I touched off an accidental firestorm yesterday by prompting Nick to comment (twice, actually) on whether one or two spaces at the end of a sentence is correct.
Unfortunately, I remembered incorrectly and Nick believes in the single space method. Oops. But he misunderstood my conversion to two spaces, so I ought to explain that.
Once upon a time, I used two spaces. Then I met Nick, and he presented a convincing argument for one space, so I switched. About six months ago, I mentioned the issue to Katie, who rebutted Nick's argument very well and offered a convincing argument in favor of two spaces, so I switched back. I unfortunately don't remember the details of Katie's argument, but it certainly didn't have anything to do with her status as an English grad student (not an English major; she majored in American Studies). I think she did mention various manuals of style, though.
Nick hasn't ranted about much recently, but if he doesn't rant about this I'll be very disappointed.
The other interesting note from Michael Tsai today is a pointer to Glenn McDonald's excellent piece describing why he switched to Mac OS X. It's difficult to explain why using a Mac just feels more right (so to speak), but this article does exactly that.
Michael Tsai wrote two things today that I want to comment on. The first says this:
Chuq Von Rospach and Eric Albert are Apple guys, so they're not impartial....
He's right, of course, that you could hardly accuse me of being impartial regarding issues involving Apple (though I'm certainly not always in favor of Apple's views). I just find it amusing that working for Apple means that I'm partial towards them. What was I a month ago, I wonder, when I worked for Microsoft?
News.com has a story tonight saying that Opera may cancel its web browser for the Mac now that Apple has released Safari.
I don't understand why Safari's entrance into the market makes much of a difference for Opera. The News.com article essentially says that Opera doesn't think its browser can compete with a free web browser that's bundled with the operating system. But Mac OS X 10.2 already has a free web browser that's bundled with the OS -- Internet Explorer. It's true that IE is really showing its age on the Mac, but Opera shipped its first release for the Mac before Mac OS X shipped, competing against what was then a best-of-breed IE 5 on Mac OS 9.
The only way in which Safari is different now from how IE was then is that it's an Apple product and not a Microsoft one. That's not much of a difference, though. And as the competitive browser market on Mac OS X has shown, it's all but impossible to write a browser that's perfect for everyone. The Omni Group believes that there's still a market for a pro-quality commercial browser on Mac OS X. I hope the Opera folks will come to the same conclusion once they realize that today's market isn't very different from the one they entered a few years ago.
Since getting a California cell phone number means that I'll need a new contract anyway, I'm planning to get a new cell phone. My current phone, a Motorola V.8162, is wonderfully small and light but doesn't get any reception at home unless I'm standing at exactly the right angle by the living room window. I can't deal with that. It gets two or three bars if I'm standing on the street outside, but that's not much help.
I'm hoping that a new phone will get better reception. Sprint apparently lets you return a new phone and back out of a new contract within 14 days, so I can buy a phone and bring it home to try it out without much risk. The question, then, is what phone to buy. Here are the requirements:
As for providers, I'm not tied to Sprint. It's just that I know I get great reception from Sprint at work, their rates aren't bad, and they seem to have much better phones than everyone else.
In his column in today's Miami Herald, Dave Barry summarizes the plot of The Two Towers. My favorite line in the summary is one of Frodo's: "How come, if I'm the protagonist, Lord Aragorn has TWO love interests, and I'm stuck in a subplot with Dick Cheney?"
Stephanie was taken aback by the Tech Museum's theater, which is a huge dome with seating on a steep angle and a full-field-of-vision screen. But it was nothing new to me -- I've seen a few Omnimax movies at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and I've often wondered why the Omnimax format seemed to be losing out to IMAX.
I was really confused, though, because the Tech Museum calls its theater an IMAX theater (actually "IMAX Dome"), not an Omnimax one. After a bit of digging just now, I've learned that both IMAX and Omnimax are from the same company, and the company renamed "Omnimax" to "IMAX Dome" a few years ago. Now I understand why I've heard so little about Omnimax in recent years. I'm also very happy to see that more and better movies are being made for it, since there always seemed to be a limited selection at the Franklin Institute. I have to say that I never imagined I'd see something like "The Lion King" on an Omnimax screen. Wow.
