October 2006 Archives

While going to the Firefox site just gives you a generic OS X version of the new Firefox, Beatnikpad.com has links to optimized versions for the various Mac processors, namely G4, G5 and Intel.

For each processor, there's also the choice of "Firefoxy form widgets," or "aqua form widgets." I have no idea what that means.

I don't think I've downloaded the new Firefox for our iBook G4, but this theoretically means a better browsing experience, given that I can get a version somewhat tuned to what is now an obsolete processor.

Not that I use Firefox all that much. This is where Josh Kleinbaum and I differ. At the office, I prefer Internet Explorer because a) some Web applications for the Daily News require it, and b) I'm just used to the way it works and c) it's lighter on system resources and starts much quicker.

And at home, on the Mac, I reluctantly gave up IE long ago and have gotten comfortable with Safari. Again, Safari is quicker and lighter on the system than Firefox.

But especially for Mac, I find myself being required to use Firefox more and more. Blogger only works with Firefox on the Mac. It works with other browsers, but you can't do automatic links or even upload photos. And Google Docs doesn't work with Safari (or IE 5.2, for that matter), so I need Firefox for that, too.

What's wrong with Microsoft? After "winning" the browser war by killing Netscape, they abandon an entire, growing platform (the Mac)? Idiocy. IE for Mac, especially in its final version, was a sweet, sweet product, in my opinion. Read this appreciation (and expression of frustration) from a guy who worked on it.

In my observation, Microsoft applications, though regarded as bloated, really aren't so much. I've found that most Microsoft applications (Word, Outlook, IE, Windows Media Player, Win2K) run fairly quickly and get the basics done very, very well). Part of this might be that MS is slow to update and tune their products to the latest processors and memory configurations (i.e. faster and more).

That's good news for people who aren't upgrading hardware every two years -- and that's way more people and businesses than you'd think. Still, get ready for a major MS upgrading of just about everything for Windows Vista, which the computer industry as a whole hopes will get everybody and their mother to buy new, Vista-compatible hardware.

It's a gamble that could work. Or not.

Back to browsers: For the PC, a Web developer would be crazy to have an application or page that didn't work on IE and required Firefox. I wish the same were true for the Mac and Safari, which I've grown to enjoy working with.

Here are parts one and two of the Low End Mac interview with System 7 Today's Dan Palka.

My System 7 guru, Dan Palka, who helps me immensely with System 7 Today and his answers on Low End Mac's Powerbook group is interviewed on Low End Mac ... in two parts, with Part 1 up today. Even though it's in Thommy Thomas' "The Legends of 68K" column, Dan focuses his energy on the PowerPC (rather than 68K processors), advocating System 7.6.1 as the best OS for pre-G3 PowerPC Macs (including my Powerbook 1400).

The hitch is that while Apple still offers System 7.5.5 for free, you have to pay for System 7.6 -- in fact, some Apple dealers will still sell it to you. Check eBay instead -- you can score a CD pretty cheaply at this point.

The 7.6.1 update is still free from Apple, but you need a 7.6 CD to make it work. I got a 7.6.1 Powerbook-specific CD a long time ago from eBay and never even looked at it when I started running the 1400, which was equipped with 7.5.3.

But just as Dan said, upgrading to 7.6.1 was easy and made everything run a whole lot better. So if you do have a pre-G3 PowerPC Mac, head over to System 7 Today and get everything you need, from IE 5 to Speed Driver 8 to make your Mac run as good as it ever will.

Want to know how Google works, or just to see what the giant of search is doing? Go to Google Code. The three main categories are "Enhance Your Web Site," "Reach Google Users," and "Integrate With Google." Resistance is futile.

For the rest of us, the same page offers the Google Code Blog, where you can also find links to other Google geek blogs, which they call "Google Developer Blogs."

Check out the Google Code FAQ.

After yesterday's news that an iPod lasts four years, and that you can run over it with a car and put it through the washer (if you're not picky about the display working), I thought it might be time to tell you how to get your iPod repaired -- or even get the battery replaced.

One place I've found is iPodResQ, which says, "We service ANY MODEL iPod and repair Hard Drives, Logic Boards, Ports, Scroll Wheels, Screens, or anything else wrong with your iPod!" They also sell "self-service" batteries for replacement, if your iPod is no longer holding a charge -- and they'll also do the work for you.

