Like the time I made an entire website with Drupal only to realize that Wordpress was going to be the better option. I’m still cleaning that mess up as Google had indexed half the pages already. Learning how to redirect moved pages in a way Google likes is another lesson I learned.

Today’s problem is source code management, or version control software, if you prefer. At Microsoft, I used something called source depot, of all the things at Microsoft, source depot was awesome. It does things exactly right. Now it is rumored heavily that source depot is based on a product called Perforce that’s used by a lot of big companies. And Perforce will work for me, but it’s limited. Free use is limited to 2 users and 5 “workspaces” which I assume is the equivalent to an enlistment, which is one (of potentially many) views of the code on a single machine which you can work on.

The problem is, after this, it gets hugely expensive. $900 per user per year for the first year, then $160 a year after that. And the other problem is given its proprietary nature I doubt the open source community loves it (although it is free for open source use.)

That basically brings me to Subversion, which is fine. My web host even supports it so I can use them as a server and repository. But I can just feel that quality difference from source depot and it makes me nervous.

So I am reading the docs, and just wanting to get started so bad, but have to take the time to learn yet another new thing. I like all this learning in so many ways, but I just can’t wait to have all the basics covered. I mean, I don’t want version control for the sake of version control. There’s actually an important real world thing that needs to come from this, and that’s going to take its own time. And to be able to do that work, I need complex features like branching. So the faster I can get through this, the better.

But my brain was full, so I decided to blog about it.

This morning I woke up and it had happened, my all-time transfer ratio was 1.27. If you don’t understand BitTorrent, here’s how it works. When you want to download a file, you get a small torrent file. This file will help you connect to everyone else who’s downloading that file. Then you download a small piece from each of them so it goes really fast. At the same time, others are downloading small pieces from you. When I was downloading this file, I was downloading from up to 50 other people at the same time.

Now once you’ve downloaded the file, you can just shut off your client and screw everyone else. But the general rule of politeness is that you should at least wait until you’ve uploaded (given to others) until you transfer ratio is at least 1. This isn’t a problem because it doesn’t take much bandwidth or processor power so you just leave it going for a few days.

I had not totally trusted BitTorrent in the past, so had usually shut it off pretty early, but now I’m OK with it. I wanted to make up for all the times in the past I had shut if off early so that means getting my ratio to be greater than 1. And now it is. Notice that my transfer ratio for this one file is 7.36, meaning I had uploaded 7.36 time what I had downloaded. That’s what it took to get my overall ratio higher.

By the way, in BitTorrent terminology downloading is called “leeching” and uploading, or sharing with others is called “seeding.” That’s why it says “Seeding to 6 of 6 peers”. That means 6 people are currently getting parts of the file from me.

Today was a rough day. And I find the best thing to do with rough days is just to ignore them.

Yesterday I received my licensed copy of Corel Painter X and my Wacom graphics tablet in the mail. The graphics tablet is kind of amazing. It runs off USB power, and the pen has no battery at all. I didn’t realize that it tracks where the pen is without it even touching the tablet. So you use it just like a real, brush, pen, pencil, etc. If the pen is within a couple of inches of the tablet, it registers. But not only does it track pen location, it tracks how the pen is tilted and the rotation of the pen. All of these factors are used by Painter to draw the strokes.

To draw a stroke, you touch the pen to the tablet. This is the equivalent of pressing and holding the left mouse button. The tablet is pressure sensitive so whatever tool your using acts like it would in real life. In fact, most of the time you just have to use very light wispy strokes barely touching the tablet if you don’t want it to look like you smashed the brush into the canvas. It’s something to get used to. Also, the pen isn’t relative like the mouse. The tablet represents the whole screen and wherever the pen is on the tablet is where it is on the screen.

You would think this would be easy, but it takes a bit of getting used to. I thought writing would be simple, but it’s quite difficult. I imagine this will get better as I get used to the feel.

