Serge's lil' Blog

Nobody Cares About Apps

Serge Boucher — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 02:25:14 +0000

Via Daring Fireball, I came upon a post by Mark Damon Hughes arguing that Apps Are the New Apps, or in a few more words, that success in the smartphone market is "all about who has the most good apps." Ergo, Windows Phone 7 is doomed.

I'm not so sure. Windows Phone 7 may or may not succeed commercially, but if it fails I don't think it will be primarily because of its App Market. Although Hughes' argument seems plausible at first glance — all computing platforms, game consoles, etc. are only as succesful as their apps are good — for me it starts breaking down around paragraph 2:

Right now, and for the forseeable future, that's iOS. Android's store is mostly junk, often outright frauds or viruses, but it's on the chart. Everybody else is in the gutter, under 50,000
[…]

[Developers] ship on the best platform: iOS. If you have time and money, you maybe target the also-ran Android […] This costs a lot, because us iOS devs are not cheap; even Android devs aren't as cheap as you'd think. […] Developing on the gutter platforms like Symbian, Blackberry, or Windows Phone 7 won't even pay the bills.

Small problem with this argument: by market share, the also-ran is iOS. How is that possible if what people look for in a smartphone is a huge number of good apps? Yet Hughes seems absolutely convinced of that:

When you ask people what they do with their phones, they talk about apps. […] Small talk now consists of "check out these awesome apps I found!"

I think the issue here is sampling bias. Hughes is an iOS developer, and presumably knows disproportionately many people who use iOS and are excited about apps. Talking with my dev friends, I also hear: you should try this app! Most often it's an iOS app, sometimes it's an Android app (I use both) but yes, apps are exciting. Among devs and tech-enthusiasts.

Outside this bubble, things are very different. When one of my non-geek friends, and yes I do have a few of those, asks me for advice on what smartphone to buy, apps almost never enter the picture. (By the way, phones in Belgium are only sold unsubsidized, so these "non-geeks" are still ready to spend more than 500€ on a phone. We're not talking about luddites.) Here's a typical request: "My mom wants a smart phone. She wants to be able to show her friends pictures, answer emails, go on facebook or other random sites." All current major platforms can do this without third-party apps, and for some use cases, Windows Phone 7 might be the best.

Obviously smartphones are much better with apps. But what they really need is a few good apps. Mail, twitter, facebook clients. Kindle. Angry Birds. Maybe Spotify. Windows Phone 7 has all of these, and it has much better games than Android. Sure, it doesn't have anything like the breadth of creative, high-quality apps that the iPhone has, because indie developers are much more likely to make money on iOS than on any other platform. However, the "must-have" apps are not built by indie developers. They're financed by big firms like facebook who want their mobile apps on every platform.

If Windows Phones become as desirable out-of-the-box as the competition, and arguably they already are, people will try them in the store, confirm with the vendor that, yes, facebook works, and buy them. Granted, someone who already bought 40 apps on another platform is unlikely to switch, but those are a minority: many people have yet to buy their first smartphone, Apple has less than 30% of the smartphone market, and Android users rarely buy apps.

I also disagree with John Gruber about the problem of WP7 dev tools being windows-only:

I also suspect, like Hughes, that it’s a big problem for Microsoft that developers need to use Windows to develop for Windows Phone. Sure, a majority of all “programmers” in the world may well still be using Windows, but because of iOS, an overwhelming majority of the best mobile app programmers in the world are on Mac OS X.

My guess is that many, perhaps most of these programmers switched to the Mac because of the opportunity provided by iOS. They're still familiar with Windows. If demand for Windows Phone 7 development increases, they'll simply dual-boot Windows 7 and start coding.

Now I'm not saying that this will necessarily happen. Microsoft is perfectly capable of screwing this up. Customers may fail to warm to the platform in spite of its critical appeal. Perhaps the carriers will insist on pushing Android no matter what. And yet, as long as the big guys continue to target Windows Phone 7, which seems to be the case, and Microsoft continues improving what is already a remarkable platform, reports of WP7's demise seem highly premature.

Sexism, Science and Journalism

Serge Boucher — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:35:50 +0000

Earlier today I stumbled on a Slate article by Mark Regnerus pondering Why Young Men Have the Upper Hand in Bed, Even When They’re Failing in Life. It raises many interesting questions, the most prominent of which being, Why on Earth is this dumbass writing for Slate?

The core argument of the article seems to be:

Women have little interest in sex except as part of a long-term relationship leading to marriage and children
Many observed sexual relationships aren't long-term nor destined for marriage or children
It follows that men currently have the upper hand on the dating scene. To explain why, we turn to "sexual economics".

My beef is mostly with proposition number 1. First, while I certainly have no knowledge of Mr. Regnerus' sexual prowesses, I can't help but mention that while I'm a computer nerd who never hits the gym, I've been lucky enough to personally establish some anecdotal evidence that his premise is bullshit. But never mind that, let's see how he justifies it:

[O]n average, men want sex more than women do. Call it sexist, call it whatever you want—the evidence shows it's true. In one frequently cited study, attractive young researchers separately approached opposite-sex strangers on Florida State University's campus and proposed casual sex. Three-quarters of the men were game, but not one woman said yes.

So scientists have found that approaching strange women and offering to take them to your place so they can have sex with you is not a very effective strategy. Who knew?

How dim do you have to be to read this result and unequivocally conclude that women want sex less than men do? Really, you can't think of any other reason for this result? Let's think about it for about twelve seconds: I bet more than once you've heard a promiscuous girl being berated as a "slut". You're just as likely to have heard a promiscuous guy admired as a "stud". Can you even imagine the reverse occurring? Do words for "male slut" or "female stud" even exist? What do you think that says about social views on promiscuity? Don't you think that might play a role in how members of both sexes react to offers of casual sex from total strangers? And that's without even considering that the overwhelming majority of sexual predators are male, and that everyone knows this.

Now, as a general tip, whenever you hear or read anyone saying "I know this sound outrageous, but the science says…", make sure you check the science. Here's that frequently cited study:

Of course, the sociological interpretation — that women are interested in love while men are interested in sex — is not the only possible interpretation of these data. It may be, of course, that both men and women were equally interested in sex, but that men associated fewer risks with accepting a sexual invitation than did women. Men may be more confident of their ability to fight back a physical assault than are women. Also, the remnants of the double standard may make women afraid to accept the man's invitation.

