“Sally.”
A mutter.
“Wake up now, Sally.”
A louder mutter: leeme lone.
He shook her harder.
“Wake up. You got to wake up!”
Charlie.
Charlie’s voice. Calling her. For how long?
Sally swam up out of sleep.
First she glanced at the clock on the night table and saw it was quarter past two in the morning. Charlie shouldn’t even be here; he should be on shift. Then she got her first good look at him and something leaped up inside her, some deadly intuition.
Her husband was deathly pale. His eyes started and bulged from their sockets. The car keys were in one hand. He was still using the other to shake her, although her eyes were open. It was as if he hadn’t been able to register the fact that she was awake.
“Charlie, what is it? What’s wrong?”
He didn’t seem to know what to say. His Adam’s apple bobbed futilely but there was no sound in the small service bungalow but the ticking of the clock.
“Is it a fire?” she asked stupidly. It was the only thing she could think of which might have put him in such a state. She knew his parents had perished in a housefire.
“In a way,” he said. “In a way it’s worse. You got to get dressed, honey. Get Baby LaVon. We got to get out of here.”

Stephen King says he considers the Dark Tower series to be his magnum opus, but for many of his fans it is The Stand (and apparently there are quite a few hidden connections between the two that I was not clever enough to pick up on). Either way, this post-apocalyptic tale is at the very least a massive undertaking. When it was first released in 1978, King's publishers took a stand of their own and decided that the manuscript had to lose four hundred pages because the market would not bear such a heavy tome (and the price sticker that it would need to carry). A "Complete And Uncut Edition" with the full 1152 pages was not published until 1990.

I suppose having to trim down books for production and marketing purposes is not an issue Stephen King has to deal with anymore, but with e-books this should not be a concern for anyone else, either. On Kindle, a million pages do not weigh any more than ten.

Where Kindle falls short however, is with the pictures that are included at seemingly random places throughout the book. They don't work very well, both in how they look and in terms of layout. Of course, they are quite marginal to the experience and this is more of a problem of this specific device than of e-books itself, so if you wanted to read, say a graphic novel, you could use a tablet with a "better" screen.

Last month I was very happy to see J.K. Rowling go DRM-free for her Harry Potter e- and audio-books, and was wondering (hoping?) if that was the beginning of the end for locked-down digital books.

This week, major science-fiction and fantasy publisher Tom Doherty Associates (they own Tor Books) announced that by early July, their entire list of e-books will be available DRM-free.

Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time, they’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.

Tom Doherty

I guess when the final installment of The Wheel of Time comes out, I won't have to buy it from Amazon (whose increasingly tempting book recommendations are starting to freak me out a little). I am hoping for a bundle of the whole series, actually, so that I can start from the beginning again: it has been twenty years since I read The Eye of the World, and five since Knife of Dreams, and I am not sure that I have not forgotten too much by now.

A long, long time ago, I made a list of what my web browser (Camino at the time, now pretty evenly split between Firefox, Chromium and Safari) would suggest when I type just a single letter. Here is what Alfred serves up today:

• Audacity
• VirtualBox
• Calculator
• Dropbox
• Eclipse
• YoruFukurou
• GitX
• HDRtist
• iPhoto
• Java_ME_SDK_3_0
• Kindle
• MarkdownLive
• MarkdownLive
• MP Navigator EX 2.0
• LibreOffice
• System Preferences
• QuickTime Player
• BIT.TRIP.RUNNER
• Safari
• Tunnelblick
• WhichWayIsUp
• VirtualBox
• TextWrangler
• Xcode
• YoruFukurou
• Affe..Zebra

It just occurred to me that I have never seen a cigarette vending machine in China, a revelation that would probably have come to me much earlier if I smoked. This is not a cause or effect of Chinese people not smoking a lot, though. In fact, they smoke a lot more than Europeans, North Americans or even Japanese (or at least the men do, for women the percentage is quite low). What you have instead are many small shops selling tobacco, often exclusively.

