iPad Killer App: Library Books part 1
Purchasing books is nice, but I like going to my library and borrowing books. I know that the Seattle Public Library lends books electronically via OverDrive in the ePub format the iPad uses, but can these books be read on the iPad?
It is, eventually, possible to do this. The Mac documentation is a bit sparse, and you do need some Unix comfort to get it done.
First I tried to simply download and extract the book. This didn't work: the DRM that OverDrive uses to enforce library return dates isn't compatible with iBooks.
By this point I was obsessed. A little poking around revealed that the ADEPT DRM used by OverDrive has been cracked.
iPad should see iPhone over Bluetooth, and only one should alert
Having bought an iPad due to a combination of peer pressure and neophilia, I've encountered the first major annoyance: my iPad and my phone both chirping when an appointment approaches.
Wouldn't it be great if the devices talked to each other, and only the one you were using alerted you? Or, if you were using neither but they saw each other over Bluetooth, they could agree as to which device would sing out your meeting invitations?
Mac Syslog GUI
I know that Console.app is a decent if not stellar tool to view syslog entries on a Mac, but recently I wanted to send remote syslog entries to a Mac.
While I've found instructions for enabling remote syslog on a Mac, they're out of date. I can figure it out from these instructions, but it occurred to me this wasn't really what I wanted to do anyway.
What I really want is a database-backed syslog (a la syslog-ng) configured to accept syslog entries from remote servers. But I really want this with a powerful GUI to filter, colorize, and sort syslog messages by timestamp, host, facility, priority, and regular expression.
Now, this is a very un-Mac-like thing I want, at root. But it sure would turn my Mac into a powerful syslog processing machine.
Bureaucracy and Thermodynamics
In his otherwise spot-on post, The Collapse of Complex Business Models, Clay Shirky makes the confusing statement:
Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.
Now, I'm no physicist, but it seems pretty clear to me that bureaucracies absolutely obey the second law of thermodynamics.
"Process" isn't anti-entropic at all, any more than gasoline-powered engines are anti-entropic. The process itself, the bureaucratic imperatives, are entropy and waste heat. Which isn't to say that you can perform useful work without a certain amount of process, or that certain applications don't require an enormous quantity of process. A good startup is an efficient engine, generating lots of results with a minimum of process. A good large organization is less efficient, but trades that efficiency for reliability and consistency—it's a big rig, with a big diesel engine, or possibly an industrial motor of some sort.
What’s After Free? Part 1: The Trends
I probably shouldn't be writing this in advance of tomorrow's Apple announcement; lots of rumors continue to swirl, describing the expected features of this device and the path out of the labyrinth it might provide for newspapers and the publishing industry.
But I'm nothing if not foolishly bold, so here it is: part one of a multi-part analysis of the changing media landscape. I'm not a professional writer (much, anymore), and I don't know anything beyond what I can see. And what I see today is a landscape still being altered by "new media," and the financial physics of the Internet.
This post will describe what I think are the crucial trends in the mediasphere; its followup will trace some possible paths into the future.
Vacation Advice for Playa del Carmen and Cozumel?
My wife and I will be heading to Playa del Carmen and Cozumel for about two weeks at the end of February.
Our plan is to spend the first half of the time in Playa, and to go from there to see the major archeological sites: Chichen Itza, Tulum, maybe others. This would be the "adventure" part of the vacation. We'll probably want to go Scuba diving in the Cenotes when we're there. We're definitely looking for other things to do during this half of the vacation.
The second half, we'll spend in Cozumel. I'll be diving a lot. Laura may dive, or may spend lots of time sitting around on the beach with a cocktail in her hand. We're considering an all-inclusive, in part to just relax more, and to have a "vacation from our vacation" while still on vacation.
We're looking for things to do, places to see, and meals to eat for the first half of the vacation; and we're looking for recommendations on where to stay for the second half.
Burr: The Rambo of the Founding Fathers
Inspired by Sarah Palin's inability or unwillingness to pick a favorite founding father, I initially decided that Hamilton was my favorite. But I've reconsidered, and now Aaron Burr is my favorite. Consider:
- Burr beat Hamilton in a duel. Maybe this isn't Rambo-esque in itself, but it certainly puts him a notch above Hamilton, if only in a Highlander way. (And if it's true that Hamilton didn't plan to fire, well, Han shot first too. Also, see next point.)