The background for this post was made by taking a really big conte crayon and lightly rubbing it on the canvas. Then I took a wet sponge and smeared the conte crayon around. Almost everything in painter is a real life type object. It as all the different types of artist tools: sponges, art knives, oils, acrylics, watercolors, pencils, pens (ink and felt tip), crayons, and erasers. Oh, that’s something else, if you flip the pen around on the tablet, the top works just like an eraser. Neato!

Hardware and Operating Systems

There was a time when everyone was waiting for 32-bit disk access or 32-bit color or 64-bit floating point number math. When a company could just say, “look! color!” and everyone would gasp. Well this time is over. Modern computers and operating systems do basically everything that anyone reasonably needs. Faster 3D graphics isn’t going to impress the vast majority of people. Faster processors are barely noticed. Disks are plenty big.

Not to say that there isn’t room for improvement, it’s just that people aren’t desperate for the improvement and are happy to let it roll in as it will. Most computer software and hardware companies are not aware that this change has occurred. They are bewildered when their new graphics platform or new processor doesn’t have people running to the stores. They think they just made a few mistakes or didn’t communicate clearly enough. No, people get it, they just don’t care. If anything, people are starting to say, “Get the hardware and operating systems out of my way!”

The Web

The web has changed at quite a rapid pace. Therefore, the web people feel they’ve done quite a good job of things. More people are using it, so it must be successful, right? Well, not really. The web is moving forward so in that sense it’s successful, but content developers haven’t even become aware of the problems yet.

There is a large conflict still between what the content providers want and what the users want. Users want to read a “story”, some bit of content. But on most commercial sites, this content is surrounded by ads, branding, links to other content, and a whole mess of stuff to distract the user from what they actually want. Personal blogs are probably the best, but even on my site currently I have the tag cloud. I think the idea’s neat, but it’s probably not horribly functional. (In fact, I’ll remove it shortly.)

Neat but not horribly functional is exactly what the web is today. Much like operating systems, web content providers need to get out of the way of what the user actually wants. Sites like Wikipedia do a pretty decent job, but commercial news sites have like 5 columns and 15 boxes and all sorts of junk. How are we expected to be able to find or read anything with all that junk on the screen? They say, look at our snazzy layout! We say, looking at your site makes my stomach hurt.

The future lies in content providers making an honest straightforward deal with the reader or customer. I will tell you what you want to know, if you do this for me. But with information easily distributable, the customer isn’t going to be willing to do much anymore. Newspapers are going out of business, but new media better watch its back, they’re going to have a pretty tough time of it too once people start realizing that what they really want is a lot less junk in their face.

I’m really not a fan of QuickBooks. It’s really quite bad. I mean, it’s bad in ways that shock me. For the search engines: QuickBooks sucks. So last night I found a new program made only for the Mac called Billings. It’s much better and creates beautiful invoices. It has all the hallmarks of a Mac-only application: looks nice, easy to use, focused, creates great output. I think I may return QuickBooks and just use Numbers (Apple’s spreadsheet application) to track all the other stuff. I spent all last night re-entering data and don’t want to have to go through that again.

Last night I also had a difficult time activating my business credit card. They wanted my business’s birthday and I informed them there was no such thing. Luckily he gave me the month which after a while allowed me to guess at what they thought my business’s birthday might be. They also wanted my business’s social security number. Again, a hint allowed me to figure out what that meant. Crisis!

I just watched the special on the British Monarchy. It’s fascinating. The Americans in the special come off as so… American. I won’t mention names but some of us keep flying to Europe and taking fun pictures. I’m envious.

I’m putting a lot more tags on my posts now. Ted recommended the Simple Tags plugin for WordPress and I like it. It’s actually sponsored now by Google, which is odd since it doesn’t work with their blogging system.

Apple encourages its developers with their own products by promoting good software design that’s beautiful and inspirational. But they take it a step further with the annual Apple Design Awards. Every year they give awards to the best applications and those that integrate best with the rest of the Mac services. Because of this, almost every photo related program made for the Mac plays nicely with iPhoto. Most apps support Automator scripting. There are a whole host of good things that come out of this.