I think not having tobacco vending machines is a good thing, and every country should consider banning them if they are serious about their stance on health issues, especially for children. The measures that they put in place instead, such as having the machine require an ID card or even implement facial recognition, of restricting where they can be put (for example not in the vicinity of schools), are complicated, expensive and probably ineffective. In addition to that, it seems like a good way to support small, local retail businesses.

I spent some time yesterday trying to determine the compatibility of popular Creative Commons and Open Source licenses with the iOS App Store. One would think that there should be some authoritative guide about this, but the groups that own these licenses seem to refuse to take a firm stand on the issue, and everyone else disclaims their opinion with IANAL. So my position is that material using the following licenses cannot be used in works distributed on the iOS App Store (but, of course, IANAL):

GNU General Public License

To use GPL code in your product, you have to place the complete work under the GPL. This means making the source code available so that end users can inspect and modify it (not a problem, even on the app store), and providing a reasonable way for end users to install the modified work onto their devices (impossible, because Apple does not allow side-loading).

GNU Lesser General Public License

You can use LGPL code in your product without having to place the rest of the work under any particular license. But you still have to make the source code for that LGPL components available and provide for a reasonable way for end users to replace the LGPL components in your product with their own modified versions. That second provision cannot be met.

Creative Commons Share Alike licenses

If you build upon a CC-SA work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license that allows the end-user to share (copy and distribute) and remix the resulting work. You cannot copy and distribute apps downloaded from the iOS App Store.

Other Creative Commons licenses are fine: for CC-BY you need to provide attribution, and for CC-NC you must make the app free of charge and free of ads.

The situation is a bit unclear for the GNU Free Documentation License. It seems to be okay for photos (and by extension I guess all other non-textual media), as long as attribution is provided. There is a section on Wikimedia that says when using a photo placed under the GFDL license as part of a larger work, the larger work does not have to be released under GFDL for usage to be within the license terms. The Free Software Foundation, creators of the GFDL license, has been asked for clarification of how much of e.g. a book counts as the "larger work" in these terms; they responded that no synopsis can substitute for what the text of the license says, and if in doubt the reuser should seek a proper legal opinion. Now, the GFDL says "When the Document is included in an aggregate, this License does not apply to the other works in the aggregate which are not themselves derivative works of the Document." So, the larger work doesn't (always) have to be released under GFDL.

I was at the electronics mall shopping for hard disk enclosures when I came across a Kindle 4 also on sale there. The first thing that surprised me was how small it has gotten: Having removed the keyboard, basically all that is left is the screen (which is exactly the same size as before). The second surprise came in the form of Leo Tolstoy's portrait on said screen. When powered down, Kindle displays a randomly rotating collection of drawings, and I know the cast of characters on my Kindle 3 by now. Tolstoy is not one of them. At first I assumed that they changed or expanded the selection for the new model, but then I saw the small copyright notice in the corner, reading duokan.com. Switching the device on, I was greeted with a completely different user interface, and all of it in Chinese. The shop explained that they replaced Amazon's software with a Chinese operating system, and that you can choose between the two.

Amazon themselves are not selling Kindle in China, and the device is lacking in two aspects for this market: The user interface is only available in English (that was until recently the case in Germany as well), and more importantly, the Kindle store where you are supposed to buy your ebooks is not open for business here, either.

DuoKan takes care of the first part by providing an alternative operating system that supports both English and Chinese. It is distribute free-as-in-beer and works on Kindle 3 and Kindle 4, with an Android version (for Kindle Fire) in the works. It can apparently co-exist with Amazon's software in a kind of dual-boot setup, and it handles a variety of ebook formats, including EPUB, which the Kindle OS does not, making it an interesting product even for non-Chinese users. With this kind of software you have to be awfully careful about not getting infested with spyware and malware, but from the looks of it, DuoKan seems perfectly legitimate. Would be even better if it was open-source, though.

