Again, Standards Matter

People who I've worked with, or worked for, or read my writing here and elsewhere, have probably figured out that I'm a huge fan of standards just about everywhere they make sense: data formats, user interfaces, and so on. After all, why should we have to relearn how to drive a car simply because we buy a new Ford in place of a Toyota that the Government doesn't want us driving anymore? (You see very few old — or even fully-paid-for — cars in Singapore.) The steering wheel, pedals, and other controls are in a familiar layout; any slight differences are quickly adapted to.

Not so with the Western world's most widely-sold word processing software (for instance); when Microsoft Word 2007 for Windows shipped with a different, unique ('innovative', whether or not you find it debatable, is beside the current point) interface. Bloggers bloviated, many users were deeply confused, and corporate help-desk calls (and support/training costs) spiked. People running Windows PCs were very rarely neutral about the change.

A year later, Microsoft shipped Word 2008 for the Mac. Although there were some interface changes, the points of loudest discussion in the Word:Mac user community seemed to be

• the omission of Visual Basic for Applications as an attempted cross-platform macro language; and
• the new semi-proprietary document format, which allowed flawless interchange with Windows users (VBA notwithstanding).

Interface changes, per se, didn't spark nearly as much angst as had the Windows version of the year before. While a certain amount of this should no doubt be attributed to Microsoft's experience with the earlier release, the main reason was both different and obvious.

When developing Mac applications, it's much easier and better to follow the Apple Human Interface Guidelines than to "roll your own" interface. Developers, including Microsoft, are well aware of the ways in which the Mac development tools make your life easier if you structure and style your app to meet the Guidelines (and user expectations), as opposed to how much scutwork needs to be reinvented from scratch to do things differently. Users benefit even more, as the amount of learning needed to use a new app, or a new version of an existing app, are much less than is the average under Windows or Linux. And, unlike far too many Windows programs, Mac programs are usually highly discoverable; the user may not know how to accomplish a desired action, but there is one (and preferably only one) obvious path to follow, and mis-steps are generally not heavily penalised.

Right, "everybody" knows this, so why did I spend five paragraphs restating the reasonably obvious? Because the real intent of this post is to draw your attention to a phenomenon which is a necessary outcome of that standardisation and discovery: it is much easier to switch from one Mac app that performs a given task to another than it is on Windows. Most Mac users periodically switch between different applications for a given purpose, even keeping two or three installed on their systems. When you ask them why, they don't (generally) point to bugs or deficiencies in one product over another; they merely switch between them as their use cases change. For example, though I have both Microsoft Office and Apple iWork on this Mac, I will often create or open smaller Word documents in a simpler application such as AbiWord instead. It doesn't have all the features of Word or Pages, but it has the basics, and it loads more quickly and uses fewer resources than its two "big brothers."

The average Mac user is also generally more willing to try new applications, and generally owns more applications, than is the average for Windows. Since she is confident in her ability to pick up and use a new program, generally without resorting to a manual or even online help, there is a much more open discussion between users and developers, since both have seen a good bit of "the competition" and know what they like and don't like.

More rarely than is the case elsewhere, but not rarely enough, this easy migration from one app to another is due to real or perceived defects in a previously-used program. This happened to me recently; the program I had been using for a few months as my main Twitter client was not showing me all the tweets of people I was following in the "mainline" stream that I would see when I looked at each person's stream individually. Once you start following more than about two or three people, the mainline becomes absolutely indispensable; you simply don't want to have to take the time to look at each stream in isolation. So, I moved to another client, Nambu (now in "private beta" for a new release; version 1.2.1 can be found via web search).

Two immediate observations: I already know how to use this, even though Nambu has a far more dense presentation than my earlier client. And, because of that "dense presentation", it now takes me about a fifth as much time to get through my morning and afternoon Twitter catchups as it did previously. (Multi-column view is the killer feature, guys; there's only one little thing I'd like to see different...)

