It’s doubtful that anybody reading this blog missed the news that Apple finally took the wraps off their much rumored tablet: the iPad. Trouble is, a bunch of folks seem to be upset about the features and specs, or something that made the buzz machine go meh. It’s just a bigger iPhone, complain the privileged tech pundits.

They apparently missed the recent Pew Internet Project report on internet usage by demographic. While it shows white users most frequently access the internet from home, black and hispanic users more frequently get online from mobile devices. Further, internet use by hispanics jumped dramatically in recent years, far exceeding the growth among whites.

The report further notes that while 83% of US adults have cell phones, only 60% use the internet from home. I’ve said it before: our notions of what a “computer” is have to change. The age of ubiquitous connectivity, Twitter, Facebook, and uncounted other tiny miracles has already changed the the reasons we use technology and shown us the difference between what it’s for and what it does.

The Pew stats show our computers as historical artifacts of a different age, built for a different purpose. The iPad is built for the ubiquitous social internet. The iPad is built for everybody who enjoys mobile internet access and the remaining 40% of users who don’t have any, though I’m quite certain that experienced internet users will eventually fall in love with the device too. Remember, the then leading tech news site Slashdot panned the original iPod in 2001: “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

You might have to check Wikipedia to remember what the Nomad was today, though the manufacturer once enjoyed 65% market share. The market for MP3 players in 2001 was just under $2 billion, by 2006 it had tripled to almost $6 billion. iPod sales continued to grow, much to the annoyance  of iPod haters, until Apple released the iPhone and started cannibalizing their traditional iPod sales. Convergence had finally arrived.

Apple’s plan with the iPad is to dramatically expand the market for internet connected devices. Do you really want to bet against them?

Posted February 1, 2010 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology. Tags: apple, Apple Inc., cell phones, demographics, internet, internet usage, internet use, iPad, iphone, ipod, mobile internet, mobile internet access, pew internet, pew internet project. One Comment.

WordPress has some simple built-in support for posting by email, but that didn’t stop a couple people  from developing plugins that might do better. Postie and PostMaster both claim to support attached photos (though neither appears to use WP’s built-in media management). But if your goal is to post photos, you might consider posting through Flickr.

Posted January 31, 2010 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: blog by email, email, flickr, moblogging, wordpress. Be the first one.

As more and more organizations become aware of the need to track their online reputation, more people in those organizations are following Google alerts for their organization’s name. That creates a perfect opportunity for scammers to play on that organizational vanity to infect computers used by officers of the organization with malware that can reveal the inner workings of that organization.

I’m not exactly sure what clicking the button above does. The sketchy domain name is concerning enough to keep me from clicking, honestly. The page includes an embedded Flash file (the red button), and I’d suspect that somebody’s hoping that people are running un-patched versions of the Flash plugin. For those running vulnerable versions of Flash, simply visiting the page opens the door to malware infection. The user is at risk even if s/he doesn’t click the button.

The effect of this type of attack is not insignificant. The attacks on Google that led to the company’s dustup China this week are said to have depended on social engineering and affected as many as 30 other companies. An October 2009 Northrop Grumman report on Chinese hacking activities directed at the US suggests as much as 20 terabytes of sensitive data has been exfiltrated using similar attacks.

Posted January 14, 2010 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Politics & Controversy, Technology. Tags: attack vector, china, google, hacking, malware, malware infection, online reputation, vanity, virus. Be the first one.

A post on thomas fitzgerald.net serves to remind us that Apple released their first netbook in 1997: the Apple eMate 300:

…next time you see people ranting about an Apple netbook, remember that Apple had something similar long before anyone even uttered the phrase “netbook.”

The device ran Netwon OS 2 with a 20-30 hour battery life (yes, 20-30 hours). I’ve written more than a few posts eulogizing the eMate’s tablet-shaped sibling: Newton Message Pad 2000.

Posted December 21, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Blink. Tags: apple, emate, netbook, newton, Technology. Be the first one.