I went to see the IMAX version of "The Lion King" today with Stephanie. I think I last saw it five or six years ago, and I'd forgotten how good it is. It's amazingly well done, full of lines that are funny to those who get them and don't seem out of place to others, subtleties that you don't notice unless you're really paying attention, and plot development that builds a good story. And, of course, it has an excellent soundtrack.
Stephanie says that "Beauty and the Beast" was also terrific as an IMAX movie. I missed it, unfortunately; the only time I saw a theater that was playing it was New Year's Day 2002, and the show times were really inconvenient so we couldn't go. Stephanie thinks that "The Little Mermaid" would also work well on IMAX, and I'd love to see that because I've never seen the movie. A bit of research (albeit somewhat old) shows that Disney might be IMAX-ing both "The Little Mermaid" and "Aladdin". More recent stories confirm that "Aladdin" is scheduled for December 2003 or January 2004. I can't wait -- that's also a terrific movie that I haven't seen in a really long time.
The Seattle Times has a story about Segway owners in the Seattle area. Left unanswered is why they didn't include Nick in the story....
Martin Schwimmer takes The New York Times to task for confusing many different aspects of trademark law in the same story. If anyone from the Times sees his comments, perhaps they'll realize that they might want to talk to an expert in trademark law before trying to write detailed stories about it.
A friend from Microsoft completely floored me today when he pointed me to a note from Dave Winer that pointed to a comment by Jenny Levine referencing a paper I wrote for a Stanford course on the history of computer games.
When I received the link to the paper, I wondered if the "Eric Albert" who authored it was me. I didn't recall writing it. Now that I've skimmed it, I remember writing it, and I can't believe it's online. Even more than that, though, I can't believe that someone not only found the paper, but read it. Wow. I don't know how I think about having random people (and especially friends) reading a paper that I probably wrote at the last minute and which certainly shouldn't be held up as a shining example of historical writing.
For what it's worth, the only thing I really recall from that paper is my work to get the DOS version of SimCity to run on any computer I had access to. I think I finally did it by installing DOS in Virtual PC, but I couldn't get it to run under Windows.
Brent Simmons points to some interesting comments from Michael Alderete about making RSS feeds much easier to discover and use on Mac OS X. I like the concept, but I think it's possible to do even better, and to do so with a solution that wouldn't be tied to a specific platform.
Currently, links for RSS feeds are given with a protocol of "http". Change that to "rss" and all of a sudden things get a lot easier. A news aggregator would just have to register for the rss protocol, and whenever the user clicked on an rss link, their news aggregator would be launched with that URL. Require aggregators to handle either a direct address for the RSS feed or an address for a web page which they'd use as the basis for autodiscovery and you're all set.
If aggregators supported this, you could construct a Javascript bookmarklet that would simply open the location of the current page, but with an 'rss://' tacked on to the front of the URL instead of 'http://'. That'd cause the user's news aggregator to launch and subscribe to the current page. Then you'd have a one-click RSS subscription process that doesn't require any browser or operating system changes, and which would work on all platforms.
Now that I have a disclaimer written, I just have to take the time to prominently link to it from my page. I'll do that shortly, but not tonight; I'm too tired and I have too much other stuff on my mind.
It was strange to be back at Apple today, a year and a half since I left and about two and a half years since I was in the office there every day. I still have the same employee ID number, so I'm happy. I'm glad I could get a new ID picture to go with it.
I also now know what I'm working on. That's the last I'll say about my team or project for the forseeable future.
It's really quite astonishing how different Microsoft and Apple are. I have a feeling I'll be amazed by that (and reminded of it) over and over again for a long time to come.
It's nice to be home again.
To quote Chuq von Rospach, "Disclaimers suck, but they're also necessary and useful."
This is a personal site. This isn't my employer's site and it's not Stanford's site; it's my site. When I post things to this site, link to articles from this site, or send email from my personal email accounts, I speak only for myself. I may talk in general terms about things that happen at work, or about things my employer does, but if I do, I'm only providing my personal thoughts, and not those of my employer.