Again, why make noise about this? Simple: I've been a Windows user (usee?) and developer quite literally as long as there's been a "Windows"; I ran across my 1.0-beta developer kit floppies (5-1/4", of course) a couple of weeks ago (thinking about having them bronzed...or mounted on a dartboard. Maybe both.) But the nasty truth is, I very rarely change applications that perform a given task in Windows. The pain level and the (hopefully temporary) hit on my productivity aren't worth it until the pain becomes absolutely excruciating. I don't have that problem with the Mac, at all. I can try out new applications at will, even daily-workflow applications, secure in the knowledge that

• I already know how to use this, at least well enough to get started, and
• I can go back — or on to another candidate — any time I want to.

There's a word for the feeling that having that kind of freedom, that control over your computing experience gives you:

Empowerment.

When Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, Don't Trip

I've been doing a lot of software installation lately, on Mac OS X and various BSDs and Linuxes. Doing so reminds me of one of the major banes of my life when developing for Windows. If you're a Windows usee, you're acutely familiar with the concept.

DLL Hell.

On Windows, as you install a dozen apps, each of them will try to install their own versions of many system-wide (or vendor-wide) libraries. The poster child for these is msvcrt.dll, the Microsoft C Runtime Library, upon which virtually everything in or running under Windows depends in some fashion. Many unhappy man-millenia have been spent by admins and PC owners the world over trying to resolve compatibility issues, usually introduced when a newly-installed app overwrites a more recent version with the earlier version that app shipped with. Other things — including other libraries the app may depend on or even Windows itself — may break since features and bug fixes they rely on (present in later versions of the library) are suddenly gone.

Why think about this, when I'm as likely to write (or even use) any Windows software in the next month as I am to win the local lottery without buying a ticket?

Because, one of the things I added to my new MacBook Pro was the MacPorts software, which is a Mac analogue to the BSD ports collection. The Linux equivalent to this is (more or less) your package manager, whether it be aptitude or yum or portage or whatever. Windows has no equivalent concept; every app you install is its own universe, or thinks it is (with the "benefits" noted earlier), and no central one-stop "update everything" capability.

Modern operating systems may not have DLL hell, but they do tend to have numerous different versions of different libraries and support frameworks installed. Since those can be accessed by apps as either "give me the most recent version" or "give me version x.y.z", no equivalent to DLL hell takes place. But it does tend to eat up disk space. And it makes it harder to mentally keep track of what's installed; installing the MacPorts edition of Bluefish, an HTML editor, installs some eighty other "ports" — direct or indirect dependencies of Bluefish (which itself is primarily a Linux app). Some of these dependencies are last-month recent updates; a few are several years old. But MacPorts determines which packages are needed by Bluefish (and its dependencies, and...) and installs the latest version (by default) of those dependencies, or the specific version asked for. Thus, several files with the same basic name, but different version numbers encoded into the filename, can coexist peacefully in virtually any modern OS.

Recent Microsoft system software, particularly the "managed" software using the .NET Framework, avoids most of the cavalier instances of DLL hell, but introduces other quirks and brittleness in compensation.

But I'm still a bit unnerved by a software package — any package mdash; that has 80+ designated dependencies. I'm certainly thankful that I don't have to manage that dependency matrix myself.

If modern software development is "standing on the shoulders of giants", to appropriate a Newton paraphrase, then careless dependency introduction would be the functional equivalent of drunken tap-dancing: almost impossible not to trip.

Two steps forward, three steps back

Alternate title: ARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!

Both of you Gentle Readers may have noticed that I've been away from the blog for a while, and that a few posts that were previously published have gone missing. I've been busy fighting some other fires for a while, and my current network access has lacked the stability and efficiency that local propaganda would have you expect.

This evening (Wednesday 18th) I came across a piece of nifty-looking software, MacJournal by Mariner Software. It looks great — software that would let me compose/revise blog posts offline, in a native Mac app with nice organizational features and so on, at an attractive price, and with a 15-day evaluation period thrown in, just so you can try before you buy.

"Cool," I thought; "I'll be able to multitask on my shiny new MBP that's coming Any Day Now™."

Downloading and installing the eval copy went just as you'd expect; drag an icon into a folder, wait for the "Copying" progress dialog to go away, and it's done. Standard Mac user experience; nothing to see here, folks — unless you were expecting a Windows-style "Twenty Questions" installation.

