jerakeen.org

created 19 February 2010 in notes tagged blogging, meta, nick and personal.

I’ve been using the nick ‘jerakeen’ for at least… hmmm… 13 years? A long time, anyway. It was a pretty good name, I think - it’s decently unique, quite easy to spell, it’s a slightly-obscure and yet nerdy reference, and (crucially) pretty unique; It’s been pretty easy to maintain myself as the top google hit for the word.

But that was 10 years ago. For a while now I’ve considered this whole ‘handle’ thing quite childish. And there are other Jerakeens now and the mis-addressed twitters and delicious links are getting annoying, not to mention the fact that I’d quite like my work to be associated with me. It’s clearly time to do what all the other Serious People have done, and just use my actual name everywhere.

Thus, I’m retiring jerakeen as a nick/handle/whatever it’s called. In hindsight, using the same name for myself and my domain was a mistake, so I’m retiring this domain entirely as well. I’m renaming myself on all the services that will safely let me do so, creating new accounts on most services that don’t, and just putting up with it on the few services (hi flickr!) that I’m pretty much tied to.

So, the new me can be found as

• @tominsam on twitter
• tominsam on github
• tominsam on delicious
• tominsam in lots of other places. You get the idea.

I’m going to move my web output to the movieos.org domain, which I’ve had knocking around unused for a while now. It’s in a terribly rough state, but I don’t expect I’ll break it too much. This gets me a new email address as well, which will probably be the most

This site will obviously stay around. Permalinks are important. But I’m going to bake it out to flat files and retire the terrifying CMS that powers it. Likewise, I assume I’ll keep watching the old accounts for a few months in case anything still gets @jerakeen-ed to me. And I’m sure I’ll forget things. But in so far as much as you have to pick a line and say ‘this is when I’m changing my name’? This is it.

created 17 January 2010 in notes tagged email and writtenwhiledrunk.

Sorry. I’m cynical about this new email client thing that Brent has kicked off. Don’t want to be a source of stop energy. But quite aside from my normal IT‘S DOOMED instincts, I think they’re solving the wrong problem.

There are people on the list saying that an email client needs to be aware that people have 3 computers and a phone nowadays. There are people wanting it to be properly mailing-list aware so that you don’t have to set up manual filtering rules. There are people wanting it to be more understanding of current email conventions, so it (for instance) will trim automatic mailing list footers from replies so you don’t get 30 lines of repeated cruft.

But the first of these goals undermines every other clever feature. Most of the current problems with email are inherent to IMAP, because IMAP is just a heap of folders with too many configuration options (folder prefix, for instance..). IMAP doesn’t do magical mailing list filtering, so it doesn’t matter if I have a clever client that does, because my phone won’t benefit from any of it. And if I reply to a mail from my phone, the footers won’t magically get trimmed, my phone doesn’t do that. And if your phone doesn’t sync with your desktop address book, you won’t be able to compose mail to your friends anyway.

Google Mail gets this right. They don’t do IMAP except as a backwards-compatible API to their mail store. They got to start again, and properly reinvent what mail is. Mailing list and spam filtering is done on the server side, rather than relying on the client to pull down all your mail, sort it, and push it into new folders. (Yes, there are server-side filtering systems. I don’t know any GUI clients with first-class support for them.) There’s one address book, and one place for that annoying ‘people I reply to go into my address book’ setting, and my mail sig, and all those other stupid things you need to tune every time you get a new email client.

The Android GMail client is a perfect example of what a client looks like in this world. It talks to the (secret / private) GMail API, it does offline mail reading, and queues actions so you can archive / filter / whatever mails while offline and it’ll push changes later. You can read and write mail. It doesn’t try to do anything clever, because anything clever done on one client isn’t reproduced on any other client. And if I don’t have a client on my current computer for GMail, I can use a web browser, and still get all the features of the server. I use the web gmail interface for everything anyway, because it’s better than any GUI client I’ve got.

GMail is a long way from being perfect. I’m not saying it’s the Solution. Maybe you disagree with the auto-conversation threading, and there’s the large nit that you’re not allowed to write your own client on the GMail API (due to the Google terms of service, plus you’d have to reverse-engineer it anyway). But I believe that Brent’s effort is never going to produce a truly great mail client because ‘Uses IMAP‘ is one of his core requirements.

created 30 November 2009 in notes tagged programming and twitter.

