brentashley

I’ve hopped onto the Bitcoin bandwagon.

Send me money!

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Yep, it’s been over 10 years since I first set fingers to keyboard and typed my first ever cyber-epistle.

I’ve slowed down somewhat of late but it’s a milestone worth marking. Another first on my blog was the debut of the in-browser dynamically updated chat box in February 2002.

Woohoo, glory days. I feel like Al Bundy regaling his epic 4-touchdown game at Polk High.

I’m on my way up Highway 400 from Toronto to Barrie, to pick up my daughter from college and bring her home for the weekend.

A tractor-trailer has left the road and tumbled into the ditch, and I’m stuck in the traffic jam, only 150 yards behind the crash, but completely immobile because the air ambulance helicopter has landed in the middle of the road and nobody’s going anywhere until it lifts off again.

Somebody is obviously having a wayyy shittier day than I am, so I’m making the best of the afternoon by getting some work done in the car on my macbook, tethered via bluetooth to my iphone, with full connectivity.

I never would have imagined this.

About 4 months ago, a copy of the Toronto Sun newspaper started turning up at my door. I hadn’t ordered it, nobody had offered me a free trial, it just started arriving every day. The Sun isn’t my cup of tea (the Globe and Mail would suit me better, that is if I still cared about a daily newspaper at all), so it was only a few days before I was tired of skimming it and then throwing it out, so it started to just go straight to the bin.

After a month of this, I phoned the Sun to ask them to stop sending it. It confused them that I wasn’t a subscriber but I was canceling their service all the same.

After another month, I called again to the same (i.e. nil) effect. They said it would for certain be cancelled this time, might take a couple of days to stop.

After a third month, I called the Sun a third time, and also called the Toronto Star, from whom I do subscribe to my weekend papers, and told them to try to get the message to the delivery agent who they apparently both use, since on weekends they come wrapped together.

And still the Sun arrives every morning, as reliably as its namesake.

I suppose I shall have to take it upon myself to camp out in the morning mist on my front stoop to accost the delivery agent and personally set him or her straight. I started for a while laying out the rolled up newspapers at the end of the driveway where they would doubtless see them piled up, but it gets really depressing seeing how much paper is being senselessly wasted.

I was speaking to a colleague yesterday who told me that she has the same problem with the National Post. We wondered if we were simply two of a huge swath of non-subscribers who are counted in the newspaper industry’s inflated distribution numbers to justify their anachronistic continued existence.

The flap over Apple’s recent iPhone OS announcements has caused me to step back from the fray and I think from a distance some clarity has emerged.

I, like much of the world, see current phone and tablet devices as an evolution of the general purpose computer getting smaller and more focused. We project on them the same expectations of openness and freedom that we’ve come to expect from computers and laptops. Standardized interchangeable chargers and cables, replaceable batteries, users and developers have administrative control over the OS, development and distribution is completely within user and developer control. Connectivity and expansion are standardized and open.

Apple sees the iPad and iPhone as an evolution of the electronic telecom or entertainment device getting bigger and more general-purpose. They project on them the same expectations of vendor lockin and control that they’ve come to expect from mobile devices, audio players, and video games. Proprietary chargers and cables, no user-serviceable parts or batteries, users have no control over the OS, development and distribution is tightly controlled by the vendor. Connectivity and expansion are proprietary and controlled.

As the two fronts of this battle advance on each other, Apple is firing their salvos from their highly fortified appliance battlements below, while other players are approaching this space from the open skies above, bringing open general purpose computing to the personal device space.

It remains to be seen whether this is a battle that will vanquish one side or the other, or whether the two approaches can carve out similar but separate markets, but it’s clear that they are different approaches and that understanding is key when choosing which side you want to follow (or for that matter, lead, which is a possibility on one side of the equation and not the other).

Daring Fireball reports that Apple has changed their iPhone Developer Agreement to exclude applications that aren’t written with purely native C/C++ or Objective-C code or HTML/Javascript/CSS and webkit.

If it proves to be true, this move can only sound the death knell for a number of projects:

• Flash CS5
• Rhomobile
• Corona
• MonoTouch

and possibly

• PhoneGap
• Titanium

I’ve personally put a few weeks of effort into a Rhomobile project that is now a big pile of wasted money unless Apple changes this requirement.

I can only imagine how completely gobsmacked the developers and funders of these projects will be to know that Apple has decided to take away their football. We’re talking literally millions of dollars of value suddenly disappearing on Apple’s whim.

I will be watching this issue with interest. These projects were only just starting to make iPhone/iPad development interesting by providing higher levels of programming abstraction.

I’m in the process of joining the Apple iPhone Developer Program, and I’ve just been asked to fax my business info to them. Here is my email response:

Is there an alternative method for sending you my articles of incorporation? I can email them as a PDF file or upload them securely to your site.

Even if I could get the fax modem working on one of my old machines, I’m not sure that it would work over my VOIP phone line with an analog adapter, and I don’t have a time machine to transport me back to 1999 when I last needed a fax machine, especially to communicate with the developer program of one of the most advanced tech companies on the planet.

Really, does anyone in the technology biz still use a Fax machine? Does anyone still have a computer with a modem as standard equipment?

I’m weary of all this talk in the USA of “bipartisan” politics. Being from a country with more than two parties, I’m not used to that word. Here in Canada we tend to use the word “nonpartisan” to describe a collaborative effort between our multitude of political forces, and I think there is a key distinction to be made.

“Bipartisan” evokes two parties, each pulling for themselves, albeit in a similar direction. “Nonpartisan” means in theory and moreso should mean in practice that partisanship has been entirely jettisoned in the interest of serving a common cause.

Bipartisan politics delivers only a glancing blow to the shared cause because each bipartisan member’s impetus is towards winning points for his or her own party in the name of the cause. Nonpartisan politics, when executed well, drives the entire cause forward with much more direct force.

Is it even possible to change the grammar of the political discourse from “Bi” to “Non”? I think the only effective course forward is to do so.