I decided to do a really simple, trivial first exercise: select the five posts I'd written so far in a tutorial series; add the keyword ("label" in Blogger.com parlance) tutorial to them; save them back to Blogger. No animals were harmed in the performance of this experiment, and very explicitly, no content was directly, intentionally edited. (Note the qualifiers; they're important.)

(insert "train wreck" sound effects here.)

The first two parts were (relatively) unmolested; they didn't have any code blocks in them. The latter three did, however, and those were completely deformed. Numerous span elements were added, particularly around links (MacJournal seems to think links shouldn't be underlined, ever). Other formatting was changed; in particular, code tags were replaced by spans that set the font size to 13 points.

WTF?

It's going to take me a bit of noodling around in the software to figure out how to change the defaults to something that makes sense (at least for me), and until then, I'm back to editing in the browser. If the evaluation period expires before I'm happy with the configuration, then I'll comply with the license and blow it off my system. I'd really rather not do that; the feature list looks good, the interface is clean, and best of all, I don't have this Could not contact blogger.com line underneath my editing area as I type.

I understand that MacJournal, like most apps, has default ways of laying things out and working with things. I'm well aware of the difference between an "import" and a "copy" of something. But... I believe very strongly that the first rule of software, as medicine, should be "First, do no harm" — and that includes "don't mess with my formatting without even putting up a confirmation dialog asking my permission!" I really don't think that's too much to ask, or too hard to implement — and doing so would a) make a much more positive initial user experience by b) showing that you've thought things through well enough that c) your still-potential user isn't looking at an hour or two of careful, detailed work just to get back to where he was before he touched your product &emdash; or, rather, it touched his work.

Like most Mac users, I've gotten spoiled by how well most software on this platform is thought through to the tiniest details. Like most, I get annoyed when I have to deal with Windows or Linux apps that simply aren't thought through at all, apparently. (Spend a week with Microsoft Office or, even better, Apple iWork on the Mac; I dare you to go back to Office on Windows and be happy with it.) To run into a Mac app that fails such a simple use case so spectacularly (granted, in its default configuration) simply beggars explanation.

The Debate between Adequacy and Excellence

I was clicking through my various feeds hooked into NetNewsWire, in this case The Apple Core column on ZDNet, when I came across this item, where the writer nicely summed up the perfectly understandable strategy Microsoft have always chosen and compared that with Apple and the Mac. Go read the original article (on Better Living without MS Office and then read the comment.

As I've commented on numerous times in this blog and elsewhere (notably here), I'm both very partial to open standards (meaning open data formats, but usually expressed in open source implementations) and to the Apple Mac. As I've said before, and as the experience of many, many users I've supported on all three platforms bears out, the Mac lets you get more done, with less effort and irritation along the way, than either Windows or Linux as both are presently constructed.

But the first two paragraphs of this guy's comment (and I'm sorry that the antispam measures on ZDNet apparently don't permit me to credit the author properly) made me sit up and take notice, because they are a great summation of how I currently feel about the competing systems:

The Macs vs. PC debate has been going on for about 25 years or so, but the underlying debate is much older. What we are really discussing is the difference between adequacy and excellence. While I doubt I would want to be friends with Frank Lloyd Wright or Steve Jobs, both represent the exciting belief in what is possible. While Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer rake in billions, their relative impact on the world of ideas is miniscule.

Bill Gates understands that business managers are on the whole are a practical, albeit uninspired and short-sighted bunch. By positioning Microsoft early on to ride into the enterprise with the implicit endorsement of one of the biggest, longest-lived, and influential suppliers of business equipment, Gates was able to secure Microsoft's future. Microsoft's goal has never seemed to me to be to change the world, only to provide a service that adequately meets business needs. Microsoft has also shown from early on a keen awareness that once you get people to use your product, your primary goal is not to innovate to keep your customers, but, rather to make leaving seem painful and even scary. Many companies do this, but Microsoft has refined this practice into an art.

He then expands on this theme for four more paragraphs, closing with

Practically speaking Microsoft is here to stay. But I am glad that Apple is still around to keep the computer from becoming dreary, to inspire people to take creative risks, to express themselves, and to embrace the idea that every day objects, even appliances like the computer, can be more than just the sum of their functions.