Traditional publishers are having a hard time dealing with digital content distribution, which removes two essential limitations present in physical media: There is no cost in creating and shipping an additional copy, and there are no other prerequisites or investments necessary to start creating and distributing copies other than having had access to a single copy. As a result, there is no longer any legitimation to make money by creating and distributing additional copies of content, and market forces are rapidly working towards eliminating this inefficiency.

What publishers should be doing in this situation is massively reduce their financial dependence on the obsolete parts of their business, and instead focus on the other parts of the publishing business, leveraging their established and privileged position as intermediary between content creators and consumers in physical media to take the same position in the digital media. If not, someone else will.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Clay Shirky

What many publishers do instead is to try to foist the limitations that they currently benefit from in the physical marketplace unto digital distribution, i.e. make it artificially expensive and difficult to copy. And this is how we got Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).

Unfortunately for the content industry, DRM is doing them more harm than good. First of all, it does not stop commercial piracy. A criminal enterprise that is serious about profiting from selling pirated copies has the resources to remove DRM. What is does do is inconvenience the people who are supposed to buy the media. It also creates the interesting situation that the pirated version of a product is now of better quality than the original , because it does not have the artificial restrictions on how it can be used and sometimes even the material quality itself (such as picture resolution or encoding bitrate). Even a casual user will encounter the fact that his DRM-ridden product does not let him do something that he could have done easily and would have been well within his rights with the physical equivalent.

Even more dangerous than consumers looking for alternatives is content creators finding out that there may be better ways for them to disseminate their output. The insistence on DRM has put the publishing industry at the mercy of the tech industry. Because all popular devices have their own incompatible DRM schemes, technology companies are now running the major digital storefronts as well, and there is massive vendor lock-in that makes it very hard to establish additional outlets. With these new powerful intermediaries, the publishing houses are losing their valuable position as mediators. Not much is stopping the tech industry from taking over here. Youtube and Netflix have started producing original video content, Amazon and Apple allow anyone to sell ebooks. At the moment these are still relatively small ventures, mostly of the sort that a big publisher would not have picked up anyway. That more voices can be heard is very good for society, but the real commercial impact will hit when the Steven Kings and Madonnas of the world decide what they can do by themselves or with more agile partners.

J.K. Rowling, probably the best-selling author in the world, is offering her Harry Potter books for download on her own website now. DRM-free, in EPUB, Kindle, and audiobook formats. She is selling them exclusively through her site, and has partnered with Sony, Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and Google to make sure it works on as many devices as possible.

Today is the day that everything breaks down.

• Laundry machine leaks lots of water. Reason and exact location unclear. All tubes seem attached properly.
• Spokenword feed scanner appears broken, is not updating my podcasts, so I cannot put the excellent latest episodes of TWiT and This American Life into thilo+ or Thilo's Tech Radio.
• Significant loss of hearing due to accumulation of gunk in ear canal. Go to the hospital for a cleaning session, have to do that every few months now. Dusty Shanghai? Too many podcasts? Getting old?
• Back home, find my Time Machine disk having been disconnected somehow in the middle of a backup. After turning it on and off again, it decides that it now needs 182 GB for the next backup, and starts deleting old backups. Takes a lot of time, and turns out to be unnecessary as the following backup only actually took up the usual 4 GB. Rest of the morning having fun with Disk Utility repairing the hundreds of errors that it found on the volume, completely destroying my faith in the validity of the backup.
• Mac mini also broken. Freezes up randomly about once a day now. No crash reports, no kernel panics, no automatic reboots. No problems reported in Disk Utility or Hardware Tool (even after extra-long memory check). Suspect mother board or GPU failure. Erase and reformat drive, plan to reinstall Lion for the benefit of the Genius at the bar. Lion download projected to take 63 hours. Skipping that.
• Arrive at the Apple Store, find the Genius Bar on a one-hour break Does not serve drinks, either, despite the name. Killing time with new iPad not an option, not yet available in China, even though made here. Spend an hour with friendly Genius, who runs some diagnostic tools only he has and reinstalls Lion (does not take him 63 hours). Of course cannot demonstrate freezes. Leave the Mini with them for more tests.
• Bus breaks down on the way back home.

