Getting Your Stuff Done, or Stuff Done To You

This is the response I wanted to leave to "MrChimei" on the spot-on YouTube video, "Steve Jobs Vs. Steve Ballmer". Since YouTube has such a tiny (but understandable) limit on comment size, a proper response would not fit. Therefore...

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Let me put it this way. It doesn't matter whether you're speaking out of limited experience, or limited cognition, or what; your flippant attitude will not survive first contact with reality (to paraphrase von Moltke).

I'm a Windows developer who's been developing for Windows since Windows 1.0 was in early developer beta, on up to Windows 8. I had nearly ten years professional development experience on five platforms before I ever touched Windows. I had three stints at Microsoft back when that was cool, and sold most of my stock when it was still worth something.

I've also supported users of Windows and various operating systems, from groups of 3-5 small businesspeople on up to being comfortably high in the operational support pecking order in a Fortune 100 company. I've seen what helps and doesn't help intelligent non-geeks get their work done.

Both in that position, and in my own current work, I've observed and experienced order-of-magnitude-or-better differences in productivity, usability, reliability, supportability… all in Apple's favour. I've worked with and for people who became statistics junkies out of an emotional imperative to "prove" Windows better, in any way, than other systems. The next such individual I meet who succeeds, out of a sample of over 20 to date, will be the very first.

In 25 years, I have never experienced a Windows desktop machine that stayed up and fully functional for more than approximately 72 hours, *including* at Redmond, prior to a lightly-loaded Windows 7 system.

In the last 6 years of using Macs and clones half-time or better, I have never experienced a Mac that failed to stay up and working for less than a week. In the last five years, my notes show, I've had two occasions where a hard reset to the Mac I'm typing this on was necessary; both turned out to be hardware faults. Prior to Windows 7, any Windows PC that did not need to be hard-rebooted twice in a given fortnight was a rarity. Windows 7 stretched that out to 6 weeks, making it by far the most stable operating system Microsoft have shipped since Windows NT 3.51. (Which I will happily rave about at length to any who remember it.)

For many years, I too was a Windows bigot. The fact that Unix, then OS/2, then Mac OS had numerous benefits not available in Windows was completely beneath my attention threshold. The idea that (on average over a ten-year period) some 30% of my time seated at a Windows PC was devoted to something other than demonstrably useful or interesting activity was something that I, like the millions of others bombarded by Ziff-Davis and other Microsoft propaganda organs, took as the natural order of things.

Then I noticed that Mac users were having more fun. "Fine," I thought, "a toy should bring amusement above all." Then I noticed that they were getting more and better work done. "Well," I said to myself, "they're paying enough extra for it; they should get some return on their investment. I'm doing well enough as is."

And then, within the space of less than a year, all five of my Windows systems were damaged through outside attack. "Why," I asked. "I've kept my antivirus current. I've installed anti-spyware and a personal firewall in addition to the (consumer-grade) router and firewall connecting me to the Internet. I don't browse pr0n or known-dodgy sites. I apply all security patches as soon as they're released. Why am I going to lose this development contract for lack of usable systems?"

I discovered a nasty little secret: it's technically impossible to fully protect a Windows PC from attacks, using tools that a reasonably-bright eight-year-old can master in a Saturday afternoon. People responsible for keeping Windows PCs have known this for over a decade; it's why the more clueful ones talk about risk mitigation than prevention, with multi-layered recovery plans in place and tested rather than leaving all to chance. For as long as DSL and cable Internet connections have been available, it's taken less time to break into a new, "virgin" Windows PC than to fully patch and protect it against all currently-likely threats.

People used to think that using cocaine or smoking tobacco was healthy for you, too.

What I appreciate most about the Mac is that, no matter what, I can sit down in front of one and in a minute or less, be doing useful, interesting work. I don't have the instability of Windows. I don't have the sense that I'm using something that was designed for a completely different environment, as Windows too closely resembles the pre-network (let alone pre-Internet) use of isolated personal computers. Above all, I appreciate the consistency and usability that let me almost forget about the tools I'm using to work with my data, or with data out in the world somewhere, than on what I'm trying to accomplish.

One system treats its users as customers, whose time, efficiency and comfort are important and who know they have choices if they become dissatisfied. The other platform treats its users as inmates, who aren't going to leave no matter what... and if that's true, then quality sensibly takes a back seat to profitability.

