Humblog

Reporting on Irish people abroad.

I’m leaving in December. To be sure, I’m not the typecast can’t-get-a-job refugee we keep hearing about. I’m starting to wonder if many actually are.

I make a living and I’m generally very happy and satisfied with my life.

With that shameful admission out of the way, I will now complain about the media for a while. If your coping strategy is to ignore Irish media, fair play; I suggest you blast into a full on bout of ignoring this too.

This new Irish Times section Generation Emigration is typical of the hard-core misery porn that passes for reporting on the Irish abroad. They load each story into photoshop and apply the “Grim Negativity” filter. (Don’t have that filter? Use sepia, add a burned edges frame. Swap images of food for soggy famine cabbage.)

Take this flaming turd of an example:

The headline: Talking to your wife only through a computer is hard.

The story: Guy gets a great job in Australia. Wife stays because she’s got a great job here.

It sums it up perfectly. A story about two people working hard, making sacrifices so they can have a better life later. Great! But… the Irish Times slaps on the grimness filter of course and ends up with that headline. Either of them could quit and be with the other, but they wouldn’t be as rich then. Shitballs. I feel so bad, I think I might puke into my Trocaire box.

To be clear, I respect the decision they made, it’s the casting of it as a mournful tale that is dishonest and infuriating. He will be home in less than a year and they’ll be more then all right.

We beleaguered emigrant souls are more or less middle class, grew up with some self-belief, plenty of ambition, and a well developed sense that we want to have nice things.

We’re going because it’ll be fun and because we can do things there that we can’t here.

We might have gone even if the boom was still on. Just like the other 500+ Irish people per week did, back when we didn’t fit the narrative.

I’m happy that I get to do this and I don’t want your fake media pity.

Be Careful What You Wish For

There’s been plenty of talk lately about ‘Cutting The Fat’ in the Dáil.   It’s a line item on Fintan O’Toole’s petition.   Martin Naughton’s argument that the Dáil should be 1/2 the size gets a front page article in the Irish Times.

Aside from the symbolic cost saving from downsizing the Dáil what effects would a smaller Dáil have? Would the composition be changed significantly?

Consider the results of the 2007 election. Those candidates elected to the first and second seats wouldn’t have been affected but if we can tally up which parties took the final seat in each constituency we can get a good sense of how the overall composition would be changed by decreasing the total number of TDs.

If we took one seat off each constituency the Dáil would be 26% smaller. However, the impact would fall disproportionately across the parties. Sinn Féin would have lost 75% of its seats. Independents -60%, Green Party -50%, FG -27%, FF -21%, LAB -20%.   The 2 PDs wouldn’t have been affected but 2007 was an exceptional year for the PDs.

Perhaps even more interesting is the list of individuals who wouldn’t have been elected. In a 2007 Dáil with one TD fewer per constituency there’d have been no John Gormley, Ciaran Cuffe, Beverly Flynn, Jackie Healy Ray, Finian McGrath or Joan Burton.

Another outcome is that FF would have had 50% of the seats in the Dáil: Enough to form a majority Government with no Green Party, Independents or PDs.

In an actual reduction of Dáil members the decrease in seats would be distributed more equally among constituencies.  However, these figures do show that smaller parties tend to get elected to the marginal seats.

Based on this, it looks as though a smaller Dáil would concentrate power in the big parties at the expense of the smaller ones. It will be interesting to see how this analysis applies to the next election.

iPhone 4.0 Predictions

Here are my predictions and analysis of the rumours before the OS 4.0 event later on today.

Notifications

The notification system badly needs a UI overhaul. This is one area where we can all agree that Android and Pre do it better.

Springboard

This is the trademark look and feel for the iPhone OS line of products, so Apple shouldn’t change it much, but there are some limitations that should be addressed.   It doesn’t scale well with lots of apps.

Sync

Most iPhone owners I know don’t connect their iPhones to their computers regularly. They buy music on their iPhones, use their iPhone calendar and don’t care about backups till it’s too late.   There’s no reason not to make this just work.   Extra points for making it easy for 3rd party apps like 1Password to keep in sync with each other.

Printing

Conspicuously absent from the iPad is any decent way to print.  Along with the syncing issue above, this means that owning an iPad also means owning one of those old fashioned ‘Macs’ or ‘PCs’.  Main problem is availability of the drivers (will every manufacturer recompile them for ARM or will the OS use some clever emulation?) — delivery is easy: same way Snow Leopard does it.  Download as required.

Multitasking

There has always been multitasking, so at it’s simplest, ‘adding’ it is a mere app store policy change.   The current policy exists for a reason however: to maintain the quality of the experience.   A background app free-for-all would kill performance, wear down your battery and potentially run up your data bill.   That’s out of the question.  If multitasking is introduced at all, it’s a safe bet that it will be much more limited than what you’re used to.   

Apple could choose to place strict limits on the resources available to background apps. (EG: Max: 5MB of RAM & only the owner’s chosen 4 dock apps can run in the background) But what happens when the app exceeds the limits? Does the OS kill it? That’ll piss off the marathon runner who’s been monitoring his speed with a background GPS app.  “Piece of shit iPhone!” he’ll say.

I don’t think there’ll be 3rd party multitasking, at least nothing like the way we understand it now. I do have a guess at a related compromise that we might see instead though.