I am going to spend the next two nights in a hospital. No, this is not because of something Windows 8 did to me, I am not sick (at least not yet; spending a lot of time in a hospital seems to be a good way to catch something). I will be keeping company with my son.

Kai has had a stuffy nose forever now, and also snores like a champion. Different types of medicine did not clear things up, and at a recent nose endoscopy (a procedure he very much did not enjoy) the doctors discovered adenoid hypertrophy blocking 80% of nasal airflow, and decided the severely enlarged and allegedly vestigial organ be removed.

This is a very simple (takes just fifteen minutes) and standard (apparently in the 1930s everyone was doing it, and I think I remember I also had it done and that there was ice cream) surgery, but while Wikipedia claims that it is mostly performed on outpatients, the hospital insists that he also stay the night before (so that they can make sure he eats properly six hours before surgery, and nothing after that), and the night after (in case there are complications). There is also a whole array of diagnostics that they routinely run on the day before.

While Kai has to stay in the hospital for these three days, I am not. I will just join him at night, and a couple of hours every day, taking shifts with Cissy and her mother. The hospital is literally just across the street from our compound, so we can be quite flexible here.

Today was finally a full day in Metro (and Snow Leopard, as I gave up on Notepad and wrote this and my notes with my usual TextWrangler setup).

• Metro is clearly intended to be used on a touchscreen: Everything is big enough to be fingered, there are no complex menu bars, status bars or tool bars, often just one big screen filled with content. There is a lot of swiping, dragging and horizontal scrolling, none of which is very comfortable to do with a mouse pointer.
• I was looking for a video tutorial on Metro basics for the end user, but did not find anything. Let me know if there is anything. Microsoft should probably include one in the final version.
• I am very grateful for PCWorld's list of keyboard shortcuts, which improved my day a lot. Old favourites that I still remember from XP like Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Tab, Alt-F4, Ctrl-F4 have also proven functional (and yes, three days in I finally reconfigured Virtual Box to relinquish control of the Windows key, which was used as the "Host Key" by default).
• For some reason, scrolling with the touchpad worked in most, but not all, apps.
• Alt-Tab still switches between apps, and it already toggles the whole screen (not just the application icon) while you are still holding the key, which is cool. Ctrl-Tab does the same for application windows (such as IE tabs).
• Speaking of "windows", there aren't any. Everything takes up the whole screen, and when it does not you have non-overlapping tiles that can only be arranged or resized according to a coarse grid. It might be good idea for Microsoft to rebrand their OS lineup. It is still justifiable since Windows 8 still has Desktop, but why is Windows Phone called "Windows"? It has certainly left its Windows CE origins far behind, something like Metro Phone or XPhone 360 seem to make more sense.
• Speaking of "tiles", that is a pretty and refreshingly different (from both the desktop and the iOS experiences) design. They come as a big clutter-free grid and in vivid colours. The old Start menu is gone, replaced by a Start screen (that actually extends over two screens for me, but that might be a resolution issue), which display application tiles, both for running apps as well as for "pinned" apps that stay there even when not active. Every tile can also become "live" and display some application-specific information, such as the current song title or weather report. They come in two sizes, and can also be placed on the lock screen (which is beautiful to look at, probably the work of the same folks that designed Bing). Unlike an Android widget however, live tiles are not interactive (they just launch the app).
• Application menu bars have been replaced by Charms, which appear in the form of a toolbar that slides in from the right side of the screen. It contains several settings and search functions, both application-specific and system-wide. You can also check the application's permissions (like Location or Internet Access, similar to what you have on mobile systems), and review it on the Store.
• Just like Apple with iCloud, Microsoft is nudging you towards getting a Microsoft account (which I think is the same as a Windows Live account), that you can then use for a number of applications (such as the various media stores) and services (such as syncing between devices), and even to replace local user accounts.
• The limited selection in the Windows Store might be because of me being in China. Maybe there is more to be had if not for that. The thought occurred to me while looking at the "Social" section, which had just three apps, Wordpress and the Chinese services QQ and RenRen. I did install the featured eight apps that won the Metro developer contest:
  • Air Soccer is a turn-based (but still real-time) air-hockey-like game. You want a touch screen here.
  • Cook Book is an online cook book that for some reason (China?) did not load any pictures (except for the gorgeous title photo, those seem to be a strong point for Microsoft).
  • Elements Weather Forecast immediately replaced the built-in Weather app. Looks better and has data for Shanghai (the stock one told me it was not available in my market and just showed Seattle).
  • Flip Saw is a puzzle app I did not get to try out.
  • Pew Pew is a nice retro/line-drawing style arcade-type shooter owing its name to a funny sound effect.
  • Physamajig looks interesting (probably along the lines of Crayon Physics), but I also had no time to look at it.
  • Puzzle Touch is a jigsaw puzzle game where you also have to rotate the pieces. Another case of beautiful photography and in need of a touch screen.
  • SigFig Portfolio lets you track a brokerage account, but you need to have one.
  All of them were free, but some of them still said "Buy" or "Try" instead of "Download", which confused me, but seems to indicate that there will be a try-before-you-buy feature that is missing from the Mac and iOS App Stores.