Which would you recommend to your best friend? Or even to a respected enemy?

Windows? Check. Skype? Check. Quality? Oops…

Several cultures share variations of a proverb which reminds us that you cannot build a house on sand and have it endure the test of time — or even the next tide.

Skype learned that the hard way a couple of weeks ago. Like all peer-to-peer, or P2P, networks, Skype relies on (a varying subset of) its users' systems to handle routine network-housekeeping chores, including routing. Fine; that's the way many applications have done things for more than a decade. Skype have been living unusually close to the edge in two respects: they have an unusually large, widely-distributed number of simultaneous users relative to other P2P networks, and it implicitly trusts the reliability of its Windows-based application and the underlying Windows operating system when performing at any needed scale. This is what sent the waves crashing in upon the sand-borne house.

Microsoft Windows is, inarguably, a wildly successful software system; along with Microsoft's Office set of applications, it is the basis of Microsoft's billions of dollars a year in revenue and profit. But just because something is successful or because it's made by a major corporation doesn't necessarily mean it's well-designed or -built. (See, for example, the Ford Pinto.)

By relying on the (always-questionable) stability and reliability of each of the Windows PCs acting as a "supernode" in its network architecture, Skype was setting itself on a path to eventual inevitable, foreseeable large-scale failure.

Many of the well-known problems with keeping Windows stable and running properly have to do with the ridiculous ease of developing, distributing and using malware; in some countries (such as Singapore), estimated infection rates of Internet-connected Windows PCs routinely hit or exceed 90%. Besides the obvious threat to any "secure" information on those systems (credit card info, login IDs, and so on), those infected Windows systems have a relatively large share of their processing power diverted for the benefit of someone other than the legitimate user or of applications other than those that s/he has authorised.

Another cause of instability and other problems, as with the Skype outage, is that it is very difficult to develop, deploy and maintain even moderately complex applications under Windows with any real means of asserting that the software is reliable and robust. The only way to gain any such real assurance is by testing as many hardware and software combinations with your software as you can, and hoping that you've found all the "most likely" problems. (This is why Microsoft and others employ thousands of software testers, in addition to a massive automated-testing infrastructure.) And, though Microsoft have made some relatively amazing improvements in this area (compare, say, Windows 98 to Windows 7), even they can't catch everything — and their development process and system architecture essentially require them to. Every Windows usee in the last 25 years has seen the "Blue Screen of Death;" that is merely an acknowledgement by Windows that it's completely lost its mind, usually after innumerable random acts of lesser senility.

Skype were bitten by both ends of this issue: a new release of their client application for Windows had defects that were not caught during development or internal testing, and by deploying that defective application on an operating system that provides little-to-no protection against maliciously or inadvertently defective applications, a large "time bomb" started ticking away, unnoticed by all until its spectacular detonation on or around 22 December 2010.

For a Skype client to be a "supernode," it cannot be behind a "firewall" that uses network address translation to isolate its clients from the big, bad Net. (There are ways around that, too, of course; but they're generally very black-hat techniques that don't scale well on a commercial basis.) A client does not have to be running on Windows to be a supernode, but given the demographics of Skype's user base, and the larger PC user base in general, the majority are.

And so, when Skype's defective Windows client ran into mortal difficulties on Windows' defective platform, the ordinary user PCs that were acting as supernodes started dropping like flies. Other Skype clients, as with any proper P2P network, simply rerouted to other supernodes. However, since many (if not most) of the Windows clients were behind NAT firewalls and there were (and are) a relatively small percentage of non-Windows clients available to serve as supernodes, the number of "leaf node" clients chasing the decreasing number of supernodes put the remaining systems under an unsustainable load, and so those Skype clients (with their supernode capabilities) dropped off the network.

Had there been a more heterogenous mix of Skype clients so that those available to perform supernode duties were not almost exclusively Windows PCs, the failure might well have been mitigated if not eliminated altogether. Or, were it practical to develop a (reasonably) guaranteed-stable application on Windows, the defect that initiated the failure cascade might well never have occurred. But by "putting all their eggs in one basket" which was known to have large, gaping holes in it, Skype were guaranteeing that their metaphorical sidewalk would eventually be covered hip-deep in broken eggs.

