Classes of iPhone Users

I've had an iPhone for some time now. While it does bother me that Apple doesn't really give two shakes about contributing back to the open source community on whose shoulders they have built, I'm also pragmatic. The device is simply the best of its kind out there.

I like to consider myself a student of other iPhone users. Any time I see someone with one, "classic" or 3G, I like to snoop on what they are doing. Over the last few months, I've noticed a few classes of iPhone user emerging. What follows is my untrained attempt at social anthropology mixed with humor.

• The Frustrated Designer - a Mac user through and through. They always buy 1st gen Apple hardware, even though rational people know better. Most easily identified by their propensity to verbally express a tangible frustration attempting to use 97 nested DIVs, advanced CSS selectors and 12578 lines of JavaScript to center an image in the iPhone Safari interface. Would write an ObjectiveC native app, but doesn't know what a compiler or socket or ObjectiveC or a native apps is.
  
• The Trophy - doesn't really know why they have an iPhone, just that their wealthy partner gave them one. Most easily identified by well-manicured nails attempting to tap out a text message with the sound at full volume for each key press. Never types faster than twelve keys per minute. Commonly sits next to me on airplanes.
  
• The Showman - Doesn't really know why he needs an iPhone, just that he does. Identify the showman by his inability to do much other than talk on the iPhone, set it on the table during meetings so you know it's there, and by the fact that his emails still end with "Sent from my iPhone" despite having the device for nearly a year.
• The Tech Luminary - Installs every possible application from the iTunes store hoping to gain status as someone qualified to comment on the state of iTunes Store/iPhone technology while at the same time not knowing a thing about the underlying platform. The luminary mocks Windows users for arbitrarily installing shareware from .ru domains, but never questions why he has installed 47 iPhone applications, 43 of which are never used.
• The Frustrated Developer - Has an iPhone application in the works, but can't talk about it due to an unenforceable NDA. Identify these users by their regular and sanctimonious references to their NDA despite never having really finished an application or by their smug looks at local user groups.
  
• The Marketing Director - Only knows that they should have an iPhone because their underlings said so. Loves the speaker phone, thinks it's the major advance of the device. Most easily identified by the fact they are still running the same firmware they bought the device with.
  
• The Commuter - Found in urban areas, this individual cannot stop texting, browsing, or listening to podcasts long enough to exhibit any awareness of those around him/her and actually move out of the path of egress for everyone else on the transit device. Likely to accidentally enter altercation with local meth addict while engrossed in something Twitter-related.
  
• The Power User - The most elusive of the iPhone users, understands device limitations (most Bluetooth profiles lacking, no Copy/Paste, no Search, AT&T partnership) along with a healthy distrust of anything Steve Jobs claims. Generally refuses to tout the virtues of the device unless overhearing someone rant about how much better a Nokia or RIM device is. Understands there are no better alternatives and that using the device sticks it to "the man" by making consumer opinion matter again. Hopes Android kicks major ass and that people will take Openmoko seriously.
  

It's probably obvious that I associate myself mostly with the latter category, but there is plenty of commuter in me as well.

There is a snobbery around having an iPhone. It's sort of like riding a fixed-gear bike in Portland; you feel like it makes you cool, you usually go out of your way to let people know you have one. Then you see all of the other DBs using one and realize its way too much machine for them. Some of them even run into walls while using the device you admire. You can't give up your baby, so you're left trying to quietly blend back into the masses hoping nobody noticed and that you don't get associated with the new user population. I'm sure there's a Gartner graph to prove it all out somewhere...

I Can Ride a Bike With No Handlebars

This post on slashdot blew me away. I'm typing this on a Hardy/Kubunty alpha (maybe beta by now?) installation and it has been more difficult to install than several of my Gentoo installations - that's saying something.

Granted, I went with KDE4 which is simply asking for problems, but really, this was a doozie. Issues of note:

1. Now famed Ubuntu "Black Screen of Death" - I attribute this to my having some slamming video cards, but seriously, the people's distro should *never* get itself into a place where you can't fall back to the kernel fb. When good ole' Ctl+Shift+Del can't save you from X+driver maddness, something is fundamentally wrong. For the interested, I had to drop to a recovery console and install nvidia-glx-new, then hack xorg.conf to use nv drivers, then "activate" properietary nvidia drviers. Not pleasant.
2. Java UIs fail - mouse-over for certain Eclipse SWT widgets cores java. That is generally difficult to do - SWT is one of the more stable Java UIs out there and it dies *hard*.
   