And if your Mac laptop is ailing, they'll fix that, too. You even get this super-secure "power box" (pictured at right) to send them your laptop -- Powerbook, iBook or MacBook. You can get 3-day or next-day turnaround, too.

So what if you either a) don't like Writely (oops, I mean Google Docs) or b) use Safari on the Mac?

Writeboard to the rescue. It's another collaborative online writing site, except that it works with Safari. And it works with the Backpack organizer system, both from 37Signals, whose free (or low cost for more services) business tools include Basecamp project collaboration, Campfire group chat for business, and Ta-Da sharable group to-do lists.

Hey, if I was Yahoo! I'd buy 37signals today:

We're a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based software products possible with the least number of features necessary. Our products do less than the competition — intentionally. We've been in business since 1999 and love what we do. Our Signal vs. Noise Weblog is read by over 30,000 people every day.

We believe software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much to learn. We build web-based products that do less, work smarter, feel better, and are easier to use. We pay enormous attention to the details, interface, and overall customer experience of our products.

While our products are mainly built for small businesses and individuals (we call this group the Fortune 5,000,000), companies of all sizes use them every day. From 1 person to teams of 3-5 people to companies of 5000. Everyone loves simple tools that help get the job done and then get out of your way. That’s what our products do.

Google even has an Official Mac Blog with which to woo you. Best thing so far is the Blogs We Read roll on the right, which has links to all the biggies (including Infinite Loop, MacSlash, Mac Minute and more).

On the blog (which only has four posts at this point), Google is touting it's Mac-ness:

-- A handy set of Dashboard widgets for checking Gmail, posting to your blog, and checking your search history

-- Two ways to upload photos from your Mac to Picasa Web Albums

-- A cool Google Notifier that alerts you to new Gmail messages and (a Mac-only feature) upcoming Google Calendar events

That's the verdict from Apple -- iPods are designed to last four years before giving up the ghost, one way or another. And according to this same Apple Insider article, the failure rate for new iPods is 5 percent. At least the Apple Store is there for you.

And the move from little, itty bitty disc drives to flash memory is a positive step:

Apple's fairly recent decision to embrace solid-state NAND flash memory at the core of its most popular iPod models, rather than hard disk drives, is likely to improve failure rates. Flash memory lacks the moveable parts contained inside hard disks, making the storage medium significantly more durable.

But what if you're a geek with lots of time -- and iPod nanos-- on your hands? You want to drive a car over one, as the Ars Technica reviewers did:

We placed the nano in the path of the car and drove over it with both front and rear tires. Driving over the nano produced sickening crunching noises which coincidentally sounded a lot like an LCD being crushed. After the first hit and run, the iPod's display was not cracked but was showing some nasty vertical lines. Shockingly, the nano was still playing music and the controls still operated as expected, as we were still able to skip ahead, go back, pause, and play music!

To kill the nano, they had to drop it from a height of 40 feet:

Alas, the iPod nano finally gave up the ghost. In addition to the display showing nothing and the backlight being perpetually stuck on, the music finally subsided. The nano had journeyed to the Land Where Consumer Electronics Are Eternally Blessed.

And the Ars Technica people did the same thing to a next-generation iPod nano (the kind that comes in colors). They think it will withstand a trip through the washing machine, if not the dryer. But only if you don't drop and crack it first:

Despite many requests to drop the nano into the toilet, boiling water, and cups of beer, I decided to quit with the washing machine. Since the nano had already survived the washer, I deemed it unnecessary to perform similar liquid-related tests that would probably ultimately give the nano at least an equal chance of survival (one would hope that after dropping a nano into a cup of beer, it would be rinsed off before drying out).

So here's the deal. You can sit on your iPod. You probably can drive your car over it. You might even be able to machine wash it. But don't drop it out of a three-story building. Class dismissed.

I wrote just about every paper I ever did in college on the UC Santa Cruz's Unix B computer system in the Unix program vi. As I wrote previously, I learned all I needed from the iconographic "Unix for Luddites," by Scott Brookie, available in Xerox form at the UCSC Bay Tree Bookstore.

But if you want to dip your foot into the geeky world of vi, start at the Vi Lovers Home Page, where I learned you can get a vi clone for everything from an Amiga to Windows XP. Why you'd want to ... well you just gotta be geeky enough.

One of the most well-known vi clones is called Elvis, and all can be learned about it at this page: http://elvis.the-little-red-haired-girl.org/ (I had to print the URL so you could see it ...)

And for those torn between vi and its rival text editors, there's The Cult of vi.