Aux barricades! it may or may not be, depending on your existing preferences and prejudices. But it does nicely sum up, more effectively and efficiently than I have been able to of late, the reasons why Apple is important as a force in the technology business. Not that Microsoft is under imminent threat of losing their lifeblood to Apple; their different ways of looking at the world and at the marketplace work against that more effectively than any regulator could. But the idea that excellence is and should be a goal in and of itself, that humanity has a moral obligation to "continually [reach] well past our grasp", should stir passion in anyone with a functioning imagination. Sure, Microsoft have a commanding lead in businesses, especially larger ones — though Apple's value proposition has become much better there in the last ten years or so; it's hard to fight the installed base, especially with an entrenched herd mentality among managers. But, we would argue, that does not argue that Apple have failed, any more than the small number of buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his direct professional disciples argue for his irrelevance in architecture. If nobody pushes the envelope, if nobody makes a habit of reaching beyond his grasp, how will the human condition ever improve? For as Shaw wrote,

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.

And that has been one of my favourite quotes for many years now.

Mac OS X is BSD Unix. Except when it's Different.

One of the things that a BSD Unix admin learns to rely on is the "ports" collection, a cornucopia of packages that can be installed and managed by the particular BSD system's built-in package manager: pkgsrc for NetBSD, pkg_add for FreeBSD, and so on. In nearly all BSD systems, the port/package manager is part of the basic system (akin to APT under Debian Linux).

Mac OS X is BSD Unix "under the hood," specifically Darwin and, indirectly, FreeBSD.

This provides the Mac user who has significant BSD experience with a nice, comfy security blanket. This blanket has a few stray threads, however. One of these is the package-management system and ports.

Software is customarily installed on Mac OS X systems from disk images, or .dmg files. When opened, these files are mounted into the OS X filesystem and appear as volumes, equivalent to "real" disks. The window that the Finder opens for that volume customarily contains an icon for the application to be installed and a shortcut to the Applications folder. Installation usually consists of merely dragging the application icon onto the shortcut (or into any other desired folder). Under the hood, things are slightly more complex, but two points should be borne in mind.

First, there is no true Grand Unified Software Manager in Mac OS that is comparable to APT under Debian Linux, or even the "Add or Remove Programs" item in Microsoft Windows' Control Panel. Uninstalling a program ordinarily consists of dragging the program icon to the Trash or running a program-specific uninstaller (usually found on the installation disk image).

Second, while there is a "ports" implementation for Mac OS X (MacPorts), it isn't a truly native part of the operating system. More seriously, the versions of software ports which are maintained in its ports list are not always the most recent version available from their respective maintainer. Installing an application via MacPorts, installing a newer version through the customary method, and attempting to use MacPorts to maintain the conflated software can quite easily introduce confusing disparities into the system, with potentially destabilizing effect.

Go back and read that last paragraph again, especially the final sentence. Mac OS X, meet BSD Unix. Touch gloves, return to your corners, and wait for the bell.

Most users will never run into any problems, simply because most Mac users make little or no use of MacPorts (or any other command-line-oriented system management tool). MacPorts users are (almost by definition) likely to be experienced Unix admins who pine for the centralized simplicity of their workhorse software-management system. Informal research suggests that many, if not most, MacPorts users are active developers of Unix and/or Mac software. In other words, we're all expected to be grown-ups capable of managing our own systems, trading away the soft, easy-to-use graphical installation for a wider variety of nuts-and-bolts-level packages.

So why is any of this a problem for me? Why am I consuming your precious time (and mine) blathering on about details which most interested people already know, and most who don't, probably aren't? As a bit of a public mea culpa and a warning to others to pay attention when mixing installation models.

I had previously installed version 8.2 of the PostgreSQL database server on my Mac via MacPorts. Returning to it later, I realized that the installation had not completely succeeded: the server was not automatically starting when I booted the system, and the Postres tools were not in my PATH. After a bit of Googling, I came across a few links recommending the PostgreSQL 8.3.6 disk images on the KyngChaos Wiki. The server failed to start as expected.

