The Tao of Mac

Up Periscope

Rui Carmo — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:29:10 GMT

Okay, so here’s the skinny: my Macbook hasn’t been powered on since, oh, Sunday or so, and my sole internet & blogging implement at home has been my iPod Touch (where I’m typing this until I can find the time to post it somehow).

Things are more than a little crazy, and not only because family calls seem to be mostly about the kid’s bowel movements and attire, both topics that I would ordinarily tune out were it not for my mildly dazed state.

Work is also somewhat on the wild side, since I still haven’t quite caught up with the few weeks’ lag brought upon by my absence and keep having to clean house and devise new strategies to cope with a killer combination of sleep deprivation and entropy.

So far, I’ve figured out that slowness has its advantages: I may be tired and sluggish, but I tend to use that to be more systematic and go through things one step at a time – and guess what, I’ve already come ahead in more than a few situations where too-quick decisions wouldn’t help.

Still, one endures. I have been racking up a quite impressive amount of starred items in Google Reader in hope that some of them may yield interesting material to write about (incidentally, I’m not too keen on the new shared notes feature, which completely mangles feed items) and have had a number of interesting discussions of late about technology in general and what the “next big things” will be for 2009 or so, so interestingness may yet win out against sleepiness.

Or, at least, one can hope for that.

P.S.: Incidentally, I couldn’t care less about Open Office being finally available with a native UI when they still haven’t gotten the Services menu to work.

Technorati Tags: gtd, ipod touch, macbook, openoffice, parenting, personal, reader, ui, work

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I, for one, welcome our new diapered overlords

Rui Carmo — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:47:00 GMT

The kid has been hogging the CPU of late with irregular moods, feeding times and all sorts of cruel little behavioral experiments on us puny humans, so there has been little opportunity to fire up my MacBook and type away at stuff to see if it goes away or gets filed properly. Here’s a stab at it, bearing in mind that I haven’t really had that much sleep lately.

Wild Wild Web

So Microsoft gave up on Yahoo, which raises the question of how long either of them will last in a bunch of sub-markets (what with neither of them being able to dodge the Google juggernaut in advertising, search, etc.). Should be interesting, especially since I don’t quite know if either of them will be in second place a couple of years from now.

Other stuff that hit my radar was Twitter moving away from Ruby on Rails, which was perplexing for one reason, and one reason alone: Who the, er… fricassee cares? It’s not as if it was a religious thing or something. Oh, wait…

Books

Thanks to the kid, I’ve been reading books the way people watch View-Master reels – I keep squinting bleary-eyed at the same scenes time and again to see if they move of their own accord. Still, there are a few reviews forthcoming, at the rate of a paragraph a day or something,

The Cloud

After fooling around with Evernote the other day, I started wondering about the kinds of notes I take and where I need them. As it turns out, there is a quite large amount of inconsequential information that does not require much in terms of security or privacy (such as links, which I commit to del.icio.us) and that I don’t really want to have to sync from one machine to another.

Besides, it all left me with a sense of deja vu. So I wasn’t at all surprised to find myself clicking on Google Notebook and finding a bunch of stale notes from last year which I had entirely forgotten about. Mucking about with it quickly yielded a number of conclusions, namely:

It works fine in Firefox (but says Safari is unsupported)
It is hopelessly outdated as far as Google web apps are concerned (browser support is flaky, SSL support is broken, and it seems to be using an older version of their libraries)
It would only require a few minor tweaks to do everything I needed (and I could always add a bookmarklet for some JavaScript encryption script)

Furthermore, it has a lackluster API that provides read-only access to public notebooks (so extending it with a desktop client is not in the cards). Still, if someone at Google picked it up as a 20% project and made it at least as good as Google Docs (which I’m now using to keep track of shopping lists and whatnot), I think it would be killer.

Oh, that reminds me – if someone at Google lands here, please pester whomever is in charge of Reader to add at least basic filtering based on RSS category fields – Bayesian classification would be better, but its blatant disregard for feed metadata is almost insulting considering that you bothered to implement tags – which, incidentally, are not propagated on shared items. But I digress.

