion--there are many issues on which we agree. For starters we both think it's essential that the Internet remains an unrestricted and open platform--where people can access any content (so long as it's legal), as well as the services and applications of their choice.

How many geeks does it take to change a lightbulb?

Or more accurately, how long and how much does it take to get a specialty lightbulb?

The green-circle light around my car's cigarette lighter burned out. These things happen, especially in a car that's 8 years old. So I removed the old one (it's easily accessible in my car) and went looking to buy a replacement.

Easier said than done.

Comments on "iTunes and Cocoa"

This week, John Gruber wrote an article commenting on the fact that the latest version of iTunes is still a 32-bit application using Apple's Carbon APIs (vs. the newer Cocoa APIs Apple encourages developers to use today.

John makes many good points and discusses the subject very thoroughly. If the question interests you, I highly recommend you jump through the above link and read the article. I'll wait for you to come back here when you're done reading.

Done reading? Great.

During the article, John writes:

Cocoa was not magic pixie dust that inherently made the Finder radically better. But so why did Apple bother? Because Cocoa and 64-bit are the future of Mac OS X. And, for many new APIs, they are the present.

This is a very plausible explanation for why Apple chose to port nearly all of the system applications to the 64-bit Cocoa libraries. It is also really good marketing PR - what better way to encourage others to use your new libraries than to point our that you yourself are using them everywhere.

But there's another possible reason that I think may make even more sense: the need to test all those new libraries.

The 64-bit Cocoa APIs are brand new. As such, they need to be thoroughly tested. What better way to test them than to use them in as many applications as possible? Since the outside world doesn't have the new libraries, there won't be any third-party applications using them, and real-world applications almost always provide better testing than contrived test cases.

With all the system apps using the 64-bit Cocoa libraries, it means developers and testers will be exercising these new libraries with every app they run. Additionally, it guarantees that the application code is portable to both 32- and 64-bit environments, since Apple will still have to ship and test 32-bit versions of them. (Some of the early-model Intel-based Macs only have 32-bit processors.)

If they didn't port all this code to 64-bit Cocoa, then the 64-bit Cocoa libraries would end up shipping with a lot less testing. This would result in bugs being discovered post-release, as third-party apps are developed. That's something no developer ever wants to have to deal with. Aside from the embarrassment, sometimes you find bugs where the best fix is to change the API in a way that breaks applications. This isn't a problem if the API hasn't been released and the only apps are your own. It is difficult, often impossible, and always embarrassing to do this after you have shipped those APIs to customers. Once an API is shipped to customers, its published interface can't change, forcing you to fix the bug in other ways, which may be awkward, less efficient, or downright hack-ish.

As for why Apple didn't port iTunes to 64-bit Cocoa? My guess is that iTunes 9 was under development for quite some time, while the new APIs were still in a state of flux. If you've got a release schedule to meet (and iTunes 9 had to ship on the same day as the new iPod announcements) then you don't want to attempt porting to a potentially unstable platform. Far better to ship on-time and then begin your porting effort afterwards.

Will iTunes be ported to 64-bit Cocoa in the future? It wouldn't surprise me, but there may not be an overriding need to do so at this point. Now that the 64-bit Cocoa libraries have shipped, the "libraries need testing" argument no longer applies, so we're back to the "how will it improve the iTunes app itself" argument. John's article discusses this at length and provides a good explanation, so I won't repeat his arguments here.

Printing costs and a minor surprise

This evening, I decided to compare prices on printers and printing supplies. I've always believed that ink jet printers cost more per page than other kinds of printers, but as it turns out, the reality is not as simple as that.