Dave Winer wants a programmable twitter client.

Unix had a shell language. DOS had a batch language. Lotus 1-2-3 had its macro language. Emacs is a programming tool as much as it is a text editor. We have gotten out of the habit of making programmable end-user products, but they are still just as important today as they were a couple of decades ago.

…

What if there were a relatively simple and low-power programming language built into a Twitter client that allowed power users to build their own little apps on top of Twitter.

I have a few thoughts about this. Firstly, I think the reason lots of apps don’t bother packaging a programming language any more is that programming languages are better now. The DOS batch language is horrible compared to Python. Or even Perl.

Secondly, Twitter has an API. It’s a really really easy to use API. There are clients for it in lots of languages. A unfollow-for-24-hours app would not be difficult to just write.

But more importantly, I have a programmable twitter client. Shelf already asks Twitterrific about the currently displayed tweet so it could display other data about the user. I could do this because just about every application on my preferred platform is already programmable.

created 14 November 2009 in notes tagged berlin.

Random thoughts about Berlin since I moved here:

• It was really really cold when I arrived. But recently it’s been a lot warmer. Very nice, in fact. I’m living out of a suitcase because my stuff is being held in storage till I get a house, so I’ve been having to buy more warm clothes, but apart from a day of snow earlier it’s been pretty decent.

• Lots of smokers here. Even indoors. It’s weird. And annoying, as a smoky bar means that I write off half my wardrobe.

• I get phone service on the U-Bahn. This is awesome. I haven’t been somewhere without phone service in days. This is beginning to give me a rather blasé attitude towards offline caching.

• Living here is a lot cheaper than London. I found a place to live that’s about 80m² in the middle of the city for less than I was paying for a shoebox 45 minutes from the centre of London. But then, most places are cheaper than London..

• I can’t pronounce words. This is more debilitating than merely not being able to speak the language. I know I can’t speak German, but as it stands I can’t even read things off menus to order food, or pronounce street names to taxi drivers. I’m reduced to pointing at words on bits of paper. I’m sub-literate in this country. Have to work on that one.

• I like it here.

created 17 September 2009 in notes tagged android and iphone.

After my previous ranting about Android on the G1, I feel I should write something optimistic about it. I’ve need using it on and off for a bit now, though I haven’t (yet) managed to switch to it full-time, as it doesn’t have an Instapaper client and I’ve become rather attached to Instapaper recently. I’m musing just sitting down and writing one at this point. Nevertheless:

I didn’t initially care about the ability to run background applications, though lots of people were very enthusiastic about it, but this turns out to be billing the feature badly. ‘Background’ isn’t really the point. Perhaps ‘still there’ is a better way of putting it. It’s not that apps can perform actions in the background that is useful, instead it’s that they haven’t had to quit just because I’m doing something else.

For instance, the Activity metaphor is one thing I’m very fond of. It’s a stack, with activities being dropped on the top when you choose something to do. If my twitter client wants to open a web page, it just drops the system web browser activity on the top of the stack, with that page in it. If I navigate around, the hardware ‘back’ button will go back in the browser history to the first page, then it’ll pop the browser off the stack and go back to the still-running twitter client. This is awesome - you don’t have to embed an entire web browser into every single app that might want to open a web page without quitting. And of course the web browser example is just a minor one - apps can call other interesting apps - I could hypothetically open my twitter client’s ‘compose’ activity directly from a blogging application to twitter about it, then pop it off and return to my blogging app, which was still running. More practically, I can open locations in the Google Maps application without losing my place.

Secondly, having my most common apps already open all the time eventually makes the G1 feel almost faster than the iPhone. I still feel enormously constrained by the speed of the device, especially with respect to the keyboard. It’s slow, and there’s no getting round this fact. But switching contexts feels lots faster than on the iPhone sometimes, as it’s a matter of ‘hold home, tap the app I want, and I’m there’, compared to the slick zooming-to-home-screen animation of the iphone, followed by lengthy app startup every time. Sometimes the iPhone animations start feeling like intentional delays put in to distract you from the fact that it’s not ready to show you the thing you’re zooming to yet. Just sayin’.

