I decided to change my blogs from WordPress to Octopress for a few reasons:

• more control: Octopress is built on Jekyll and I am more comfortable with my ability to bend Jekyll to my will easily than I am with editing WordPress themes.
• preferrable workflow: I like editing plain text in my text editor. I like being able to manipulate an image and drop it into a directory to get it online.
• no comments: I hate having to moderate comments on blogs. There’s just too much spam and too little useful action these days. A few years ago, it was the best way to go. Not today.
• upgrade treadmill: Most WordPress exploits seem to be along the lines of privlege escalation for people with accounts on the WordPress installation. Those don’t affect my sites. However, those aren’t the only kinds of exploits, so it’s best to keep things up to date. But why should I have to do that, when all I want is to publish a bunch of pages? My generated HTML pages are never going to become insecure.
• super scalability: for when I have 10 million daily readers (kidding! While static sites are certainly faster than WordPress, WordPress with proper caching works just fine)

More On Comments

For the types of things that I read and write, comments are likely to be found in these places:

• Google+
• Twitter
• Hacker News
• Reddit
• Disqus (if I felt like adding Disqus)

I don’t list Facebook, because I don’t really use it. I list Google+ first because that’s what I want. I want each of my blog posts to have a link to a matching post over on Google+ and for the comments to appear there. I just prefer the way that comments work there.

I also like the way Hacker News comments work and would link over there for commentary for anything I post that happens to show up over there.

In the end, though, I don’t want the comments to appear here, as part of my writing. John Gruber has written about comments (more than once, if memory serves) and I agree with the idea that all comments are not created equal and I would rather link to comments elsewhere at my discretion rather than having them appear here hanging on to the things I post.

Dynamism with JavaScript

I make no secret about the fact that I prefer JavaScript to PHP. I’m happy to add as much dynamic behavior as desired to my site via JavaScript (sometimes connecting to external services) alone.

Up Next

Having converted my wimpy little personal blog, the next step is to convert Blue Sky On Mars, my blog about software product creation. BSOM has been around for more than a decade now, and I believe I’m up to more than 2,500 posts. I’ve gathered that Jekyll is going to spend a bit of time on chewing on that, and I want to make sure that I don’t lose anything in the translation.

I’m also using the default Octopress theme here right now. I want to change the front page of KevinDangoor.com to be a better “home page”.

I was quite happy with the ease of migrating from WordPress to Octopress. The documentation is great and Mark Nichols had both good information and a useful conversion script that eased the transition.

• very portable
• touch screen
• touch optimized UI
• simple application management
• no need to consciously think about files and directories
• little opportunity for one errant application to take down the whole device
• smaller chance for viruses to take hold and wreak havoc

In the long run, it’s possible that some company other than Apple could come to dominate this market, but I wouldn’t bet against Apple at this stage. Their head start is too great, especially in light of what may be coming tomorrow.

The iPad was capable of the kinds of things that most people needed from their computers:

• access to the web
• photo management
• music
• videos
• word processing
• perhaps things like spreadsheets, presentations

Three big things were missing from the iPad: the ability to print, a way to back up the data and a way to synchronize with your iPhone. The iPad relied on a computer to do those two things. Then, of course, Apple shipped Air Print. HP is already shipping printers with Air Print support, so you can print directly from an iPad. No other computer required.

What I had been telling people since last year is that I was certain that within a couple of years Apple would sell a box that would eliminate the need to have a computer by providing backup and sync services. While Apple could have gone for providing those services completely in the cloud, I suspected that Apple would ship a box because the box would likely be more convenient and faster for large amounts of data. The rumor mill is now saying that Apple will introduce a Time Capsule update tomorrow that will do just that.

And this is why I wouldn’t bet against Apple right now. I wouldn’t describe their lead as insurmountable, but I would certainly call it formidable. To beat Apple in tablets, the future of personal computers, is going to be a challenge indeed.

I like Apple’s products because they do a great job of delivering on a solid user experience. On the downside, though, Apple wields a level of control over the iOS ecosystem that is far greater than Microsoft ever did over Windows. Microsoft abused their monopoly position, but Apple has consciously designed an ecosystem in which people buy into a level of control and filtering that promotes a predictable user experience on the one hand, but reduces freedom on the other.

In Apple’s defense, I will say that they have been working hard to build a great web experience into the iPad. Even after the App Store took off, Apple has continued to build new features into Mobile Safari that allow web developers to create apps that rival native apps. Of course, I wish they would open up their ecosystem to other browsers, but at least they aren’t letting their browser stagnate.