Another general tip: if you must quote an article in writing, unless you enjoy looking like an idiot, you should probably read it first.

Back to Slate:

I know: Women love sex too. But research like this consistently demonstrates that men have a greater and far less discriminating appetite for it.

This is not entirely wrong, but it's incomplete. It's worth mentioning that mostly-heterosexual women are much more likely to experiment with homosexual sex than mostly-heterosexual men are. (Again, not to question Mr. Regnerus' social life, but this is the kind of knowledge most people eventually pick up just by virtue of being alive.) This would seem to put a serious dent in the whole "women are mostly into sex for the children" theory.

But, more precisely, women are much more likely to report having flirted with same-sex experimentation. We don't know what men and women are actually doing, we can only compare what they admit they're doing. And this applies to just about every study about sex drive and promiscuity.

And yet everybody pretends these biases don't exist. What's the word for "male slut"? "Womanizer" is defined as "A habitual seducer of women." Compare that with "slut: (countable, derogatory) a sexually promiscuous woman or girl." How can one ignore that kind of societal reality when discussing how the different sexes react to offerings of sexual gratification?

This affects a lot more than sexuality. Among my crowd, it's hard to escape the fact that computer science and engineering are male-dominated fields. Even feminists such as myself who deplore this reality are not sure what, if anything, should be done about it. Quotas are far from a perfect solution. Other policies take ages to have any effect. And, yes, it's not impossible that there exists benign reasons why these fields are less attractive to women than men.

But one would be crazy to argue that the current imbalance is the result of a level playing field. I could list many reasons why potentially great female engineers never even consider the career, but Zach Weiner makes this point more elegantly than I can.

I'm not saying that women necessarily have the same sex drive as men. Nor that there cannot in principle be any differences in abilities for different tasks among the sexes — although everything I've seen tells me that the often heard "girls suck at math" is completely false. My point is that as long as these unacknowledged prejudices are entrenched in our society, it is extremely hard to draw any conclusion on what each gender is fundamentally good at, or what it fundamentally wants. (Arguably those "fundamentals" are really meaningless, because all relationships take place inside a social context.) But as long as we overwhelmingly accept these prejudices as "truths", those who fall outside their bounds will be less happy, and contribute less to society than they could.

Also, if you're writing a paper about gender attitudes towards sex, and you ignore this entire societal context, you're a fucking idiot.

Is Facebook Too Crowded?

Serge Boucher — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:59:43 +0000

Uncrunched via Strategyist:

[M]ost of us aren’t going to spend the time removing friends on Facebook. Instead many of us are using new social networks, like Path (we’re an investor) and the upcoming Just.Me (we’re also investors, guess how much we like this space) to start fresh. Facebook is for thousands of people you don’t know. The start fresh new services can be finely crafted from the start to include only your actual friends. And they’re made for mobile.

Michael Arrington isn't making any sense. If taking a few seconds to remove an unwanted friend from facebook takes "too long", what about rebuilding your entire social network from scratch ? What about doing that regularly, each time a new up-and-coming social networking platform looks promising, because you never know what's going to take off, and anyway the last one is now "too crowded"?

I made a similar mistake about a year ago when I stopped using RSS readers. I was following so many blogs that I spent a ridiculous amount of time just trying, and failing, to keep up with the flow. I then noticed that this was much less of a problem on twitter. Because it doesn't care about "read" and "unread" items, twitter makes you feel a lot less guilty about not reading a few updates. So I uninstalled NetNewsWire and started following my favorite blogs on twitter instead.

This worked well for a while, but over time I gradually realized that for some of these blogs I really, really want to read every single post. Twitter does not make that easy, for the same reason that made it attractive to me at first: it doesn't keep track of read articles. Thus you need to manually skim lists of tweets, trying to remember which ones point to blog posts you've already read. I ended up just regularly visiting my favorite blogs by typing URLs in the good ol' fashioned browser. Of course, not knowing when a given blog had been updated, I spent much time loading pages without a single new post, or scrolling down a lot looking for the latest thing I'd read.

Only a few weeks ago did I reflect on my ridiculous behavior long enough to remember that there's a cool 12-year old technology that makes for a much-smarter way of doing things. So I reinstalled NetNewsWire, but this time I'm only subscribing to the blogs I absolutely want to read exhaustively. And if this list changes for any reason, I will ruthlessly unsubscribe from low-quality time-wasters.

Well, I wish. If history's any guide, a couple months from now I'll have 2000 unread posts on 43 different blogs. There's still a lesson behind this story though: Before you give in to frustration and look for a different platform, make sure the problem doesn't come from your expectations and behaviors.

If your expectation is that you can follow dozens of blogs, never skip a post, do something useful with your life and not feel completely miserable, no platform can help you. Some may be more efficient than others, but that will give you only incremental gains at best. At worst, the added efficiency only encourages you to subscribe to more feeds. Similarly, while OmniFocus can be a more efficient task manager than Excel, as long as you regularly review and cull your lists, Excel does the job very well. On the other hand, if you don't do reviews, even OmniFocus won't really help you make the best use of your time.

So the way to deal with facebook overload is not to look for a better platform, but to change your behavior. You can friend everybody you ever meet. You can read all the updates from all your friends. You can spend less than 8 hours a day on facebook. But you can't do all three. Pick.

Sure, facebook's news feed can quickly become overwhelming. Everyone is on facebook, and many of them are playing MafiaWars or FarmVille or some other hell fresh out of Zynga's Factory of Doom. But it gives you tools to help tame the flow, for example by blocking certain users or apps. If that's not enough, you can unfriend people. Or you can do what I do, and stop caring that maybe you're missing out on stuff. If it's that important, you'll learn about it outside facebook.

I'm not saying facebook is perfect. Of course, I wish it gave me even better filtering tools. But to think that a just-released platform is going to do a better job, in fact such a better job that it's worth rebuilding your entire network over there, that's just madness. Yes, my timeline is cleaner on Path than on facebook, but that's entirely because it's easier to organize updates from 7 friends than from 500+.