Today a play-by-play of what I did, without much commentary.

Install the VirtualBox guest additions

For a better integration between the virtual Windows 8 and the physical hardware and host operating system (OS X Lion), VirtualBox comes with so-called "guest additions". They mount as a virtual CD, which I could open with Explorer. The installer required command-line parameters, though, and I had no idea how to open a command line. I tried finding cmd.exe or something like that, but failed. I am now also confused why there are two folders with applications (Program Files and Program Files x86, whose contents appear to be identical). So I asked the Superusers, bending my rule of using only Windows 8 itself, because I could not install my password generator into IE 10 and thus could not log in to post the question (I say bending instead of breaking, because I could have posted anoymously). After finding out that I can go back to Metro to do a search (which would then take me back again to a command line in Desktop), I also found that all that messing around with the command line was unneccessary after all, because there was another installer with a GUI wizard. Rebooted, now sound works, and I have a "USB tablet device", which can successfully scroll left and right.

No luck in the Windows Store

The interesting thing about Windows 8 is the Metro interface, but so far I have spent all my time in Desktop mode. To leave that behind, I need a text editor and an SCP client that work in Metro. I first turned to the Windows Store. That is still under development, and only had a grand total of five productivity apps. One of them was Evernote, which I could install for free after creating a Windows Live ID (which involved another trip back to my Mac for the password tool, and to turn the VPN on to be able to log in to GMail to get the verification email). Unfortunately, the app asked me for yet another user name and password, presumably for the Evernote service, but without making that clear, or offering me a way to create one, and I was not in the mood for two new cloud service accounts in a single afternoon just to edit a local text file, so I gave up on that (and gave it a two star review using the nice integration of the Store into the application's settings sidebar, where you can also manage permissions and notifications). I did get updates for four of the pre-installed Microsoft apps from the Store, though (even before I signed up for a Windows account).

No luck on the Internet

I then tried to find Metro apps outside of the Store, and a quick search for "Windows 8 Metro text editor" (on Bing with IE10) turned up the very promising, apparently (as I had never heard of it before) highly acclaimed open-source text editor Bend. The download threw me back into Desktop, where a warning dialog asked me if I wanted to go ahead with installing software from an unknown publisher (I suppose this is what Apple is going for with Gatekeeper as well), and when I said okay and launched it I was back in Metro for a moment, where another (much slicker) dialog called Windows Smart Screen asked me pretty much the same question again. Unfortunately, that was it, as no application launched, and no error message appeared either. I assume that it just crashed. I went to the trouble of finding the Task Manager (which seems to have gained a lot of features) but could find no evidence of any process still alive. I continued to look for other Metro apps, but could not find any. Hopefully the Store will have more to offer later during the week.