3. Probably most important, my shell gets into some wierd sound death-trap. Yes, that's right, I said shell and sound are problems. Alarm bells going off for anyone yet? Basically, the DCOP issues on the Ubuntu forums don't seem to be fixed for me anyway, my shell is trying to do something sound related (even with sould off) and hanging until I start a corresponding shell to recover the first. The scenario looks something like - start System -> Konsole -- see DCOP error message, see Konsole hang. Start System -> Konsole 3 -- watch Konsole work while Konsole 3 hangs. The two seem to be fighting for control of the KDM and one but not both work at a time. I spend ~40% of my compute time in a shell. When something that fundamental doesn't work, I freak out.
4. FF3 widgets look like crap. That's not really Hardy or KDE4's fault, but it's true. Tabs, drop-down decorations both look simply aweful.
   

In all fariness, Gusty didn't install properly on this hardware. Still, I'm not seeing how things in XORG land have gotten any better, infact they may have gotten worse. Complain all you want about Windows, at least Vista on the same hardware displayed a UI without me dropping to a rescue console.

Stale Cake - With Frosting!

Funny comments by Microsoft product manager Lawrence Liu on Mike Gotta's blog. Removing some noise between the lines:

"I am asking customers to step back and assess what business problem(s) they’re trying to solve... Jive and IBM are trying to wedge ... themselves into the SharePoint 'pie' by focusing on feature-to-feature comparisons while we’re working hard with our partners to provide the right frosting (or Cool Whip) to solve our customers’ problems."

I'm confused by Lawrence's response here for a couple of reasons:

• Bad metaphor is always difficult to read - Who puts frosting on pie? Who takes a "wedge" of pie? Good pie is best served hot by a knowledgeable baker, not after the original baker has stepped away from the pie and waited for six months to see what other pie makers are selling, then asking some other pie maker to fix the six-month-old, stale pie.
  
• Certainly nobody is asking customers to *not* solve a business problem. That would be equally as insulting - Microsoft does not have a monopoly on fixing business problems. If anything, they have a monopoly for causing business problems (early EOLs for XP, patch practices requiring substantial outages and reboots, Vista protocol design that causes networking headaches all translate into BCP issues in my mind).
• More comical, Lawrence is trying to convince customers that alternatives to *their* products are rash and that buyers are *safer* sticking with the platform and ignoring what other vendors are doing in the space. In my mind, this is akin to "only following orders", but why take orders from the used car salesman at the end of the block? Sure, eventually Microsoft will figure out what is important for their most profitable customers, or alternatively customers can buy a number of flexible solutions today that meet their needs.
  

My translation: "We're Microsoft. You will do what we say is important, when we say it is important. Thank you, your next invoice is in the mail."

The term "Microserf" comes to mind...

Erlang Musings

Completely bogged down buy our 2.0 release push at work, generally not a lot of time to blog these days. That combined with the Twitter micro-blog phenomena and I'm neglecting this blog. Sorry for the two people who read this :)

I did want to capture some thoughts on the recent discussion on the Erlang mailing list around Damien Katz's post about Erlang.

To preface my comments, I've been using a decent bit of Erlang over the past few weeks and have been learning the language for several months now. My current endeavors are in the distributed load-testing arena (Tsung didn't meet my needs). I'm by no means an expert and have nowhere near the experience of Damien or the members of the Erlang mailing list, but I'm beginning to feel like I'm not a total n00b.

Initial thoughts on Damien's post:

• I've also found refactoring a bit difficult. Over time, defining an entirely different function to elicit a slight behavior change generally results in some parameter munging then a call to an existing function. Problem is, in development, the behavior of that existing function often changes thereby affecting all the calling functions.
• I was also intrigued by the response to Damien's post on the Erlang mailing list where I lurk but rarely post. Some highlights:

• "sometimes giving a whining child a lollipop is a rational thing to do." - Richard O'Keefe clarifies this comment in subsequent posts, but the condescending attitude towards other languages continues to discredit him IMO. I generally get this sense from the Erlang community - "we know functional and you don't, so don't bother us with your critique of our superior language." Not sure why early adopters of most languages feel a need to succumb to Napoleonic urges and lash out at successful platforms. Java bashing is so very original these days...

• Robert Raschke also jumps on the Java-bashing bandwagon but with less valuable critique other than that he doesn't want to write Java in Erlang - not sure who asked him to do so.

• As usual, Ulf comes through with solid, valuable feedback.

• My experience has been similar to NAR's and I related to his comments for the life of the thread. In particular, defining dozens of one-line functions has made flow control difficult to follow in some circumstances. Probably my lack of understanding towards the language idioms but building on Damien's points, there aren't consistent examples of those idioms so it's easy to lose your way. I stand by my claim that Wide Finder proved this for file I/O in Erlang. It shouldn't take a committee to help you write good file handling code.