All the way back to Pong and beyond, relive your classic gaming past in the Classic Gaming Museum.

On the Pong page, you can play the game on your browser. (So far, the computer is beating my ass).

And from the extensive Atari 2600 coverage, you can relive your 8-bit past. (This picture is from the "ET" game)

Believe it or not, plenty of Web sites that cover the business of TV news, both local and national, actually charge a fee for access. It's not even porn! Or the Wall Street Journal! Well, there's a really good site that covers the national scene, both broadcast and cable, with all the ratings numbers you can handle, personnel changes and more.

TV Newser, part of the MediaBistro empire, today has the info on which cable network will present the first GOP presidential debate in May 2007. Bet you can guess who the lucky winner is without clicking.

And of course, who doesn't want to know nightly cable news and broadcast ratings in key demos? Am I right?

And in the NBC-lite era, the network is mulling plans to rely on local Florida station WTVJ for any future hurricane coverage.

Want to show your tech friends that you actually know what you're talking about? Review the blogs at Ars Technica to geek up.

Infinite Loop follows the world of "Apple and Apple-related ventures," including Macintosh and iPod.

M-Dollar is all about Microsoft, these days mostly the trials and tribulations of Windows Vista.

Opposible Thumbs focuses on video games, both for players and from the business side.

And if that's not technical enough for you, Nobel Intent is "science-centric."

And there's lots more to see from the main Ars Technica page, too.

For a taste, Infinite Loop today covered the changing face of Macintosh screen resolution as Apple adopts the Leopard OS, as they quote from an Apple doc:

Macs now ship with displays that sport displays with native resolutions of 100dpi or better. Furthermore, the number of pixels per inch will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. This will make displays crisper and smoother, but it also means that interfaces that are pixel-based will shrink to the point of being unusable. The solution is to remove the 72dpi assumption that has been the norm. In Leopard, the system, including the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks, will be able to draw user interface elements using a scale factor. This will let the user interface maintain the same physical size while gaining resolution and crispness from high dpi displays.

And from M-Dollar:

Back in September, the Gartner consulting group predicted that Windows Vista would be delayed until at least May of 2007. The group claimed that Microsoft should delay the operating system in order to avoid antitrust violations, take advantage of more consumer spending revenue in the second quarter of 2007, and keep Vista's code base complete rather than break it into pieces for different release dates. Since then, Microsoft has been working diligently to get Vista on track, and most experts feel the operating system is just about ready to head out the door. Nevertheless, Gartner's bread and butter is in predictions, and the company has been holding to its forecast that Microsoft will delay Vista until mid-2007. Well, it doesn't look like a delay is in the cards, so what does the group have to say for itself now?

YouTube isn't on your side (from Marketwatch.com, via BoingBoing):

On May 24, lawyers for Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures convinced a federal judge in San Francisco to issue a subpoena requiring YouTube to turn over details about a user who uploaded dialog from the movie studio's "Twin Towers," according to a copy of the document.

YouTube promptly handed over the data to Paramount, which on June 16 sued the creator of the 12-minute clip, New York City-based filmmaker Chris Moukarbel, for copyright infringement, in federal court in Washington.

That YouTube chose to turn over the data, rather than simply remove the offending video from its site -- as it did Friday when it agreed to take down 30,000 videos at the request of a group of Japanese media companies -- came as a surprise to copyright experts.

On the other hand: Go to the BoingBoing item for an explanation from the Electronic Freedom Federation on why YouTube isn't to blame.

... this is what the College Football top 25 would look like (last week ranking in parentheses):

1. Ohio State (1)
2. Michigan (2)
3. Southern Cal (3)
4. Texas (5)
5. LSU (14)
6. Florida (9)
7. Cal (12)
8. Clemson (10)
9. Wisconsin (17)
10. West Virginia (4)
11. Louisville (6)
12. Tennessee (8)
13. Notre Dame (11)
14. Auburn (7)
15. Nebraska (20)
16. Oregon (25)
17. Oklahoma (19)
18. Arkansas (13)
19. Missouri (23)
20. Boise State (15)
21. Boston College (18)
22. BYU (NR)
23. Rutgers (16)
24. Georgia Tech (21)
25. Virginia Tech (NR)

This comes by way of the Washington Post's DC SportsBog, where blogger Dan Steinberg discovered rankings by the Las Vegas Sports Consultants.