As you can see, today's plan to switch over to Metro did not come together. But time for preparations is running out, so I will give up on that and make do with Notepad and WinSCP and spend tomorrow finding out what Metro can do for me.

Last week, Microsoft released a preview version of their upcoming Windows 8 operating system (interestingly enough at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which is an event not for the PC industry, but for mobile phones), and since it is a free download (I assume it expires after a few months) I am thinking to spend a week playing with it, documenting my impressions in daily blog posts. And to make things interesting the blogging itself, and the research around it, is going to happen exclusively under Windows 8.

First order of business was to get the thing installed. The original plan was to partition the hard disk in my decommissioned Mac mini, and directly boot into it using Boot Camp. That failed however, because Disk Utility was unable to shrink the Leopard partition, even though there should have been plenty of free space. I hate HFS+, it is an embarrassment for Apple, and I was actually getting ready to spend a week playing with the new ZFS software Zevo, had not Windows 8 come along. Only one frivolous timesink at once. I then tried to check if my almost ten year old 80 GB external Firewire disks were still functional. I had dismissed them as defective, and (after finding out that I had to connect them with USB because the connectors have changed from Firewire 400 to Firewire 800, which unlike USB and USB 2 are not compatible) unfortunately that turned out to be the case: nothing except clicking noises and horrible read timeouts.

So instead of that, I installed it on my current Mac mini, but as Boot Camp and partitioning are too scary to do with a computer that needs to actually work every day, not directly on the machine, but as a VirtualBox. Installation into VirtualBox went smoothly, although I am still running with a bare minimum of integration, full screen mode has black borders, there is no sound, and the keyboard layout is off. Most of these things can probably be fixed if I dig deeper into VirtualBox, but that seems too much of a rat hole. What I would like, though, is to have proper drivers for the Magic Touchpad, as I can already see that Windows 8 would be so much more fun with gestures (or even a touchscreen tablet, but that is beyond my means).

I am reserving first impressions and further exploration of the new Metro interface for tomorrow, but what still needed to get done today was this post, and for that I need an SCP client, and a text editor. I will try to get Metro apps, probably from the Windows Store, tomorrow, but for now sticking with what little I remember from the XP days, I switched to the Desktop mode, downloaded WinSCP, and launched Notepad (by creating a New Text Document, not by opening the application, which frankly I don't even know how to do, because the Start menu is gone).

I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.

I never thought I'd live to see the day when Keep A-Movin' Dan would decide to deadhead until the heat death of the Universe.

Something is afoot in Disney World. Julius is part of the crew running the Haunted Mansion and the Hall of the Presidents when a new team moves in with plans to replace animatronics with experience imprinting technology. He is afraid that they are trying to take over his favourite ride, ruining it in the process. Julius also suspects that they are behind his recent assassination, which is not as big a thing as it used to be now that people can be restored from a backup, but still extremely rude and annoying.

Cory Doctorow's first novel (which of course you can download for free in a variety of non-DRM formats from his website) is set in a future when mankind has overcome the limitations of the physical world. There is free and abundant energy, space travel, and infinite life-extensions (by means of growing clones and transferring memory). While that is certainly not a near-term prospect, at least two topics featured have some relevance to a closer future, or even the present. The first is that it shows how people live and work when they have an always-on Internet connection (and how isolated and helpless they become when that connection breaks down, even though Julius seems to handle it quite fine, probably because he was born pre-Bitchun). The second is the idea of adhocracy, where large and fixed forms of government and organisation have been replaced by local and fluent structures, based on shared interests and competency, a meritocracy where in order to stay in a position of power you have to keep earning the respect of your community, conveniently measured in terms of your "Whuffie" score.