Actually, I'm pretty sure Arrington doesn't mean what he says. His post is only a transparent attempt to generate publicity for the social networks backed by his fund. I'm happy to play along with this, because I really like Path. (I haven't tried the other ones.) It's not going to replace facebook, nor I think is it intended to. But it's a beautiful little app, and you should try it out. Just don't think for a moment that it would be better than facebook at doing what facebook does.

Meet the Santorums

Serge Boucher — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:13:06 +0000

There is a lot of discussion on liberal blogs about how social über-conservative Rick Santorum's wife might or might not have had an abortion. I find the coverage of this story troubling on at least two levels.

First, I can hardly believe how callous every journalist writing about this seems to be. Don't get me wrong: I have slightly less respect for the Senator than I do for toxic pond scum. But even pond scum don't deserve to go through such a horrific experience. We're talking about a couple who saw their fourth child die in just about the worst way imaginable, nearly taking his mother with him. For me the story only confirms how immoral and dangerous the Santorums' "values" are, but can't we show a little compassion for what they went through, no matter their somewhat creepy reaction to it? The only trace of sentiment I've read comes from Irin Carmon, who feels "uncomfortable about having gone this far up Karen Santorum's womb." So pain and fear and sickness and a child dying in his father's arms while his mother fights for her life don't faze you, but you're really uncomfortable talking about anatomy? Unbelievable.

The more important question is why are critics content merely with charging Rick Santorum with hypocrisy? It is by far the least onerous charge you can make about him based on this story, and besides, it is completely false. On the contrary, this confirms two things about Santorum's position on abortion: he and his wife fundamentally believe in it, and it is unambiguously immoral.

Shortly after having undergone risky intrauterine surgery to correct a malformation while 19-weeks pregnant, Karen Santorum develops a high fever and rushes to the hospital with her husband. The doctors quickly tell them that she is only hours away from life-threatening septic shock and needs antibiotics. They also say her body is going to react by miscarrying to expel the source of the infection, and that they can give her drugs to ease the process. Karen answers "We’re not inducing labor, that’s an abortion. No way. That isn’t going to happen. I don’t care what happens." Later when labour starts as predicted she asks her doctors to "make it stop". They refuse. The baby is born, and dies a couple of hours later.

As gut-wrenchingly sad as this is, it also shows moral confusion on a scale that almost defies comprehension. What is the principle behind Karen saying "[…] that's an abortion. No way. That isn't going to happen. I don't care what happens."? It can't be the sanctity of life. If all human life is sacred, surely delaying labour is wrong when it puts a viable life at risk while doing nothing to save a doomed one. If the principle is not to artificially oppose nature, or God's will, then why attempt to correct the initial malformation with surgery? The only coherent way to reduce the Santorums' actions to fundamental principles is if one of these unquestioned principles is "Abortion is wrong. No matter the circumstances."

In the aftermath, Rick Santorum said: "Obviously, if it was a choice of whether both Karen and the child are going to die or just the child is going to die, I mean it's a pretty easy call." Indeed, that seems a devastating but inescapable conclusion to me. But it is one that they only came to at the last possible moment. Of course no-one can blame them for what either of them said or did during such an emotionally trying event, but this sentence is not a direct quote relayed by innocent bystanders. Rather it is one of the rare quotes from the story as told by the Santorums themselves, after the fact, and they, with the benefit of hindsight, still chose to include the "No way I'm having an abortion" line. I can only assume they think this stance is morally laudable, despite the eventual inevitability of making the "pretty easy call" that, as Brad DeLong opines, is "one that Rick Santorum claims to be in favor of making a crime."

Athough most in the media apparently don't want to mention it, this moral confusion is not unconnected to the Santorums being catholic fundamentalists. Don't get me wrong: I know many Christians are horrified at the idea of making a life-saving operation criminal. Even in the United States, nearly two-thirds of Catholics don't agree that abortion is morally wrong in all cases. Catholicism is neither a required nor a sufficient condition for making the wrong moral choices in these matters. But I can't for the life of me imagine how a secular person could ever reach the moral position the Santorums found during this story. Their stance on abortion doesn't come from the sanctity of life, nor from respect for natural law. It is all about the church declaring that abortion is evil. If you genuinely believe the Pope to be the Vicar of Christ on Earth, this is likely to trump all other considerations, be it medicine, common sense, or your responsibility to your already-born children. The sheer untenability of this position goes some way to explain falling church attendance in much of the world.

Thus the scariest thing about the Santorums is that they're not at all hypocrites: they're perfectly sincere. In matters of life-and-death, their first reference is the preachings of their church, above what the doctors tell them, above what simple common-sense would tell them is in the best interests of all their children — including those already born. And they believe this gives them the moral high-ground. Not only is Rick Santorum defending a position that many consider morally repugnant, he wants those who'd make a different choice to be prosecuted as murderers. And he thinks this gives him the moral high-ground.

In perhaps the most quoted passage of John Stuart Mill's autobiography, he describes his father's attitude towards religion thus:

"As it was, his aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind as that of Lucretius; he regarded it with the feeling due not a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality; by setting up factitious excellencies — belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind — and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues; but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals, making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful."

Yes indeed, former Senator and presidential hopeful Santorum's "values" are not connected to the good of human kind, or even of this own family. Mill's father died in 1836, Lucretius around 55BC. Yet in the 21st century, their argument on religion's potentially toxic influence on morality remains frighteningly relevant.

How Everything is Going to Shit

Serge Boucher — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:20:00 +0000

Two eternal principles of human societies are, first, things tend to get better over time, and second, at any given moment, everyone believes they're getting much, much worse. I'm aware of the contradiction, and try to keep a realistic and optimistic worldview. Sometimes, though, it's really hard.

This morning, for example. I can't sleep, so around 5AM I get dressed, plonk myself on the couch and start watching the last republican debate. (Yeah, I know, big mistake.) A vicious back-and-forth erupts while discussing foreign policy. Asked to clarify how eager she is to start a war against a country of 70 million which has not attacked anyone in the last two centuries, one of the candidates answers, Otherwise, an unspecified number of American lives might be at risk. Oh, we have no choice then. Let's do it. It's nice that waging war is apparently risk-free.

Her opponent counters that there is no evidence, no evidence at all, that Iran is even trying to build a nuclear weapon. And he says it with a straight face, on national television. (I'm assuming. I saw it on YouTube.)

