exoskeleton for farming

Wearable robotics is very cool, and there are plenty of uses for it, but this device suffers from the same problem as tractors, i.e. that there is a one-to-one correspondence between machines and human operators.

Siracusa on keynote anticipation

Ars Technica's John Siracusa nails it with regard to how recent Stevenotes have played and the sense that Steve's going to manage to leave our jaws hanging limp, despite all the factors working to steal his thunder - maybe not this time, but soon.

here cometh the Stevenote

The world is about to change.

Exactly how, the vast majority of us won't know for sure until Tuesday, the 15th, but if you haven't already felt the ground shifting beneath your feet you haven't been paying attention.

MacWorld is about to start, Steve Jobs takes the stage Tuesday morning, and just about everything you thought you knew about technology and what it's good for is ripe for extension and redefinition.

Leave your expectations at the door...

what's coming for 2008?

Prediction is a chancy game, particularly if you're more than casually invested in being right, or at least closer to right than average, which I certainly am. That said, I'll jump right in...

2008 will *NOT* be the year in which Apple loses it's status as the coolest of companies, however it will be the year in which a few other companies demonstrate that they've managed to assimilate some of the lessons Apple has been teaching by example, meaning the competition will start to get more interesting. Meanwhile, Apple will be surging ahead, introducing new product lines and connecting the dots between technologies they've introduced over the last decade. Hidebound competitors will continue slipping toward oblivion.

2008 will not, unfortunately, be the year in which Dick Cheney is removed from office via the impeachment process, but it will be the year in which those who believe he should have been impeached long ago come to outnumber those who believe otherwise.

2008 *WILL* be the year in which George Bush's successor is selected, by the closest thing to a free and fair election we've seen in awhile, despite the best efforts of the remaining few who really believe we're better off with the sort of government they've managed to foist upon us two terms in a row. However those efforts will provide some interesting distractions.

2008 will be the year in which a critical mass of the population comes to understand that their vintage television sets will soon become useless without a converter box, and in which many more than ever before will recognize 700 MHz as being the band in which the soon-to-be-discontinued television signals (channels 52 through 69) are currently being delivered, and more than a few will take an interest in how that band is being repurposed. The ranks of amateur radio operators will swell somewhat. (Broadcast television will continue on channels 2 through 51, but digital only, which is why older sets will need a converter box.)

2008 will *NOT* be the year in which the practice of doling out spectrum to the highest bidder is seriously assailed. Neither will 2009, although more people will begin to pay attention and wonder whether it's a good idea.

With the exception of Apple and a few other bright spots, 2008 will be more about consolidation and clarification than anything new. Old issues will be resolved at a prodigious rate, unfortunately probably not including the feud between Israel and its Islamic neighbors. (Prove me wrong on that one!)

15% short of a sure thing

A Piper Jaffray analyst puts the probability of an "ultra-portable" MacBook being introduced at MacWorld at 85%.

That's as close to being a certainty as anything rumored to be about to sprout forth from Apple ever is, which is to say don't count on it until you hear Steve Jobs say that it's true, but be listening for it.

So what, you say?

Well, if the possibility of Apple bringing out such a device hasn't got you on the edge of your seat, you either never leave home (and hence have no use for portability) or you're underestimating Apple.

When Apple brings a new product category to market it represents a careful examination of the uses that device is likely to be put to, and typically a novel design, with a feature set that provokes first surprise then recognition, as the logic behind it sinks in and you realize that they've nailed it again. Apple hardly ever goes to market with a new product unless it's that good.

So, assuming that an 'ultra-portable' MacBook is a sure bet not to be an exception to that pattern, and giving the Piper Jaffray fellow the benefit of a doubt, there would seem to be something very special about to arrive, something that will at least reshape, if not redefine, portable computing.

And, as always with Apple, the truth may turn out to be even more interesting than anticipated.

something old, something new

Apple has added what must surely be the last chapter to the book of Mac OS X 10.4, a.k.a. Tiger. Version 10.4.11 was posted yesterday. That's not to say that there won't still be a few footnotes added, after all Apple also just posted a pair of security updates to Mac OS X 10.3.9, a.k.a. Panther, which was superseded by Tiger more than two years ago.

Looking forward, the rumor mill is abuzz with talk about a soon-to-be-released ultra-portable Mac sub-notebook which is expected not to have an internal optical drive, and which will have solid-state mass storage, possibly in lieu of an internal hard drive. Probably to be marketed as a MacBook Pro, with a metal case, this new model will be noticeably thinner than and only about half as heavy as the current 15-inch MacBook Pro, but will share its LED screen backlighting, which makes a more vivid display possible and uses less power. This model is expected to be very popular.

sorting it out

It's not about me. Well, actually, a bit of it is about me, but mostly not. Mostly I'm a bystander, an onlooker; I am not the pivot about which the world turns, not even for myself. At best I am a servant of forces far more powerful than myself, and may choose to which of those forces to add my own meager efforts, and which to deny. I am nearly inconsequential, just not quite entirely so.

