Kindle’s Vision vs Execution

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Our strategy with the ebookstore is ‘buy once, read everywhere.’ If you want to read on your iPhone, if you want to read on your BlackBerry. We want people to be able to read their books anywhere they want to read them. That’s the PC, that’s the Macintosh. It’s the iPad, it’s the iPhone. It’s the Kindle. So you have this whole multitude of devices and whatever’s most convenient for you at the moment.
JP Mangalindan, “Jeff Bezos’s mission: Compelling small publishers to think big“, CNNMoney Fortune, June 29, 2010

I also enjoyed Bezos update in the article on cloud computing and the utility model reality..

I love my Kindle 2, and what Amazon.com has done for publishing!

Here though, “read their books anywhere they want to read them”, there is a disconnect between vision and execution. The Amazon Kindle experience on the Mac has a strong unpleasant odor.

Whistleblower

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That’s a whistleblower in the purest form:  discovering government secrets of criminal and corrupt acts and then publicizing them to the world not for profit, not to give other nations an edge, but to trigger “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.”  That’s the person that Adrian Lamo informed on and risked sending to prison for an extremely long time.

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The reason this story matters so much — aside from the fact that it may be the case that a truly heroic, 22-year-old whistle-blower is facing an extremely lengthy prison term — is the unique and incomparably valuable function WikiLeaks is fulfilling.  Even before the Apache helicopter leak, I wrote at length about why they are so vital, and won’t repeat all of that here.  Suffice to say, there are very few entities, if there are any, which pose as much of a threat to the ability of governmental and corporate elites to shroud their corrupt conduct behind an extreme wall of secrecy.

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Any rational person would have to acknowledge that government secrecy in rare cases is justifiable and that it’s possible for leaks of legitimate secrets to result in serious harm. I’m not aware of a single instance where any leak from WikiLeaks has done so, but it’s certainly possible that, at some point, it might. But right now, the scales are tipped so far in the other direction — toward excessive, all-consuming secrecy — that the far greater danger comes from allowing that to fester and grow even more. It’s not even a close call. Any efforts to subvert that secrecy cult are commendable in the extreme, and nobody is doing that as effectively as WikiLeaks (and their value is not confined to leaking, as they just inspired a serious effort to turn Iceland into a worldwide haven for investigative journalism and anonymous whistle-blowers).
Glenn Greenwald, “case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks“, Salon, June 18th, 2010

Control and Comfort

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Ritualistic behavior like you are now witnessing, is your toddler’s way of maintaining control while asserting his new found independence in a safe and worry-free manner.  When your little one is faced with some type of change in his routine, he feels vulnerable, anxious and frustrated, so having control of even the smallest areas of his life right now means more than you’ll ever know.  Being denied the fulfillment experienced through rituals can do a number on your little one’s self-esteem, so remember that what you may see as monotonous, your toddler sees as peace-of-mind, and who’s to argue with a content toddler?  Certainly not me.
Shelley Feldman, “Your 22-month-old toddler (week 93)“, edHelperBaby

The above makes sense, what we suspected, and seems to be the consistent explanation.

“My do it”, regularly insists my toddler son.

The examples of this that stands out to me all relate to eating:

  • He insists on putting the cap back on his milk bottle, so he can remove it himself, before he’ll consider drinking it.
  • Food that he doesn’t want can’t stay on his plate. He puts it on my plate.
  • If his fruit filled cereal bar breaks in two then he earnestly tries to put it back together, and ends up rejecting it in frustration.

Being part of my toddler’s world, witnessing what is instinctual and being part of his learning, gives me incredibly enjoyable and insights.

I feel that being a parent is already making me a better person. My son really is my greatest teacher.

Emerging Web Fonts

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“It turns out that Mobile Safari doesn’t support as many embeddable font formats as the desktop version, so Google sends an SVG font version to iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches, or anything pretending to be them. And it looks like Google’s SVG fonts contain only ASCII characters, while the other formats have full character sets.”
Derek Miller, “A weird Safari-Google bug”, June 21, 2010

I haven’t encountered anything like this, but I found it to be an interesting interplay of emerging technologies.