Imagine a world where such clowns are competing for the most important job on Earth. Where both are supported by millions of people, can raise fortunes to help their campaign, are taken seriously by the media and the entire nation. Where both of them already hold political positions of considerable power.

Yup, that's the world we're living in.

I switch to the presumably less retarded realm of economic news, where the debate du jour is about the proper protocol for one senior economist to call bullshit on another senior economist. Sure, that's important.

My father enters the room and hands me today's paper. There's a group photo of what looks like haredi jews wearing the striped-shirts-cum-yellow-star garbs often seen in Europe during the 1940's. A young girl is throwing a timid but well-intentioned Nazi salute while watching the camera. Please, oh please, let this story be about a Guinness World Record for Most Insensitive School Play Ever. Or Dieudonné's latest musical.

It's not. It's a protest by an actual group of Haredi comparing the secular Israeli state's hostility to their ultra-orthodox ways with Naziism's hostility to the existence of Jews. You see, a Jew walking the streets in Nazi Germany might be sent away to die in a labour camp. A Haredi walking the streets in Jerusalem might see a woman. Yeah, I can understand how that's totally the same thing. In a related story, grown men have been publicly rebuked for picketing a girl school, spitting on the pupils and calling them "nazi whores". Those girls are 6 to 8 years-old.

Let me make this absolutely clear: those concentration-camp-reenacters are not protesting the spitting-on-8-year-old-girls guys. They are the spitting-on-8-year-old-girls guys. They're protesting the rebuke that followed their spitballs, because they feel it's a totally inappropriate reaction to their completely reasonable spiritual lifestyle, which happens to involve standing outside schools shouting insults at 8 year-olds. I disagree. I think a rebuke is an entirely appropriate response. So is a baseball bat, thumbscrews or any combination of slick Krav Maga moves like they apparently do down there. You know what would be inappropriate ? Forcing them into one of those medieval sarcophagi, you know, the kind with all the nails on the inside, whaddya-call-'em?… Yeah, iron maidens, that's the name. Yes, that would be inappropriate. Definitely an overeaction. Somewhat.

Anyway…

Below this abomination, two Israeli academics debate the relation between faith and secular law in their country. The phrase "a small but vocal minority of religious fascist nutjobs" is conspicuously — and depressingly — absent.

I turn the page, thinking things can hardly get any worse. There's a photo of what can only be a female version of a Jesus-on-the-cross statue. I mean, that can't possibly be an actual, living, breathing human being. No way anyone does such a thing.

Uh, yes way: "Found in the cave where she'd been imprisoned, starved and tortured for her five-month long marriage, 15-year old Sahar Gul…"

OK, I give up. I just don't care anymore. I throw the paper towards a dark corner, very far away, switch to Youtube and search for "cat".

I know these are times of good resolutions, and many of you are probably pledging to exercise more, drink less, be more punctual, whatever… For my part, I mostly wish I could read less news.

Addendum: I wrote this while the first votes in the process that will eventually determine the next leader of the free world were being counted. The result: a shameless mannequin tied with a man who believes that mutually consenting adults do not have a right to privacy. "Land of the Free" indeed. The only sane and principled candidate scored 0.6%.

Escaping the Walled Garden

Serge Boucher — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:48:10 +0000

A few weeks ago, as my iPhone was doing its best to wake me up, it suddenly started vibrating constantly. After a few seconds the screen went black, but the vibration continued uninterrupted for nearly a minute before the phone seemingly shut down. It was six in the morning and I was in a hurry, so after trying and failing to turn it back on, I popped the SIM out, grabbed a Galaxy SII that was conveniently lying on my desk, got dressed and left for the train station.

I had recently read a few articles about how Apple kept its customers in "shackles", prisoners in a "jail made cool", so I figured this was a nice occasion to do a little experiment. I have used an iPhone as my primary smartphone since the day the 3G came out in Belgium. (I bought the Galaxy a few months ago for testing purposes but never really used it for anything personal.) Although I regularly use Windows and Linux, all my important info lives in Mac OS X. My contacts and calendars are in MobileMe/iCloud. My music is in iTunes. I am, in short, pretty much as reliant on the Apple ecosystem as it is possible to be.

Nursing my morning coffee in the train station, I wondered, How locked-in am I? If my iPhone really is dead, is my only realistic option to visit an Apple store and buy a new one? How painful would it be to move to Android right now, cold-turkey so to speak… Is that even possible without leaving much of my data on the other side of the fence?

I mentally went through the iOS apps I rely upon and started looking for equivalents on the Android Market. As my train was about to leave, the most pressing need was an audiobook. I found the Audible app, installed it, logged in, and before the train had fully pulled out of the station I was listening to Sex at Dawn, from right where I'd left it on my iPhone the day before. So far, so good, and it's nice that the Android Audible app lets you download full books on 3G — iOS will only do that over WiFi for some reason.

When I stepped out of the train 40 minutes later, I had access to all my emails as well as my accounts on foursquare, facebook, twitter, whatsapp, path, skype, squarespace, and doodle. I could get to all my files on dropbox, all my kindle books and the latest issue of the Economist. I'd found out that even SNCB and STIB (public transport operators for Belgium and Brussels respectively) had Android apps functionally equivalent to their iOS counterparts. All in all, I found only two sore points: OmniFocus and my bank's app were apparently iOS-only. Fine, I can live without these two.

I can't, however, live without my contacts and calendars. First I tried to find some kind of iCloud client for Android. Apple doesn't publish one, shame on them, but a few third-party apps claimed to do the trick. None of them really worked though: getting existing contacts and appointments to show up on the phone was easy, but adding data to iCloud from Android was not.

Eventually I figured out that if I was to escape Apple's clutches, I had to escape entirely, so I changed tack. I exported all my iCloud contacts and appointments in standard vCard/iCal format, then imported them all in a Google account that syncs to my phone. This took four minutes and works perfectly to this day.

The only thing missing from my new favorite smartphone was my music, and that had to wait until I got back home. Once there, I plugged the phone to my main computer where my iTunes library lives. I have thousands of songs, most of them ripped from my CDs plus quite a few bought from the iTunes Store. None of them are DRMed. I clic-and-dragged my "On the Go" playlist to a folder on the Samsung, went to fix dinner while the copy was going on, and when I got back I finally had a perfectly set up smartphone with everything I needed on it. The entire thing had taken perhaps two hours of my time, most of it on the train. I wonder if Eric S. Raymond seriously believes that Foxconn employees can find another job quicker than that.