I’d long been a user of BareBones’ BBEdit, a product that’s served me well for a number of years. But upgrading from version 8.5 to 9 is a paid deal, and after spending 15 days with the demo of BBEdit 9, I decided I wanted to look around a little bit. My friend Matt switched from BBEdit to Panic’s Coda some time ago, and I liked the demo of that well enough that I bought a license.

Now, after using Coda for about a month, I’ve found that I miss a number of BBEdit’s behaviors and can point to a few areas where Coda can use improvement.

Selection ranges

If you don’t know that double clicking a word is the fastest way to select the entire word in most GUIs, you’re missing out. However, the rules that define a “word” (or the word boundaries) vary considerably. BBedit’s rules are clear and consistent, but Coda does weird things. Specifically, double-clicking a variable like $var does not select the $ in BBEdit, but Coda’s selection behavior changes. If you simply double-click the $var, Coda will select the $. But, if you double-click, then move the mouse to extend the selection range, Coda drops the $. Why? This has led to a number of compilation errors because of missing $s preceding variable names. Argh.

(Worth mentioning: text selection in Windows apps is the worst of all, that’s the biggest reason why I can’t use Windows.)

Find, grep, regex

The marketing materials for both BBedit and Coda praise their find and grep features. I was pleasantly surprised at first to see Coda’s rich and easily accessible options for those features, but then I began to miss a number of BBEdit’s features and options.

The simplest different is that BBEdit gives much more space to create both search and replace patterns. Both support regular expressions, but BBEdit’s support for non-regex searches is stronger. If I continue to use Coda, I’ll need to develop the practice of always writing my search and replace expressions as regex, which wouldn’t be so bad if I could understand Coda’s regex engine. Coda offers a number of options to control the regex engine, but all I want is to duplicate PHP’s preg_match() behavior.

FTP behavior

While my first two complaints related to deficiencies in Coda as relates to BBEdit, this is probably the feature in Coda that made me switch. The integrated FTP works well and answers a number of complaints I had with BBEdit. Creating a new remote file is a surprisingly difficult task in BBEdit, but works simply and conveniently in Coda. That said, I have a few frustrations.

A few examples:

• Navigating the remote filesystem isn’t as fast as it should be; hitting the enter key on a selected file or directory renames it rather than opens it (big complaint). This behavior mimics the Finder, but contradicts a number of conventions of the File > Open dialog.
• Copying a file from one directory to another isn’t as easy and simple as it should be. I wouldn’t complain about this if the above behavior were less like the Finder’s in other respects (that is, I’d rather solve the first issue and drop this one).
• I’ve grown rather accustomed to Mac OS X’s Quick Look feature. Why can’t I quick look the images and other non-text files in the FTP viewer? (Another small complaint.)

Update: Panic has a blog (and the design is awesome), but I don’t see any obvious place to leave product feedback.

Posted December 14, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: bbedit, Coda, mac, text editor. One Comment.

I spied the Wintec FileMate 48GB Ultra ExpressCard and began to wonder how it works as a boot drive for Mac OS X in a late 2008 MacBook Pro (the model just before Apple replaced the ExpressCard slot with an SD slot). But I didn’t have to wonder too much, as a post to this MacObserver forum thread offers enough details to make a geek salivate:

The computer now boots primarily from the SSD Card and will start up the computer in less than 1/2 the time of the internal HD [...] I have all the applications and system files on the SSD Card, the user files/record on the internal HD. Programs launch about 4 to 5 times faster.

The manufacturer claims 115MB/s reads and 65MB/s and writes, which is better than the max performance (according to Tom’s Hardware) of the 320GB 5400 RPM drive it shipped with, but only similar to the max performance of the top of the line 7200 RPM drives. The stated read performance of the SSD, however, is only slightly better than the average performance those 7200 RPM drives, and the write performance is middling. For comparison, Intel claims their consumer-class X25-M can do 250MB/s reads and 100MB/s writes. (However, none of these numbers show the effect of seek times on actual performance, which may account for the gains reported in the forum posting.)

So, is it worth it?

Posted November 30, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: apple, mac os X, MacBook Pro, performance, SSD, storage. 2 Comments.