Monocultures in technology, as in farming, are generally Bad Things; a threat which can attack any member of a monoculture can attack all such members. (Think of the Windows malware-infection rates as an example of this.) Single points of commonality (or of control) are always eventual single points of failure.

The Skype failure could well have been a reminder of these long-known basic truths. The commercial interests involved, however, ensure that such a lesson will go unheeded. It will therefore be repeated; very possibly not with Skype, but with some other aspect of our grossly defective information-technology ecosystem. Think of it as "Unsafe at Any Speed" meeting Groundhog Day until something is done to prevent yet another China Syndrome.

Saving Effort and Time is Hard Work

As both my regular readers well know, I've been using a couple of Macs1 as my main systems for some time now. As many (if not most, these days) Web developers do, I run different systems (Windows and a raft of Linuxes) using VMWare Fusion so that I can do various testing activities.

Many Linux distributions come with some form of automation support for installation and updates2. Several of these use the (generally excellent) Red Hat Anaconda installer and its automation scheme, Kickstart. Red Hat and the user community offer copious, free documentation to help the new-to-automation system administrator get started.

If you're doing a relatively plain-vanilla installation, this is trivially easy. After installing a new Fedora system (image), for example, there is a file named anaconda-ks.cfg in the root user's home directory, which can be used to either replay the just-completed installation or as a basis for further customisation. To reuse, save the file to a USB key or to a suitable location on your local network, and you can replay the installation at will.

Customising the installation further, naturally, takes significant additional effort — almost as "significant" as the effort required to do the same level of customisation manually during installation. The saving grace, of course, is that this only needs to be done once for a given version of a given distribution. Some relatively minor tinkering will be needed to move from one version to another (say, Fedora 13 to 14), and an unknowable-in-advance amount of effort needed to adapt the Kickstart configuration to a new, different distribution (such as Mandriva), since packages on offer as well as package names themselves can vary between distros3.

It's almost enough to make me pull both remaining hairs out. For several years, I have had a manual installation procedure for Fedora documented on my internal Wiki. That process, however, leaves something to be desired, mainly because it is an intermixture of manual steps and small shell scripts that install and configure various bits and pieces. Having a fire-and-forget system like Kickstart (that could then be adapted to other distributions as well), is an extremely seductive idea.

It doesn't help that the Kickstart Configurator on Fedora 13, which provides a (relatively) easy-to-use GUI for configuring and specifying the contents of a Kickstart configuration file, works inconsistently. Using the default GNOME desktop environment, one of my two Fedora VMs fails to display the application menu, which is used for tasks such as loading and saving configuration files. Under the alternate (for Fedora) KDE desktop, the menu appears and functions correctly.

One of the things I might get around to eventually is to write an alternative automated-installation-configuration utility. Being able to install a common set of packages across RPM-based (Red Hat-style) Linuxes such as Fedora, Mandriva and CentOS as well as Debian and its derivatives (like Ubuntu), and maybe one or two others besides, would be a Very Handy Thing to Have™.

That is, once I scavenge enough pet-project time to do it, of course. For now, it's back to the nuances of Kickstart.

Footnotes:

1. an iMac and a MacBook Pro. (Return)

2. Microsoft offer this for Windows, of course, but they only support Vista SP1, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. No XP. Oops. (Return)

3. Jargon. The term distro is commonly used by Linux professionals and enthusiasts as an abbreviation for "distribution"; a collection of GNU and other tools and applications built on top of the Linux kernel. (Return)

Proof Against Most Idiots

Fair warning: Geekish laudatory rant ahead. Still with me? Good!

I suppose it says something less than complimentary about our Craft that, when things actually work in a sensible fashion, recovering from Stupid User Actions™, it's surprising enough to be noteworthy. But I seriously doubt that I'm the only one who's noticed this.

Case in point: yesterday, I started downloading the Debian Linux testing-version DVDs. Yes, plural; there are 8 of them., as the standard software repository comes along with the test build. Anyway...

As most of us do, I was multitasking pretty heavily last night; when I knocked off, I just put my iMac to sleep as usual. It was long after I had gone to bed that I remembered, "hey, wasn't I downloading a passel of Linux DVDs when I slept the system?"

Expecting to have several "interesting" error messages displayed when I woke the system up (if in fact the file system hadn't been somehow damaged... yes, I was used by Windows for far too long), I powered up the system and was about to log in when BAM!... 15 minutes of phone calls. Thoroughly distracted afterwards, I log in, check my email, read a couple of new bug reports for a project I'm working on, and then remember "hey! everything's working!"