This raises a serious question: when one can leave iOS behind in a couple hours taking all his important data with him, what is it that these people are talking about when they say Apple has its users "locked-in"? Granted, staying on Android would mean forgoing OmniFocus mobile, but it is hardly Apple's fault if Omni insists on developing exclusively for Apple platforms. All the money I spent on iOS apps would be forfeit, but that is always the case when one leaves a platform: your DS games don't magically become PSP games when you trade your Nintendo console for a Sony, and switching from Mac to Windows on the Desktop means buying all your apps again, even though both platforms are open. It is also impossible to play TV shows or Movies bought on iTunes on Android devices, but this is a case against DRM in general, not Apple. Anyway, I am unaware of any legal way to get hollywood movies without DRMs, so that particular wall doesn't seem to be of Apple's making.

In the meantime, while my iPhone turned out perfectly fine, I decided to stay with Android for a little while anyway. It has become quite a nice mobile OS, and it's time I get to know it better on a day-to-day basis. When and if I get tired of it, I can always move back.

How is it again that iPhone users surrender their freedom to Apple? Beats me.

Me, Cooking

Serge Boucher — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 09:30:59 +0000

There are few things more satisfying in life than sharing a home-cooked meal with close friends. I took to cooking rather late, but I now love it, and whenever I invite people over at my place, I tend to aim for ridiculously sophisticated dishes way beyond my skill level. The evening quickly reaches a point (usually about twenty minutes before the first guest arrives) where I completely lose control of the situation, make plans as I go along, ask guests to help with all and everything, and pray that things somehow turn out alright.

We never eat exactly what I had planned, and we don't usually get to the entree before midnight, but we have loads of fun, and most guests want to come back, so even though I'm obviously doing everything wrong, I'll stick with the fun out-of-control way in favor of the reasonable and proper one.

This week I got to do it twice, and as a small tribute to my friend's great blog Cooking: Fuck Yeah!, I'd like to share that experience with you.

Tuesday

I'm back from grocery shopping, and inexplicably it's two hours later than 4PM. It's obvious most of the prep I had planned will have to get done after the guests arrive. Oh well.

Grate chocolate

Combine grated chocolate with "fresh espresso"

Pour in the chocolate/coffee mix in an ice cube tray and put it in the freezer

Butter a cake mold and put it in the fridge

Guests should be there fifteen minutes from now. I'm completely screwed. Luckily Fabien calls to say he'll be a bit late. I tell him to be thirty minutes late, forward the message to the others, and start slicing garlic.

Fry to turn them into chips

They're supposedly needed for course number two so at this moment this seems like the best use of my time, although about five minutes from now I'll completely forget about the chips and won't remember them until the next day when I find them under a dirty plate.

Seed a pomegranate

Thinly slice a piece of ginger

Pick two bunches of mint leaves

Get coriander, thai chillies, spring onions

Combine all these in a liquidizer, but don't turn it on yet

Guests will be there 8 minutes from now, so I take a six-minute shower, change, and with 20 seconds left to setup the table I go for minimalist chic and a subtle reference to Mondrian

Pick basil leaves

Fabien arrives. He's a great cook and I'm obviously completely overwhelmed, so he offers his help. I throw 12 radishes two carrots two bags of lettuce and a bowl in his direction and say "chop".

In the meantime I use a speed-peeler to make ribbons out of courgettes and asparagus.

Julie and Phil arrive bringing champagne, so we're just forced to take a break and make a toast.

A few minutes later I ask whether anyone is hungry. Of course they are. So I ditch whatever is left of my plan and sprint for the first course.

Slice, combine, add basil, olive oil, salt and pepper, and here's your first course.

Eat. Discuss. Enjoy the evening. Be happy that your second course has been ready for twenty-four hours, and you only have to pour it in glasses, add tortilla chips and serve it.

Now there's a tough call: there's a bit of work to get the third course ready, but the champagne is nearly gone. So, start chopping fresh tuna and coriander leaves…

Midway through chopping, take a break, drop a hibiscus flower and creme de violette in four flutes and fill with californian sparkling white.

(The hibiscus flowers are great by the way. They taste really good, but more importantly they get your guests to ask why there's a dead mollusk in their glass.)

Remember that liquidizer with spring onions and whatnot in it ? Turn it on. Pour what comes out on serving plates, top with your chopped tuna and coriander, a dollop of sour cream and a few quartered cherry tomatoes — voila, third course.

Now that I got some food into my guests, all I need to do is buy enough time to catch up with all the prep I should have done about five hours ago but didn't. A good cocktail is great for that.

Press half a lime in each glass

Add pomegranate seed, ginger slices (remember?) and muddle

You can add a splash of grenadine if you want. Then a bunch of mint leaves (remember?) and muddle very gently (Best way to ruin any kind of mojito is to bash the leaves too hard.)

Add ice cubes and stir

Add white rum, stir again, then top with seltzer, stir one last time and serve. Check out there for a photo of the final drink.

Tear open a pack of flour tortillas and pop them in the oven on low heat.

At this point Fa asks again if there's anything he can do. I tell him I need guacamole. I tell him he's authorized to take any action he deems necessary to bring about the existence of guacamole in this apartment. I tell him there's a couple avocados in the fridge. Probably.

Chop a few radishes and add them to the courgette strips from earlier on. Throw a couple fish filets on a griddle pan.

Get the warm tortillas on individual plates and divide the courgette-salad between them. Top with the grilled fish fillets.

Add dollops of sour cream and guacamole, a couple of coriander leaves, and there's your fourth course.

She seems happy about it.

We're now on the home stretch, but I suddenly remember that the desert dough is nowhere near ready. So everyone gathers in the kitchen, taking turns whipping up egg whites and incorporating almond powder in the chocolate. I work on some approximation of a grilled peanut sauce. Fa makes salsa verde.

Phil and I grill the steaks.

(Let's pretend I was always aiming for medium-well and didn't overcook anything.)

The chopped salad from four hours ago makes a comeback, and I realize I'm only about halfway through the recipe. The steaks are ready though, so we scrap the rest of the recipe, throw lime juice and olive oil and salt and pepper on the salad, toss it. Surely it can't be too bad. It isn't.