Movies

Going to the cinema is now tantamount to mounting a Mars expedition (i.e., it will happen in ten years or so and would end in tears if I tried it now), so movies are now a completely alien art form that I have no access to until the DVD release cycle turns. Still, I’ll be adding Iron Man to my wishlist, if only because pfig hasn’t called it crap yet¹.

Also, given that Apple shows no tendency to use their considerable clout to try to rationalize access to iTunes content worldwide (and I’m one of those people who finds it ridiculous to play around with vouchers and falsified Beverly Hills addresses² to buy movies and TV series), I’m patiently waiting to see what Sony will do with their PS3 store³.

Of course, that would require me to have a TV set. And a renovated flat. Hmmm.

—-

¹ And if he does, that’s likely to be an even better endorsement.

² Could it be that Apple never really checks all those Beverly Hills 90210 addresses in iTunes accounts?

³ Hint to the guys in Shinagawa – the aggregate market of European countries except the UK, France and Germany is under-addressed and very big – here, this report is only about 40.000 Yen, as much as a cup of decent coffee near your office.

Technorati Tags: advertising, api, apple, bayesian, bookmarklets, catching up, cpu, del.icio.us, docs, donate, dvd, evernote, firefox, google, itunes, javascript, macbook, microsoft, miscellaneous, notebook, pedro figueiredo, personal, playstation 3, rails, reader, rss, ruby, safari, sony, ssl, tv, twitter, yahoo

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On Evernote, and Security

Rui Carmo — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:42:35 GMT

Everyone’s raving about Evernote these days – and with good reason, since from my brief experience with it the UI is great, indexing works very well indeed and it’s fast.

Plus it’s multi-platform (although not all features work the same way on all platforms) and the Windows version can run in “portable” mode from a USB stick, which makes it tremendously appealing to me (I have it installed inside a TrueCrypt volume in my corporate laptop).

The thing is, despite this largish post on Evernote’s site regarding security, I’m not really sure I’ll be using its syncing features – at least not for now.

You see, when I was reading that post I thought this passage was slightly odd:

When you add a note to the service, it is secured like your email would be at a high-end email provider. This means that your notes are stored in a private, locked cage at a guarded data center that can only be accessed by a small number of Evernote operations personnel. Administrative maintenance on these servers can only be performed through secure, encrypted communications by the same set of people. All network access to these servers is similarly protected by a set of firewalls and hardened servers. Your login information is only transmitted to the servers in encrypted form over SSL, and your passwords are not directly stored on any of our systems.

Emphasis mine, of course.

But, you see, I thought it very odd that SSL was only mentioned for password transfer, so I decided to dig up a packet analyzer and submit Evernote to what I like to call the iDisk test – i.e., verify if the data is transmitted securely or not.

Why? Well, I am the sort of person who, knowing that data transmission security is an end-to-end affair, uses SSL for everything, from IMAP to Google Reader. Security is not just about authentication and making sure your passwords are safe. It’s also about making sure your data is safe, whether or not it’s stored in a secure vault¹.

And that includes using “high-end email providers” such as, erm, .Mac and Google Apps For Your Domain.

Which, in fact, provide me with secure end-to-end transmission of data over SSL, and where I currently store my stuff² via IMAP.

What many people don’t seem to realize when designing online services these days is that it is a trivial endeavor for anyone to sniff out your stuff from the air in a public Wi-Fi hotspot.

Plus the internet runs through a lot of strange places (like hotel and college networks), so I like to know how my data is transmitted, no matter how inconsequential it happens to be.

So I fired up Evernote and created a simple note:

I then fired up a packet sniffer and hit the sync button. I had no trouble finding my note among the captured packets:

This can be reproduced by anyone in, oh, around 5 minutes or so (go and grab CPA, it’s simple and straightforward to use). Sniffing other people’s packets is left as an (unethical and unadvisable) exercise to the reader.

It is true that Evernote logs in (and apparently does a bit more) over SSL, but for some reason it falls back to plain, unfettered (and quite readable) HTTP to transmit your data to their servers.

Which might be understandable for performance reasons, but which is regrettable in a service that aims to help you store and manage your information across multiple machines.

Maybe this will get fixed after the preview (it’s nothing that a few SSL accelerator cards can’t solve), but until then, and despite its brilliance in other regards, I have to rate Evernote it a D- security-wise.

