I recently encountered two unexpected examples of location-based services that show how useful it can be if a service provider knows where you are when accessing his service (even though the whole concept has its scary aspects as well).

I am using a commercial VPN service (5 USD/month) now to jump over (or dig through) the Great Firewall, and as a side effect this makes my Internet access appear to be originating from the US or Europe. Now Google showed me a warning message about my account being accessed from an unlikely location, and advised my to change my password if I had nothing to do with this. Apparently, they keep track of your physical location (which can be determined relatively accurately from your IP address, unless you are using something like a VPN or proxy server) and if your point of access moves faster than a human being could, they generate the warning.

And yesterday, my sister and I received text messages to our mobile phones with Expo information shortly after we entered the Expo site. Your mobile phone operator obviously knows where you are (in urban areas within a few hundred meters), and they can use this information themselves or share it with partners to provide location-specific information.

The scary part is the ability to record and store this data, combine it with data from other sources to get an uncomfortably comprehensive profile, and share it with people you would rather not disclose your location to. But it sure is pretty darn useful.

After a long time, finally another Perl project, so here you go:

Perl has a range operator to help iterating over index ranges.

foreach ( 1 .. 10 ) { 
    # do something
}

foreach ($start .. $finish) {
	# do something
}

# get the last three array elements
# negative array indices are another of the 1001 reasons
my @array_slice = @array[ -3 .. -1];

Many languages have that, but Perl's version has a little extra magic to also work with letters, and not just numbers:

$ perl -le 'foreach ("F97" .. "G05"){ print }';
F97
F98
F99
G00
G01
G02
G03
G04
G05

In scalar context, the range operator works as a boolean bi-stable flip-flop, with some extra special magic thrown in if constant values are present, but that is getting a bit too arcane to be considered a great feature. I am not even going to try to explain it here, the Perl Monks have an article about it.

The Internet was supposed to bring about micropayments, online money which could easily be sent from anyone to anyone, at transaction costs so low that sending as little as a cent would be feasible. This has not really happened so far, the closest is probably PayPal, but that is geared more towards bigger payments. This week, I came across two interesting services, each addressing a particular niche in this market.

The first one is MYC4.com, a Danish company that provides a marketplace for microcredit loans to African countries. The loans are in the range between a few hundred and a few thousand euros, and go to individuals (mostly shop owners) in Africa. The loans are collectively financed by MYC4 members, who in an auction bid for part of the loan, with shares starting from five euro at an interest rate of their choosing. The bids with the lowest interest rates and enough combined amount are used to pay out the loan.

The second one was just endorsed by my favourite newspaper to help pay the bill for their online edition: Flattr (the Web 2.0 compatible name is a combination of to flatter and flat-rate) is a Swedish micro-donation service, currently still in an invite-only beta. It works just like digg, in that you put a button on your content, for people who like it to click on. The difference is that when they click, they send you some money. Flattr members allocate a monthly budget they want to spend (which can be as low as two euro), and at the end of the month this budget is divided equally among their clicks.

Because Dec(imal) 25 = Oct(al) 31.

While your application has not been rejected, it would be appropriate to remove "Finalist in Google’s Android Developer’s Challenge!" from the Application Description.

Please log into iTunes Connect to make appropriate changes to the Application Description now to avoid an interruption in the availability of [the application].

I am a card-carrying member of the Free Software Foundation (and that card is bootable), and I am getting a little worried how they spend their resources. Every time Microsoft comes out with a new version of their operating system there is a new campaign against it. Is this really the important battle anymore?

Windows works on hardware that is available in the form of standardized components, which you can combine in many different ways to fit your needs and obtain from many different vendors at competitive pricing. The existence of this ecosystem is to a large part a direct consequence of the success of Microsoft's business model.

If you feel like it, you can replace (or augment) the Windows installation on your computer with an open-source operating system. But even if you don't, you can run (and create) any kind of software you want, open-source or otherwise, on top of either operating system. And you can directly access, copy and modify all of data files that you create with them.

Contrast this to Steve Job's reimagination of the personal computer in the form of the iPad. You can only install application through Apple's App Store, from which the company quite often bans programs for reasons that not everyone agrees with. It is unlikely that iPad users will ever be able to use software written with Flash or Java technology, even though the device is clearly capable of doing so. It seem impossible that another company could offer an improved (or just different) iPad-compatible tablet computer. Content providers will be offering digital downloads of books, magazines, news feeds, just like they already do for music and movies, and this will most probably come with DRM to make it impossible to consume your purchased media on devices made by a competing brand, and in addition potentially reduce the quality of information that will be available free of charge on the open Internet.