I do ultimately expect that there will be some very successful Android tablets, and I’m looking forward to switching to one sometime soon if for no reason other than being able to run the awesome and quickly improving Firefox Mobile. As a geek, I appreciate the extra freedom that Android devices often provide.

It sounds like Apple will tomorrow set your iOS devices free from a traditional PC or Mac, if you so desire. If it doesn’t happen tomorrow, I’m guessing that the introduction tomorrow will put us one step closer to that and within a year or two you could reasonably have a household where the only general purpose computers were iOS-based.

Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla and therefore have a keen interest in seeing a free internet flourish and a desire to see the Mozilla community’s amazing work on Firefox spread far and wide. I also own a small amount of AAPL stock.

But how much better? The big question, particularly for the Daring Fireball demographic: If you already own an iPad, should you get an iPad 2? My best answer: If you buy a new iPhone or iPod Touch every year, then, yes, you should replace your old iPad with the iPad 2. It’s thinner, a comparative joy to hold in hand, noticeably faster, gets the exact same battery life, and has more RAM (spoiler: 512 MB). If you don’t buy a new iPhone every year — if you have the good sense to hold onto them for more than a year before upgrading to a new model — then you’ll likely want to wait for a new iPad, too.

I think the question of “do I upgrade my iPad?” is a little different from the question of “do I upgrade my iPhone?” because of the carrier subsidies and contract extensions that go along with iPhone purchases. So, let’s just consider iPads on their own. For simplicity, I’ll look at the 16GB Wifi model.

If you’ve kept your iPad 1 in “perfect” condition, Gazelle will give you $300 for it. No monkeying with auctions and all of that. I need to scrutinize it, but I think my iPad is in “perfect” condition because it’s been in the Apple case since day 1. (I’m not sure if Gazelle will give me anything for the case, but I’ll ignore case issues for the moment…)

The upgrade cost is then $200. Let’s assume that an iPad 3 comes out in a year, ignoring the rumors of some new iPad model for the fall, and that the pricing works out the same. Another $200 upgrade then.

iPad 1 to 2 to 3 = $400 in upgrade cost

Now, imagine that you skip the iPad 2 and just hold on until the iPad 3 next spring. For the sake of argument, let me guess that an iPad 1 post-iPad 3 announcement will fetch $150. Apple gear holds its value remarkably well, so it’s hard to say exactly. My guess is not more than $200, though, and not less than $100.  New iPad 3 $500 - iPad 1 $150 = $350.

iPad 1 to 3 = $350 in upgrade cost

I assert, then, that it’s a question of whether you want to pay $50 in order to use an iPad 2 during this coming year rather than sticking with the iPad 1. $50 sounds a whole lot less than $200. Granted, people are very good at rationalizing things (“it’s definitely worth it to spend $400 upgrading [twice] this $500 device that replaces neither my phone nor my computer!”). Don’t get me wrong: I love my iPad and find new uses for it all the time, but it’s more a thing of enjoyment than necessity.

Of course, if everyone decided to upgrade, then basic supply/demand would likely dictate a steeper drop in the price of used iPads.

One final note: I do wonder how cases fit into the equation. They’re just under 10% of the cost of the iPad itself.

Talking about Old Maid’s boringness led us to a much more fun pursuit of inventing other boring card games. I think I hit on what is possibly the world’s most boring card game. It’s also among the simplest to describe:

The deck of cards is placed in the middle of all of the players. The first player to draw a card loses.

I think a good name for this game would be Make It Stop (tm), because that would appear to be the point at which the game ends. One player will become bored enough to grab a card just to make the game end.

Before diving into Autofocus, I should talk about a high-level of what I’m looking for and why I stopped using Things. Paper doesn’t work well for me, because I don’t want to carry around a notebook. I always have my phone, so some way to access the data from my iPhone is important. Finally, I also have an iPad which is why I gave up on Things: the “cloud sync” never materialized, so synchronization is a hassle. I also thought that the total cost for Things (Mac+iPhone+iPad) is a bit out of line for a todo list ($80!).

One of the things that I like about Autofocus is that you review tasks on a page-by-page basis. This makes the notion of reviewing things less daunting and also aids the culling of the list to remove things that are never likely to actual feel like the most important thing to do. That’s an important aspect of Autofocus: doing what feels like it needs to be done and lightweight review is part of that.

