There was a time, pretty much before the mid-90s, when portability of computing environments was more prevelant than today. Well, at least until literally today.

In the 1980s, I would travel with a box of 9 x 5.25″ diskettes in my kit bag. Five contained various cracking and copying tools, much of it my own code, two or three would contain a development environment and various assembly source snippets from my home library, and the rest would be a couple of different operating systems, and maybe a recent work in progress. The extra space would be enough for up to three disks if I picked any up in my travels. The beauty of it was you could boot up on anyone’s machine, and it pretty much looked and behaved exactly like your own machine. Portability.

Fast forward to the early to mid-90s, when hard drives really took off. I can’t count how many times I carried my Quantum 105S (105MB) hard drive to user groups, conferences and friends places. Everyone had a SCSI card, so your entire home set up could be carried under your arm and work the same on virtually any other machine. My old 11ms super reliable Q105S made many a journey overseas to U.S. conferences, and is still running.

That was of course before security knew what a hard drive was, which usually made for an interesting experience coming through customs. This was just about the time when switching power supplies started to become standard, which also nicely solved the U.S. 110V vs. Australia 240V problem. Anyone want to buy a couple of my old step down transformers? They’re some of the very few things I have left since L* did her accidental clean out of our back room.

But come Windows 2000 and onwards, the O/S pretty much started binding to the hardware, and because hardware is so variable in the PC market, carrying around drives wasn’t too much of a problem, but carrying around your home boot up drive was. Add the fact that most drives then went internal, and goodbye portability. Sure, we had the old SyQuest 44MB removable cartridge drive, followed by countless Iomega removable devices, but how many people had the drive to use them on?

And then Macs started locking the O/S to the hardware as well, not as bad as Windows, considering the proprietary nature of the machine, but booting on different boxes, while doable, became problematic.

Larry Ellison (what a great photo!), blinkered billionaire buffoon that he is, thought the NC or Net Computer would be the next revolution in computing, not necessarily for portability, but it would at least provide the common platform upon which we could possibly return to real portability of personal content stores that would work on every machine. Although he failed to understand that a single specification for a generic computer would be outdated very quickly indeed, a simple oversight perhaps due to the fact that he’s an idiot. The other failing of the NC was that people want their individuality, which is the whole digital device revolution we’re seeing at the moment. Turning us into a bunch of NC compliant clones probably flies in the face of this. So anyway, after the NC idea failed, he returned yet again to making dollars off the now 27 year old Oracle RDBMS. Although I’m proud to say that it was the 1998 Sydney Hobart Yacht Race that turned Larry off both ocean racing and Australia, all in the same week.

The interesting thing about ol’ blinkered buffoon Ellison, is that he’s also on the Apple board, mostly if not all to do with his friendship with Steve Jobs, and probably little to do with his innovation or clairvoyant skills. Which is why it is becoming more and more obvious that Steve Jobs is really The Guy. I was a doubter when Jobs came back to Apple, but now I’m well and truly for him. Which brings me to…

Goodbye to portability. Until today that is. The new Mac Mini brings us to a new era in portability. No bigger than a large hard back book, or ironically roughly the same as the SyQuest 44MB removable drive, this baby you can take with you anywhere. I know there’s been, and will continue to be a lot of coverage on the Mac Mini, but really, this is what a computer should be. I look at the tower case under my desk for my lowly 333Mhz Windows box, and I laugh, then I look at my various Macs, and while some of the iMacs are fairly luggable, the Mac Mini puts them all to shame.

I could take my Mini to work and use it with my Windows peripherals, I could take it to conferences and guarantee I have everything I need and that it works before demos etc. I could take it to friends places, instead of my firewire drive which doesn’t boot. And more importantly, I can put it on top of my home stereo, or I can put it in my work room, or even take it on holidays.

PC manufacturers never really copied the beauty of the iMac, a single self contained unit, luggable, and if you got one of the later graphite (like mine) or snow models, then they also came in arguably standard computer colours. This time I think it will be different. We’ll start to see smaller Wintel boxes start to appear, but nowhere near as inexpensive as you’d expect. PCs are cheap because the hardware is big, cheap and mass produced, all big problems when trying to copy the Mac Mini.

Like the iPod, after a few iterations we’ll see a fast usable Mac Mini, which gives people an easy way to if not switch from Windows, then at least try it out, and the ability to detach you and your desktop computer from your desktop.

This is what a computer should be, a portable appliance. You can see it in the mobile phone space, the PDA, the tablet PC and MP3/iPod space, technology is finally converging, and this is the first major computer manfacturer to really make the push. Bring it on.

Apple haters piss take

When The Going Gets Tough The Press Get All Whiney

Apple goes after rumor sites.

There’s been a lot of talk about Apple’s recent subpoenas for Mac rumor sites to give up their leads for leaks about unreleased products, particularly in the blogosphere, where Apple bashing seems to be a recent trend.

I don’t see anyone arguing that companies such as Apple should be completely open about new products and their development status. Of course not, people understand that when running a business, the timing and delivery of such messages have the opportunity to make or break a product or even a company. Even Scoble won’t argue that one, having intentionally kept mum about Microsoft products in his blog. I guess the blogging as open communication mantra doesn’t hold in all cases.