Magically everything sort of comes together, and we serve the salad and steaks and stuff. Everyone's too full to eat, but we all agree the combination of sauces works quite well. I get congratulated for the wine, even though in all honesty I can't say it's my achievement.

While we're eating the steaks, the desert cooks in the oven

Note to self: clean the oven.

Since fruit enhances all chocolate dishes, I make a couple orange slices

And there's the desert

That photo was taken at five to one. It'll be an hour before anyone realizes how late it is or that they're working the next morning. My planning failed miserably and we had way too much to eat, but apart from that, great night !

Wednesday

Do the dishes

(More precisely, clean the few dirty dishes that remained after Jubib, Phil and Fa went through most of them. I can't thank them enough for that.)

Thursday

Cleverly choose to go grocery shopping 7 minutes before the start of the storm of the century.

The cooking starts same as tuesday. Grate chocolate, mix with coffee, pour into ice cube trays. Leave for a walk and notice autumn is already here.

Back home, realize the chocolate dough is frozen solid so put it on a pan of boiling water to melt.

Thinly slice 8 shallots.

Put half of them in a bowl and cover with white vinegar

Chop ginger

Guests arrive and are hungry, so, as before, make your first course a caprese

Remove pit from five plums, chop them and fry them with ginger and star anise

Lower fire and let simmer for 10 minutes, then store the sauce in the fridge

Meanwhile, pick leaves from two bunches dragon

Mix with your vinegarred shallots, olive oil, and a dozen halved grapes

Divide between serving plates

Shave a few pieces of dry goat cheese on top of each

Voila, second course

Fry remaining shallots and ginger slices in sunflower oil until they're crispy

Combine lime juice, lime zest, soy sauce and coriander leaves in a bowl, then slice raw halibut in small chunks.

Drop a bunch of watercress on each of your serving plates. Lay raw fish chunks on top of them.

Top fish with grilled onion and ginger

Garnish with coriander vinaigrette

Course three, ready to serve

Eat it !

Time for the final course. Get out a piece of good pork filet

Cut it in 5 mm slices. This is the reason you bought a really good knife

Cover with cling film and bash with your heaviest pan until you get the thickness down to 3mm. (This is by far my favorite part of the recipe.)

Coat with your plum sauce

Roll them up

Tie the rolls with string

Put them all in a bamboo basket and cook for 18 minutes

In the meantime put your coffee/chocolate ice cubes in your baking mold

Fill with chocolate dough and put in the oven

Get your cooked pork off the heat

Lay each roll on top of a bed of spring onions

Top with soy sauce

Voilà, main course ready

Cut it open and see how gorgeous it looks

Just like the last time, the final step is making orange slices

Get your fondants out of the oven and put them each on a separate plate

…and the last course is ready

How Much Tax is Too Much?

Serge Boucher — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:43:51 +0000

On this season's last Real Time with Bill Maher, Stephen Bannon, whose only claim to fame seems to be he directed an up and coming documentary about Sarah Palin (counterfactually named "The Undefeated"), voiced a frequently heard right-wing "fact" on the US Economy:

"It's a line in the sand. We don't want, under any circumstance, any increase in revenue.[…] The federal government takes too much tax revenue today."

So as always in these cases I expected someone on the panel, or maybe the moderator, to ask "What do you mean by 'too much' ?", and as always I was disappointed. Neil DeGrasse Tyson came close, but his vague question was never answered.

Really, how does one make the case that the US government takes too much revenue ? I'm guessing they think the US would be a better country if its government took less revenue. That's a hard proposition to test. What we can do is compare the US with all the countries which take less in tax revenue (as percentage of GDP):

United States	26.9
South Africa	26.9
South Korea	26.8
Kazakhstan	26.8
Croatia	26.6
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	26.5
Samoa	25.5
Venezuela	25.0
Solomon Islands	24.7
Papua New Guinea	24.5
Belarus	24.2
Saint Lucia	23.1
Uruguay	23.1
Cape Verde	23.0
Colombia	23.0
Albania	22.9
Argentina	22.9
Morocco	22.3
Suriname	22.1
Fiji	21.8
Georgia	21.7
Belize	21.6
Kyrgyzstan	21.4
Jordan	21.1
Uzbekistan	21.0
Lithuania	20.9
Ghana	20.8
Malawi	20.7
Maldives	20.5
Turkmenistan	20.2
Macau	20.1
Djibouti	20.0
Senegal	19.2
Mauritius	19.0
Gambia	18.9
The Bahamas	18.7
Chile	18.6
Kenya	18.4
Cameroon	18.2
Azerbaijan	17.8
Nicaragua	17.8
Vanuatu	17.8
India	17.7
Burundi	17.4
São Tomé and Príncipe	17.4
People's Republic of China	17.0
Thailand	17.0
Tajikistan	16.5
Zambia	16.1
Egypt	15.8
Honduras	15.6
Malaysia	15.5
Togo	15.5
Benin	15.4
Mauritania	15.4
Côte d'Ivoire	15.3
Mali	15.3
Sri Lanka	15.3
Peru	15.1
Dominican Republic	15.0
Tunisia	14.9
Lebanon	14.4
Philippines	14.4
Singapore	14.2
Armenia	14.1
Rwanda	14.1
Costa Rica	14.0
Vietnam	13.8
Mozambique	13.4
El Salvador	13.3
Democratic Republic of Congo	13.2
Ecuador	13.2
Liberia	13.2
Hong Kong	13.0
Uganda	12.6
Taiwan	12.4
Federated States of Micronesia	12.3
Comoros	12.0
Paraguay	12.0
Tanzania	12.0
Guatemala	11.9
Ethiopia	11.6
Burkina Faso	11.5
Guinea-Bissau	11.5
Indonesia	11.0
Niger	11.0
Nepal	10.9
Laos	10.8
Bhutan	10.7
Madagascar	10.7
Syria	10.7
Panama	10.6
Sierra Leone	10.5
Gabon	10.3
Pakistan	10.2
Mexico	9.7
Haiti	9.4
Bangladesh	8.5
Guinea	8.2
Cambodia	8.0
Algeria	7.7
Central African Republic	7.7
Iran	7.3
Yemen	7.1
Afghanistan	6.4
Sudan	6.3
Nigeria	6.1
Republic of Congo	5.9
Angola	5.7
Saudi Arabia	5.3
Burma	4.9
Bahrain	4.8
Chad	4.2
Libya	2.7
Qatar	2.2
Oman	2.0
Equatorial Guinea	1.7
Kuwait	1.5
United Arab Emirates	1.4

So which one of these countries does the Tea Party want the United States to turn into ? Except for a few resource-rich countries (which the US isn't anymore) and the fast growing export-oriented economies of South Korea and Singapore (ditto), there's not a single country in there that I'm especially eager to move to.