Basically, it works like this: If teams were playing on a neutral field, without taking into account gambling trends or fan bases, who would be favored in Vegas? The favorite is ranked higher. So Ohio State would be favored over every team in the nation. Michigan will be the underdog on Nov. 18, when it faces Ohio State, but would be favored over everyone else. Etc, etc.

It's an interesting way to rank the teams. Anyone who gambles on football knows that Vegas has an uncanny knack for nailing the spreads most of the time. They can't do that much worse than the BCS, could they?

Yes, you can find anything on eBay. I learned that lesson six years ago, when I first discovered eBay and spent three days searching for everything imaginable. During those three days, I typed in the name of my favorite baseball player growing up, Gary Carter. Along with lots of baseball cards, magazine covers and autographed memorabilia, I found a listing for the 1972 Dodge - a brown piece of crap, complete with rust-like coloring. That's right, it was the car that The Kid was driving when he broke into the Majors.

So I wasn't surprised when I saw a link on deadspin to this gem: a Mark Foley action figure. That's right, the disgraced former congressman embroiled in the White House page scandal has his own action figure. With his pants down. And for a few hundred bucks, it can be yours. But as the packaging says, "Warning: Not for children."

Sure, I can get all geeked up with my old PC and Mac thing, but if you really want to do it, collect old Unix hardware.

Brian Cirulnick is doing just that. He does run Linux, but his collection is (pardon me, Snoop) the rizzle shizzle.

Here he is on the box pictured above:

SGI machines are heavy because they are encased in steel - don't let that plastic covering fool you. The plastic itself is called a "skin" by SGI, and that's really all it is -- just a covering providing little purpose beyond the asthetic. To remove the skin, so you can access the insides, you must unlock the left side from the right side. When you are facing the rear of the machine, the left side will be able to be easily removed after it's unlocked. Simply turn the enormous dial. Pull off the left side skin. You'll now be able to see the rear ports and the metal sheet that covers the CPU card.

It should be noted that the SGI engineers went to great lengths to make everything nice and neat. Notice that while the skin is on, all the rear ports are covered by the skin, and all the cables going into and out of the machine all exit from a small opening near the bottom (cut off in the photo, and providing a steel rod to attach wires to -- to act as a strain relief.

I'm trying to find somebody who is running a true multiple-user Unix system, complete with terminals, at home. Somebody as geeky as the Homebrew CPU guy.
But I haven't found that person as yet.

When I find a person who has a running Unix system at home (NOT Linux on a PC) with at least four "dumb" terminals attached and working, plus the ability to Telnet into your system, that person will be crowned, in a special Click ceremony, "Biggest Geek in America."

(This might already be the title of a reality TV show, but if it's not, let this post be my planting of this idea on the beachhead of our cultural mindset. If Endemol wants to find me, here I am, baby.)

You've probably seen this by now. If you haven't, you should. Robert Cheruiyot approaches the finish line at the Chicago Marathon, about to claim victory. He raises his arms in celebration... OOPS! Not quite Leon Lett celebrating a Super Bowl touchdown before crossing the goal line - at least this guy actually won - but still pretty funny...

Writing about the iPod in the Current section was so nice, the L.A. Times did it twice. On the same day.

First Steven Levy, pimping a book about the same subject, talks about how iPods in general, and their "shuffle" capability in particular, is reimagining the way we are in the world:

The iPod has changed us in a lot of ways. Its insular nature protects us in public spaces with a happy bubble of our favorite songs. The accessibility of one's music library, when one chooses to expose it, provides a peep show to our personalities. And the passion engendered by the device's Zen-like simplicity and museum-quality looks has raised the design bar for the entire field of consumer electronics. No wonder the iPod has charmed everybody from Karl Lagerfeld (he claims to own 60 iPods) to President Bush (he goes into Ear-bud Land on a daily basis for his workout).

In the very same section, Thomas de Zengotia (is that a real name?) fetishizes the iPod, repeating many of Levy's sentiments:

The iPod is the most perfect realization of the culture of self-construction, even more so than the cellphone. After all, though you can filter people out of your world with your cell, once they are on — well, they have their own scripts. But your music never lets you down. It always delivers what it delivered before, what you know so well, what you want again.

What's more, with the iPod's amazing storage capacities, you can keep adding to your cache of meaning enhancements. You can build an evolving library of self-reflection, a virtual history of your life expressed in song. You get to dote on your past as well as your present — because there's nothing like a song to make memories come alive, is there?