I work for Apple. I used to work for Microsoft. Prior to that, I worked for Apple while I went to school at Stanford. Not one of those organizations has ever paid me to be an official spokesman, and I'll never serve in that role. To quote Chuq again, "If my employer wants me to act as a spokesman, they'll need to pay me a lot more money to do it, and I'll do it from an official address of my employer's, not my personal systems."
What, explicitly, does all of this mean? It means that if I say something here, it isn't Apple's viewpoint, nor is it the viewpoint of my team at Apple, nor does it mean that Apple is engaged in an internal debate on the issue, nor does it mean that I don't have a completely different perspective on the issue when I'm at work. Similarly, anything I say shouldn't be construed as Microsoft or Stanford's viewpoint, or the views of my former team at Microsoft, or anything along those lines.
The fastest way to lose my respect is to quote something I say from a personal account as "an Apple engineer says X" or "an ex-Microsoft engineer says Y". I've had that happen before, by a web site that I'll never contact again. Anything I say on this site is worth as much as you paid for it, which is nothing. If you want an official comment on anything, Apple has a fine group of PR people who I'm sure would be happy to help you.
I may already have quoted Chuq twice, but he wrote an awfully good disclaimer. Everything in there applies to this site as well.
Later today (in about seven hours, actually) I'll start work at Apple. I'm both excited and nervous, hoping that I'll enjoy it and worrying that I won't. Of course, judgments like that can hardly be made on the first day, or even in the first week.
Before I can start real work, though, I have to go through Apple's new employee orientation. I've only been through it twice before, so I'm sure it'll be fascinating. I hope I manage to stay awake. It'll probably be somewhat different from my previous times, though, since it'll almost certainly be smaller. Apple's not hiring all that many people these days, so I can't imagine they'll have more than four or five people for orientation. Intern orientations were always a dozen or more. Of course, all of that pales in comparison to Microsoft orientation, where they have to reserve a conference room each week for the 50-70 new hires. Yet another one of the differences between the two companies, I suppose....
Nick and Alexei have complained that I don't have comments enabled, so I'm turning them on for all future entries.
I haven't had comments turned on before because with all respect to y'all who are reading this, I'm writing this for me as much as for anyone who reads it, and it doesn't really make sense to solicit comments on what's essentially a personal journal. At the same time, I suppose I ought to recognize that as long as I make this public, people will read it, and if any of them want to respond they may prefer to do so on the web page instead of via email. With that in mind, comment away.
I stopped by Stanford a few times last week to take advantage of the free Internet connection. On one of those visits, I wandered into the campus Wells Fargo branch to change the address on my account.
After asking for my driver's license and Social Security number, the teller asked for my Stanford ID. I laughed, said that I'd graduated a year and a half ago, and asked if she still wanted it. Yep; she still did. Weird. Fortunately, I had it on me (Stanford IDs don't have expiration dates, so the ID comes in handy every so often if I feel like being cheap and getting a student discount on a movie ticket), and she was happy to use it for an additional form of identification. I still found it pretty silly, though -- I wonder what off-campus branches ask for instead. And I wonder what she would've done if I'd never attended Stanford, or if I decided to stop carrying my ID around after graduation.
Of course, I found out later that I could change my account addresses online...even the one for my Wells Fargo credit card, which I couldn't change at the bank. I guess I should've tried that in the first place.
I suppose it's all but impossible to get through a move without damaging some things, but that won't keep me from trying. Unfortunately, I haven't been successful so far.
On my trip down here, I dropped my TiBook while trying to take it out of its case. It fell onto a thin carpet from about three feet up. Fortunately, the only damage I've noticed so far is a slight bulge in the case right around the battery bay, at a point where the case is really thin. The hard drive and screen appear to be OK. I'm annoyed at myself for dropping it, but I'm glad the damage wasn't worse.
Then this morning, Ruby came back from Costco and put some cans down on the dining room table a bit too hard. Net result: a slight scratch. It's not too noticeable if you're not looking for it, but like a stuck pixel, once you know it's there it's tough to avoid seeing it. Oh, well...the table managed to get through about a year and a half in great shape, so having only a single small scratch isn't too bad, I suppose.