I switch to the Terminal window for the download (which was using GNU wget 1.12 if you care), to be greeted by the following display (excerpting):

--2010-08-15 19:45:15--  http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-dvd/debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso
Resolving cdimage.debian.org (cdimage.debian.org)... 130.239.18.163, 130.239.18.173
Connecting to cdimage.debian.org (cdimage.debian.org)|130.239.18.163|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: http://caesar.acc.umu.se/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-dvd/debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso [following]
--2010-08-15 19:45:20--  http://caesar.acc.umu.se/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-dvd/debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso
Resolving caesar.acc.umu.se (caesar.acc.umu.se)... 2001:6b0:e:2018::142, 130.239.18.142
Connecting to caesar.acc.umu.se (caesar.acc.umu.se)|2001:6b0:e:2018::142|:80... failed: No route to host.
Connecting to caesar.acc.umu.se (caesar.acc.umu.se)|130.239.18.142|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 4696719360 (4.4G) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: “debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso”

89% [===============================================================================================>           ] 4,214,102,016 --.-K/s   in 13h 40m 

2010-08-16 09:26:01 (83.6 KB/s) - Read error at byte 4214102016/4696719360 (Operation timed out). Retrying.

--2010-08-16 09:26:04--  (try: 2)  http://caesar.acc.umu.se/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-dvd/debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso
Connecting to caesar.acc.umu.se (caesar.acc.umu.se)|130.239.18.142|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 206 Partial Content
Length: 4696719360 (4.4G), 482617344 (460M) remaining [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: “debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso”

100%[++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++==========>] 4,696,719,360 1.26M/s   in 6m 26s  

2010-08-16 09:32:50 (1.19 MB/s) - “debian-testing-amd64-DVD-6.iso” saved [4696719360/4696719360]

Note the report of a read error at 09:26:04 on 2010-08-16. The software was complaining that it had to recover from a timeout. Yes, I'm sure ten hours or so significantly exceeds whatever timeout value had been coded into wget... but it never missed a beat (or a byte; the SHA1 checksum matched afterwards).

I'm including the obligatory "don't try this at home, kids!" warning... but, if you aren't sitting in front of Windows, isn't it nice to know you can?

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.

The Best Tool for the Job

One of the nice things about growing up around (almost exclusively) men who were master mechanics, carpenters or other such highly skilled tradesmen was that I developed an appreciation both for "the best tool for the job at hand" and "making do with what's available" — and whichever of these applied, accomplishing the task at hand to the best of anyone's ability.

As I've progressed through my software and Web career, I've become highly opinionated about the tools I use, just like any other experienced software craftsperson I've ever known. You and I might use different tools to accomplish what functionally is the same task, but so long as we each have practical, experiential bases for those preferences, we should just go ahead and get what needs doing done. (There's an argument in there for open standards as a requisite for that to happen, but that's another post.)

Too many people who should know better have religious-level devotion to or hostility towards certain companies and/or products. Yes, that includes me; I know I've said some pretty inflammatory things, usually when I felt someone was expressing a religious belief masked as a technical opinion. No doubt they've felt the same about me and any others who were incautious enough to oppose their evangelism (or reactionism, depending on the circumstances). In general, it should be pretty evident to everyone with a personal or professional involvement in IT or personal electronics that trends are driven as much by "what I say three times is true!" as what actually can be shown to be true. That's how mediocre-at-best products become "industry Leaders"; inertia and close-mindedness set in, reinforced by a well-funded, continuous and strident marketing/branding campaign.

I was having a discussion about this online recently, with a former associate who's long had me pegged as an ABMer ("Anything but Microsoft"). I can understand how he formed that opinion; I've long complained about the (innumerable) defects in the "market-leading" operating system, and about how slowly progress has been made in cleaning up the most egregious faults (such as security). But I've also worked at Microsoft in Redmond — three different times — and I've always been impressed by the number of truly gifted people working there. They've had their triumphs and tragedies (anyone used Microsoft Bob lately?). They've had to deal with widely differing process and management effectiveness as they transfer between or liaise with different groups. They've ignored a lot of what has been done outside the company, but they've also created some amazing things inside; too many of which unfortunately never make it into public products.