And if you happen to be in the mood for surprises? Well, there's always the iPod shuffle function. Another stroke of genius. Randomness domesticated. Safe risk. You don't know what's coming on next but, whatever it is, you can be assured of this much: It will be about you.

Never mind that a single section, on a single day, has two "essays," about the very same topic, both pretty much fawning over the iPod (with only slight hints of a perturbation in the Force). And while the iPod, iTunes and all that goes with it is revolutionary (or perhaps just evolutionary) in both the realms of entertainment and commerce, there's more afoot than just the iPod itself. Like the portable CD player before it, the Sony Walkman before that, portable and home cassette recorders, vinyl LPs, 45 RPM singles, 78 RPM discs, wax cylinders, radio, the printing press, etc., the iPod represents a degree of technological evolution and change that would come one way (and with one device) or another, destined to change the way we consume entertainment, and the way said entertainment is made and marketed for us to consume in turn.

If you ask me (and I know full well that you did not), the devaluation of recorded music as a salable product, given that it's too easy to get free illegally over the Web, is transforming the world of entertainment way more than the iPod itself.

Sure iTunes is there, at 99 cents a song, to offer a "digital rights managed" file that can be transferred to a maximum of five computers (unless you burn it to disc as a .WAV file and re-rip in that format or as .MP3), but should I pay 99 cents for as many of the 20 tracks on that Elvis live record ... or get the whole thing from iTunes for $9.99 ... or get the physical disc, rippable forever with no restrictions for $8 from Amazon?

So many choice, so little relation to real value. The idea that I'm pretty much "renting" that live recording of "Suspicious Minds" until I go through five computers -- which takes me 25 to 30 years, but some only 10 years --or neglect to back up my hard drive and lose it at any time, well, that doesn't sound all that attractive. Sure, I don't have to go through all the machinations of buying the CD, hoping my PC will do a clear rip (it's dicey as hell on This Old PC) and bringing it into iTunes. It's so much easier to click and buy. At 99 cents, you're tempted not to care about the future in increments of $1 minus 1 cent. Live for today, buy again next decade.

There's still plenty of free music out their in this post-real-Napster era. I found Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" as an .MP3 in about 5 minutes. I felt guilty enough to get it on iTunes for 99 cents the next day. But when I downloaded "99 Luftballoons" from iTunes, I just picked the "best match" on iTunes and got some weirded out, 20 years later live version. Question my taste in crappy music -- I'm doing it myself -- and question why I didn't listen to the preview before clicking (It was late ... the kid was sleeping ... yadda), but I ended up with a bum version of Nena's only hit. iTunes doesn't provide enough information, the catalog isn't deep enough (no "Elvis as Recorded at Madison Square Garden" at all). And does anybody want one company controlling the hardware, software and media of all recorded music (and eventually video)? That means Microsoft, Apple or other.

The whole idea that recorded music, as a means of making money, is over and done with -- at least as it has been known for the past 50 or 60 years -- just means that a new model needs to be found to, as the Clash once said, "turn rebellion into money." It means dealing constructively with downloads, albums vs. tracks, iPods, iTunes, MySpace, YouTube, touring (and ticket prices), podcasts, merchandising and more.

Hey, 30 years ago Gene Simmons realized that music was one thing, but selling KISS-branded crap of all kinds was another way more lucrative one. I watch Gene Simmons' reality show today and am amused that the KISS' "The Demon" (I didn't know the various KISS members had such monikers -- you learn something ...) wonders who wouldn't merch the hell out of their music. Hey, I spent 99 cents on "Rock and Roll All Nite" (would it kill them to spell "Night" right?), so consider the deal done. I didn't spend $200 on a KISS concert ticket. Sorry, Gene.

Anyhow, back to my point -- and yes, I do have one, the world of recorded music and the money that could be made from it was by no means static from the 1920s through 2000. During World War II, there was a union-imposed ban on recorded music entirely. And the record "industry," as it is called, got itself a 15-year reprieve from retooling and creating its own survivable future while the advent of the CD spiked sales of back catalog during that period. And in the wake of Napster, that same industry needed Steve Jobs to bring legitimate digital music sales to reality (they could've done it themselves and reaped all the benefits ...) and still isn't terribly comfortable dumping their entire catalog into the 99-cent electronic bin.

Summing it up ... the iPod is a tool. There's always a new way to hammer that nail. Watch your thumbs, O consumers.