• I found Alpár Jüttner's comment interesting: "I think, the major obstacle for newcomers is not the syntax, but the immutable data structures". As a newcomer, this was not an issue for me at all. In fact, having spent more time than I care to remember worrying about dirty reads of shared memory, this is a welcome addition to my programming routine. Rather, I struggled with multi-byte strings (referring people to ejabberd is not sufficient documentation for an entire language), function proliferation, syntax ( =:= ), and most importantly lack of libraries.

• Robert Raschke's clarifications as line endings was a huge help here.

• The fact that POST'ing a form with http:request remains an enigma (eh, where are my param encoding functions?) really makes me feel like the language is a DSL for networking gear. Yes, Erlang is more expressive and concise than Java, but that doesn't mean much to me when I can write a Scala function to make an HTTP POST in four lines of code and have it run screamingly fast where as the same Erlang takes two dozen lines (and based on the documentation is questionably not process safe). I have the sense that the Erlang community would happily provide me with 10 different functions to solve the parameter encoding issue, but that misses the point - I don't have to worry about such things in most other languages I work with.
  

In summary, I actually agree with most of Damien's original post. Having written a good bit of C/C++/Java/Python/Ruby, his observations are generally representative of how I feel approaching Erlang from that perspective.

Like Damien, I have a lot of issues with Erlang. I kind of hate Erlang. I hate it in the sense that I wish I had a better, more familiar solution to programming with actors. At the same time, it's immensely powerful and expressive. Every time I use it, I think "wow, I love functional programming" and "actors are so important, it will be amazing when the programming public realizes why we all need to do this".

At the same time, the syntactical and idiomatic issues I have with Erlang constantly nag me. I'm sure these will ease over time, but I have yet to reach a point where I've stopped looking/hoping for alternatives. Given some of the attitude displayed on the mailing list, I won't really have a lot of community loyalty if given a comparable option.

S3 Outage

A bit surprised this didn't make more news, but I find the S3 outage (originally via Tim Bray) fascinating. From what I can tell reading between the lines, it seems as though a handful of demanding clients ground the service down with bad authentication requests. Makes sense on some level, auth requests are computationally expensive and in this case, they came from within EC2. My guess is that Amazon treats EC2 as a more privileged network and ultimately allows a higher QoS level between EC2 nodes and S3 nodes. So, while it may be en vouge to diss "architects", it's also important to have people around who understand the fundamentals from TCP stacks through the crypto and application layers and who build reliable systems across all three.

My prediction is that we'll see more of these incidents from EC2-hosted nodes, then growing out to bad S3 requests across the public network launched from various bot nets. It's not an easy problem Amazon is undertaking with EC2 or S3 to begin with, it's an even more difficult one to protect from DDoS and DoS attacks.

The Power of Simple, Online Collaboration

I won't attempt to use any fancy market-speak or terminology. I've long been a believer in how blogs and wikis can drive collaboration inside a company. One of the things Jive is really good at is capturing ROI around open collaboration in quantitative terms and telling a compelling story. Sam's latest blog is a great example. In short, based on a self-organizing set of categorizations, we can track cross-departmental collaboration and interactions. Cool stuff, not the type of data you can see from Share Point, that's for sure.

Rhino with readline - Hurray for rlwrap

Stumbled across dr.bob's sweet post on getting a readline wrapper around rhino.

Prior to reading his post, I had no idea rlwrap even existed, I'm simply amazed. GNU readline is IMO one of the most useful abstractions in all of *nix-dom. If I had known that I could use it even with tools that weren't readline-enabled, my previous lives would have been much easier. For example, looks like some foo-equipped DBAs (inspired by one of my heroes Tom Kyte) have found a way to use rlwrap to get a command history for sqlplus. It's been ages since I've actually used sqlplus (most time these days is in psql thankfully which natively supports readline), but this would be step 0 in my Oracle client install.

Anyway, back to Rhino. rlwrap + rhino is lethal. Gives me vi key bindings in rhino.

My setup ended up like so:

* Installed Rhino to ~/java/rhino
* Created script in ~/bin which was already on the path
* chmodded said script
* Added vi editing mode to ~/.inputrc
* Edited rhino commands with vi bindings
* Lived the good life

The various files looked like so:

~/.inputrc
set editing-mode vi

~/bin/rhino
#!/bin/bash
for jar in `find ~/java -type f -iname '*.jar'`; do
export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:$jar;
done
rlwrap /opt/java/current/bin/java -cp $CLASSPATH org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.Main -strict "$@"


Drop an exploded rhino anywhere into ~/java, and you're good to go.

Of course, GNU Readline supports hundreds of options including other bindings like emacs if your are so inclined.