Remembering that I had previously installed 8.2 the "ports" way, I first uninstalled the newly-installed and -broken 8.3.6. I then ran port uninstall postgresql82 && port clean postgresql82 in an apparently successful attempt to clean up the preexisting mess, after which the KyngChaos disk images installed correctly and (thus far) work properly.

This once again points out the usefulness of keeping a personal system-management Wiki as a catchall for information like this — both to help diagnose future problems, and (especially) to avoid them altogether. These can be dirt simple; I use Dokuwiki, and have for over a year now. Forewarned (especially by yourself) is forearmed, after all.

Just thought I'd get this off my chest.

Maybe not eating 'crow', specifically, but..... DUCK!!!

As in, "bend over, here it comes again..."

One of the things I have greatly appreciated about the Mac, especially with OS X, is how simple and straightforward software management is, compared to Linux and especially Windows (where every system change is a death-defying adventure against great odds). Operating system or Apple-supplied apps need an update? Software Update is as painless as it gets: the defaults Just Work in proper Mac fashion, but you can set your own schedule, along with a few other options. There is a well-established convention for third-party apps to check for updates via a Web service "phoning home" at app startup; this has been very easy to deal with. Application and file layout is regular and sensible; libraries and resources are generally grouped in bundles at the system or user level. After a few years of DLL hell in Windows and library mix-and-match in Linux, this was shaping up to be a real pleasure.

Then, as some of you know, I updated Mac OS X on my iMac from 10.5.5 to 10.5.6. As expected, that apparently went as smooth as glass. I even blogged about it. XCode worked; MS Office 2008 for the Mac worked; Komodo Edit worked; all my IM clients worked; all seemed customarily wonderful in the omniverse. I even started up Mail; it opened normally and happily downloaded my regular mail and Google mail, just as it had done every day for months. (I didn't actually open any messages then; that will turn out to be important.) Satisfied that everything Just Worked as always, I went back to working on a project for a few hours before turning in for the night.

Next morning, I went through the usual routine. Awake the Mac from hibernation; log in; start Yahoo, MSN and Skype; start Mail; open Komodo; open Web browsers (Safari, Opera and Camino) and I'm ready to get started. First thing...here's an interesting-sounding email message; let's open that up and... *POOF* — Mail crashes.

WTF? It started up just fine; I even got the "Message for you, Sir" Monty Python WAV I'd set Mail to use as my new-mail-received notification. I start Mail again. Picking a different message, I double-click it in the inbox. A window frame opens with the message title, sits empty for a few hundred milliseconds, then Mail goes away again. Absolutely, totally repeatable. Reboot changes nothing. Safe Boot (the Mac equivalent of Windows' "safe mode") changes nothing. The cold fingers of panic stroke my ribs like Glenn Gould at the piano. On a bad-karma scale of 0 to 10, initial reaction is an "O my God"; we're not dead, but we're hurt bad; the karma has definitely run over the dogma. 

The next couple of days are spent using my ISP's Webmail service, and a set of Python scripts I'd previously written to search mailbox contents — Apple Mail, like any sensible email program, adheres to established standard formats. If I'd been using Microsoft Lookout! in a similar situation, I'd have been up the creek.

Finally, I come across some Web-forum items that indicate that GPGMail needs to be updated; if it's not, Mail will crash under OS X 10.5.6 — which is exactly what was happening. (If you're not using GPGMail, GNU Privacy Guard, or any of the various GPG interfaces for Windows such as Enigmail for Mozilla Thunderbird, you don't know how many people are recording and/or reading your email — but if it transits a server in the US or UK, it's guaranteed that it will be.

Installing the upgraded GPGMail bundle was the work of less than two minutes (hint: remove or rename the old bundle before copying the new one over. You probably don't need the insurance, but consider how we got here...). Then start up Mail as usual. It should, once again, Just Work — complete with being able to read and reply to messages, with or without GPG signatures.

OK, so what lessons can we take away from this experience, both as users and developers?