—

¹ And even then I’d only consider the storage truly secure if it was encrypted as well, but that’s another matter – I accept that decrypting stuff from disk on the fly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

² Interested parties may want to pick up MailArchive, clean it up a bit, and make it store stuff via IMAP and SSL – Spotlight will index the results just fine, although not with the same style and panache as Evernote. And for extra brownie points, build a Cocoa text editor that stores its stuff directly into IMAP.

Technorati Tags: .mac, cocoa, cocoa packet analyzer, evernote, google, http, imap, mailarchive, notes, personal data, privacy, reader, security, sniffing, spotlight, ssl, sync, truecrypt, ui, usb, wi-fi, windows

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VGA/DVI cables are not long for this world

Rui Carmo — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:40:36 GMT

A few weeks back, soon after the release of their beta Mac drivers, the kind folk at DisplayLink mailed me one of their USB adapters, pretty much out of the blue (I have corresponded with them in the past, but the opportunity to tinker with their solution at leisure was a great surprise). I got a DVI one with a very spiffy cable:

Being temporarily bereft of a desk at home¹ I was unable to try it out properly there, but on a whim I set it up in a VM inside Fusion without any Mac drivers (thanks to Fusion’s great USB support), causing XP to believe it had an extra monitor:

This was mostly because I wanted to see how Fusion handled USB devices that are unsupported by the host (since I often have to test USB devices on Windows), but also because I had been musing about the feasibility of having an XP VM act as a “secondary computer” of sorts (yes, I keep thinking about thin clients of all kinds).

At work, however, I was able to hook up the adapter to the MacBook Pro I have at hand and get it working without any hassles over lunchtime – my desk layout these days is a pain and I had to rig it via one of the USB extension cords we ship with USB modems, but I was able to run two external displays without any hassles whatsoever – one via the built-in DVI port and another via the DisplayLink DVI.

Sorry, no (public) pictures – I’ve got a whole bunch of sensitive stuff on my desk these days…

Performance was good enough for a bunch of terminal windows and web pages, although I did come across a few screen redraw issues exactly as outlined in the release notes.

Having no graphics acceleration means, of course, that the user experience is far from ideal, but the important thing is that it worked as advertised – it was just another display, and popped up in all the right places as such (i.e., in System Preferences, menu bar, etc.).

Connecting it to my XP laptop (a Dell D410) yielded a very responsive display, indistinguishable from the usual performance I get from the Intel GMA 950’s external VGA port (and actually a little better, since the component sourcing guys at Dell must be cheapskates and its video out is somewhat noisy).

And this is where the potential sinks in: Since I loathe docking stations, I use a USB KVM to hook up an external keyboard and mouse to my laptop – which means that I have to plug in the power, video and USB plugs every time I arrive at my desk, but which I vastly prefer to XP’s fundamentally broken “Undock Computer” option. So if I was using a USB hub instead of the KVM, I could simply plug the dongle there and cut that to two cables – power and everything else.

But back to performance, and back to the Mac: The bottom line is that for a beta of something that they managed to do without significant support from Apple, the beta DisplayLink driver is very impressive.

The overall experience was not unlike using an older Mac (like my iBook G3), and I see no reason why Apple shouldn’t give them a hand developing this further – or even adopting their tech and pumping it up a notch².

I await further driver developments with interest – in the meantime, all I have to do is persuade my wife to let me buy a couple of 24” displays…

¹ A more accurate statement would be that I am bereft of both a desk and a home, since the damn renovation isn’t finished yet. But I digress.

² Can you say ‘30” Studio Displays with Wireless USB?’ That kind of connectivity would fit the MacBook Air like a glove. And it works today.”

Technorati Tags: apple, d410, dell, disclaimer, displaylink, dual-head, dvi, fusion, g3, hardware, ibook, intel, mac, macbook air, macbook pro, monitors, multi-head, multiple, peripherals, usb, vga, vm, windows, xp

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Me, Mini-Me, Mini Attention Spans and Mini-Laptops

Rui Carmo — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:20:40 GMT

After a couple of days’ wrestling with my work inbox and perusal of numerous attachments in the kind of stupefied zombie-like state that non-parents can only achieve by, well, becoming parents to a little bundle of wailing joy with a two-and-a-half hour nightly feeding cycle, I find myself in the rather sorry state of having to write piecemeal, tapping away a sentence at a time as my neurons sway drunkenly from side to side inside my skull, somewhat like a bunch of inebriated lemmings stumbling all over each other in their urge to find some bottomless pit to jump into.