So assuming we agree companies need to make the decisions on when and how products are announced, why are so many people up in arms about it? Probably because they don’t know how the process works.

The problem for Apple, is that employees and third party people exposed to yet to be released products, will have signed an NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) saying that they will not do so. This is a legally binding agreement that would have been signed willingly. Having signed countless NDAs over the years, many being from Apple, I can testify that not once was I forced into signing one.

So in order to regain control of communications, Apple goes after the NDAed folks who leaked, and because they have no idea who they are, they need to go after the rumor sites that reported them.

Apple aren’t after the sites, they’re after the employees who broke one of the most basic principles of working for a technology company. Keeping quiet about unreleased products. And if you’re not in the industry, then I guess yes you could perhaps be excused for a little Apple bashing.

In researching this, I came across an even better post, When The Going Gets Tough The Press Get All Whiney, by Adrian Sutton on his Randomness blog.

Possible Apple mobile phone

I’ve had quite a few emails asking when I’m going to comment on the U.S. disaster elections, but to be honest I don’t think I’ve got much to add to the noise, and it probably conflicts a little with what I’ve been trying to do with this site. And anyway, I’ve already spoken about our local version of G.W. in It’s time to stay, John Howard and The search for the last Liberal voter, the Liberal Party being the Australian version of the U.S. Republican Party.

So let me instead weave in a related story, try to tie up the loose ends, and return us to our regular programming.

About a month ago, I was in the backyard attending to my beetroots, and L* comes out, looking proud of herself, and the following exchange took place:

L*: Hey, notice anything about the back room?

R: The back room? Umm… no why?

L*: Have you noticed how it looks a lot neater?

R: Uhh, what do you mean neater? You mean the back room where I keep all my collectable computer gear?

L*: Collectable? Umm… I’ve been throwing a box out each week since we moved, because you said they all had to go.

R: You what?! Yeah! They all had to go INTO STORAGE!

So it turns out that she’s now done me a favour in throwing out all my old AppleII gear. Out went all my hard drives, source code, finished products, my backup hard drives and cartridges. My AppleIIgs Tenspeed prototype, my custom built (by Zip Technology for GraphicWriterIII development) Zip GSX 14MHz, two high speed SCSI cards, two RAMFasts, a bunch of rare Australian RAM cards, an Apple Integer Card with my custom serial port debugging roms built in, two Transwarp GS cards, an original first edition Apple CD ROM drive, two industrial strength power supplies, a 110V to 240V power transformer, several other cards and AppleIIgs machines including my Woz edition which I used to develop pretty much every product I wrote for the AppleIIgs.

Lucky though, she was about to throw out the old laser printer which no longer works and the old green screen with the bad flicker. Phew, saved in the nick of time!

Pretty much all the gear mentioned on my history page is now gone, sitting in a city dump somehwere as land fill. Thousands of years from now, someone is going to dig up that stuff, think to themselves “What is this crap?” and subsequently bury it all again.

So the last few months have been a bit of a watershed for me, a turning point if you will. Well, at least after the crying and screaming subsided, and when L* was finally allowed to move back home again.

With no more AppleII gear, the home and U.S. elections looming, and several other changes to my world, things were looking up, a time for change, a fresh start… and then the world suddenly plunged into another four years of darkness. I feel ripped off.

The blogosphere learned a good lesson this week about isolation and visibility. I’ll leave you with two of my favourite perspectives on the election (and yes, I’ve read a lot of them): Gina Trapani’s personal before and after journey into politics; and Dave Pollard’s post UNDERSTANDING THE PEOPLE, PART 2, and to show what is wrong with this world, I quote:

Yesterday eight million anxious, fearful white American suburbanites, male and female, who didn’t vote in 2000, pried themselves out of their isolated, insulated, heavily-mortgaged, two-income-trap homes, and voted for the devil they knew over of the devil they didn’t. And then they went home and prayed. And as a consequence, we have four more years of George Bush.

I was reminded over the weekend why I love developing software for Apple products, and that I haven’t done nearly enough of it recently. Having spent almost 25 years of my life developing for the Apple II, and the odd thing here and there for the Mac, I thought I should take a look at Apple’s latest Xcode IDE for OS X. Nice. 🙂 (By the way, OS X is pronounced “oh ess ten”)

I’ll probably blog about it later, but I decided to build a virtual radio broadcasting mixer, after being disappointed at what I found on the Internet when I went looking.

Anyway, Xcode is Apple’s current development environment, which includes a funky app called Interface Builder. Interface Builder lets you build all your UI, as you would in any modern IDE, but includes a few extra cool features.

OS X is built around Objective-C and the MVC design pattern, and the name Interface Builder comes from the fact that you use it to visually model your MVC including Objective-C outlets and actions.