Time Machine may well be the single most rave-worthy piece of software I've touched in 30 years, but it can't (obviously, easily) do everything, and in a crisis, even experienced users may well not want to risk bringing too much (or too little) "back from history". There's definitely a market for addons to TM to do things like "look in my user and system library directories, the Application directory structure, MacPorts, etc., and bring application Foo back to the state it was in last Tuesday morning, but leave my data files as they are." I almost certainly could do that with the bare interface -- but, especially since it was "broken" as part of an OS upgrade, and (with the Windows/Linux experience fresh in mind) not comfortable exploring hidden dependencies... I was without my main email system for three days. Sure, I had workarounds -- that I wouldn't have had if I'd been in a stock Windows situation -- but that's not really the point, is it?

Also, app developers (Mac or other), add this to your "best practices" list: If your software uses any sort of plug-in/add-on architecture, where modules are developed independently of the main app, then you can have dependency issues. The API you make available to your plugin developers will change over time (or your application will stagnate); if you make it easy for them (and your users) to deal with your latest update, you'll be more successful. There's (at least) two ways to go about doing this:

The traditional "brute force" approach. Have a call you can use to tell plugins what version of the app is running, and allow them to declare whether or not they're compatible with that version. Notify the user about any that don't like your new version. For examples of this, see the way Firefox and friends deal with their plugins. Yes, it works, but it's not very flexible; a new version may come out that doesn't in fact modify any of the APIs you care about — which means that the plugin should work even though it was developed against version 2.4 of your app and you're now on 4.2.

Alternatively, a more fine-grained approach. Group your API into smaller, functional service areas (such as, say, address-book interface or encryption services for an email program). Have your plug-in API support a conversational approach.

1. The app calls into the plugin, asking it which services it needs and what versions of each it supports.
2. The app parses the list it gets back from the plugin. If the app version is later than the supported range for a specific feature identified by the plugin, add that to a "possibly unsupported" list. (If the app version is earlier than the range supported by the plugin, assume that it's not supported and go on to check the next one.)
3. If the "possibly unsupported" plugin list is empty, go ahead and continue bringing up the app, loading the plugins normally; you're done with this checklist.
4. For each item in the "possibly unsupported" list, determine whether the API for each feature required for the plugin has changed since the plugin was explicitly supported. (This is how a plugin for an earlier release, say 2.4, could work just fine with a later version, like 4.2.) If there's no change in the APIs of each feature required by the plugin, remove that plugin from the "possibly unsupported" list.
5. If any plugins remain in the list, check if there's an updated version of that plugin on the Net. This might be done using a simple web-service-to-database-query on your Web server. If your Web server knows of an update, ask the user for permission to install it. If the user declines, or no upgrade is available, unload the plugin. (You'll check again next time the app is started; maybe there's an update by then.)
6. Once the status of each plugin has been established, and compatible plugins loaded, finish starting up your app.

Of course, there are various obvious optimisations and convenience features that can be built into this. Any presentation to the user can and likely should be aggregated; "here's a list of the plugins that I wasn't able to load and couldn't find updates for." Firefox and friends are a good open-source example of this. The checks for plugin updates can also be scheduled, so as not to slow down every app startup. This might be daily, weekly, twice a month, whatever; the important thing is to let the user configure that schedule and view a list of plugins that are installed but not active.

As I started this post by saying, I've been very favorably impressed by Mac apps' ease of use (including installation and maintenance). Mail fell down and couldn't get up again without outside assistance; this is unusual. The fact that this was caused by a plugin and that Mail could not detect and work around the conflict just amazes me; I expect more from Apple. I'm not ready to decrease my use of the Mac because this happened — but I am going to pay more attention to how things work under the hood. The fact that I have to even be aware of this -- which is one of the features that hitherto distinguished the Mac from the grubbier Windows and Linux alternatives -- is worrisome.

Again, your comments are welcome.

Happy Updating....