I have little doubt that the iPad will be a very successful product, and define a new category, just like the iPhone and the iPod before it. Maybe not in its first iteration, but definitely within the next two years, and especially when it reaches the point where it can operate without the need for a (traditional) PC to sync with. Thus, the iPad will have a much bigger impact on computer users' freedom and ability to control their devices and data than anything Microsoft is doing at this point.

Of course, I'll buy one as soon as it reaches generation three. Let's just stop pointing fingers at Microsoft, and worry about the next wave of scary monopolies (not just Apple, by the way, Google and Facebook also need to be watched).

Update: I just noticed that a section of the FSF's Defective by Design campaign against DRM is indeed aimed at the iBad.

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered --combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Wow. Do no evil, indeed.

Is this the first major international company to refuse to collaborate with China because of human rights issues? They'll be walking away from a lot of money, which I am afraid other Western companies will be very eager to pick up instead. I also wonder if some shareholders are shameless enough to sue over this. Let's see how this plays out.

(I am worried if I will be able to use any of Google's services from Shanghai later this year)

I often find myself annoyed by something while coding on work projects, and then quickly venting my grievance on the company-internal Skype chat. No reason the whole world should not be able to participate. This will be about Java, and in Japanese.

Hardware troubles continue. My Time Machine disk is making I/O errors. I'll get a new 1 TB drive (just the drive, now that I have the toaster), but I also signed up for a trial account with online backup service Backblaze. 5 dollars a month for unlimited backup seems very affordable. Unfortunately, it will have to be in addition to a local backup, because the transfer speeds over the Internet are just not comparable to what you get from USB2 or Firewire: I am told my initial upload of 69 GB in 321 thousand files will take 33 days. After that it will be continous incremental backups. If I ever need to restore, there is a web interface where I can download my files, or they can send the data on a 160 GB USB drive (USD 189).

I trashed my old iBook G3 today. Of all the computers I have owned this was my favourite. I bought it when I started working in Tokyo in 2002, and it was my primary machine both privately and at work for about three years, after which I switched to a procession of Mac minis at home (and a procession of Dells at work). I would have loved to use it longer, but it was unfortunately not a very healthy little computer. I had already replaced a faulty logic board, a crashed hard-disk, and a cracked keyboard, when it was acting up again, in the end refusing to boot.

Apple had just announced their switch to Intel, and I wanted to wait for an Intel iBook, so I got a G4 mini as temporary fix. But in the end it took another four years for me to finally get a portable again. My old iBook was so perfect (except for the unreliable hardware) that I feared a new one would not hold up to it. Sure, the specs of a newer computer are always much better, but I did not like the small changes made to the later revisions. Why did they have to get rid of the cool transparent polycarbonate casing? Will not some scratched DVD or oddly-shaped CD-ROM get stuck in the slot-loading drive? Who came up with that terrible name MacBook? Is not 13.3 inch too big? Can I really do without Firewire? No removable battery ?

Before handing it over to the Apple shop (which hopefully takes care of recycling and proper disposal), I wanted to erase the hard disk. That was not an option, though, because the iBook refuses to boot. And so we spent the morning together in a final session, me taking the case apart to remove the drive (and the RAM while I was at it), which with this particular model is quite an undertaking.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

My new five-year prediction is that we will see the end of the traditional computer file system, at least as a user-visible component. Having to manually keep track of what files to save data in, and where to put them (local hard disks and network shares) is just not something a user wants to be troubled with.

If I create some document, I want it to be immediately available on all my devices. I do not want to have to worry about backups and encryption. I may want to have a version history and unlimited undo. I may want to share it with others. There are already a few applications that more or less work this way, most notably online services like Google Docs. Something like iTunes is also a step in the right direction (although terribly limited in what it can do). All these applications have in common that they let you work with your data while shielding you from the complexities of how and where these files are stored.

This month I switched from a Mac Mini to a MacBook Pro for my primary computer. Thanks to the Time Machine backup, that was very easy: all my data was immediately available on the new computer. But this only works smoothly because I stopped using the Mini completely. If I wanted to simultaneously use both, that would create terrible synchronization headaches.

The Mac Mini is hooked to the TV now and in the process of becoming a media center. Ideally, it would automatically make available all content from other iTunes and iPhoto libraries on the network. There is a feature called Home Sharing, which allows to stream between those libraries, but this only works when both computers (and the respective iApps) are running. So instead I have to copy all my media files to the Mini. Which I am willing to do once, but what about photos and videos taken after that? The copying itself was made more difficult by the conflicting file access permissions of the four different user accounts involved. And what about all the files duplicated between user accounts?