- Dude breaks his agreements with Jefferson and the others when the Presidency seems within his grasp. Not just out for himself, but in a way that cuts his own cronies out.
- When that fails, and he's stuck as VP, he (maybe) goes off and tries to start his own country, so he can be President-for-Life there.
Maybe Rambo isn't quite right; perhaps Burr was more like Cobra. Whatever. He's the epitome of the power-mad rules-breaking American badass, so I'm sticking with him. (Also, the Gore Vidal novel is incredibly entertaining. Has there been an equally good book about Hamilton? I don't think so!)
A Few Words on Haiti
I've been concerned about Haiti for more than a decade, ever since college. My professor and mentor Madison Bell wrote a trilogy of books on Haitian history; Russell Banks, who visited campus and was a tremendous voice, was concerned about Haiti too: Madison Bell considered Banks' Continental Drift the great American novel, and one of the storylines in that book involved a Haitian refugee. Edwidge Danticat came to campus, and while I missed her visit I did read her book of stories. I'd heard about the Tonton Macoutes before college, but reading Danticat's stories really brought them home.
All of that reading, abstracted as it might be from the real world of Haitian life, led me to pay more attention. And since college, I've continued to follow the news: the coups, the food riots... and now the earthquake.
We don't know yet, but the reports suggest tens of thousands of dead. It's horrifying, and we must do what we can to ameliorate the suffering of the millions of people affected—that's incontestable, and certainly urgent.
But where was everyone while the (US-backed) Duvaliers killed tens of thousands? What have we done about the 300,000 restaveks? Who has done anything about the basic sanitation and medical shortcomings that kill one in five Haitian children? Those numbers eclipse those affected by the earthquake.
Further, aid to Haiti will be slow and ineffective because of the lack of political and physical infrastructure, a lack due to a history of corrupt leadership (who we backed) and enormous debt (from those corrupt leaders) that we could forgive, but will not.
In the end, aid is still crucial, and we must do what we can to help. But we're treating this as we treated Katrina: as a natural disaster without human responsibility. We're wiping our mental slates clean of the suffering we've caused, actively and through neglect. We're offering our assistance, briefly, and then we'll turn away as the tragedy continues.
Recipe Vector: Egg Noodles with Mushroom Cream sauce
Tonight at Laura's behest I made a mushroom cream sauce, incorporating leftover chicken. We were going to put it on top of normal noodles, but Laura suggested we get egg noodles, which were exactly the right thing for this somewhat Stroganoff-like dish.
I hesitate to say that I "made up" the recipe — it's remarkably similar to Mushroom Mystery Casserole from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, except that instead of bread and milk and cheese there's pasta and cream, instead of onion there's shallot, and I cut out the celery but added chicken. (It would have worked nearly as well without the chicken.)
I didn't follow that recipe, or any other, to make the dish, but obviously I just adjusted the recipe to meet my goals, and ended up almost exactly where I'd hoped to. This reminds me of what I read about people who become expert at muddling through foreign languages: they've memorized certain typical sentences, and then learn how to modify those by changing tense, subject and verb, and so on in order to produce the sentence they desire. So tonight's dinner was made through a sort of "recipe vector" similar to those sentence vectors.
Without further ado, the recipe:
New Girldiver site
I wanted to take a moment to congratulate Laura on her first professional Web development project: a new design and implementation for Girldiver, AKA Cindy, our dive instructor.
Congratulations to both women on a beautiful and functional new site!
iSlate Wishlist items
If the rumored Apple iSlate device had a kickstand and one of these virtual laser keyboards built in, that would be awesome, and a tempting device.
I've always been leery of the laser keyboard due to its lack of tactile feedback, but I don't think it would be worse than a touchscreen. Given the screen real estate this would free up, it might be a good trade.
Barring that, it's tough to imagine why I would want one of these things, slotted as it is between an iPhone and a laptop. It would have to be good enough to replace the laptop, at least for lightweight trips — overnight business trips, coffee shop visits, and the like — and have unbeatable battery life, maybe eight to ten hours of real-world use. Without those things, it's tough to imagine why I'd want one. But Apple has (positively and negatively) surprised me before.