For such a humble personage, one homepage is quite enough, and it might as well be the one I've had for years. That and other pages on the same site are where I honed my HTML and CSS manual coding skills, a well as JavaScript, although I'm very rusty at that.

Cultibotics is easily an important enough issue for me to be willing to devote my .Mac website to it, even if all that's there thus far is a link to the Cultibotics blog. The Cultibotics.org website will develop as I become more comfortable with iWeb.

The Harmonic Ratio blog is home to a project that has been taunting me for years with niggling results that do poor service to the deep potential of music not hampered by a centuries old compromise. That project is also my main hope for breaking through as a serious programmer, although I have other programming projects that may reach 1.0 status before any of my musical efforts do.

This blog, Lacy Ice + Heat (snowmelt, get it?), is where I get to indulge my Mac fixation, as well as anything else that camps out in the forefront of my mind for awhile, which will undoubtedly include those other programming projects, when the time is ripe.

It may not be perfect, but it at least seems like a rational parceling out of purposes.

Leopard: first impressions

Well, it's been a bit over ten days since Leopard was released, and almost as long since I started using it. So far, most of my attention has gone to the new Spaces feature, which is a great addition but has a few behavioral quirks in the version included with 10.5.0. They're nothing I can't get used to, given a little time, and I do have Spaces enabled, but I'm hopeful there'll be a few adjustments in how it works in 10.5.1 or 10.5.2.

Others may differ, but I like the new Dock, with its reflections and bright dots to indicate running applications. I've given up on trying to include everything in the Dock that I'd like to have there, and have installed aliases to a handful of apps on one side of the Desktop. I wish that it had occurred to me to do this before, both because it allows me to put more apps where they're easy to get to and because their icons make nice decorations on the Desktop. It also allows me to group them in two dimensions instead of just one, as on the Dock, and I know right where they're going to be if I need one of them. The Dock is still more convenient, but aliases on the Desktop rate a close second.

I also like the newly adjustable grid that controls icon placement on the Desktop and in Windows, the more detailed icons, the unified window appearance, and the inclusion of predefined searches in Finder's sidebar.

As much as any new feature, though, I like the sparkling performance. Tiger was quick, but, with very few exceptions, Leopard is quicker. It also feels quite stable for a point-zero release. Aside from the rules driving the behavior of Spaces, I haven't found any bugs at all so far, and only one feature gone missing, the ability to launch a URL from Terminal using Command-Doubleclick.

My main reason for wanting Leopard was the new version of Xcode, with support for refactoring, and of Objective-C 2.0, with declared properties, iteration over collections, and garbage collection, and that's where my attention is now turning. The rest I'll get around to sooner or later.

the more things change

The more things change, the more they stay the same, or so they say, and sometimes that's a good thing.

The last thing you want to encounter when doing a software upgrade is having to learn to use it all over again.

Happily, that's not the case with Mac OS X 10.5, a.k.a. Leopard. While the look is a little different, and there's some new features to be explored, chances are just about everything you already knew how to do with OS X still works as expected. It fits like a new glove carefully modeled on an old one that had already shaped itself to your hand.

taking your OS X game to the next level

The version of Mac OS X 10.5 that will come preinstalled on all new consumer Macs starting this coming Friday is, strictly speaking, the 'client' version of the OS. There's also a server version, which will also be released on the 26th.

The foundation of the two is the same. What differentiates the server version is that it comes with a suite of administration tools and server programs.

Like the client version, it's designed to be easy to use, easy enough that it's a reasonable choice for groups and company's too small to have an IT department, even easy enough for home use for those who need the sophistication of a server.

That's not to say that it's been dumbed down, Mac OS X is Unix, after all, and you have only to open the Terminal program to be reminded of that fact. Any standard tools that may not have been encapsulated in graphical interfaces will still be there, just a command-line entry away, and any other POSIX compliant software available as source code should compile without modification.

Personally, I'll be getting the client version, since I only have one computer, at present, and no real need for the server programs. I wish I could justify the server version, because I'd love to play around with Wiki Server, iCal Server, and iChat Server! Taken together, these server programs and the client programs that work with them comprise some pretty fancy groupware, capable of significantly improving productivity in situations where they're a good fit.

So maybe you're not yet ready for Mac OS X Server either. Just remember that it exists and keep an eye peeled for circumstances in which it might be the right solution. You may find that such circumstances are commonplace, practically everywhere you look!