And the quality of their work product varies as much as any of the factors that go into it. Cases in point: compare, say, Windows Vista with Windows Mobile or the XBox; compare Microsoft Outlook (forever known as "Lookout!" to security/admin people) with Entourage; compare Word for Windows to Word for the Mac — what I understand is a completely different code base (and visibly so) that "just happens" to be able to flawlessly read and write documents shared with Word for Windows.

I also reread a blog post I wrote last December where I detailed the issues I was starting to have with Apple's own Mail app for the Mac. I have a mail store that's hovered somewhere above 2 GB for the last year. I receive 100-200 legitimate emails per day (and up to 700 spams). I presently have over 230 filtering rules defined for how to handle all that mail. Those rules have been built up over the last five years or so — first using Mozilla Thunderbird, then Apple's Mail.app, and now a new system; a progression that also speaks eloquently about the value of open standards. I have never, to my knowledge, lost a saved message whilst transferring from one package to its successor. The few hiccups each transition has had with filtering rules have all been relatively easy to find and fix, with the newest app making that process breathtakingly simple.

The new mail app? As you've no doubt guessed, Microsoft Entourage. It, like every other Mac app I've ever used, Just Works as expected (at least until you get out to the far, bleeding edges). If Microsoft made Windows and Office for Windows as well as they make Entourage (and the rest of their Office:Mac products), they really wouldn't have to worry about competition — and they'd richly deserve that. The market-friendly price for their Mac product (where their major, worthy competitor sells for US$79) is just icing on the cake.

I don't hate Microsoft. I just wish they would stick to what they do as well or better than anyone else, and leave the crappy products that can never be anything but hypersonic train wrecks — like Windows and Internet Exploder. I wish that ever more fervently every time I'm asked to help some hapless Windows usee fix "why my computer doesn't work". That would also make Microsoft's long-suffering stockholders — including current employees, former employees and myself, among others — feel a lot better.

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.

Differences that Make Differences Are Differences

(as opposed to the Scottish proverb, "a difference that makes no difference, is no difference")

This is a very long post. I'll likely come back and revisit it later, breaking it up into two or three smaller ones. But for now, please dip your oar in my stream of consciousness.

I was hanging around on the Freenode IRC network earlier this evening, in some of my usual channels, and witnessed a Windows zealot and an ABMer going at it. Now, ordinarily, this is as interesting as watching paint dry and as full of useful, current information as a 1954 edition of Правда. But there was one bit that caught my eye (nicknames modified for obfuscation):

FriendOfBill: Admit it; Microsoft can outmarket anybody.
MrABM: Sure. But marketing is not great software.
FriendOfBill: So?
MrABM: So... on Windows you pay for a system and apps that aren't worth the price, on Linux you have free apps that are either priceless or worth almost what you pay (but you can fix them if you want to), and on the Mac, you have a lot of inexpensive shareware that's generally at least pretty good, and commercial apps that are much better. THAT's why Microsoft is junk... they ship crap that can't be fixed by anyone else.
FriendOfBill: So you're saying that the Linux crap is good because it can be fixed, and the Mac being locked in is OK because it's great, but Windows is junk because it's neither great nor fixable?
MrABM: Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Now...that got me to thinking. Both of these guys were absolutely right, in my opinion. Microsoft is, without question, one of the greatest marketing phenomena in the history of software, if not of the world. But it is unoriginal crap. (Quick: Name one successful Microsoft product that wasn't bought or otherwise acquired from outside. Internet Explorer? Nope. PowerPoint? Try again.) Any software system that convinces otherwise ordinary people that they are "stupid" and "unable to get this 'computer' thing figured out" is not a net improvement in the world, in my view. I've been using and developing for Windows as long as there's been a 'Windows'; I think I've earned the opinion.

Linux? Sure, which one? As Grace Hopper famously might have said, "The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." (Relevant to The Other Side: "The most dangerous phrase in the language is, 'We've always done it this way.'") As can be easily demonstrated at the DistroWatch.com search page, there are literally hundreds of active "major" distributions; the nature of Free Software is such that nobody can ever know with certainty how many "minor" variants there are (the rabbits in Australia apparently served as inspiration here). Since every distribution has, by definition, some difference with others, it is sometimes difficult to guarantee that programs built on one Linux system will work properly on another. The traditional solution is to compile from source locally with the help of ingenious tools like autoconf. Though this (usually) can be made to work, it disproportionately rewards deep system knowledge to solve problems. The "real" fix has been the coalescence of large ecosystems around a limited number of "base" systems (Debian/Ubuntu, Red Hat, Slackware) with businesses offering testing and certification services. Sure, it passes the "grandma test"....once it's set up and working.