If you know me, in a blogging sense, you know I'm all about old crap. Especially computers. Besides This Old PC and This Old Mac, I'm on the lookout for good deals, and here's one:

Geeks.com (man, what a domain name!) is selling refurbished iBooks for $360 to $720, with free shipping.

Now if you've ever looked for just about anything on eBay, you know that a) if it's something that is in the least bit usable, it'll get bid up way over what it's worth, b) it might not work at all ... and you may never get it and c) the shipping charges will kill you.

So this is a way to get yourself a perfectly usable laptop for less. We have an iBook G4 at home, and it's does great on the Internet and with Office and other apps. You don't really NEED a new MacBook Pro ... and if you don't have a spare $2,000 lying around, this just might get you through the next few years, computing-wise.

I have a review of Jake Shimabukuro's CD coming up in the Daily News ... but here's a taste of him playing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," on solo ukulele. It's on YouTube ... you know, that now-Google-owned Web site all the kids are using to upload videos of them stuffing raisins in their noses ... or whatever it is they do for kicks these days.

Seriously ... the coolest thing about YouTube is that it makes the viral part of "viral videos" work so easily -- you can e-mail a simple piece of code, or paste it into a blog post, and you needn't be a super genius to get video on your page. Seriously, if I can do it, your grandpappy can do it.

That said, GET THIS CD ... because it totally, completely rocks, in an acoustic-ukulele kind of way. It's only $15. Throw the kid a bone, know what I mean?

The adm3a was first created around 1977. I've never seen an older terminal -- these were the oldest ones when I used vi and nroff to write papers on good ol' Unix B at U.C. Santa Cruz in the mid- to late '80s. If there was a VT100 or better terminal available, that's what I and just about everybody else used. But during crunch time, the adm3a -- in quantity -- was always there. The keyboard was kind of crappy, screen a bit blurry, the response a bit slow, but it was a freakin' workhorse, the VW Beetle of "dumb" terminals in the '80s, and I suspect beyond.

Speaking of U.C. Santa Cruz's Unix B, here's a tidbit from UCSC computer guru Scott Brookie, who wrote the classic manual, "Unix for Luddites," which taught me how to get things done on Unix (note ... this is the first I've heard about the gay-sex angle to Scott's involvement with Unix, so if you aren't OK reading about that, don't click on the link above):

---------------------------snip-----------------------------------------

Brookie: ... Coming back, computers have just been invented, or have just become a somewhat mass tool, at least in academia--and there was a whole community online of gay men. It's interesting to me -- this is a whole other subject -- but I feel like I've been a part of gay men's online communities since the very beginning. The very beginning for me was at UC Santa Cruz, when your community was within the campus. The networks weren't very powerful, they didn't go very far, the internet wasn't invented yet. But all the gay people could get online, whoever could get online at night and flirt with each other and fight with each other.

Letellier: So there was an online even then?

Brookie: Yes. Computers were, how to say...

Letellier: It's way pre-internet, right? You're talking early-1980s.

Brookie: Not way pre-internet, not way . Basically, there was one computer. Has anyone talked about UNIX-B? Back then, every student was eligible to have an account on a UNIX machine where you could send and receive email and write papers. It was one computer about the size of a washing machine, and it sat in the Communications Building, and you connected to it with terminals from all over campus. Somebody wrote a program called Forum; it was basically a chat room, an early, primitive chat room. I remember one guy's name was Stuart something or other. He was "agayboy." Now that was kind of out-there, to take the name "agayboy." People would get online and flirt and so on, and you didn't get off campus, because the internet wasn't really active or the internet wasn't really quite there yet, you could send mail but... Oh, I know why. You could send mail off campus because every couple of hours computers would phone each other, but you couldn't in real time talk to anybody off campus, but you could on campus. So a lot of flirting, a lot of fighting, probably a certain amount of hooking up. I hooked up using that, come to think of it, in the Merrill Steno Pool where I had a little office. [laughter] A three-way. It was fun.

But it happened that I had discovered computers while I was in Boston, and I really liked them, and I got a job tutoring faculty on the early UNIX machines. I discovered I really liked that and I used my writing skills to write computer manuals, one called UNIX For Luddites, which is still used on campus. That got me a job in computing and I liked it, and stayed on campus.

------------------------------------------snip-----------------------------------

I'm sure I've still got my copy of "Unix for Luddites" (it was a photocopied thing that cost less than $2 at the campus bookstore), but who knows where it is?

