Oliver Roup’s Blog

At the WWDC last summer, Steve Jobs made a big deal about how he was keeping a few features in the next release of OS X (Leopard) secret because he didn’t want the folks in Redmond (ahem) to ”start their photocopiers too early”. Although the whole photocopiers angle is an obvious jab (and not even plausibly realistic) I do think there are some interesting features that still haven’t been announced in Leopard.  There’s been a fair bit of speculation as to what Steve Jobs still has up his sleeves, but to my eye, nobody has quite nailed it.

I think the well known work to make OS X resolution independent will be applied to creating a “google maps style” interface for the desktop UX. Imagine a desktop that is a variable number of pixels across. Dragging a window so that it sits partially offscreen causes the viewport to smoothly zoom out and everything is visible, just scaled down. In this context, Expose is just a zoom out, instead of tiling programs in a flat grid with no relation to how they were laid out on screen. Naturally you can zoom in too or do the google-eque “drag” which is really just panning the viewport across a large area.

What’s my reasoning?

• It just makes sense as a feature. You’ve always got more stuff running than you can deal with. It is much more natural and makes a hell of a lot more sense than multiple desktops, spinning cubes or Flip 3D. 
• This feature doesn’t affect developers lives at all. They don’t even need to know about it so keeping it secret is possible.
• It is indeed difficult for others to copy. Nobody else has done the resolution independence work that Apple has. (512*512 icons? Wow.)
• It can have some super snazzy sounding name which Jobs loves so much. Time Travel?

I’ve read a fair number of the Apple blogs and haven’t seen this prediction anywhere else, but I’m not a regular so it’s possible I’ve missed something obvious. Personally I’m going to be shelling down for a new Vista laptop with a snazzy SideShow display, but I’m definitely pretty impressed by the Apple stuff.

The always insightful Scott Adams has a hillarious new blog post: Atheists: The New Gays

While I think many Atheists have an unfortunate tendency to be evangelical about their non-belief, I do think that recent events have made atheism more publicly acceptable in America than ever, even if it’s unfortunate that it’s at the expense of Muslims. I personally very much doubt that Bill Gates will ever run for president and I think it would be easy to go overboard with the “Billionaire as benevolent dictator” meme. Think, what if it were Larry Ellison?

It’s 6am the morning after the election and the democrats have done it. They’ve taken control of the house and the Senate is still up for grabs. Montana and Virginia are too close to call. If the democrats take both of those, they’ll have control of the Senate too, 51:49.
While I’m very pleased with this result, I’m afraid that the Democrats will get the wrong message, that the people of America somehow voted for them. They did not. This election was about turfing out the incumbents and the Democrats were the available alternative. The Republicans are smart. They will re-think and re-tool and in 2008 they will be back with a vengeance. If the Democrats don’t have an actual leadership plan (as opposed to just opposing the Republicans) all those hard fought gains will be lost.

I was pretty inspired by the speech Arnold Schwarzennegger gave at the 2004 Republican convention where he described why he is a Republican and why he thought everyone else should be too. The funny thing is I can imagine how if your initiation to politics is watching Jimmy Carter vs. Ronald Reagan, you’d make that decision too.

The Democrats need to decide the list of things they’re for and then be behind those things even if it means siding with Republicans.
I see three key areas that matter to me. The party that is for these things is the party I will vote for:

1. Fair, Reality-Based and Success-Driven
2. Socially Non-Interfering
3. Sustainable

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A while back, I ran across a great HackDiary entry extolling the virtues of using TagSoup and XPATH to do screenscraping from the web. TagSoup is a library that coerces all the ugly nasty HTML you find out in the wild into well-formed (although not necessarily valid) XML. While there’s no guarantee that the results are semantically the same as the input, it lets you use all your nice XML tools like XPATH to extract data. The entry does a great job of showing you how to use TagSoup with Xalan. However, the JDK has been updated with it’s own XPATH parser so it’s no longer necessary to import the Xalan library. Below is a code sample for using TagSoup and the default XPATH parser to retrieve the stock price of Google from Google Finance. Note that the whole “MutableNamespaceContext” implementation is just a workaround for a missing JDK method as documented in JDK Bug 5101859. If that bug gets fixed, the code could be simplified substantially.

The usual disclaimers apply about this all being sample quality code. All error handling has been punted to keep the example length short, but you’d never really want to do that. Also, I’m having trouble preserving indenting in this HTML View, I’ll work on that. This code assumes JDK 1.5. Click through for the code itself.

Does this code support the argument that Java is WAY too verbose? Absolutely.
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My rimu host hosts a number of domains, including oroup.com, openrelay.com, cadabraco.com and drugmaps.com. I want to be able to send and receive email to those domains, but (at least for now) I don’t really want to set up dovecot locally and actually deal with mail. So the ideal thing is just to forward your mail to another email address. Postfix is a little daunting at first, but the key instructions turn out to be quite simple.

1 /etc/postfix/main.cf:
2     virtual_alias_domains = example.com ...other hosted domains...
3     virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual
4
5 /etc/postfix/virtual:
6     postmaster@example.com postmaster
7     joe@example.com        joe@somewhere
8     jane@example.com       jane@somewhere-else
9     # Uncomment entry below to implement a catch-all address
10     # @example.com         jim@yet-another-site
11     ...virtual aliases for more domains...

Presto, instant email!

Recently, my last friend who was still a student at MIT in the PHD program graduated and so I had to find a new home for oroup.com. What I’d always really wanted was my own box hosted at a colo where I could play around at will, install bizarre software, and so on. I’d previously priced this out a few times but the costs were always prohibitive, easily several hundred per month after the purchase price of the box itself. Boy how times have changed.
Rimuhosting offers you “root” on your own box and a static IP address for $19.95 a month. Of course, it’s not really your own box, it just feels that way. In reality, the magic of Xen, I run happily in my own little slice of a larger machine, happily unaware of who I share the box with or what they’re doing. They price by RAM. $19.95 only gets you 96MB of RAM which probably won’t get me as far as I’d like but still it’s pretty amazing.
Suddenly, new things seem possible. I’d always resisted using something like blogger.com or MSN Spaces for a bunch of reasons:

1. Probably the key issue is I just don’t like the URL. I realized early on that setting my email address to a domain name I hosted meant I could swap out the underlying email provider whenever I wanted. While my friends send out notices announcing their move from hotmail to yahoo to gmail, I have had the same email address for almost 10 years and never plan to change it. (Spam issues notwithstanding.) The same should be true for your blog.
2. At the end of the day, it’s my data. Google seems pretty enlightened at this point with respect to not trying to lock you in. Any email sent to my gmail account lands in my “real” inbox automatically without me having to log into their website. Still, you just never know how that’s going to evolve in the future. Sourceforge seemed pretty enlightened in this regard too and has gotten somewhat less so. If the data sits on my box, I know I can get to it.
3. I want flexibility. Blogger will let you turn features on and off but they’re never going to use a search engine other than Google. MSN Spaces is always going to be pushing Live Search. Neither of them are ever going to connect to Flickr. It’s my site and I should be able to build it as I want. Sure, I’m unlikely to ever start writing my own PHP plugins but I want the flexibility to install what I want.

I tried to do a little comparison shopping of blog software and landed at this chart. It’s still basically too much information to grok but the author ended up going with WordPress, I’ve seen a bunch of WordPress sites around and the list of plugins seemed impressive. The only downside was that it requires MySQL. My impression has always been that PostgreSQL is a real database and MySQL is a toy, but that impression may be dated and at the end of the day it wasn’t that important to me. So WordPress it is.
Welcome to the new blog.