Background Tasks

Severely policed tasks with no UI that run for a few seconds and deal only with data. These could be

1. Queued
   Most of the time that your phone’s in your pocket, it’s conserving power: the display is off, WIFI is off, it’s not communicating with the internet, etc. It wakes up occasionally to check e-mail.   What if you could register to have some code executed when the phone is awake and the internet connection is available anyway?  The marginal cost of a few extra kb is low.   The bottleneck in most of the apps I use regularly is pulling the tweets, facebook updates, rss feeds, etc.   If one argument for background apps is ‘faster start-up’, this feature would help.  It also keeps the OS in charge — when the battery’s low it might choose not to execute these tasks. 
2. Scheduled
   As above, but on the app’s own schedule.  A way to register for some code to be executed (or at least an internally generated ‘push’ notification) at a precise time.

Dashboard for iPad

There’s no place for a full screen Clock, Stocks or Weather app on the iPad.  I’m not the first to suggest this, but mark me down as a Yes for Dashboard on iPad.

Well those are my predictions … I’m looking forward to following the event and then quietly deleting this blog post when I’m shown to be embarrassingly wrong! 

Notes from Installing an SSD on a Mac Pro

Inspired by this, I ordered an Intel X-25M 160GB SSD hard drive for my Mac Pro.

Some notes:

• I followed this guide.
• The drive comes with a 3.5” plate, but I didn’t realise this and bought a separate one too.
• I did my best to fit it into one of my 2 spare SATA hard drive enclosures in my Mac Pro, but the 3.5” plates situate the SSD connectors in the centre instead of to the left like the other drives.   You could probably make it work if you had a really short male-female SATA and power cable.  2009 Mac Pros are apparently better wired for this (Mine is an Early 2008 model)
• I ended up leaving the drive loose in the spare optical drive enclosure.  There are no moving parts in an SSD, so I’ll get away with it, but I may buy a 5 1/2” plate for it at some point.
• I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything but my /Users folder over to the SSD.
• I opened System Preferences, Accounts, right-clicked on my username and chose advanced options.  This allowed me to tell the OS to use /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users for user data.
• I had a problem with iTunes authorisations — apparently these are stored in /Users/shared. Creating that folder on the SSD allowed me to re-authorise my iTunes.  There’s probably a better way, but this works.
• My Snow Leopard, /Developer and /Applications folders altogether occupy almost 40GB in total.   It’s nice to have a bit of spare fast storage, (I’m thinking: Aperture library, Xcode projects) but I could have spent 1/2 the money and still got all the benefits from the smaller 80GB drive.  Lesson learned.
• It starts up from cold in about 35 seconds so I’m actually going to start shutting it down at night.
• Finder is snappy: big folders like /Applications load and scroll instantly.
• Applications like Mail, iTunes and Safari take one ‘bounce’ to open and gloriously, it’s way quieter than before.

The worlds are colliding

mrgan:

Epic knowledge dropped by stevenf tonight:

In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.

Is the New World better than the Old World? Nothing’s ever simply black or white.

(Read the whole thing, please. Done? Cool.)

Here’s one metric I’ve been using: think of the person for whom the iPad will be the first computer they use. They will come to it with no expectation of cameras, multitasking, Flash, or storage size. Now wait a few years (months?) and give them a desktop computer. They have to interact with it using these weird things on the desk which aren’t even where the content is. Like, you look here but you click here - crazy! You have to move “windows” around. And check out all those buttons. What, nothing happens when I tap and hold on this?

Now you tell me if that person, the person the future is made of, will leave their iPad because the PC has more gigahertz.

Resolved!

I have removed my previous post.  I would like to clarify a few points and explain how Philip and I solved this.

The potential long-term impact on Philip’s reputation of my posting that entry is serious.  He took a shortcut that he shouldn’t have taken, but it’s not exactly the crime of the century.  He has admitted his mistake and we’ve come to an agreement on how to make up for it.  (I’m excited about what we came up with actually, but more about that at the end.)  We both agree that it would be disproportionate to leave the post up, now that he’s done everything he can to make up for it.  

I want to admit that I could have done more to figure this out with Philip privately before going public with it.   I had every right to post that entry, but frankly a bit more patience might have wrapped it up a lot quicker and with a lot less stress for both of us.  I’ll know better next time.

It’s simple. If you find yourself in this situation, send your nemesis a draft of the article a few hours before posting it.  If you’re right and they’re smart enough to know it, you’ll achieve everything you would have, but without the hoopla.  If they don’t react to that, you can throw everything at them with a clear conscience.

Dublin Bus Maps will remain on the App Store.  It’s a good app, and there’s no point in punishing customers.  I have asked Apple to ignore my request to have his app removed.  Philip will update the schema within the next few weeks and I’m happy that with that.

Ok, here’s the exciting part:  Philip has agreed to donate his most profitable month’s earnings from Dublin Bus Maps to Concern’s Haiti project.  The app has only been around for 3 months, so this is more than 1/3 of his earnings — a better percentage than I would have got for licensing the database.  

This all blew way out of proportion, so to show that there are no hard feelings and to acknowledge that there are better things to worry about than arguing over a database of bus timetables, I’m going to match his amount with my own donation.  We’ll be posting the receipts later on today. 

Thanks for working this out with me, Philip.  Looking forward to that pint.