With my attention span firmly in the “ooh shiny” end of the timescale, it would be hard to express any sort of opinionated view of the Apple news landscape if it weren’t for its current dreariness – after all, what can you expect when luminaries such as Gruber can find little else to do but comment upon the Eee PC’s battery life, not just once, but twice?

Still, he managed to lead me to David Weiss’ essay on how we view our own knowledge, which included my favorite Descartes quote on good/common sense.

I suppose it’s karmic compensation for circling the sub-mini-notebooks topic without diving in. I’ve been wondering if such a device fits my newfound “let’s dip into the net before the kid wakes up” lifestyle, and finding it hard to avoid musing where Apple stands on all this.

After all, when Asus was playing in the sandbox all by themselves, it was pretty safe to ignore. But when HP spat out the Mini-Note, I started taking notice¹ – these days there is more hype floating around regarding these devices than Apple laptops, and with good reason:

It’s good, solid consumer backlash from years of overweight, over-featured and crap-filled laptops that have far too much computing power than anyone really needs – unless, of course, they actually wanted a desktop instead of a tethered boat anchor in the first place.

With most interesting stuff “in the cloud” these days and my long time interest in network computing and similar stuff², it makes perfect sense to me to one day get rid of most of my computers (except a nice desktop I can access remotely with standard protocols) and use a lightweight, “disposable” laptop of sorts that would let me leave stuff running on my desktop and hop back to it at a moment’s notice.

Yes, even if none of them are Macs. The Air, for all its technological prowess, lacks a decent remote access solution that will let you borrow a more than a desktop machine’s disc drive – and given Apple’s tendency to create “fat” platforms with lots of frilly stuff on a client, I don’t think that is forthcoming³.

Still, here’s my Eur.0.02 regarding these mini-laptops – simple, lean, light devices with SSD storage will win this one, since what people want in laptops is instant boot/suspend/resume and good battery life, and you can’t get that while lugging around a conventional disk drive (let alone one loaded with Vista).

And I don’t really think Apple will want to play in this sandbox (at least not by the same rules, of course). With current conventional laptop margins hovering at around 5% and these mini-notebooks raking in something between 10–15% (thanks to massive availability of DVD player size LCDs and other standard parts), Apple will hold on to the profitable niche of those who want more, in both style and substance.

And no, I don’t think there will be an Apple webpad springing forth from the iPhone platform, or a cheaper Air (what would they call it – MacBook Vacuum?). Apple’s not really into managing roadmaps for multiple form factors⁴.

As to the current contenders on what is fast being termed a “race to the bottom”, given the rave reviews of the hardware (all of which bitched about Vista being pre-installed), I may well have a go at the Mini-Note myself, if there is any chance of the Linux version reaching Portugal.

Mind you, I’d probably rip out Linux and install XP – all I want is enough flash storage to hold the OS, a text editor and Citrix, plus some way to reach my home desktop⁵ – which would make it tremendously easier to get stuff done throughout the constant interruptions of my new daily (or should I say nightly?) lifestyle.

And yeah, given a decent mobile thin client solution, I would probably even switch away from the Mac – and it’s not an April Fools. I like to plan ahead…

Care to check where this link leads to?

—

Anyone at HP (or Asus, for that matter) want to write a success story about a Mac un-switcher? Here’s your chance, guys.

¹ See my notes, complete with spiffy image gallery I’ve been meaning to write about.

² Like remote displays – more on that specific topic later, when I have had more sleep and the lemmings come back without a headache.

³ The Mac ethos is all about it being your own, standalone, individual computer that holds your life – an offshoot of Steve’s desire to control every little aspect of what lies before him – as such, thin clients and network computing are too grey and corporate (and require surrendering too much control) to be of interest to Apple.

⁴ As the checkered history of products like the Cube and the mini will readily attest.

⁵ Maybe NX, if they’ve managed to shake the cruftiness out of it.