The Macintosh is, and has been for many years, the easiest system for novice users to learn to use quickly. Part of that is due to Apple's legendary Human Interface Guidelines; paired with the tools and frameworks freely available, it is far easier for developers to comply with the Guidelines than to invent their own interface. The current generation of systems, Mac OS X, is based on industry-standard, highly-reliable core components (BSD Unix, the Mach microkernel, etc.) which underpin an extremely consistent yet powerful interface. A vast improvement over famously troubled earlier versions of the system, this has been proven in the field to be proof against most "grandmas".

A slight fugue here; I am active in the Singapore Linux Meetup Group. At our July meeting, there was an animated discussion concerning the upcoming annual Software Freedom Day events. The question before the group was how to organize a local event that would advance the event's purpose: promoting the use of free and open source software for both applications and systems. What I understood the consensus to be basically worked out as "let's show people all the cool stuff they can do, and especially let's show them how they can use free software, especially applications, to do all the stuff they do right now with Windows." The standard example is someone browsing the Web with Firefox instead of Internet Explorer; once he's happy with replacement apps running under Windows, it's easier to move to a non-Windows system (e.g., Linux) with the same apps and interface. That strategy has worked well, particularly in the last couple of years (look at Firefox itself and especially Ubuntu Linux as examples). The one fly in the ointment is that other parts of the system don't always feel the same. (Try watching a novice user set up a Winprinter or wireless networking on a laptop.) The system is free ("as in speech" and "as in beer") but it is most definitely not free in terms of the time needed to get things working sometimes... and that cannot always be predicted reliably.

The Mac, by comparison, is free in neither sense, even though the system software is based on open-source software, and many open-source applications (Firefox, the Apache Web server) run just fine. Apache, for instance, is already installed on every current Mac when you first start it up. But many of the truly "Mac-like" apps — games, the IRC program I use, a nifty note organizer, and so on) are either shareware or full commercial applications (like Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Microsoft Word:mac). You pay money for them, and you (usually) don't get the source code or the same rights that you do under licenses like the GNU GPL.

But you get something else, by and large: a piece of software that is far more likely to "just work" in an expectable, explorable fashion. Useful, interesting features, not always just more bloat to put a few more bullet items on the marketing slides. And that gives you a different kind of freedom, one summed up by an IT-support joke at a company I used to work for, more than ten years ago.

Q: What's the difference between a Windows usee and a Mac user?
A: The Windows usee talks about everything he had to do to get his work done. The Mac user...shows you all the great work she got done.

That freedom may be neither economic or ideological. But, especially for those who feel that the "Open Source v. Free Software" dispute sounds like a less entertaining Miller Lite "Tastes Great/Less Filling" schtick, for those who realize that the hour they spend fixing a problem will never be lived again, this offers a different kind of freedom: the freedom to use the computer as an appliance for interesting, intellectually stimulating activity.

And having the freedom to choose between the other, seemingly competing freedoms... is the greatest of these.

Oh. Mah. Gawwwwwwwwd.

You no longer need to reboot a running Linux system to apply security patches to it.

Check it out.

Excuse me whilst I pick my jaw up from the sub-sub-sub-basement floor. If this checks out in the field, on multiple distros, then a lot of sysadmins are going to be able to get a lot more sleep at night. And the comment by one David Pottage:

This should be good for distro kernels.

Just think if you can prepare a special kernel module that will apply security patches to a running kernel, then so can your favorite distro. In future when there is a security update, instead of downloading a ~20Mb kernel package from security.debian.org or the like, and then waiting until a suitable time to install it and reboot the system, you can download a small package containing patching modules for the standard kernels from that distro, and install it immediately...