Just yesterday, I wrote about how Chinese users might benefit from a special version of iOS, and now today's announcement of Mountain Lion has this passage:

It’s a new Mac experience in China. OS X Mountain Lion brings all-new support for many popular Chinese services. And they’re easy to set up. Mail, Contacts, and Calendar work with QQ, 163, and 126. Baidu, the leading Chinese search provider, is a built-in option in Safari. The video-sharing websites Youku and Tudou are included in the new Share Sheets, so users in China can easily post videos to the web. They can also blog with Sina weibo, the popular microblogging service. And with improved text input, typing in Chinese is easier, faster, and more accurate.

Apple have just announced (in a rather unusual fashion) that they plan to speed up the release cycle of OS X, aiming for a major update every year, starting with Mountain Lion, scheduled for summer. The main focus for them is to align OS X with iOS, in terms of user experience, but also in the amount of control they assert over the platform.

The biggest difference between traditional computers and post-PC devices is how you install applications, respectively from files you could have gotten anywhere versus an official (and tightly controlled) market place. When the Mac App Store launched, it was obvious that this would be the model Apple prefers, but that they would be using carrots and sticks to make everyone accept that. It already carried a couple of carrots: For consumers, it is easy to find and install apps, it takes care of updates and installing it on all you computers, you do not have to be afraid of malware, and payments are done with your existing Apple ID. For smaller developers it provides exposure to a much bigger audience, and takes care of the hassle of having to handle payment processing (on the other hand, bigger developers probably don't need that and would rather not pay the 30% cut, you do not get to build your own customer database anymore, and there is no mechanism for paid updates or free demos).

Mountain Lion now introduces a small stick and another set of carrots. In the carrot department, there are some additional features that are only available to App Store apps, most notably iCloud storage integration. The "Open File" dialog in Mountain Lion now has two modes, opening local files and opening cloud files. The latter is reserved for properly sandboxed and approved third-party software only.

As for sticks there is Gatekeeper, which is a setting that prevents installation of non-App-Store apps. That is not (yet?) the default, but the setting is available now. The current behaviour (of allowing everything) is not the default either, though. The new default is to only allow installs from "identified developers", which means either from the App Store or from cryptographically signed packages. An "identified developer" is anyone with an Apple developer account, and he can self-sign his software. There is no approval process, but in case malware is found, Apple will blacklist the developer account, and Macs will refuse to install his software. This mechanism is built on top of the existing facility that prompts for confirmation to run a downloaded program for the first time, there are several ways it can be circumvented, it does not disable software already installed, and developer accounts are probably very easy to get anyway, so this is not a fool-proof security measure, but still a nice idea.

If there was any need to still provide evidence how mainstream Apple products have become, it cannot get more obvious than at our neighbourhood Walmart, where I go for groceries three times a week, and which has recently become an Apple Authorized Reseller, a fact they proudly advertise on a banner hoisted above the little section where you can play with the goods (if by goods you mean iPads, you will have to compete with a constant number of kids that hang around the three hands-on devices). As you know, reluctance to buy something that is essentially two years old now has prevented me to get my replacement iPod, but those retina displays sure are a temptation and hardware updates have been substituted by price cuts, too. So I try to stay away from this part of the shop.

One interesting thing about the gadgets on display is that they (like their siblings across the globe) prominently feature a Youtube app, which is completely non-functional here in China (at least out-of-the-box). I find this interesting because normally Apple is very keen on making sure everything works on their devices, either by making it work on their devices, or by kicking it off their devices, and because in this case it is not clear how they would do that. As far as I can tell, iOS devices are completely identical across the world, and Apple has made it a point to not let anyone (such as phone companies) get between them and the end-user. (NB: There are apparently camera-less iPhones in Singapore, so that military personal can buy them). Removing the pre-installed Youtube app world-wide does not seem like a good option (but still something Apple if anyone would do at a whim, especially to spite Google, the relationship with which has soured considerably since the iPhone made its debut). Having a special China edition would draw criticism about censorship, ironically along the same lines that Google faced when they removed search results to improve the user-experience by not showing links that would be blocked anyway.

