boundlessly accessless

So I made this Blogger/Blogspot/Google Blog account a couple weeks ago, and for the first several days I had been making sure to login to my Gmail account and then go to blogger.com, because I was sure that the Gmail login page is secure, while it's less obvious that the blogger.com login page is secure. The URL is http://blogger.com, not https, and there's nothing in the login form that says "we'll use SSL, promise." As it turns out, they do submit the password via SSL:



If I was only risking access to my blog I might not have worried so much, but I was using a password that, if intercepted, would give someone access to my Gmail. Why doesn't the login page mention SSL? Have we reached an era when people just assume sites are keeping their logins safe? (I hope not, cause it's not a safe assumption.) Or is Blogger just being sloppy?

They should do a show where a family has to live like it's 1895

When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.

- Steve Jobs

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.

- Dick Cavett

I hate reality tv. If you're watching reality tv and you wonder "how can these people be so dumb/selfish/cruel?", keep in mind that you're not seeing a random cross-section of society. The show's producers have kicked over every damp rock and rotten barrel they could find to locate people who will (a) do anything for money and (2) form a volatile mix of conflicting personalities. And that's just the beginning. TV audiences are finally starting to twig on to the fact that reality tv isn't real.

You may find it depressing to see the dregs of our society being rewarded for being horrible people. You may find it depressing to think about the heartless tv producers who seek these people out, throw them together, and stir them up, like a bloodless form of dog fighting. But the part that depresses me is that we, the collective we, we who watch television, keep watching the dogs night after night. TV producers don't make reality shows because they like them, they make reality shows because they have piles and piles of statistical reports telling them that's where the money is. The average American tv viewer, as measured by the Nielsen system, craves this stuff. We don't turn away in disgust. We don't say "I refuse to reward these people for being cruel to each other. I refuse to reward the producers for creating this crap." Instead we eat it up and ask for more. Why, WHY is there a Flavor of Love 2? Because people watched the first one. We live in a culture where enough people watched Flavor of Love to warrant the creation of a sequel. That's depressing.

If the television medium were a Hollywood starlet, reality shows would be her fake boobs. They kinda sorta look real, everybody knows they're really not real, but everyone keeps looking at them anyway.

I Can See Through Time

Time Machine: incremental backups and rsyncing are nothing new. But if you've ever been responsible for backups you know something about scheduling full dumps versus incremental dumps and layering restores and on and on... it used to be we'd try to come up with clever levelling strategies to optimize our storage space, but now storage has gotten cheap enough that I think everybody just does level ones all week and full dumps on Sundays.

Normally this is where we say "if you've ever tried to walk your mom thru doing X you'll appreciate how Apple makes it easy" but no one I know has EVER tried to walk their mom thru restoring a level zero and layering the most recent incremental over it. That's one of those things that (assuming you make backups for your parents) if you ever have to do a restore you just drive over and do it yourself, stopping for a six-pack on the way there and a fifth on the way home.

Is Time Machine the silver bullet so that now Mom can restore her own backups? Too early to say, but I think there's a chance. I think the interface to Time Machine is pretty damn clever. Obviously each of those windows in the stack stretching off to infinity represents a checkpoint on the backup volume, and you can browse them or search them, and when you find the file you want just drag and drop it back to the present. The slider on the right lets you zoom into the past, but it also lets you zoom back to the present, recovering windows that you had previously popped off the stack. Without that slider the windows would have to be represented as some kind of carousel instead of a stack, and would be much more difficult to navigate a la Fanta's Expose knock-off.

Even assuming Time Machine is every bit as effective and intuitive as its proponents say, is this going to change the face of computing? Of course not. It will "just" be the best backup and restore interface ever. Oh noes! Damn you Apple! I was expecting nanobots that trim my lawn while factoring prime numbers with XGrid!

It's like Dashboard. When Dashboard was previewed the majority response was "oh, it's just eyecandy." But if you actually use a Mac, every day, Dashboard is a great convenience. Just by throwing my mouse into a hot corner (another simple convenience that I love) I can see the weather, football scores, and the stock market, and also have a dictionary, a calculator, and a phone book. Flick the mouse into the hot corner again, and I'm back in my work environment.

Actually I'm not here to apologize for Time Machine or for Dashboard. The underlying theme here is Apple's products, their "innovation", and people's expectations. I think sometimes Apple is part of their own public expectation problem. Dashboard is NOT the centerpiece of anyone's workspace, and it was never meant to be, but when Apple trots it out they make it sound important enough to be a centerpiece. In a way you can't blame them - their people worked hard on these things and they did a great job and they deserve to have their work showcased. But if Apple made a toaster, they'd act like they'd invented bread.

The upcoming Web Parts feature is another example of the same phenomenon. I think Web Parts is going to be a great convenience for me - I anticipate making widgets so I can keep up with an auction or a discussion board or football games or anything else I feel like watching during my day. But if you watch the WWDC presentation, you kind of come away with the impression that Web Parts are so easy and so cool and so much goddammed fun that Apple expects us to spend all day every day making Web Parts. They don't say it, but the grandeur of the presentation is such that you just feel it. But really the exact opposite is true - Web Parts are supposed to be easy so that you don't spend all day making a widget. You make one in seconds and throw it away when you're done with it exactly because you didn't pour your sweat into it.

Part of the enjoyment of using a Mac is the sum of all these conveniences. I can read my mail with Thunderbird on Windows. I can browse the web with Firefox on Linux. But the sum of Expose and Dashboard and Spotlight and Quicksilver makes me happier and more efficient during my day.