I’ve been giving FocusPad a try. It’s available as a webapp (free!) and an iPhone app ($2) which automatically syncs with the web. FocusPad is designed specifically to support Autofocus. Your task list is separated into pages. When you finish a page, you can mark it so that it doesn’t show up any more when you navigate. You can cross an item off and re-add it to the last page (a common part of Autofocus). FocusPad also has a nice feature where you can move a task from one page to another on a given date, which means that you could create a “tickler” pad that will remind you of something you need to look at later.

On the whole, FocusPad looks like the most faithful, syncs-with-my-mobile implementation of Autofocus that I’ve seen. I wish it had keyboard shortcuts in the webapp and iPad support, but it certainly reaches the “good enough” level and I’ve enjoyed working with it so far.

Recently, we got an Ooma Telo for our home phone service. So far, the call quality has seemed very good (when Google Voice is not in front of it), the price is reasonable and the multi-ring feature comes close to our favorite feature of Google Voice, namely the ability to ring more than one phone when someone calls. The only problem with multi-ring is that it can only ring a single other phone.

This is particularly true since my blog posts automatically appear on Twitter and they would have been linking from Twitter to the original site and not to my site. It’s not a matter of wanting traffic to my site. It’s a matter of not wanting to link to the sites without comment. (I use delicious for that sometimes…)

For those of us who spend most of their time in Markdown, this tool allows to simply type a document using the Markdown syntax, and visualize its HTML equivalent immediately in a web-powered window, without leaving the app. In other words, it does the Markdown to HTML conversion in a breeze, and lets you email the resulting files.

The on-screen keyboard has a row of useful keys for Markdown. It also includes a web browser. No Dropbox integration (yet!), but I think they’re on the right track here and this could become a great way to write blog posts on the iPad.

Unlike the ClamCase, this one looks like a product that will be shipping soon.

Right now, Amazon is listing this at retail price ($100). I have a feeling that will drop by the time they ship. Meanwhile, MacMall is listing the item at $75.

“The goal is to make it seem politically advantageous for legislators to keep the American people in mind when making laws,” Weldon said. “Lawmakers are going to ask me, ‘Why should I care about the American people? What’s in it for me?’ And it will be up to me and my team to find some reason why they should consider putting poverty and medical care for children on the legislative docket.”

The Onion proves once again why it’s America’s Finest News Source. I wish that an article like this wasn’t so spot on.

I’ve seen how much my daughter has learned, through her own volition but with guidance and assistance from us. That’s what a “free school” is all about… it provides an environment for children to do that style of learning in an environment with other kids.

I can only imagine how much work they need to do to get their school going, and I know they can use any kind of help they can get. They have a wishlist full of supplies and assistance they can use, plus a kickstarter fundraiser going.

“Listen, the thing is, my wife is pregnant—like really pregnant—and she sent me on a quest for McDonald’s french fries. But she only likes them really fresh, like straight out of the fryer fresh, so I figured I’d just get some frozen, and fry them for her at home. You know how it is. Women—no accounting for’em, right?”

That attempt was met with a dose of McFAIL, so he next resorted to Facebook, where he found an accomplice:

I had pre-printed a list of items for said made up “Scavenger Hunt” (I basically Googled “Scavenger Hunt Lists” and added “Frozen McDonald’s french fries”.)

Kenji’s accomplice succeeded in snagging some frozen fries. He then measured the fries and fried them up in peanut oil and found out that they tasted just as good as they do at the golden arches. But, he hadn’t really figured out the secret, right?

He next resorted to “research”, which I assume means googling. The googling turned up an article that described exactly what McDonald’s does to turn potatoes into frozen fries:

The fries are then flumed out of the A.D.R. room to the “blancher.” The blancher is a large vessel filled with one hundred and seventy degree water. The trip through the blancher takes about fifteen minutes… After the fries leave the blancher, they are dried and then it’s off to the “fryer,” which is filled with one hundred percent vegetable oil. The oil is heated to three hundred and sixty five degrees and the fries take a fifty second dip before being conveyed to the “de-oiler shaker,” where excess oil is “shook off.

It turns out that, in this case, both Google and Facebook came through with their assigned tasks, but Google actually delivered the goods. What struck me about this article, other than the extreme detail about the french fries, is the fact that snagging some frozen fries was entirely irrelevant. Had he and his accomplice not done this at all, the article would have been shortened but had the same conclusion.

Lesson learned: before you hit the street, hit the goog.