An AT&T technician came by yesterday to set up our cable and Internet connections in time for today's Eagles game, so I'm happy. I'm now enjoying a rather fast Internet connection from home -- noticeably faster than the DSL connection we had through Verizon/Isomedia in Redmond.
Better yet is that everything works great through that connection. I can send mail through AT&T's SMTP server with 'ejalbert@cs.stanford.edu' as my return address, I can connect to Stanford's news server, and the best (and most surprising) news is that with my AirPort base station set up as a bridge, both of my computers are getting their own IP addresses. I don't think the connection is supposed to work that way, but I'm certainly not complaining.
On the other hand, we still don't have phone service (which is also provided by AT&T). It was supposed to be set up between 8 and 11 Friday morning, but nobody showed. When I called, I was told that they actually meant 8 a.m. to 11 p.m., and that I was supposed to wait at home the entire time. I protested, and after a few minutes I was told that they didn't actually need to come into our apartment to set up phone service (which I could've told them a long time ago) and that it would all be set up by 11 that night. Now it's Sunday, and 10 phone calls to AT&T later the line still isn't turned on. Meanwhile, I got a letter in the mail yesterday -- Saturday-- telling me that I had to be at home from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Friday so they could set up the phone line. Yay.
It's been a busy week, and I unfortunately don't have time right now to provide many details. Suffice to say that I'm safely in San Jose after a harrowing drive through the rain in the mountains, and less-harrowing but still annoying rain all the way from Tacoma, WA to Concord, CA. I really don't like rain.
I've been spending all of my time this week trying to take care of the eight zillion things that have to be done ASAP when you move. I've managed to get new car insurance (and save 30% off of my Washington rates!); receive my stuff from the movers; do the initial bit of shopping for the apartment; schedule times for phone service, cable TV, and cable modem installation; transfer my AAA membership; and do a few other things, but there's still a lot more to be done. Meanwhile, I keep falling farther and farther behind on email and news...I'm now about a thousand messages behind in email, and I'm in far worse shape with weblogs, newsgroups, and web pages.
With luck, I'll be able to start catching up once the AT&T technician shows up on Saturday to set up our cable connection and plug in the cable modem. I decided to go with AT&T's cable Internet service after they offered us $21.95 a month for the first four months with no installation fee and no long-term contract if we had it installed at the same time as cable TV. I figure that if I don't like it, I can get DSL without worrying about canceling a contract, so there's no harm in trying it out.
The apartment's pretty nice so far. We can hear the people upstairs moving around from time to time, but it's not too bad. The neighborhood is incredibly quiet -- there's no traffic on the street by us, for example, so that's a plus. Our heating system is rather loud, but we hopefully won't have to use it very often. The only really annoying thing comes from an inset space in the hall where they built a thick shelf at desk height and put a little hole in it, calling it a "computer desk" with the hole for your monitor and keyboard cables. It sounded sort of useful until I put my Cinema Display on it and realized that the ADC cable doesn't fit through the hole. Great. It's really close, but the hole's just not wide enough. I'm wondering if Dr. Bott's ADC Extension Cable or DVIator might be slightly smaller. If so, I'll gladly buy either one to allow me to use the desk in the way it was intended.
Today is my last day as a Microsoft employee. It's also my last day in Washington. Leaving is never much fun. It's always so strange to talk to someone I've known for months and think that I might never talk to them again, or realize for each place I visit that I might never be there again. Everyone asks if I'm excited and I am, but I can't help but to be nervous as well. No important decision is without its shades of gray, and there's always the chance that the reasons to move won't seem as compelling in a year or two. We'll see.
My team is taking me out to lunch today. After that, I'm leaving for Portland, where I'll spend Friday night visiting Steve McGrath and his family, who I haven't seen in a long time. Saturday morning I'm off to Corvallis, where I'll spend the day with Katie and Marc. On Sunday, I'm planning to drive from Corvallis to San Jose. As long as there's no snow on I-5 around Mt. Shasta (and the forecast currently looks good), I shouldn't have too much trouble on the drive.