If you're a Windows usee with a few years' experience, you've encountered the rare, monumental and monolithic Service Packs that Micorosoft release on an intermittent basis (as one writer put it, "once every blue moon that falls on a Patch Tuesday"). They're almost always rollups of a large number of security patches, with more added besides. Rarely, with the notable (and very welcome at the time) exception of Windows XP Service Pack 2, is significant user-visible functionality added. Now that SP3 has been out for seven months or so, it's interesting to see how many individuals and businesses (especially SMEs) haven't updated to it yet. While I understand, from direct personal experience, the uncertainty of "do I trust this not to break anything major?" (that is, "anything I use and care about?"), I have always advised installing major updates (and all security updates) as quickly as practical. Given the fact that there will always be more gaping insecurities in Windows, closing all the barn doors that you can just seems the most prudent course of action.

I got to thinking about this a few minutes ago, while working merrily away on my iMac. Software Update, the Mac equivalent of Windows' Microsoft Update, popped up, notifying me that it had downloaded the update for Mac OS X 10.5.6, and did I want to install it now? I agreed, typed my password when requested (to accept that a potentially system-altering event was about to take place, and approve the action), and three minutes later, I was logged in and working again.

Why is this blogworthy? Let's go back and look at the comparison again. In effect, this was Service Pack 6 for Mac OS X 10.5. Bear in mind that 10.5.5 was released precisely three months before the latest update, and 10.5.0 was released on 26 October 2007, just under 14 months ago. "Switchers" from Windows to Mac quickly become accustomed to a more pro-active yet gentle and predictable update schedule than their Windows counterparts. The vast majority of Mac users whom I've spoken with share my experience of never having had an update visibly break a previously working system. This cannot be said for Redmond's consumers; witness the flurry of application and driver updates that directly follow Windows service packs. XP SP2, as necessary and useful as it was, broke more systems than I or several colleagues can remember any single service pack doing previously...by changing behavior that those programs had taken advantage of or worked around. Again, the typical Mac customer doesn't have that kind of experience. Things that work, just tend to stay working.

Contrast this with Linux systems, where almost every day seems to bring updates to one group of packages or another, and distributions vary wildly in the amount of attention paid to integrating the disparate packages, or at least ensuring that they don't step on each other. Some recent releases have greatly improved things, but that's another blog entry. Linux has historically assumed that there is reasonably competent management of an installed system, and offers resources sufficient for almost anyone to become so. Again, recent releases make this much easier.

Windows, on the other hand, essentially requires a knowledgeable, properly-equipped and -staffed support team to keep the system working with a minimum of trouble; the great marketing triumph of Microsoft has been to both convince consumers that "arcane" knowledge is unnecessary while simultaneously encouraging the "I'm too dumb to know anything about computers" mentality — from people who still pony up for the next hit on the crack pipe. Show me another consumer product that disrespects its paying customers to that degree without going belly-up faster than you can say "customer service". It's a regular software Stockholm syndrome.

The truth will set you free, an old saying tells us. Free Software proponents (contrast with open source software) like to talk about "free as in speech" and "free as in beer". Personally, after over ten years of Linux and twenty of Windows, I'm much more attracted by a different freedom: the freedom to use the computer as a tool to do interesting things and/or have interesting experiences, without having to worry overmuch about any runes and incantations needed to keep it that way.

Modern Tools and Archaic Practices Shouldn't Mix

Sun have released NetBeans 6.5, which, among many other (potentially) useful and interesting features, claims to officially support Web development using PHP. This is, on the face of things, a major improvement from the situation under NB 6.1 and prior, which treated PHP essentially as other unsupported languages were treated: you could do raw text editing, but the features that are the entire point of using an IDE - auto-completion, search/cross-reference, and so on - were completely absent. Not so in 6.5; at least minimal support for features like code completion, auto-display of PHPDoc during code entry, and so on can be found here. After a few minutes of poking around, I was starting to get optimistic; here was a decent, if somewhat more heavyweight, alternative to the Komodo Edit which I had been using for some months. Why look for alternatives when I was extremely happy with Komodo Edit for the Mac? Because, almost every day, I sat down in front of Komodo Edit for Linux, and became frustrated with the inconsistencies, limitations and general less-polished feel (Why can't ActiveState include KE for Mac key emulation along with vi and emacs?)

So, back to NetBeans and PHP. I spent a few minutes putting together toy code just to see how the editor felt. Then I created the really one-and-only sample PHP project that came with NB 6.5, a site for a fictional India-based budget airline. Go through the 'New Project' wizard, select the project type, the directory to be used to contain the entire thing (for development, at least), and hit The Magic "Finish" Button.