Technorati Tags: apple, asus, citrix, common sense, cube, david weiss, dvd, eee pc, hp, iphone, john gruber, lcd, lifestyle, linux, mac, mac mini, macbook air, mini-note, mobility, network computing, news, nx, os, parenting, portugal, ssd, steve jobs, sub-notebook scorecard, subnotebooks, switching, technology, vista, work, xp

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Regarding AppleScript on Mail.app and RSS Items

Rui Carmo — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:05:57 GMT

Remember when I figured out how to attach inline images to Mail.app RSS items?

Well, today I tried to build a trivial little AppleScript to invoke my Python script straight from Mail.app, based on the premise that the numeric part of the filename is actually unique on Mail’s filesystem tree and that it matches the message id that you can (quite trivially) obtain in a script such as:

tell application "Mail"
  -- grab the message ID
  set theSel to get selection
  repeat with theMsg in theSel
  	set theId to theMsg's message id
  	-- get Python to do the dirty work for us
  	set output to (do shell script "python ~/Scripts/emlx.py -i " & theId)
  	-- rest of AppleScript truncated for brevity
  end repeat
end tell

The idea would be that I could just invoke this from Mail Act-On and the RSS items would get properly archived.

Well, it turns out that RSS items are “special”, in the sense that AppleScript fails with Mail got an error: Can’t get account “RSS”.

Why? Well, reading Script Editor’s Event Log, I get:

tell application "Mail"
  get selection
    {message id 329686 of mailbox "Test Feed" of account "RSS"}
  get message id of message id 329686 of mailbox "Test Feed" of account "RSS"
    "Mail got an error: Can’t get account \"RSS\"."

Which means that yes, AppleScript can get the actual numeric value, but apparently not assign it to anything because you’re supposed to get a complete reference (ID + mailbox + account), and AppleScript cannot resolve the account bit.

Since the above is a bit ambiguous, I also tried the following:

tell application "Mail"
  set theId to id of item 1 of (selection as list)
  set output to (do shell script "python ~/Scripts/emlx.py -i " & theId)
  -- etc.
end tell

Which fails in precisely the same fashion – i.e., it is unable to figure out what the “RSS” account is.

So I just filed #5874316. If anyone knows a decent workaround for this (other than copying the RSS items to a “normal” folder under a “normal” account, which I really don’t want to do), I’d appreciate it if you could drop me a line.

Technorati Tags: applescript, coding, mail act-on, mail.app, python, rss, scripting

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Four examples of Internet anti-news

Rui Carmo — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:21:16 GMT

I have this theory that the Internet is getting dumber. Or, at least, more spectacularly so, since we now have Web 2.0, and that’s supposed to be better, and more social and stuff.

Maybe it’s sleep deprivation. Or having less and less patience to put up with idiots in general. Or (most likely) maybe I really need to get Bayesian classification working again on my RSS feed intake to filter out the crud and waste less time paging through a quagmire of stupid, pointless “news”.

Basically, what it adds up to is that we now have the equivalent of a global, hysterical little old ladies’ club. You know, like those aging dowagers that loiter around tea shops in their extended book clubs or prayer groups or whatever – the ones that twitter about anything.

Here’s a few examples offhand:

Some fool tries to sell Mac clones. Apple trounces them. End of story.

Prior Art: Going back to the Apple II days. (i.e., not news – I remember NuTek and others from the raging 90s)

Visible Effects: mass hysteria in Mac blogs. Endless speculation about when they’ll get sued, garnished with stupid fanboys ranting about how it’s “all about the integration” and utterly clueless industry pundits harping on about how Apple needs to license Mac OS X to ensure their computer business stays afloat.

Invariable Outcome: They get legally nuked to the ground – or go out of business by themselves. Nothing grows on the scorched patch of ground for seven years. Everyone forgets about it in under a week.

Someone adopts Apple technology at a large organization. Turns out it’s not the largest department. End of story.

Prior Art: Mostly minor footnotes here and there, discarded in the culverts under the information superhighway.

Visible Effects: mass hysteria in Mac blogs (yes, there’s a pattern lurking here). Endless speculation about Cupertino’s strategy for the enterprise, with selective amnesia regarding Apple’s recent phasing out of some enterprise products and their oft-cited inability to provide platform roadmaps large IT purchasing decisions rely upon. After all, who is (ever) going to game their entire hardware inventory on a single supplier? Oh, wait.