I didn't know about the Forum program, but you could type in "who" at the Unix command line and see who was logged on to Unix B, then type "talk" and their login, and start what -- 15 years later -- became to be known as an IM session. That's one of the reasons that AOL and the Internet weren't quite the revelation to me that they were to many others -- I'd been doing all that stuff with networked computing in the '80s. Getting on BBSes in the late-'80s/early '90s, which pretty much worked like Unix, was a further prelude to the networked world of the Web.

So you've got a super-cool name for your Web startup, and then Google buys your ass ... you drop out of sight for awhile ... you return to mild fanfare, and then you lose your super-cool name ... but you're still part of the world's biggest Web conglomerate. Hey, as long as the checks don't bounce, it's all good, no?

I'd call it a wash for Writely, which has now been folded into Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Turns out I haven't been on Writely in about six weeks, and the change happened right under my nose. The only problem I had with the name is that at first, I tried typing in writerly.com ... which ain't writely.com. Two words with dubious origins ... but then again, who'd name a bookstore Amazon, a search engine Yahoo! (or Google, for that matter) ... the list goes on.

Yellow alert: There's a new Writely/Google Docs feature: "Indent Less" and "Indent More," which doesn't really solve my problem, because I want/need/have to have Microsoft Word style PARAGRAPH indents for the first line of a paragraph. As I've said, give me that and "smart" quotes, and I'll never use Word or OpenOffice again. It's nice that blogging has sallied forth with no need or regard for both features (paragraph indents and smart quotes), but real-world print writing requires them -- and how.

Holding my breath for these features, I'm not.

And one of the things that I thought was totally cool about Writely was that it supported a whole bunch of browsers, especially important due to my work with This Old Mac. For a Web-based application, Writely was and is surprisingly nimble, and I loved being able to run it on Netscape 4 and IE 5 for Mac. Well, say goodbye to that, because the list of supported browsers has changed:

Which browsers are supported?

Google Docs & Spreadsheets will work wherever you have access to the Internet via a Windows or Macintosh computer with one of these browsers:

IE 6.0+ (Windows)

Firefox 1.07, 1.5.0.6+ (Mac & Windows -- except for 1.0.8 on Windows and Mac, and 1.5b1 on Mac)

Mozilla 1.7.12+

Netscape 7.2, 8.0

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is not supported, and probably won't run on*:

IE 5 (Mac) or IE 4 (Windows)

Safari

Netscape 4

Opera

* We've heard from some folks who run Google Docs & Spreadsheets on Linux, but don't support it because there are outstanding problems with it.

Let me tell you, lots of stuff doesn't work with Netscape 4 and IE 5 for the Mac, and with older computers running 7.6.1 and before, that's just about all there is, so I enter a period of mourning for the Writely that once was and will never be again. I thought it was unusual that the original Writely worked at all with such old browsers, given that it's a suprisingly powerful interface, but with such a gift-horse/mouth situation, I didn't think it would've left the barn so soon. (Report me to the mixed-metaphor police, immediately!)

And that means that I won't be giving up on the other free online-writing service, Pote.

All of that said, you just might find Google Docs & Spreadsheets to be of use, especially if the project you're working on is collaborative in nature. I will try to export a doc into Word (or, in my case OpenOffice) and see what transpires.

Update: The Open Office export gave me a file format that OO didn't recognize. I associated the .odt file in XP, and all was fine. (My OpenOffice 1.1.4 creates .sxw files -- perhaps .odt is part of the new version 2 of OO, which I haven't bothered to download.) The Word export worked fine in OO. Hint: Don't add tabs in Google Docs, as I did, but wait until you get to Word/OpenOffice to change the formatting for paragraph indents -- and then do an Autoformat to get the smart quotes. And since you can call for smart quotes in HTML, though nobody ever bothers, I expect there's a way to get them in your Google Docs stuff now. If only Google made it easier -- and I suspect they will.

Previously from me:

In Web we trust
Your applications are moving
Writely to Blogger -- what's the frequency?
Writely can indent and print ... but nothing's perfect
Writely just a few rocks short of a full load
What the hell is Writely anyway?

Start your Apple II re-education right here.

One of my first jobs -- early '80s -- was automating a fund-raising operation, with a database of potential contributors, mail merge capability and computer-printed labels ... all done with an Apple II+ and an Epson dot-matrix printer. I can't for the life of me remember whether or not it was running AppleWorks. Must've been.

Just like Woz says, Apple II's don't break down.