David Weinberger kicked off the latest installment in the ongoing debate about the future of electronic books versus paper books in his Will books survive? A scorecard… post.

He’s got some good points, but like many of the smart folks I admire, he approaches this question assuming that books, in any form, are important. Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent essay on “the alleged decline of reading” is especially informative on this point: books don’t matter to most Americans, and they haven’t for some time.

And among those who do read, the book industry’s bread and butter is in romance novels that appeal “largely older, less affluent female buyer.” The continued commercial viability of country music radio stations while other formats suffer declines blamed on iPods might suggest that those readers are technology averse (yes, I’m assuming country listeners and romance readers are a similar demographic), but just as that audience learned how to use VHS, then DVD, they’ll likely learn to appreciate other book formats as well.

A few of David’s readers have commented that books will likely become the new vinyl. They’re probably right, but that doesn’t mean ebooks will replace them in the mainstream. As noted in my comment, I’m not sure paper-bound books will survive the cultural and economic shifts that face them long enough to be effectively translated into some electronic form.

I sometimes wonder if we’ve already replaced the book and it’s called “blog.”

Posted November 25, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology. Tags: david weinberger, e-book, ebook, electronic books, Publishing, reading, speculation. Be the first one.

Ethan Zuckerman’s recent post, What if they stop clicking? points out the difficulty of building a business on ad revenue. He points to statistics that show fewer readers are clicking banner and arguments from the web advertising industry about how un-clicked ads still build brand awareness.

It’s not really central to Zuckerman’s point, but I didn’t sense that he was aware that Google has picked up the same argument. I commented on the post that Google has started reporting the numbers of people who are presented (but don’t click) ads, then later visit the advertisers that are paying for, um, clicks.

On the one hand this is probably supposed to make advertisers feel better about spending the money, on the other hand, I can imagine Google finding a way to charge for those visits too.

Zuckerman seems to genuinely doubt that advertising can support anything other than search engines, and he may be right. The internet itself is the enemy of ad supported business models. Old newspapers were discarded, but old web pages get new ads for every visitor. Given the number of places an ad can run (and the thousands of new pages Demand Studios pumping out each day), there’s no way to create the scarcity that made print ads so valuable. Meanwhile, the abundance of content on the web forces us to develop the very skills we use to ignore ads and other irrelevant material.

Aside: Google, please consider de-ranking eHow and other Demand Studios properties. Their content was frustrating before I understood how evil their model was, now it’s worse.

Posted November 23, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Politics & Controversy, Technology. Tags: ads, advertising, Ethan Zuckerman, google, internet marketing, web advertising. Be the first one.

Authentication Hacks

My first talk was on User Authentication with MU in Existing Ecosystems, all about integrating WP with LDAP/AD/CAS and other directory authentication schemes, as well as the hacks I did to make that integration bi-directional and deliver new user features. My slides are online (.MOV / .PDF), and you can read earlier blog post summing up the project.

Plugins Mentioned

• wpCAS (long description)
• Alternate Contact Info
• WordPress Ticket Framework
• wpSMS (long description)

Scriblio

I was most excited, however, to talk about Scriblio, a plugin that turns WordPress into a library catalog with faceted searching and browsing. Those slides are online as well (.MOV / .PDF). The core plugin is in the repository, but I’d recommend people join the mail list if they’re thinking of diving in to it.

Scriblio Sites I Demoed

• Collingswood Public Library
• Colby-Sawyer College Archives
• Beyond Brown Paper photo archive

Posted November 14, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: presentation, scriblio, WordCamp, WordCamp NYC, wordpress. One Comment.

Matt demanded accent-aware spell checking for the WordPress spell checking plugin his company acquired earlier this year. And just a little more than a month later, After the Deadline delivered. Now Beyoncé, café, coöperate, and even my resumé look prettier.

Separately, Wordnik offers a new take on online dictionaries, and they just launched an API.

Posted November 12, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Dispatches, Technology. Tags: After the Deadline, api, dictionary, online dictionaries, Spell checker, spell checking, spelling, Wordnik, wordpress. Be the first one.