Invariable Outcome: Apple fanboys get a new disposable poster child for their evangelization campaigns until someone realizes that there are less than 100 people involved in an organization totalling 386.558 people worldwide. Then the news becomes just another minor footnote somewhere.

Microsoft leaks some internal video, which may or may not suck. It doesn’t matter in the end.

Prior Art: Some were brilliant. Others became history.

Visible Effects: Everyone links to this insanely cheesy production and wonders what the hell they were thinking. Which is OK by itself, until the Vista doomsayers start chiming in and ranting about how XP was way better and how they’re going “start looking at alternatives” or something.

Invariable Outcome: The video will soon be consigned to the bottomless pit of visual sludge that YouTube is turning into and people will keep using XP. Nobody really switches away from Windows – they just like to complain about it (remember how long it took for people to get rid of MS-DOS? it went through eight versions…)

A Linux distribution releases a new version. Clueless zealots say it’s better than Mac OS X.

Prior Art: Slashdot. ‘nuff said.

Visible Effects: Slashdot again. Still, there’s plenty to look forward to in the next few weeks. Here’s a little table of upcoming releases:

Distribution	Version	Release Date
Ubuntu	8.10	April 24th
Fedora	9	April 29th
OpenSUSE	11	June 19th
Debian	?	Whenever it’s ready

In a week or so, there’s going to be mudslinging galore in all the usual places, mostly fueled by people who confuse compiz and (rather unintuitive) eye-candy with usability, plus the usual KDE vs. Gnome debate from the legions of cheapskate armchair geeks who confuse a desktop environment with a whole computer.

Invariable Outcome: People with too much time on their hands¹ reinstall their machines three times in three months (four if Debian ever makes another release). 97.98% of people don’t care.

I suppose I could go on and on. But, on the whole, why bother?

—

¹ People still without kids (and hitherto some time on their hands) who want a decent Linux for their laptop might want to check out Fedora (if only because they now acknowledge the existence of mobile broadband) or OpenSUSE (yes, even despite the continued horror that is YaST), if only because Novell builds their enterprise desktop off it and I happen to like their user-centric desktop customizations.

Technorati Tags: apple, bayesian, blogosphere, debian, fedora, gnome, ibm, it, kde, linux, mac, mac os x, media, microsoft, news, novell, punditry, rumors, slashdot, stupidity, suse, twitter, ubuntu, usability, vista, waste of time, web_2.0, windows, xp, youtube, zealots

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History Meme

Rui Carmo — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 19:24:09 GMT

Yeah, well, I’ve seen all the UNIX wannabes out there do this, so I thought I’d take a stab at it too:

stealthbook:~ user$ history | awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
131 hg
92 cd
87 mate
33 ls
24 duplicity
15 mv
13 ssh
13 open
13 mkdir
10 convert

Notes for the unititiated:

I manage a lot of stuff with Mercurial – documents, source code, this site’s content, etc.
TextMate is, of course, my preferred text editor on the Mac.
duplicity is now available in MacPorts, and since I only have my laptop with me these days I’ve been using it to keep encrypted off-site backups of some of my stuff.
I use open a lot in Mac OS X. Few people know that you can do open -n to run a new instance of an application, or do ls | open -f to get a file listing (or any CLI output) in your editor (oddly enough, pbcopy didn’t make it to the listing above – I use that a lot, too).
ImageMagick is still one of the command-line tools I use the most, all things considered. Nothing beats it for quick image resizing and conversion – not even Pixelmator.

Technorati Tags: cli, duplicity, geek, history, imagemagick, mac, mac os x, macports, meme, mercurial, pixelmator, textmate, unix

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Ten Years Later

Rui Carmo — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:16:04 GMT

Here’s what I was most likely to be doing at 2AM for the past ten years or so, aside from reading and other more mundane activities:

1998	playing QuakeWorld over 14.4kbps dial-up
1999	blogging, well before most of the idiots jumped on the bandwagon
2000	playing Quake III Arena over 56Kbps dial-up and coding my own blog platform
2001	photoblogging and moblogging, before it became fashionable (we even had an SMS gateway that worked pretty much like Twitter)
2002	migrating my blog to a wiki, before most people even got what a bliki was (most still don’t)
2003	patching PhpWiki or reading work e-mail via early 3G cards (way before the official launch)
2004	working on IMS before it became fashionable or trying to use Ubuntu (both equally unrewarding in many ways, although IMS did inspire my Blue Packet spoof)
2005	working late on umpteen projects I took on due to general chaos
2006	sleeping to get my health back
2007	hacking away at Yaki during occasional bouts of insomnia, but mostly sleeping
2008	mixing formula, burping the kid, and most likely not sleeping

Yep, you read that right: over the past few weeks, I’ve become a parent.

It wasn’t exactly a surprise. Well, at least not for me – the kid might have a different view on this, but he isn’t very articulate yet.

Being a pretty private person, I was loathe to even mention the fact, but the cat’s pretty much out of the bag now – I think that the tipping point came when Amazon UK started suggesting kids’ stuff to me when I visit (although, to be fair, that has probably been going on since I ordered Where’s My Cow?).

The whole thing has been a learning experience (and it hasn’t been easy, especially given the ongoing home renovation), but the most puzzling aspects have been the reactions from my friends and co-workers.

People who “get” me said “congrats” and didn’t make a fuss¹. People who don’t have been unbelievable pains in the proverbial posterior and showered me with calls and requests for photos.

Which reminds me, I understand that there are idiotic Internet traditions to comply with, so here’s the obligatory photo (or as much of one as I will ever post online for occasional gawkers):

You’ll have to take my word for it that this is actually him and not a balled-up sock or something.

And I think that is as much exposure as he’ll ever get until he is old enough to manage his own identity and privacy – or until somehow my better judgement is overwhelmed by the kid’s cuteness (whatever comes first).

Either way, I fully don’t expect becoming the kind of parent that splashes their firstborn’s photo onto a mug – I tend to look at the people who do that in askew, for fear that they will extract a complete photo album from their wallet and annoy me with tales of their kids’ first steps, regularity of bodily functions, and suchlike.

And since most of that stuff happens online these days (with people spamming everyone with links to photo galleries of their mewling infants), I should also probably point out that I loathe the kind of exposure that results from it².

So here is my first tyrannical parenting resolution: As far as I’m concerned, the kid will never have a public photo gallery.

Or, come to think of it, not even a Facebook account (if only because the Web 2.0 bubble will likely burst and the company will tank before he’s of age), although I’m pretty convinced he could Twitter with the best right now (at least considering the intellectual content of the average twit I get these days³).

And, for the record, I hope his life doesn’t end up revolving around technology, and we won’t press him to take it up⁴.

Still, I was helpless to avoid utterly stupid and moronic “so you’re going to get a new mini-Mac” comments from people who utterly don’t get:

Me.
Apple product nomenclature.
That the computers I use aren’t synonymous with who I am (or, more to the point, with whom the kid will turn out to be).

So please don’t.

Finally, an update on the logistics of the thing: the kid did arrive on time, but the contractor who’s handling our flat renovation has royally screwed up the timeline, and the time off I had scheduled for handling everything (kid, moving back in, and a dozen other things) has pretty much gone out the window – the only good thing is that I’ve spent more time with the kid than originally planned.

I can put up with sleep deprivation, diapers, liquid catering, and essence de poo (they’re not much worse than some of the stuff I’ve had to put up with at work), but I cannot abide idiocy in any form⁵.

That said, I’m going to see if I can get some sleep now.

—

¹ Although a few did add “see you in a couple of years”, which was a poignant touch – to have people book their agendas so far in advance for us shows true friendship is eternal.

² Which, by extension, also means that I pretty much loathe the Internet in general these days.

³ The amount of inane spam I get from Twitter has recently prompted a thorough culling of my friends list. Please don’t take it personally if you’re shut out.

⁴ But if he does take after his parents, I will probably draw the line at allowing him to use Linux, because, you know, I don’t want him turning into a freetard – or $DIVINITY forbid, learning Perl.

⁵ There’s an entire post lurking here regarding 90% of my gear being in storage, our being temporarily living with family and having people flying in from Germany especially for helping us manage things who cannot re-schedule their trip, but I’ll save that for another day.

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