And, voilà, a new project is born:

At first blush, nothing too obviously catastrophic. Rather non-semantic names for the image files, and the files under 'include' generally presume that you'll only ever need one nav bar, for example, but hey, it's a sample project, I tell myself. It's not necessarily meant to be production-quality; it's supposed to give you a starting point to either see how to use NetBeans to work in the PHP you already know, or how to use this PHP that's all over the Web in the NetBeans you've been using earlier versions of.

And then I double-click on the index.php file in the Projects pane. And my jaw hits the floor as I see... 1996-ASP-style intermingling of PHP code and raw HTML. OK, the DTD is from 1999 and the PHP code uses superglobals, which date from 2001, but you get the idea.

We've spent the better part of a decade, as a craft, running screaming away from this style of work. No sane, experienced PHP developer would write code like this today; we may not have (quite) advanced to the point where "everybody" uses the same tools for similar projects, but separation of presentation (HTML) and logic (PHP) is pretty universally seen as not just a Good Thing® but a Necessary Thing® if the site is ever going to be debugged/maintained. There are just so many problems that conmingled code and markup create, unnecessarily, in living code. I'm well aware that a 'toy' example for a general-purpose editor-with-benefits can not (and arguably should not) try to teach tyros the basics of the language in question.

But is it really too much to ask that such an example be written in a reasonably modern and correct style, or at least put big red (say, 144-point Comic Sans) warnings to the effect, "DANGER: If you don't know why this is  horrible practice, please go buy a book! The job you save may well be your own."

Still using the free Komodo Edit on the Mac, trying to justify shelling out for the "real" Komodo IDE... but that's a deliberation for another post.

Back in the Saddle, Again

....with abject apologies to Gene Autry...

I haven't posted here for a while (about three months — gak!). For the six or eight of you still hanging on, humble apologies and my deepest appreciation (sympathies?). Some have publicly wondered (offline) whether I am merely offline or have flatlined. Actually, I've been in hospital twice during that time, and my personal and professional lives have undergone more than the usual random fluctuations. Be that as it may...

As with roughly half of the Linux-aware folks out there, I've been playing with Ubuntu Linux for a while now. The job I just started — as Principal Technologist and alleged future CTO for FoneVillage.com in Beijing — is with an Ubuntu shop, so that's one motivation. I've been a Debian evangelist for a few years now — formerly a Kanotix (now Sidux refugee, now with Ubuntu and Mepis installed and happy on laptops and a desktop (and lusting after a Mac Pro (but that's another blog entry)...

Half of me LOVES Ubuntu. Point-and-click everything; all the applications (except mainstream violent Windows games) that a user could want immediately available, name-brand Big Applications for the enterprise; more-solid-than-most-rocks Debian under the hood; regularly updated Live CDs (but get the better Live DVD); what's not to like?

The other half of me, the guy who's been intimate with the care and feeding of Unix systems for almost 30 years, has an easy answer for that; sudo (as superuser/SystemGod, do) everything, but in particular, sudo bash (as superuser, open up a shell [terminal] and let me run arbitrary commands with no restrictions).If you read Ubuntu guides and Web pages, almost everything a user does from a command shell that affects the system is done as sudo command, while logged in as an ordinary user. A bit of poking around with Google led me to a page on About.com's Ubuntu Desktop Guide that put things into better perspective:

The first user account you created on your system during installation will, by default, have access to sudo. You can restrict and enable sudo access to users with the Users and Groups application.

My knee-jerk reaction having subsided, I'm back to generally liking what I see in Ubuntu. It's intended to achieve — and generally succeeds at — being "easy enough for anybody to use", not just "geeks", as Linux has heretofore been viewed by Windows usees. It's another answer to the classic "what's the difference between a Windows usee and a Mac user?" question: The Windows usee talks about everything he had to do to get his work done; the Mac user (or, generally, the Ubuntu user) talks about all the great work she got done.

For the technophobes out there who still want to join the modern world, definitely worth a spin.