Contrast this to how an iPod works (or an Apple TV for that matter, I wish a Mac Mini could act like one): You buy a new iPod, connect it to your computer, and it will have all your music on there. You listen to a few songs on your iPod, give them a star rating, and it will transmit that information back to your computer. You shoot some more photos, and the next time you connect the player, it will automatically copy them over. Also note that while an iPod is useless without connecting to its master library once in a while, it does not need a constant network connection.

One reason that iPod synching works so well is that it is single-user, master-slave, and single-master. Things get more complicated when your various devices are owned by different people, and act as peers, with each of them being able to add or change documents. And this is exactly the situation that everyone is in ever since we moved from isolated personal computers to a networked gadget world.

There are a number of useful (exciting, frankly) tools to solve these kind of problems on the file system level (DropBox, Mercurial, git all fall in this category), and any application that properly integrates these approaches will be immensely successful.

PS: Apple has this week officialy killed development of its ZFS support, probably due to licensing concerns, now that Oracle runs Sun Microsystems. Too bad. I had high hopes for ZFS to play a big part here.

+45609910233

CONGRAT, YOUR 
MOBILE NUMBER WON
£975,000 IN TEXT 
MESSAGE WIN 
PROMOTION,YOUR 
MONEY IS READY TO 
BE SENT TO YOU.

FOR DETAILS
CONTACT TAYLOR
AT
ADMFXR@AOL.COM

Now that I am paying for incoming(!) calls and messages, I could really use those £975,000.

Dear Friend,

I am James Barry, an army contractor attached to the army force in Iraq.

On the 27th day of June 2009, I and my men discovered a metal box containing US Dollars, which is a total figure mark $8.2 Million. We believe the box was owned and linked to late Saddam Hussein.

We hid the box containing the money in untraceable location, and we are now in a desperate need of a reliable and trustworthy person whom will receive and secure the box containing the US Dollars. We can't afford to leave the box here in Iraq for any reason since Iraq is getting unsafe and dangerous every day. We have no idea what could happen next as everything remains inconclusive at this point.

I am fully aware of what your thought would be, I will forward you my picture as well as my Identity, for you to know who you are dealing with.

You will be compensated with 15% of this fund, please assure me of your keeping this topmost secret so that my job would not be jeopardized.

My Sincere Regards,

James Barry

So I have been reading xkcd for two or three years now, and just today discovered by accident that there is (and has always been) a witty message attached to the image's title attribute (usually shows up when putting the mouse cursor on the comic for a little while). I might now need to go deep catalogue, and this useful site can make sure that digging around there will actually contribute to a noble cause (finding the best xkcd of the all).

Ever since I bought a wallet for my mother on Amazon Germany, they keep me informed about every time shoes and other leather goods are on sale, which is about once every week.

• Birkenstock bis -15% + aktuelle Schuh-Kollektionen
• Aktuelle Sneakers, Ballerinas uvm. von Top-Marken
• Markenschuhe: Summer-Sale & aktuelle Kollektionen
• Puma, Gola und weitere Topmarken bis -50%
• Markenschuhe zu Top-Preisen im Sale
• Sparen bis zu 40% im Schuh-Sale!
• Bis -50% reduziert: Markenschuhe und Handtaschen

Eine Durchsage der Redaktion an das deutschsprachige Publikum:

Ab und zu höre ich auch mal einen Podcast aus Deutschland (oder Österreich oder der Schweiz, die klingen dort viel unterhaltsamer), und deshalb gibt es jetzt den deutschsprachigen Ableger von Thilo's Tech Radio, das es ja im ersten Jahr seines Bestehens auf stolze sechzehn Folgen gebracht hat. So viele technologische Töne werden es eher nicht, aber zur Einstimmung gibt es erstmal eine leicht verstehbare (ein Wort, das ich Gymnasiallehrer habe sagen hören, wenn auch mit humoristischen Hintergedanken) Zusammenfassung des Internets aus der SWR2-Reihe Welt am Draht.

Ahh, Google geek humour.

Choice quote from an Alan Kay interview:

If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort — but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

My mobile phone provider (au) has recently announced the 2009 Summer Collection, and it includes the Sharp Solar Phone, a handset that self-charges using built-in solar panels. An hour of solar charging gives you six minutes of talk time or six hours of stand-by. It is also water-proof, potentially making for an ideal beach phone.

If you want to make fun of MS Windows stability issues, you bring up the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD, although, to be honest, you hardly see them these days). When the Windows folks want to fire back, they point at the spinning beach ball that indicates an unresponsive Mac application. So these two design elements have negative connotations prominent enough that other system vendors should not want to copy them.

Today on the train the person next to me was using a Samsung Windows Mobile phone which displayed a spinning beach ball. In the four Windows logo colours. Weird.

PS: I also saw a guy with an iPhone and an iPod touch.