It reminds me of the headaches of different database encoding and WordPress.

“Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab.”

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This is a hot button issue for me.

[U.S. Vice President Joe] Biden told reporters Thursday at a press conference in Washington, D.C. “But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing [merchandise].”
Greg Sandoval, “Biden to file sharers: ‘Piracy is theft’“, cnet

What is “clean and simple” is

  • That’s propaganda.
  • Piracy happens on the high seas, or in Disney movies.
  • Nothing smashed nor grabbed. Property is a physical concept. There is no loss of property from copyright violations.
  • There is room for fair use.

I don’t recommend using or distributing works that you don’t have license to.

I do recommend getting involved in Free Culture and Open Source.

One of my great inspirations is Lawrence Lessig’s keynote presentation at the annual Open Source Convention (OSCON) made on July 24, 2002. My favorite parts are:

  • Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
  • The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
  • Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
  • Ours is less and less a free society.

.bin & .cue to .iso on Mac

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If you are dealing with some old CD images in the .bin + .cue format, then 

sudo port install bchunk
bhunk <bin -filename.bin> <cue -filename.cue> <new -filename.iso>

Explanation

A cue sheet, or cue file, is a metadata file which describes how the tracks of a CD or DVD are laid out. Cue sheets are stored as plain text files and commonly have a “.cue” filename extension. CDRWIN first introduced cue sheets, which are now supported by many optical disc authoring applications and media players.

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Cue sheets are also used for many types of CDs in conjunction with an image file. The image file generally has a “.bin” extension.
“Cue sheet (computing)“, Wikipedia

Hat Tips

    Other Notes

    Anonymous commenter Don writes, “For those of you who have a .bin file but instead of a .cue file have a .toc file, there is a utility for mac called toc2cue that you can get if you run macports and install the cdrdao port. Then you can convert over to .cue file and use this fine tool to convert your .bin file to .iso”

Mac Tweakers <3 SIMBL, Visor & Fish

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While deciphering countless web pages for information about configuring and tuning iTerm, reoccurring themes from the most hard core are:

  • SIMBL: allows you to “patch” Mac applications to do what you want. I’ve come across at least 3 SIMBL plugins to make Apple Terminal.app more useful. The detractors cry that SIMBL destabilizes the OS, while its champions swear they’ve never had a problem.
  • Visor: ”a Quake-style drop-down Terminal” need I say more?
  • Fish: is the newest UNIX shell, it’s a friendly shell. The naysayers warn that it has a very small user community and that its development has slowed. The true believes proclaim that once you try it, there is no substitute for FISH in your diet.

I’m not currently considering using any of these, but I enjoyed coming across them.

Tuners Use zsh & iTerm

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One of the tools that I haven’t had much success really tuning before, which I’m looking to try again is Apple Terminal.

Mac OS X has been with us since 2001. There is now a lot of stale information out there for tuning the command line experience. For example, there are still a lot of articles about tsch in search results. The earlier versions of Mac OS X default shell was tsch, but since 2003 the shell has been bash.

One thing I’ve noticed in the screenshots of tuned Terminal is “zsh” in the window’s title bar. I’m not willing to tackle figuring out the zsh shell, but I find it interesting that it’s a favorite of the tuners.

Another favorite seems to be using iTerm. I noticed my co-worker Demitrious Kelly sporting iTerm in his WATCHME for wpshell. And today, reading my co-worker Andy Skelton’s “My SSH config setup” fellow WordPress contributor Dougal Campbell and my co-worker Donncha O Caoimh both gave iTerm shout outs.

I wonder if Apple Terminal has mostly caught up to iTerm. It seems iTerm might still have some tab advantages.

Tune Your Tools

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Black and white photo of a hand tuning a guitar

"Tune it in 96/365" cc by-nc flickr user Crashmaster007

Although I love to try the latest software and gadget, I’ve most recently been spending more effort tuning my tools.

When time is family time it seems like a greater benefit to optimize where I can instead of always seeking the next great thing!

It’s also a lot more work than just playing with the shiny.