Much of the great new software that’s coming out is coming out for Mac only. Developers who passionatley care about software only want to develop on a platform that can help them build more exciting products. These applications are not made at all for Windows and far outshine their Windows couterparts.

One of my favorite examples of this is the web site creation and maintenance program called Coda. Coda is Mac only and is also an Apple Design Award winner. I’m using a trial version of Coda right now and I love it. I think I’m going to have to pay the $79 cost to actually buy it. That’s another common theme of this new breed of applications. The developers don’t try to charge ridiculous amounts of money for them.

I recently found an upcoming piece of software that I’m definitely going to buy. It’s called Pixelmator and is a image editing and creation tool providing features many people would us Adobe Photoshop for. However, Pixelmator is newer, better designed, simpler, and most importantly, cheaper. The current version of Photoshop costs $999. Are they serious? How much will Pixelmator cost when it’s released? Get ready… just $59. I can’t wait.

I went through some old photos and found this picture of ted that I really like. It’s take at Disney World on the people mover a number of years ago it’s just really an interesting photo. It’s reminiscent of a Devo album cover.

Because of this, your average computer user is looking at other things. Very quickly free graphics tools like The Gimp are spreading to other platforms in different shapes. For instance, I currently have an early version of Seashore on my machine which is based on code from The Gimp. It’s not all that great yet, but eventually these free applications will do 80% of what Photoshop does or even more. At that point, Adobe can charge $100 and people still won’t buy Photoshop.

I thought, why would they package Safari with Quicktime? Then I remembered YouTube. Apple has recently announced that YouTube videos will be available on Apple TV not because Apple TV supports Flash, but because YouTube is going to recode all of its videos into the H.264 open standard format. Apple also said that this would allow for higher resolution and quality video. Presumably, this is how the iPhone will be able to view YouTube videos as well.

So now it kinda makes sense. Will Apple temp windows users with the promise of higher quality YouTube if they download Safari + Quicktime? I think they will. What’s funny is if Microsoft just supported open standards, Safari and Quicktime wouldn’t be needed.

Now, there’s deep drama to this. Flash video has been a problem to a number people. Microsoft doesn’t like it because they don’t make it. Apple doesn’t like it because Adobe controls it. Content producers don’t like it because it’s bizarre. Consumers don’t like it because it’s not a format that’s playable anywhere but the web. Open source doesn’t like it because Adobe can’t support all the platforms they like. As usual, Adobe is kinda messing this one up. They like to play big, but then they can’t back it up. If it weren’t for Apple, PDF would be dead. But this time Apple isn’t on Adobe’s side.

The almost best thing for almost everyone is to switch internet video to use the H.264 open standard. It’s not best for Microsoft, because they don’t control it, and you know how they are. It may not be best for some open source folks because there may be some fees associated with H.264, although I doubt any that would prevent them from shipping support in Linux. But you know open source folks, if it isn’t Ogg Vorbis, it’s just crap. So Apple wins. They promote H.264 and pretty much everyone wins except for Microsoft. (And actually Microsoft probably also wins, they just don’t get it.) Adobe loses, but they were already on that road. Also, Flash can easily be retooled to support H.264, so it’s not the end for them. This is why Steve Jobs is a genius: he’s one of the first people to successfully use open standards and open source to win.

Safari 3 for Mac and Windows! Um… everything else! Steve Jobs is a genius! I’m just about to download the Safari 3 beta! Click on the image above to try it yourself! I’m so excited!

Our goal: To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.

What I love most is that this project completely threatens the computer monopolies around the world. It’s not even a project that tries to change the way businesses use computers, it’s a project to give kids all around the world the chance to learn about computers. What the big businesses misunderstand about this project, and about computers in schools in general, is that they aren’t trying to train students to use word processing software. They’re trying to inspire students to write the software of the future. To come up with new, different, creative, and innovative ideas to enhance their own lives.