Finally, we have Spotify. This is where background apps running properly in the background actually matter in the traditional sense. I can listen to my music and do something else at the same time. The iPhone version of the app is lovely, as I said, but also totally useless, as I quite like using my iPhone to read things, check mail, other internetty things, and I also like to listen to music while doing this.

Finding some nice software has helped the Android experience a little.

• newsrob - the closest thing to Byline, my favourite offline Google Reader app I’ve found so far. Doesn’t know about starred items, though. And given that I’ve mostly switched to Instapaper for my offline reading, I’m drifting away from it.
• twitdroid - twitter client. I have little to say about this other than it’s the one that sucks the least. Damning with faint praise, really. It is getting better, though. It’s still being worked on, and this is a big deal.
• k9 - an ugly, but damn effective email client. It’ll check more than one IMAP folder, for instance, which I love, because I do a lot of server-side filtering.

Annoyingly, as I have (access to) a G1 dev phone, I can’t pay money for software. In fact, I can’t even see software on the Marketplace if it costs money (or is otherwise marked as ‘copy protected’). This means that there’s a stack of supposedly-useful stuff I can’t try. Most Android users I’ve talked to strongly recommend Better Keyboard as an alternative to the built-in keyboard, but that’s not an option for me. A pity.

So, I’m aware that I presented a review of ‘Android running on the G1’ as a list of problems with Android. As I said in one of the comments later,

What I’m actually doing is comparing the 2 pieces of hardware I actually have sitting in front of me and that I can put a SIM card into. I know the Hero is better than this. I know there are things in the pipeline that will probably blow the iPhone away, when they actually arrive. But none of them are here, so I can’t play with them.

There are comments elsewhere complaining that I’m holding the shortcomings of the G1 hardware responsible for Android’s speed or unfriendliness. This is, of course, true. And I don’t consider it relevant. It’s a single thing to me. I know how it works, and where I could draw pretty arbitrary lines between ‘hardware’ and ‘software’, but I really don’t think that it matters.

This is still the case - I’ve been unable to see a Hero running anything other than a looped demo video, though I have managed to grope the hardware and I like it. I’ve very tempted. But my SIM card is still in the iPhone.

created 09 September 2009 in notes tagged blog and hosting.

in Blogs and baked goods John August simultaneously uses a new and incompatible baking metaphor about blogging, and argues that..

Most people shouldn’t be running their own blogging software

I agree. Except that I do run my own. In fact, not only do I host my own blogging software, on a machine that I admin myself, but I wrote the whole thing too. Every time I want a feature, I can’t just look for a plugin, I have to crack open a text editor. I’m crazy!

I’ve pondered changing this a few times, and indeed, I’ve re-written the software a lot in the past, and ported it around various different off-the-shelf systems, and nearly just canned the whole thing and moved to Tumblr on a couple of particularly bad days in the past, but I don’t. And I think it’s worth explicitly writing down the reason.

I don’t really care about the bread. I make ovens and baking trays. The bread (recent inexplicable blogging frenzy notwithstanding) is just a demo of the software. Look! I can syndicate a Flickr photoset and my twittering and Dopplr-driven maps and integrate them into a single page for the trip then tie them into an article about something, then provide a link to put all the photos on a map! The words aren’t the important bit.

So that’s why I bake. Except that I fry. Whatever.

created 09 September 2009 in notes tagged android and spotify.

Well, I was going to use Spotify on Android today. Wanted to take a couple more screenshots. Except that it’s self-destructed - the app utterly refuses to run, because there’s a newer version on the Marketplace (with no listed changes that apply to me). But I can’t download the version on the Marketplace, I get nothing but ‘download unsuccessful’ messages.

Yay technology.

Update later - aah, the Spotify Mobile page now has a direct download link for the app, and specifically mentions the G1 dev phone. Interesting. adb install -r ~/Downloads/SpotifyAndroid.apk will install the app, assuming you have the Android dev tools installed.

created 08 September 2009 in notes tagged apple, creatorcodes and macos.

Thus, an application in Snow Leopard cannot use a creator code attached to a document to bind that document to itself.