In any case, it's unlikely that I'll post anything here until Monday, and I almost certainly won't read email either. Both of those will also be somewhat sporadic once I get to San Jose until we get DSL at home.
I'm going to have to find an ISP in California next week. I've heard good reports about Speakeasy and Sonic.net, but I don't know much about either of them, or if there are any others which I should consider. If you have any suggestions for an affordable Bay Area ISP that's easier to deal with than SBC, let me know. Thanks!
I have a number of issues with the implementation of the O'Reilly Network's weblogs. Specifically, there are no RSS feeds (at least not that I've found), not every entry has a permalink, and the only way to provide feedback is via comments without any reason to think that the author will see them.
That last point is particularly bothersome right now. Matthew Gast posted a story yesterday about Citrix's attempt to avoid paying taxes. If you were paying close attention, you might've noticed that I mentioned the same story about three weeks ago. More importantly, though, Citrix dropped the suit on December 26th. I'd like to let Matthew know that his story is wrong, but there's no way for me to do that other than telling the entire world. I hate correcting people in public when it shouldn't be necessary, but I can't see how to avoid it here.
After a little bit of encouragement from a soon-to-be-ex-roommate, Nick has a weblog. If he can get himself to post the random things he comes across every day, it'll be quite entertaining. He has a knack for finding bizarre things. Or he can just post about his Segway when it shows up next week and make all of us jealous.
Brendan Donohue talks about the release of Keynote and Safari, and in the process explains why I'm very glad to be returning to Apple. Some companies get it; others don't. Apple certainly isn't perfect, but the company culture is much more conducive to the things Brendan discusses than the cultures of most similar companies.
For the past year and a half I've used a desktop and laptop simultaneously. I typically read email and newsgroups on the laptop, but I browse the web, read RSS feeds, and post to my weblog from the desktop.
Once the movers show up later today, though, I'll be without my desktop for about a week. That led me to connect an ethernet cable between the two machines tonight to copy various applications, settings, and documents over. I think I've got it all set up correctly now. I've even got my OmniWeb bookmarks from the desktop nicely imported into Safari on the new machine (with a detour through Internet Explorer in the middle until Apple adds bookmark importing from other browsers). In this case, it's not like I can ssh in to my desktop from wherever I am and get whatever files I need. I have to get everything right, because the desktop will be in a box in a moving van. Here's hoping I got it all.
I don't know where Chuq von Rospach picked up this Macworld tidbit, but it'll be of interest to a lot TiVo users out there:
"TiVo's upcoming premium service package will use Rendezvous technology to automatically discover Macs within the home network and determine which services they provide, allowing customers to listen to their shared music or view their shared photos on their TV," said Jim Barton, co-founder and CTO for TiVo. "We are excited about working with Apple on other ways Rendezvous can help TiVo Series2 DVRs connect to a Mac to deliver future services."
I'll probably comment more on today's Macworld announcements later, but I wanted to point quickly to some interesting links over at the KDE developers site. Apple's new web browser, Safari, is based on the KHTML rendering engine, which is GPL'd. Apple's browser, then, is required to be open source. I think this is the first piece of desktop software bundled with a mainstream operating system that's open source. That's a huge commitment, and it's one I can't imagine Microsoft making.
But I digress. The most interesting link from the KDE site is a note from Apple's Don Melton to KDE's Dirk Mueller that announces Safari to KDE, introduces the Safari team, and extends an offer for significant cooperation between the Safari and KHTML teams. The Safari team has a lot of good people on it. I don't know all of them, but the ones I know are terrific at what they do.
One tidbit from that message is an explanation for why Apple chose KHTML over Mozilla's rendering engine, Gecko. Alexei criticizes the choice, and he won't be the only one to do so. But the explanation is a good one:
When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus.Apple has done a lot of customization to the KHTML code, and they'll have to do a lot more as bug reports pour in. It's tough to customize Gecko, though -- it's a huge code base with many design decisions made for cross-platform support that Apple doesn't need (or wouldn't want). KHTML may not be as mature as Gecko is today, but it's a lot easier for Apple to build the browser it wants with KHTML than with Gecko.