Now let's examine the ten countries which take the most tax revenue :

Kiribati	69.7
Zimbabwe	49.3
Denmark	49.0
Sweden	47.9
Belgium	46.8
France	46.1
Cuba	44.8
Finland	43.6
Norway	43.6
Austria	43.4

I'll admit I'm not a big fan of Zimbabwe, Kiribati, or Cuba. However, I do live in Belgium, and I've been to nearly all the other countries on this list. Trust me, they're doing great.

So what evidence exactly does the Tea Party have for saying US tax revenue is too high ? And, more importantly, why aren't any of the journalists who interview those people making this self-evident point ?!?

Closing the Book on China

Serge Boucher — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 16:32:14 +0000

I just now published the last part of my China travelogue, the story of a one-month trip I took with 5 friends almost two years ago. While this might not be the most ambitious writing project I ever started, it certainly is, by far, the most ambitious I ever completed. If you don't mind the self-indulgence, I'd like to write a few words about what's involved in such an undertaking. If, like most people, you've entertained the idea of writing about your travels, hopefully some of this will prove helpful.

A few numbers

Here's the raw data:

About 30 pages of notes (on laptop)
7393 pictures
182GB of storage, 364GB counting field backup

(If you've never done serious travel photography you're probably recoiling in fear at this point, but these are actually fairly typical numbers.)

And here's the output:

32 blog posts totaling nearly 25,000 words — enough to fill more than 50 single-spaced A4 pages or about the size of the typical novella
328 published photos (4.5% of the total, also a fairly typical proportion of "keepers")

Gear

Along with the obvious clothing and toiletries, this is what I carried:

Canon 5DMk2
Canon EF 16-35/2.8L
Canon EF 50/1.4
Canon EF 70-300 DO
Gitzo 1530 tripod with Acratech GV2 ballhead and leveling base
MacBook Air (1st gen non-ssd)
Two external hard drives, lots of memory cards, UV and polarizing filters, RRS plates, spare batteries, etc.

Travel Budget

Every time we hit the ATM — which we tended to do with alarming frequency — we withdrew about 300€, or slightly more than the average Chinese makes in a month. How far such a sum would take us varied wildly: it barely pays for one night in the Park Hyatt Shanghai (and that's before you even take a look at the minibar), but it would have lasted us three months in the piss-infested wreck of a hostel we made our home in Lijiang.

Traveling as a group saves quite a lot of money. Hiring a minivan and driver to get to out-of-town sights is very cheap when you're splitting the bill five-ways. It also increases your bargaining power and thus makes haggling slightly easier, which is always welcome.

Hong Kong is markedly more expensive than the rest of China. There are basically no hotels below four stars in the interesting parts of the city, and they're priced accordingly. Food and transportation is slightly cheaper than in Europe, and thus way more expensive than in the PRC proper.

While bare subsistence costs are relatively low, obviously as soon as you get the idea of doing some shopping or enjoying a really nice meal, the sky's the limit – even on a clear day. In our case, for spending three weeks in China proper and one week in Macau and Hong Kong, with four internal flights and a couple of sleeper trains, staying mostly in cheap hostels but with the occasional splurge, we ended up spending close to 2500€ each.

Time

Taking the trip took one month. Documenting it took eighteen, although obviously I stopped and started a number of times and never worked on it full time for longer than a day or two. (I do have a job.) Still, it's obviously quite an undertaking. I started out thinking I'd just bang out a few words each day and it would hardly take any time at all. It did, partly because what I ended up writing is significantly more involved than a straightforward travel blog (some posts required quite a bit of research), and partly because "banging out a few words" is a lot harder than most people think. Not planning to invoice anyone about this, I didn't keep accurate time sheets, but I can give you a vague work plan with fairly reasonable time estimates.

Publishing the photos is time-consuming but reasonably straight-forward:

Edit 7393 pictures down to about 300, making sure those selects are all of good-enough quality and that you've covered everything important. For each of those photos:
- Straighten and crop
- Adjust exposure, contrast, saturation, etc.
- Retouch if needed, which was relatively rare here

From past project that I have religiously timed, I know this takes at least 60 hours.

For the text the process is more involved:

Take notes every day. (Even though you'll be among friends in a foreign land, and will thus have zero difficulty finding more exciting things to do than whip out a laptop and jot down whatever's happening, you absolutely need to do this regularly if you want your writing to be at all reflective of the trip.)
Research if needed
Write post (Outline, Draft, Rewrite until you're happy.)
Choose illustrative photos
Layout post
Repeat the above 30(ish) times

Note-taking is fairly quick if you do it right, maybe 10 minutes per day. The rest is much harder to estimate, not least because different posts require vastly different amounts of time. The very first one was probably conceived, written and published in less than an hour, because it's quite short and purely narrative. The posts on our forcible stay in Xi'An airport are also narrative, but they're much longer and were rewritten several times to improve their comedic appeal. Writing about Shanghai's economic development is straightforward, after you've done enough research to actually understand what it is you're writing about. The epilogue, like a few of the latter posts, is long, required a lot of research and proved hard to write. Some of these posts might have taken upwards of 30 hours of effort, and that's without taking and choosing photos, layout and proof-reading.

If this sounds ridiculously long, you failed to follow the earlier link to "Fuck the Karate Kid". Please go there now, I'll wait. Thank you. So, as everyone who's tried knows, stringing together words in a way that sounds pleasantly effortless is surprisingly time-consuming. I don't claim to be an especially good writer, but some of my work has gotten the occasional bit of praise from friends or family. If indeed I can sometimes produce good copy, the only reason I can think of is that I try a whole lot harder than most people. A lot harder. Most seem to think that "first draft" is the same as "nearly done". That may be true for a progress report, but if you want people to enjoy your writing, you can't stop at your very first attempt, find it lacking and then complain you can't write. That doesn't even count as trying. Good, effortless writing never happens for me before the fifth rewrite.