The mind reels a bit. Security patches are the most gotta-do-it-right-NOW things that come down the pipe for any system. Open-source systems that are widely audited, like Linux, tend to get patches a lot quicker than Windows (which had attacks in the wild with no fixes available for some 271 days in 2007), or even Mac OS X. Any closed system that depends on a single organization to secure it will always have slower reaction time than an open system with enough (mutually independent, distributed) resources to throw at it. As Eric S. Raymond wrote in The Cathedral and The Bazaar, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". As long as there is some meritocratic control over the "official" patch-submission process - and there is - it's now easier than ever to keep critical systems up and secure, in ways and at speeds that simply can't be matched in the Microsoft world. Remember, even if your uptime is 99.999%, (the so-called "five nines gold standard"), you're still down five minutes and fifteen seconds every year. Murphy's Law says at least five minutes of that time will be when it was really, truly important that the system not be down.

You can't repeal Murphy's Law, but I think it does give us a big step towards an insurance policy.

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.

Promises Kept, Credibility Gaps, and Microsoft: Are we Customers or Consumers?

As reported on Slashdot, quoting Quentin Clark's WinFS team blog (which spun the item mercilessly), and commented on widely, particularly by rjdohnert and Kamal:

WinFS is dead. What has been understood for a decade or so to refer to a "Windows File System", recently rechristened in Microsoftspeak as "Windows Future Storage" (to imply a lack of commitment to a product or in fact anything specific at all); in any form recognisable as the product/technology that has been hyped unrelentingly by Microsoft when they needed something to keep users (and developers) committed to the Next Windows Version, the plug has been pulled for what promises to be the very last time. This could be viewed in a number of ways; the least uncharitable explanation that concievably touches upon our shared reality is the subject of the remainder of this item.

Yet another case of Microsoft overpromising and underdelivering? Since they really don't care about providing great software to consumers — either end users or developers, there is no real penalty for failing to keep promises (though they do, in true Rove/O'Reilly fashion, try to spin the sucker positive as hard as they can, just to keep the yokels giving the slack-jawed "wow....they say it's cool" and, as Michalski originally wrote, crapping cash).

There is absolutely no reason to keep waiting for a relational file store in Windows or any product except SQL Server (and possibly some future version of OFfice that requires SQL Server). There is no reason whatever to believe Microsoft will keep ANY promise made to developers or end users, nor or in future. There is absolutely no reason to believe that any gee-whiz "technology preview" given by Microsoft will ever turn into a real, stable, usable product unless that product is announced (with a ship date) at the show or conference where the demo is made. Stability and usability of said product will, as with all previous Microsoft releases, have to wait for the second service pack.

What this boils down to, in other words, is a matter of trust, and commitment, and honesty, and all the values that a company which values its customers (and workers) is expected to incorporate into its ethos. That Microsoft deliberately chooses not to do this, as it has proven on numerous occasions, shows its complete and consistent contempt for those poor schmucks it sees as consumers, not customers.

We, as developers and users, have two choices. We can either continue to prove Microsoft right, gulping whatever product they deign to deliver, crapping out whatever cash they choose to take, abjectly powerless to exert any change over their behaviour. Or, we can refuse to play their game any more. There are other tools to develop products for Windows. Most of these have the additional benefit of being cross-platform.

"Cross-platform". There's a quaintly radical word in these times. The idea that people could use a variety of systems, tools, applications, to get their work done. Companies don't have to pay US$600 to buy an office "suite" with a heavy-duty word processor, spreadsheet, and yadda yadda for a manager whose work is primarily limited to short memos? Revolutionary. Selecting tools based on the needs of the user rather than the "default" "choice" for the entire organisation? If one choice of office layout doesn't fit everybody from the managing director to the secretarial pool, then by what logic should they use the same software tools to do their work? How ma many users of, say, Microsoft Word use more than a tiny percentage (say, 5%) of the "features" in the product? (According to surveys dating back to 2000, roughly 5%). By looking at the situation as a need to give each user tools appropriate for the task at hand, rather than imposing a uniform "solution" and adapting the task to the "solution"?

This whole WinFS affair is yet another bit of weight pushing the Good Ship Microsoft towards (or past, in some opinions) the tipping point. Those already on board might do well to examine their options; those considering extending their 'booking' may wish to reconsider. The main forces arguing that no 'realistic' options exist have been marketing-driven, rather than technically- or business-driven. Consumers blindly take whatever they're given; customers demand products that meet their needs. It is high time that those who purchase and use business computer software systems, and the tools to work with them, availa themselves of their options.