Reading the comment again, I see one of the things the cool spammers are doing today. The comment was relevant to the post – because they had scraped a previous comment and re-used the content! At first scan, I had thought it was two posts from the same person (impatient at my moderation delay). When I noticed the second username and website were different, I said ah-ha: just spam scraping. It was way too specific of a comment for a spammer to have typed it in by hand.

Thank goodness for Akismet – well, once it catches up to the spammer’s domain name, that is. Heck, now I’m trying to figure out what the spammer’s point is, especially since there aren’t any obvious ads or other income streams on the site itself.

The Oracle reply to the ASF’s position on the Java 7 vote really doesn’t say much at all, now does it?

Everyone understands the point, right?

• Oracle refuses to play ball by the written agreements they made with the JSPA – so, basically, they’re breaking their earlier contract (and also reversing the position they held pre-Sun aquisition).
• All Apache wants is to be able to release Apache Harmony as a Java-compliant JDK, under the Apache License; we will not release software under another license.
• All Oracle wants is sole control the future of Java, and is using whatever licensing tactics they can to assure that.

From Oracle’s point of view, they’re presumably concerned about their revenue streams from Java related technologies. That’s great for them; possibly less great for everyone else, and certainly not great for a truly open Java ecosystem.

From Apache’s point of view, all we want to do is release software under our own license. Oracle’s continued disregard of the rules of the JSPA, and continued refusal to grant a TCK license that is actually “open source compatible” is the real problem point, no matter how much the Oracle marketing machine says otherwise.

To everyone else working on Java: if your project is willing to accept the restrictions that Oracle is putting on Java, then that’s great; I’m happy for you.

But Apache isn’t willing to accept the restrictions: our license is a key part of what we do and who we are. If we can’t release something under our license, then we can’t release it, period. If the EC and the JCP aren’t producing specs where implementations can be released under the Apache license, then Apache projects won’t be able to implement them.

That would be unfortunate for nearly everyone, I think. All it takes is for Oracle to add three little words…

It would make sense – it’s the right kind of feel, and it’s just the right time, too.

Oh, and I must say – I’m very disappointed in you internet. Besides the fact that you don’t have the immediate answer to my question [1], I’m asounded – astonished! – amazed, in fact that no one retweeted my tip on the newest taste sensation out there, Inhalable Coffee.

I mean, come on – how many jokes are there about geeks and caffeine, and now someone has commercially available (mail order even) coffee you can breathe, and no-one cares? I realize it’s not in an IV or patch form, but still – this is such a breakthrough in caffeine delivery – and reportedly tasty too – and no-one else retweeted it or is even talking about it? Has caffeine gone out of style when I wasn’t watching or something? Or is it true, that since I’ve been blogging so infrequently that no-one is reading anymore?

Ah well. We’ll see if anyone reads my review of the freshest new coffee product out there next week.

[1] Isn’t it interesting how the internet has the answers to almost all your questions, but… no useful information about some of your questions. I think my brain only bothers to ask the questions that I think the internet will answer, and I just dismiss other questions. I know, I know: what I really need is a librarian instead of just the internet.

[2] P.S. I have no affiliation with – nor have I actually tried – Le Whif yet. But I will soon, especially since it’s available locally.

Why do we still use QWERTY?

Sure, it’s embedded in tons of hardware – both plastic/metal and muscle for many of us – but isn’t it a good time to switch? The immensely fast pace of learning for younger people, plus the soon-to-be outpouring of new keyboard and input styles seems like we could actually start the switch now.

Not only would touch-screen keyboards be simple to switch, but form factors and tactile feedback are changing for more and more of our data entry. This would be a good time for existing QWERTY folks to start switching their muscles to think AOEUI instead, since we’re already having to adjust to how glass-screen typing feels anyway.

Hmmm, that’d be a great geeky replacement for ROT13 too.

Seriously – it’s amazing. OK, we were sitting around for a while and yakking it up, and maybe I’m a little out there, but I think it actually has potential for a new niche market someplace. Involves licensing management (in areas that understand licenses but aren’t usually managed like this), and usefully targeted advertising (yuck, I know, but hey, the “useful” applies to consumers and advertisers alike). Requires web presence much like dozens of other sites use, but fits a niche that’s simultaneously narrow and yet broad (depending on how you look at it).

The idea has nothing to do with what I do for a living or volunteering at the ASF. The question is, do I actually know anyone I trust who could evaluate it and might know the right place to sell it?

Please add a clear and obviously explained option, for both callers and AT&T customers, to permanently disable the carrier-provided messages for voice mail.

A suggestion for your business model: realize that in today’s age of excessively fast information, your customers actually do care about the details – and if they don’t now, some blogger will remind them of it soon.