Snow Leopard Snubs Document Creator Codes

Well, as far as I’m concerned, good. I don’t think I’ve opened a document by double-clicking on it in years - the unpredictability of ‘which of the 4 text editors I have installed is going to open this time?’ has led me to stick a TextMate icon in my Finder toolbar, and I open all text files by dragging them to that icon. Likewise, I have an Acorn icon there I drag images to. For other file types, I tend to drag them to the Dock. Why on earth would I want the preferred text/image editor of whoever originally wrote this file to affect what application I use to edit it?

Now I might be able to cure myself of the habit, and go back to trusting my computer to open files in the apps that I actually use.

created 07 September 2009 in notes tagged android, iphone and spotify.

Hurrah, Spotify for the iPhone/Android is released. This makes me very happy. Especially nice is the simultaneous release of the app on both iPhone and Android - I can’t think of anyone else who’s done this, and for good reason - it’s REALLY HARD. So props to them for that.

Random first thoughts:

• It’s a really fast, smooth app. Almost no delays at all that I’ve seen. Music starts instantly, menus are fluid, it’s all just lovely.
• The song position indicator on the iPhone is in the same place, and looks the same, as the volume control in the iPod app. This is going to lead to me doing something stupid some time soon, I can tell.
• The play/pause control on the headphones doesn’t do the ‘right thing’. It controls the iPod application. Not Spotify’s fault, I assume, this is all Hidden Apple API stuff.
• Another Hidden API Unplugging the headphones doesn’t pause the music. Pity.
• If you quit and run the app again, it restores what you were doing before perfectly - down to resuming playing music if you happened to be playing at the time. This is one of the best implementations of resume I’ve seen. But again, it’s going to bite me next time I want to show someone the app and it starts playing Britney through the iPhone speakers at full volume and I have to go kill myself in shame.

So far, I think it’s great. I’d like ‘run in background’ support, of course, and I’d like it to use the double-press-home play/pause controls so that I don’t have to unlock the screen to control it, and I’d like it to use all manner of other forbidden Apple APIs that they’re not allowed to use. None of this is Spotify’s fault.

I’ve also now tried the Android version:

• It’s an equally wonderful and polished experience. Even on the very slow G1 I have access to in the office, it’s pretty fast, and again, the music starts playing instantly. Very nice.
• On Android, it runs in the background!
• It really needs a home screen widget to control playback, though, the disadvantage of being in the background is that there’s the overhead of switching to it every time you want to pause.
• It does the same thing as the iPhone version and doesn’t pause when you unplug the headphones. Less forgivable here, as the ‘private API‘ argument is harder to make.

I’d be very happy using either of these apps in the wild, I think.

I have a small collection of screenshots here.

created 31 July 2009 in notes tagged games, mac and warhammer.

Warhammer Online has a Mac client, finally. Except that, rather than an actual native effort, it’s a shitty Transgaming wrapper.

I downloaded it, clicked ‘create account’, and it crashed.

I left the downloader, once persuaded to work, overnight to get everything. 20 mins after I leave it, as far as I can tell, it hung solid again. So I’m still no closer to finishing this 15 gigs of download, and meanwhile the 10 day trial account I had to sign up to to even start downloading is ticking away. I’ll be lucky if I even see the inside of the game at this rate.

I had roughly the same experience when trying both City of Heroes and Eve Online - both also shitty Transgaming ‘ports’. Random crashes, graphical glitches, the latest prettiness tends to not be supported, and they’re a lot slower than the comparable Windows versions.

It seems to me that Transgaming have done more to hurt the Mac gaming world than anyone else. The idea that you can turn your product into a Mac game OVERNIGHT, without employing ANYONE WHO SEEMS TO CARE ABOUT THE PLATFORM is an absurd thing to peddle.

World of Warcraft runs on the Mac well because every Blizzard game since the dawn of time has run on both Windows and the Mac, off the same install disk. I’m convinced that a significant chunk of the WoW user base are there for the same reason I am - there are no decent alternative (mainstream) MMO for the platform. Until recently, there were just none. Now there is WoW and three shitty Transgaming ports. I assume they won’t get lots of Mac users, because their Mac clients all SUCK. Which is self-reinforcing. Why bother putting effort into such a niche platform?