Enough of this rant and back to the effort estimation. In addition to all the time above I spent being productive, I also expended quite a lot of hours on needlessly doing things twice. Namely, I had to re-layout every post when, 80% through, I decided that the whole thing would look better on Squarespace than as just another iWeb blog. Also, maintaining a terabytes-sized photo library is not exactly effortless, and I spend way too much time backing up and checking backups and moving hard drives around. Anyone who does this kind of project regularly eventually needs to stop and seriously think about how they're going to keep their photos (and their adjustments) safe and backed up. This, however, probably deserves a whole post in and of itself.

Process

That's easy: there never was any process. I flew to China and travelled 8000 kilometers there while carrying loads of photographic gear. A few days in, I felt I should write a few things to my friends at home, and decided to do it on a public blog. One thing lead to another, and 500-odd hours of work later I have something not entirely unlike a travel book.

Despite my starting this post listing the camera and lenses and computer I used, it eventually became obvious to me that gear matters very little. Funny thing is, had I had just a P&S and access to cyber-cafes on the way, I could have produced something very similar. It would have taken longer, a few of the photos would have been different, but in essence I could have done something looking quite close to this with almost no (financial) investment. And you could have too. None of this is actually hard: it's just taking the pictures you'd show your family, and the stories you'd mail your friends, massaging them just a little bit and putting the result online. There is nothing in here that anyone can't do. Only one step is a real challenge: writing the very first post. You need to be foolish enough to pick a few photos, write a few words, throw them online, before you realize that you're committing to doing that same thing thirty times more. Which is remarkably short-sighted, certainly. But if you're stupid enough to finish that first post, all the rest happens, eventually, all by itself.

Of course one needs a website to publish that kind of stuff, preferably one with tools for hosting a blog and photos. But just as anyone can take photos these days, anyone can go to blogger or wordpress and create a free account. I was surprised how ridiculously easy the whole technology part of all this turned out to be.

Writing was a lot of fun, but like many of the things I do, it's heavily geared to an audience of one. Looking back at the blog, it's more than a personal memoir about the trip, but it's not really travel writing or an essay on China either. It's just a bunch of things that caught my eye, be they personal anecdotes, historical facts or social commentary. I doubt it's of much interest to anyone who doesn't know me or wasn't on the trip, and even most of those will be bored by a lot of the trivia I've weaved into the story. Travel writing is a very idiosyncratic genre, and great writers like Bill Bryson or J. Maarten Troost can spend pages and pages on personal stories only tangentially related to their trip without ever getting anywhere near boring, seemingly effortlessly, but for people like me that's hard, really hard, actually hard enough that it seems like I cannot do it. I realized this long before I'd finished telling the tale, but it didn't stop me. I've been writing about my trips since I was 14, but somehow I always gave up around the second week, when it became obvious that the "What's the point?" question had no satisfactory answer. I have now accepted that there is no point, except in enjoying the process of putting sights and smells and frustration and amazement into words and trying to make them look good on a page. For the first time I can honestly say that I've tried my best to do that, and the result will certainly not win any prize nor even be read by… well, anyone… but it is my story, and I must say I had nearly as much fun telling it as I had living it. Perhaps for the first time, I truly understand what Terry Pratchett means when he says: "Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself."

Not a MacBook Air Review

Serge Boucher — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 22:38:23 +0000

I travel a lot. On average I'm on the road every other day, usually on the cheap, using mostly public transport, carrying everything on my back. On a typical trip, I take thousands of photos and write thousands of words of occasionally technical prose.

In short, I have a need for a laptop that is very light, small but with a high-quality screen, powerful enough to run serious image editing software and IDEs. When the original MacBook Air came out in early 2008, it seemed quite close to an ideal machine for me, so I bought one. It was quite good, but had a few glaring defects: although thinner than nearly all other laptops at the time, it was still relatively big in the two other dimensions; a single USB port is not nearly enough when you use external hard drives and card readers; battery life was unimpressive, and charging took forever.

In late 2010, Apple revamped its Macbook Air line and came up with a whole-new 11" model. Again I bought one, customized with all available options (1.6GHz processor, 4GB RAM, 128GB storage; 1329€ or $1399.) I think it's fair to say that I've used it extensively: in the few months I've owned it, I carried it to France, Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal and the United States. I relied on it to right research papers on transatlantic flights, edit photos of Javan volcanoes in the very 4WD carrying me away from said volcano, and blog from a tent on the slopes of the Earth's 8th highest mountain. I'm using it right now to write this post, in a very nice pub in Greenwich Village.

My verdict? It has all the qualities of the original Air, which I liked very much, and fixes everything I didn't like. It is at last small enough to fit in places where a conventional laptop would not; it has two USB ports; a full charge takes about an hour, even while doing resource-intensive jobs like editing photos in Aperture. In short, while it's not quite a perfect tool for the job, it is much closer to perfection than any other computer I have ever used.

So, you'd probably guess I've been recommending the 11" MacBook Air to everyone who asked or didn't ask that question known to geeks everywhere: "What computer should I buy?"

You'd be wrong.

As good as the Air is for what I do, it does sacrifice quite a bit in the name of portability, and for many users these trade-offs are probably not the right ones. Someone looking for a computer that lives in his briefcase and follows him to work might be better off with a full-sized laptop. While I suspect the optical drive is pretty much at end-of-life in consumer laptops, as of today many people use it very much. If you only need one computer and like to watch DVDs on it, well, the Air doesn't do that. It's also expensive. Someone who wants a travel computer just for emails and blogging might be better off with a conventional netbook, if only because traveling with a $300 no-name netbook is much less stressful than with a $1500 shiny thing that screams "steal me".

Which brings me to the main points of this post: if you're a geek who's regularly asked for gear recommendation by — for lack of a better word — laypeople, don't ever forget that what may be the perfect tool for you might also be a terrible choice for most other people. On the flip side, if you're usually the one asking the question "What computer/camera/cellphone should I buy?", pay attention to the very first thing your geek friend says in response. If it's anything other than "Well, what do you want to use it for?", you'll be better off ignoring everything he says and looking for someone a little less self-centered.