Comments like this (from the David Pogue NYT article):

And yes, several attendees (cell executives) admitted to me, point-blank, that the voicemail instructions exist primarily to make you use up airtime, thereby maximizing ARPU.

will alienate your company from larger and larger segments of your customers in the coming years. And it’s not just the cost issue, it’s the efficiency issue. Your fellow industry leaders have admitted that they’re PURPOSEFULLY wasting our time. While I can understand that your purpose is to make a profit, it’s just insulting to be doing it by explicitly being inefficient.

Thanks for your time,
- Shane

But how many bytes does a tweet actually take up in a week’s lifetime? Everywhere, on everything?

Let’s see: Twitter.com has my tweet on their servers. Probably on a handful of hard drives at various points in their internal infrastructure. And I bet they use a content delivery network, which means it’s replicated on another handful of hard drives around the world.

Each Twitter follower gets at least one copy in their client – so in my case that’s another 100 or so hard disks that have a copy somewhere. (Yes, it’s true, I only have ~100 followers. My twitter ego is sad.)

All of my feeds and my friend’s feeds store a copy of my tweet. That’s another whole handful of feed aggregator server systems that it’s stored on, to say nothing of the number of web/RSS/Atom clients that cache a copy of the page locally when someone reads the feed.

With Twitter’s popularity, tweets get widely searched. This week, for example, #MoonFruit is giving away MacBooks by randomly selecting tweets with their hashtag. That means plenty of people are searching for that hashtag, and all those people will get copies of my tweet as well.

And nowhere have we talked about how Google and other search engines store crawl and query results across their labs full of machines – that probably adds dozens of other instances of at least bits of each tweet.

So – what’s the peak number of aggregate storage bytes that one tweet uses over a week’s lifetime?

It’s interesting to think that all of that storage – something that just 20 years ago would have been quite expensive – is now used for something as mundane as telling your friends and random followers when you’re taking a coffee break. Moore’s Law certainly enables us to do some amazing things with information and communication – as well as lots and lots of inane things.

Does anyone have strong personal suggestions for a home 1TB NAS that’s fairly easy to setup and has at least basic media streaming features? RSVP ASAP since I’ll be heading to MicroCenter and buying a new one tomorrow.

I is a geek, so I’m happy doing some hacker setup, but when it comes to backup and file storage, I mostly want it to just work. I’d also prefer something reasonably quiet and power efficient; print server will be a bonus for when I buy a printer that actually works; both easy Mac and Windows access required. Although it sounds silly, RAID would be nice, since I know once I get it setup it’ll be a while before I actually get around to backing it all up to organized DVDs.

Update: Thanks to the thousands of callers who’ve dialed in to comment and remind me that of course what I’m looking for is a NAS, not a NAT. Just one last speleling mistake to cap off the past weak. And yes, I’d prefer one of the linux ones; in this particular case I’d rather pull a little more hair out trying to get it to work rather than selling just a little bit more of my soul for proprietary software.

- signed, a child of Star Wars and MTV.

Once you learn enough of the cryptically arcane symbols that serve as the magic handshake to actually get Unix-like boxes to do something useful, there really is a lot of quickly accessible power in there. All sorts of file, web, data, and network processing is possible from a few short and simple (er, cryptically arcane) lines of text. Even better, with Cygwin and the like, it’s possible to take some of this power all over the place.

Macs are magic – most of the time. 80% of the things you touch, click, or CTRL-click on a Mac just ‘Do The Right Thing’. Not only is it intuitive, it’s also beautiful. Hmmm, I’ll have that one – click – done. Oh, cool – it also buttered my toast while measuring milk for my coffee – delicious and convenient all in one!

The other 20% is the arsenic-laced inner seeds of Macdom. The moment you step off the path of the One True Way, you’re lost. Even worse than being lost, even after scouring the forums and tips and clicking on every pretty button there is, you find out that there just plain isn’t any way to accomplish what you want.

Now in Unix, you get lost plenty. But there you should expect it, ever since you passed by that #!/bin sh echo "Abandon All Hope" line a while back. In Macdom, it’s all the more frustrating when you find yourself adrift, with no obvious or unobvious way to get what you want.

On Windows, it’s reversed: 20% of the things work the way you expect. The other 80% are different, and they’re different between each set of applications you use too boot. But once you learn the arcanely cryptic menu accelerator keys, you get by pretty well. And the great thing about Windows is that if you want to do something unusual, then you can find a way to do it. It may require downloading an unsupported program to hack the underlying data file, and it may not be portable anywhere else, but it will work. You do have options.

So I want just enough of the core power of Unix shells and potentially portable, higher level scripting languages. Then I want the beauty and simplicity of Mac to manage it all for me without too much typing most of the time.

Then when I decide to do one of those aberrant things that the Mac Gods have declared not worthy, I want the breadth of semi-pro hack tools available on Windows to get it to do exactly what I want.

That, or an iPhone that fits in my pocket with a screen that magically expanded when needed. I’d settle for that, I guess.