One other quick note on Safari: quite a few people seem to be coming up with reasons why they won't use it. Tabbed browsing's at the top of the list, but it's certainly not the only issue. Keep in mind that Safari is a beta product. That means that Apple's looking for feedback, and that the browser you see today isn't necessarily the browser you'll see when it's final. So if you want tabs or a standard Aqua interface, use the little bug button in the upper right to send your comments back to Apple, or even file bugs in Radar.
As for me, well, I'm going to try to use it instead of OmniWeb. Once I figure out how to get my bookmarks migrated, we'll see if I can use it full-time. I'm sure I'll have a lot of bug reports to file, but that's just my small part towards helping Apple write what I'm sure will eventually be a terrific web browser.
Neil Gaiman learns that to an 8-year-old, all curse words are equally bad. (See the end of the January 5th entry.)
For those of us who are packrats, it's amazing what we can accumulate over the years. Of course, that makes moving oh so much more interesting, since naturally that's the only time we have to go through all of our Mounds O'Random Stuff.
In my case, I moved to Redmond almost a year and a half ago. That's a short enough time that my random stuff isn't what I've picked up while at Microsoft; instead, it's what I brought with me from Stanford. Quite a lot of that mess never got unpacked after I moved -- thanks to the confluence of a trip to Philadelphia and September 11th delays, I didn't have much time to go through my boxes before I started work, and I was never inspired enough to do so afterwards except when I needed specific things. So anything that I haven't used in the past year and a half was still in a box...until tonight.
The movers are coming in two days, you see, and they won't move anything that they haven't packed. That's why I spent most of tonight going through all of those long-lost boxes to take everything out of them and decide what I could toss and what had to be kept. In the process, I came across a few things that were big surprises:
Tim O'Reilly chimes in regarding Kasky v. Nike, in which a California activist sued Nike regarding Nike's denials that it employed underaged workers or used sweatshops. Kasky won in the California Supreme Court, but Nike is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court. O'Reilly appears to believe that Nike's argument is tantamount to claiming that a company has the right to lie, and that such behavior shouldn't be allowed.
That's a pretty short-sighted viewpoint. Yes, we expect the truth from our corporations, especially in these days of scandals like those at Enron and Worldcom. But there's a critical difference between ensuring that financial statements are accurate and forcing a company to declare that every statement it makes in public must be perfectly truthful. Kasky's world is one in which any questionable statement may lead to a lawsuit. If Phil Schiller gets up on stage at Macworld, for example, and claims that a PowerMac can outperform a PC, Kasky would allow Apple to be sued for exaggerating the circumstances under which Macs are faster. If Bill Gates gives a speech at Comdex and says that Microsoft products are secure, Kasky would allow Microsoft to be sued if any of its products was known to have a security hole.
Perhaps Apple and Microsoft would win those lawsuits, but that's not the point. Few, if any, corporations want to risk a lawsuit. If saying anything other than certified and properly audited numbers can lead to a day in court, a company simply won't say anything. That's not the way business is supposed to work, and that's not the way we want our businesses to work. There are already laws in place to protect against truly deceptive advertising -- products that don't work, prices that aren't correct, and so on -- and they work. We don't need more restrictions, and we certainly don't need to force businesses to give us less information about the way they operate.
Today in the comp.sys.mac.programmer.* newsgroups, Miro Jurisic mentioned something I wish I'd known a long time ago -- that the -x flag to sh puts the shell in a debugging mode in which it'll output every command it runs. That would've made debugging various configure script issues in Rotor much easier. All I'd've had to do is change the first line of the script to #!/bin/sh -x. Instead, I spent time tweaking individual commands and putting echo lines in at appropriate places.
The Mummers Parade was today, rain-delayed from January 1st. On the morning of the 1st I saw a TV ad for the Rose Parade and found myself trying to explain the Mummers to Ruby. It wasn't easy -- they're so different from anything else that you can't really explain them without pictures. I've now found a few pictures online, but I haven't come across anything that conveys a sense of more than "people in elaborate costumes with lots of feathers." That's a shame -- the parade is something uniquely Philadelphian and I'm proud of that, but it's hard to get anyone else to understand what sets it apart, and why watching the Rose Parade would feel sacreligious.