I've been reading "iWoz," the autobiography of Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak, in which he details how he developed the Apple I and II computers while at the same time working on calculator designs for Hewlett-Packard. He talked about the early '70s, when the idea of having a home computer was pie-in-the-sky stuff, and how he made it happen, part by part, logical leap by leap, and how he always had the engineering philosophy of using as few components as possible.

This got me thinking about my own misspent, geekier-than-thou youth, during which I, too, dreamed of building my own computer from scratch. I'm at the age -- 40, if you must know -- when I'm thinking about the stuff I had when I was a kid that I let go, and the stuff I never had that I always wanted. This includes the books, electronic gizmos, etc., most of which I got rid of over the years.

Now with sites like Alibris and Abe Books, just about everything is available -- at a price. Sometimes that price is $3, like for the classic Tab Books volume, "How to Design & Build Your Own Custom TV Games," by David L. Heiserman. Sometimes it's more like $70, the going rate for Byte magazine columnist Steve Ciarcia's "Build Your Own Z80 Microcomputer." Ouch -- wish I had saved that one. Then you'd be paying me $70 for it. Or not.

I spent many, many hours poring over both of these books, and others, but for the most part could make neither heads, nor tales, or NAND gates, nor OR gates.

If you get the joke, you're plenty geeky enough. If you don't, consider youself lucky.

Both of these books were chock full of multi-page schematic diagrams, some parts obscenly common (i.e. available at the RadioShack in North Hollywood's Laurel Plaza mall) or just plain elusive (i.e. you had to mail-order them from one of those $25-minimum-order parts places -- and in the late '70s/early '80s, $25 was a way bigger chunk than it is today.

So I've been scouring the Web for the coolest homebrew computer stuff, and since computer history and the Web is a duck-water issue, it Mother Lode-ish in the extreme.

The Homebrew CPU Home Page follows Bill Buzbee's exceedingly cool success in building a computer with a CPU made entirely of TTL logic chips -- the aforementioned NAND, OR, NOR gates, flip-flops, etc., that formed the backbone of 1970s arcade video games, "dumb" terminals like the adm3a's we used at UC Santa Cruz in the mid- to late '80s if a better terminal wasn't available.

Here's what the Homebrew CPU looks like:

I am stunned, in a geeky way, by his intro:

Magic-1 is a homebuilt minicomputer. It doesn't use an off-the-shelf microprocessor, but rather has a custom CPU made out of 74 Series TTL chips. Altogether there are more than 200 chips in Magic-1 connected together with thousands of individually wrapped wires. And, it works. Not only the hardware, but there's also a full ANSI C compiler for Magic-1 (retargeted LCC), and a rudimentary homebrew operating system.

Except when I'm working on it, Magic-1 is connected to the net. It will either be serving web pages at http://www.magic-1.org, or by clicking here you can telnet into Magic-1 and play Original Adventure or run a few other simple programs.

It's made up of 7400-series ICs, no standard microprocessor, no DOS (very, very obviously no Windows) and it's a Web server. Geeks gone wild, indeed. And this monument to geekiness doesn't just sit there and flash its LEDs at you. It is a functioning Web server.

This is bow-down-level geekdom. And I do. Just look at the photo gallery. There are even movies of the Homebrew CPU running, construction photo diaries, a timeline from December 2001 to May 2005, an overview of the project and much more.

Here are the specs: 3.75 MHz (equivalent to an old Intel 8086) 4 MB of memory (a lot for something like this), IDE hard drive interface, two serial ports, 20 MB hard drive as master, Compact Flash card as slave.

More from the builder:

Magic-1 is built out of TTL devices, mostly 74LS, 74F and one 74 series device from 1969. Also included are modern SRAM and a handful of support devices (UARTs, PIO, RTC, etc.). The whole thing is put together using a particular type of wire-wrapping: cut-strip-wrap. This was done using an electric wire-wrap gun with a special bit that cuts, strips and wraps the wire in one action. It's also really good at just breaking the wire off rather than wrapping it.

All together there are more than 200 chips spread across 5 wire-wrap prototype cards. I didn't try to count the number of wires, but my rough guess is around 4,000. Building those five cards took about four months worth of evenings and weekends.

And his goal? To port Minix, a small-fry version of Unix, to the machine.

You can even start a Telnet session with the Magic-1. I just played it in a game of Tic-Tac-Toe. It was a draw.

Yeah, I can't even beat a well-wired pile of 10-cent ICs at Tic-Tac-Toe. That's why I'm in this racket.