The end of 2009 was exceedingly busy for both home and work. I thought that 2010 would get off to a less busy start, but that’s not how it went. Certain things became a bit easier, but work has been very busy for the past month.

The Bespin project “reboot” kicked off in October and has kept us chugging along ever since. I feel a lot of pressure to ship the software when I know there are people out there waiting for updates. I’m happy that we are about to ship the biggest Bespin release since the reboot began, and we’re in a great position for this quarter’s work.

As an experiment, I’m writing this blog post on my new iPad. One of my hopes for the ipad is that, unlike an iPhone, this will make a better blogging and general writing tool than the phone. Not only is it better at consuming content but it is certainly better for producing it. Typing on glass is less than ideal, but the landscape keyboard is definitely better than anything I could do on the iPhone.

Anyhow, that’s enough rambling. My apologies for posting a completely random and useless blog post. More considered writing will come forth another time.

In the past, I’ve posted random links on my blog (primarily Blue Sky On Mars, the blog I’ve had since 2001). I’m actually quite happy that there’s no need to post tidbits on my blog any more. I have Twitter for that, and my delicious bookmarks automatically get posted on twitter.

For those of you reading this blog and Blue Sky On Mars, you can expect to see more writing from me here in 2010 than in 2009, and I hope you enjoy it.

I can certainly agree with your call for people to report suspicious activity, though “normal people” have been known to report suspicious activity around completely normal other people, where trained security people would not. Thanks for that video link, because that can help to improve the kinds of things that those of us not trained in security can spot!

I’d like to highlight some alternative views of the overall situation that tend to get ignored in the media around events like this one. For example, air travel in the 2000s is the safest it’s been since the 1960s and is incredibly safe:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/skies-are-as-friendly-as-ever-911-al.html

Put another way, “The chances of being hurt by someone who got past airport security, even without things like the full-body scanners being deployed after this latest panic, are smaller than dying in your dentist’s office from an anaesthesia error.”

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2010/01/big_numbers_and_air_travel.php

Another way to look at the Christmas Day incident is that security actually worked:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/christmas_bombe.html

Reality is unpredictable and it’s impossible (and undesirable!) to get to 100% secure:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01brooks.html?emc=eta1

I think it pays to focus on the things that truly make us more secure, rather than the security theater we are subjected to every time we fly. Bruce Schneier: “Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.”

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/separating_expl.html

I sincerely hope we can see more of that kind of discussion in the media.

Alas, for me, this particular bundle doesn’t really have any software I want. Maybe next bundle…

We’ve got what amounts to a reverse Nuremberg defense, where Bush administration officials are let off the hook because they were only giving orders.

From Sound familiar? Apple launches a revolution - and then gets overtaken

Apple sure is fun to write about, isn’t it?

From what I can see, Apple likes to make neat products that they would personally enjoy using and that can be sold for a reasonable profit. The Observer article chose to mention how Apple lost a tremendous amount of market share in personal computers within a few years of the Mac’s debut (let’s ignore the fact that that also occurred within a few years of Steve Jobs’ departure). The Observer did not choose to focus on portable music players, a market that Apple stepped into and still holds a dominant position in.

In the case of music players, Apple’s cheapest iPod is $50. I’ve seen MP3 players with comparable features for $20. Apple competes in music players not by driving prices down, but by driving features up. There is a low end that they will not touch. They same is true of Macintosh computers: Apple will compete only in price segments in which they can compete profitably. Though they ensure that their prices are not insane, they also don’t worry too much about competing on price. They compete instead on fit and finish and the software.

What does this tell us about Apple and phones? Unlike music players, the cell phone market is already quite established. As the Observer points out, Apple has had only about 1% market share. Apple doesn’t care. They may have only 1% market share, but they have a product that is generating billions a year for them. As the iPhone line expands and improves over time, Apple’s market share will likely expand as well. But, that’s not the goal: the goal is making profitable products that people want to use.

So, back to the Observer article: they say that Apple started a revolution but will be overtaken. While I am pretty sure that Apple will never have a dominant market share position in cell phones (say more than 30%), I don’t think it’s certain that they will be overtaken in the new segment that they have created: portable computing and communication devices. They have first mover advantage with the App Store and have already built a thriving ecosystem around the iPhone. Those 20 million phones sold, plus some number of iPod Touches, represent a platform for Apple to grow, rather than “just a phone”.

Apple’s ultimate success (or failure) with the iPhone should not be measured relative to cell phone market share, but relative to ultra portable computing devices in general.