I'm moving in a week. Aaah!
The plans were more or less set today. On Tuesday the moving folks will come by to see what they're going to have to pack and move, on Wednesday they'll move all of it (assuming it all fits through the door, but it got in somehow so it has to be able to get out, right?), and on Friday or early Saturday I'll leave Redmond. I'll probably spend all day Saturday with Katie and Marc in Corvallis and then drive from Corvallis to San Jose on Sunday. I'll get there late Sunday night, at about the right time to pick up my key from Ruby and collapse in an apartment that'll be completely devoid of furniture for another few days. Ruby will move there the following weekend; she's waiting for the three-day weekend.
I can't believe I'll be living in San Jose ten days from now. Significant life changes never seem all that large until you realize that they're actually going to happen.
The big story of the day in the Macintosh universe is news.com's report that Apple will start charging for iDVD, iPhoto, and iMovie as of next week's Macworld. The three applications will continue to be bundled for free with new Macs, but other users will have to pay for updates to them.
I don't know if this story is true or not, and if I did, I certainly wouldn't say. But if this is what Apple chooses to do, well, it's not much of a story after all. Why's that? Because iDVD and iMovie aren't free today -- both are bundled with new Macs and are only available to existing Mac users for a fee. All that would change, then, is that iPhoto would join those two. And that's really not that big of a deal. The current version of iPhoto is quite good, so it's not like the iCal beta where users were clamoring for an update. If Apple adds new compelling features to iPhoto, I'll be happy to pay for the upgrade. But if I don't want to pay for it, the copy that I have will continue to work just fine.
I must say, though, that if Apple does do this, it'd be great if iApp updates were bundled with a .Mac subscription. Perhaps that'd be a more expensive version of .Mac -- say, $125 for .Mac and a year of iApp updates instead of the standard $99 -- but it'd certainly be a good package. .Mac and the iApps really do go hand in hand, so it'd be nice if there was some way to buy them together.
After backing up my email and documents somewhat randomly for years, I finally bought a copy of Retrospect today. I still have to buy something that I can back up onto, but that's just a Small Matter of Shopping.
This became more important all of a sudden because I'm moving in a week (eep!). Sometime next week, probably Thursday, the moving folks are going to show up, throw all of my computers but my PowerBook in a bunch of boxes, and send them to California, while hopefully not swapping them for some eMachines in the middle of Oregon. If the computers get damaged in transit, the moving company will pay for their fair market value, but I don't want to lose the data I have on them.
Of course, I should've done this a long time ago. I've even had a hard drive die without being sufficiently inspired to buy backup software. I've mostly hesitated because I'd rather have a pocket-sized FireWire drive than deal with DVD-R disks, and I've had a tough time finding a pocket-sized FireWire drive that isn't ugly. Yes, I'm a Mac user, and I care about design. Sorry.
I've looked at WiebeTech's MicroGB+, but that doesn't seem to use the Oxford 911 FireWire chipset, and I've heard bad things about drives that don't have that chipset. LaCie's PocketDrive U&I has the same issue, but I'm more inclined to trust a LaCie drive. Their drives are rather expensive, though. MCE's Transport Pro drive seems like it'll do the job well and I've had good experiences with MCE in the past. I can get a much better price on OWC's Mercury On-The-Go drives with the same feature set and I love ordering from OWC because their shipping is so inexpensive, but man, is that clear case ugly. Why would anyone want to see the drive inside the case?
I suppose I could buy an iPod instead, but something feels wrong about using an MP3 player as a backup device in addition to its standard audio goodness.
I think I'll probably end up going with the MCE Transport Pro. It's a good thing my manager moved my intended exit date at work to a few days later than I wanted, since the extra days will help pay for the drive.
I'm back from a quick trip to California for New Year's. The highlight of the quick vacation was a trip to see Catch Me If You Can Tuesday night. It's a terrific movie -- both the acting and the story are excellent. I'm going to have to read the book now to see how much they changed in the movie.