When you start lining up controls for a window in Interface Builder, instead of fixed grid sizes like in most IDEs, it generates dynamic grids based on the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. For example, “push button” controls can be 20, 17 or 15 pixels in height, but must be 12, 10 or 8 pixels vertically and horizontally spaced respectively. Certain reserved buttons, like Cancel and OK, must be 68 pixels wide. Lining these controls up in the old days consisted of either manually plugging in values (before we had visual resource editors), or lining them up on dodgey fixed grids that took no notice of controls widths, heights and embellishments.

Well, when you drag controls around in Interface Builder, a dynamic grid is displayed, with line guides wherever an appropriate grid snap should be. In the screen shot, you can see guides for the button text baseline, the bottom button align, the minimum horizontal button spacing, and the right align with the list control. Move the target button around, and guides appear or disappear as appropriate, and the control will snap to a guide when within about two pixels of it. Considering that all OS X controls have an inner frame which is the alignment border, and an outer variable size embellishment frame for the 3D and shadowing effects, this is a life saver.

More on the mixer later, but no wonder there’s a lot of software coming out for OS X. The tools are great, and Objective-C with Interface Builder and other tools is a breeze to use.

Jason Scott is putting the finishing touches on his BBS Documentary, covering the history of the BBS scene from 1978 to the present day, or at least when the web sort of took over from the BBS.

Released on 3 DVDs, with 200 interviews and taking 3 three years to produce, looks like Jason’s done an amazing job, especially getting hold of a lot of the original innovators like Ward Christensen.

Although I haven’t actually seen it myself, I’m sensing a big hole in the research with respect to the AppleII, and more specifically Australia, which had a huge BBS scene. However this is our problem, not Jason’s, as we never really found the time to answer his questions or document the local history for him. Seems a shame to do it after the documentary’s come out, but he’s pestered us enough over the past few years, or least I’m guessing that Andrew was as well.

The only mention I did get is for Eclipse (yes, we had the name first), a pretty cool project, but not much of a landmark release for Australia. In fact I don’t think anyone ever ran it locally, as by then the whole scene had pretty much collapsed. And to rub it in, Andrew gets top billing, which I guess is probably fair considering he basically took over the project once I’d gotten over it. Eclipse was a development platform, including plug in drivers and a Pascal/REXX hybrid language designed specifically for BBS use.

Anyway, if you have an interest in the 1980s BBS scene, take a look at Jason’s site, or even grab a copy of the documentary. And if you’re interested in hearing about the Australian history, then perhaps keep pestering me to find the time to write it all up. Although some of it is covered in my personal history of the Australian Apple II scene.

Saw a mildly amusing tshirt this morning on the way to work in Sunny ol’ Canberra, which I’ve since found after googling it, did the rounds a few years back. No matter:

There are 10 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and those that don’t.

Like I said, mildly amusing, perhaps because I fall into the former camp, and am still able to quote ASCII and 6502 instruction codes at will.

I really don’t believe it has come to this, but I’m going to explain roughly how languages and spelling work in recent versions of Microsoft Word. This came about from my guilt for luring poor Word users to my site, looking for a solution for the Australian spelling problem, and finding instead my bitch about U.S. English in Word and no solution.

To clear my guilt, perhaps this summary will help fellow travellers as we wander aimlessly around Word, bug ridden compass in hand and our original inspiration for writing clearly beginning to wane, with Word’s infinite complexity firmly inserted up our collective asses. (U.S. English used intentionally, yadda yadda yadda)

In Word, any part of a document can be marked as a particular language, or the default language. This is separate from the spelling checker, so put that out of your head. Now, the nice thing about being able to mark up parts of a document with different languages, is that you can then have different character sets, grammar checking and yes, spell checking, work in the languages you’ve selected. You see, you don’t configure the spell checker for a particular language, that went away many Word versions ago. What you do is mark your selected text as a particular language, and when you select spell check, it automatically detects the language and selects the appropriate dictionary.

You see, you could have French, English and German in the same document, and when you select spell check from the menu, it will switch dictionaries when it gets to each section of marked text. Same with the grammar checker, same with character sets, and who knows what else. This is a huge change from how it used to work, and I’m amazed Microsoft hasn’t publicised it very well, especially as we’re all so used to telling spell checkers which dictionary to use. How I18N of us.

So what’s the problem with U.S. English always being selected in Australian documents? Well, you’re probably selecting the Australian dictionary in the spell check options. All that does is tell it to use Australian for default language text. Problem is, the standard template, which is loaded from disk when you select New from the menu, is set to U.S. English. Or, you may have switched languages specifically from U.S. English to Australia, without realising that you’ve only switched the language for the text where the cursor is, and anything you add from then on. As we know, the spell checker typically repositions the cursor after each mispelling, so it could very easily wrap and jump into the original U.S. English text, thus switching the dictionary back to U.S. English.

OK, so how do we fix the problem? Well, for current documents, select all in the document, then double click on the language in the status bar at the bottom of the window. Change this to Australian English, and you’re done. You’ve now changed the whole document to Australian. But, there is still the odd bug where this may not always take, and you’ll end up back in U.S. English. And that is where my bitch about U.S. English in Word post begins.

So good luck, and if this has helped you in some way, leave me a comment. 13 people found my bitch post through Google over the past 30 days, maybe you’re one of them?