Cafe Bucky

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has written a pretty good analysis of the Dashboard vs Konfabulator controversy. I’m pretty convinced that Apple is doing the right thing. As a longtime web person, I look forward to digging into developing something like a FlexiPhoto gadget.

For a good demo of Dashboard, go check out the WWDC Keynote. It’s at about the 1:20:30 mark.

For the last few days I’ve been getting all sorts of bounced emails, supposedly from my domain. I hate it. As any sendmail/MTA-aware person knows, someone’s forging addresses from one of my domains, sending out a bunch of email, and hoping some of it makes it through.

And as a mere owner of a domain, there’s nothing I can do about it. The email has nothing to do with my colo server (which isn’t even configured to send/receive email), or any of my systems. I can point people to articles, such as this one at ask-leo.com, but it’s still frustrating. I mean, in a perfect world, the only email coming from one of my domains would be something I actually wrote! Imagine that!

So it aint me, babe. The open nature of mail transfer agents designed in the 80’s doesn’t work in the 00’s. Perhaps Yahoo has an answer with their DomainKeys proposal.

Wow, is it the 25th already?

I’ll write about the Big Move in more detail later, but have some impressions:

* be careful about living facing the street. I am right around the corner from Amsterdam, which is very active at night. 3 am. Loud People Going Home.

* we’ve been able to move into an empty shell of an apartment, and get mostly set up in a week. Stores. Whirlwind. Deliveries. Signing things.

* I like being close to the subway, and Zabars, and half a million cafes, bagel places, bodegas, and so on.

* we’re tough. We have spent the last 9 days without air conditioning. Our noisy fans rearrange the hot air in the room, but it doesn’t fool a thermometer. The Beast of an air conditioner (’B’ sleeve, not one of the ubiquitous window units) gets installed today. Mental note: never get another apartment without checking the AC situation first.

* Go see the movie Napolean Dynamite!

There’s a new O’Reilly book out entitled Hackers & Painters (Big Ideas from the Computer Age) by Paul Graham. The sample chapter focuses on the idea of hackers (in the classical sense of the word) and painters sharing many traits:

What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They’re not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better.

He goes on to compare the different types of programmers (those obsessed with research and writing papers, those who take an artistic approach, etc.) The sample chapter (Paul’s site) is a great read, and hit many chords with me. (PDF version). I can’t explain every last rocket science algorithm to you, but I can sure delve into all sorts of design discussions, and get into the process of how software evolves (iteration is a good thing). I’ve always been more of one who programs via a sketch, and then continually refines. Back in the BSD 4.1 days, my college friends and I loved getting our programming assignments out of the way, so that we could spend time doing our own projects. Paul doesn’t outright state so (at least in the sample chapter), but a trait that ties together Hackers & Painters would be Passion. He points out how paintings evolve, giving the example: “Countless paintings, when you look at them in xrays, turn out to have limbs that have been moved or facial features that have been readjusted.” I’d call that hacking with a brush.

I’m looking forward to getting this in hardcover, if it doesn’t show up on Safari in the next week.

Two tangents here …

The first is that I head to the airport in a few days to go to New York, so that I can move into my new apartment in the UWS.

But that’s not the Airport I really wanted to write about.

I’m impressed by the new Airport Express. You’ll see some whining elsewhere about how it doesn’t go far enough as a sort of iTunes remote control.

I look at it this way:

• $129 for a portable 802.11g AP. Something I can throw in my bag and take wherever, if for no other reason than to extend the range of some hotspot.
• Oh, and it has a USB connection for a printer. Yeah, ok, I can see using that. At this point, it’s already worth $129 to me.
• And it has audio out, analog and digital. This could be great, depending on how it’s implemented.

So I think it’s a potentially a great product, with a couple of caveats: they better nail the software on the first try, or there’s going to be a lot of ill-will generated. The other thing that strikes me is the interaction with iTunes - What if I want output to go to my living room speakers, but also to the speakers hooked up to my PowerBook? In other words, one-at-a-time output is not going to go over very well.