I also find it interesting because it showcases China's approach to Internet censorship, which is plain pragmatic. One might argue that they would be keen on suppressing knowledge that Youtube (and Facebook and Twitter) even existed, and be unhappy about a Youtube app on a phone sold here. But it seems that they do not care that the "1%" have their ways to unfettered Internet access (or even acknowledge the fact that they need it to keep the economy functioning), as long as they can control media access for the vast majority of the population. The enormous and growing income gap between the rich and the poor in China has become the most urgent problem for the government here, and they claim to be taking steps to address it, if only to maintain their own grip on power. I wonder if a fairer distribution of wealth will need to coincide in less restrictive access to media (both in the traditional broadcast sense and of the user-generated variety).

Along the same lines, you see a lot of Mark Zuckerberg on the covers of business magazines here these days. Everything Mark Zuckerberg does is blocked in China. I do not know what stance Facebook has towards China, it seems that they have not felt the need to make concessions to get allowed in, and I congratulate them for it. Pulling out of China must have been a hard thing for Google to do, and I hope that after their IPO, Facebook does not feel the pressure to make more money by expanding its presence here (especially after having signed up everyone else in the rest of the world).

thilo+ is slowly growing (in functionality, if not in membership).

It started out as just a twitter stream that I would manually send my ratings to. First order of business was to write a Java application to manage a database (was looking for an embedded document database, settled for OrientDB, even though I am still not completely clear what a graph database is and how to use it) , so that I could manually enter my ratings into a database and have it send tweets automatically when that happens.

As it turns out, while Twitter does offer a publicly accessible RSS feeds, those are not as useful as they could be. First and foremost, they use URL shorteners for everything, which is terrible. The tweets fit into 140 characters with the complete URL (not that this should be a concern for RSS anyway), so this completely unnecessary and makes it impossible to see where the link is going without using special client software (or clicking on it). But now that I have a database I can produce other kinds of feeds as well, so let me present

thiloplus.atom

An Atom feed is basically the same thing as an RSS feed, don't ask me what the differences are, I am using Atom just because that is what the feed generation library I use does. The contents are still a work in progress, but the idea is that it provides as much useful information as possible to as many reader applications as possible. The source data is just what you see in the tweet, a category, a title, a URL and my rating. I then use embed.ly to pull in some more context. I am also including audio enclosures for the podcasts, so that you can use the Atom feed itself as a podcast in iTunes (in addition to the other two that you hopefully already listen to). Let me know if it does not work properly in your reader, and (if you know that) how I can improve the markup.

The next steps will be to make it unnecessary for me to manually enter my ratings into the database, but instead pull them from the various places on the Internet where I already make them public. So far, this works for Spokenword (podcasts) and Flickr (photos).

I have just finished watching the six episodes of the BBC mini-series Sherlock, and while it is an excellent production, I have two big complaints about it. First of all are the scope of the crimes, which tend to take on enormous proportions. While the original also hints at Holmes' involvement in delicate cases concerning royal houses, there is no need to take it to an over-the-top level that would better suit James Bond. The second, and more urgent, complaint are the cliffhanger season finales, which seem to serve no purpose other than to drive the audience nuts with speculation. I strongly advise anyone against watching The Reichenbach Fall before the third season is available. A good cliffhanger needs to be an important part of a story arch that connects two seasons, and get resolved in a satisfactory fashion. Otherwise we can all go back and watch Lost again.

Hollywood movies are also fertile ground for both these ingredients, but fortunately A Game of Shadows, while not avoiding them altogether, uses them in a much more palatable way. Yes, there is a chase across Europe, but that is in Conan Doyle's Moriarty story as well, yes, the plot involves triggering a World War, but they make a point that Europe really was very explosive at the time. These things are par for the course with big-budget franchise movies, so one must be forgiving. And the ending is just friendly hint that more sequels may be coming instead of a nerve-wrecking cliffhanger.

Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law are still a perfect duo, the signature fight scenes from the first movie are back (where Holmes meticulously plans the action before it happens) and used very effectively in the final confrontation with Moriarty. Plus you can get a very good look indeed at Stephen Fry's brilliant Mycroft.

7 points

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