Category: Swaine’s Flames

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Swaine’s Flames Technology

Dirges in the Dark

And oldie but goodie.

Sorry Circuit Cellar Serenade

A long, long time ago, I can still remember how the circuit popped and hissed and stank, when I thought that I could take a chance with that old electron dance, and maybe I’d be lucky and give thanks. But the circuit closed and made me shiver, as full mains voltage was delivered through me via my thumb, could not have been more dumb. I can’t remember if I cried when I committed thumbicide, but something touched me deep inside, the day the circuit fried.

Dot-Com Lament

Did you write the Linux kernel, and do you have faith in the Doctor’s Journal, if your broker tells you so. And do you believe in K and R, can coding save my house and car, and can you teach me how to code real tight? Well I know that you’re a finance fool, ’cause I saw you writing business rules, you reek of affluence, and I dig those dollars and cents. I was a lone day-trader with a rebel yell, and I margin-traded till the closing bell, but I knew that I was SOL the day the market died.

Little Green Apples

Now for years he’s been back on the throne, this one the company disowned, but that’s not how it used to be, when the jester built the circuit board, a design so fine it won awards, and said this Apple’s made for you and me. But because the king just couldn’t count, the sugar-water saleman pounced, and from his throne the king was bounced, but now he has returned. And while John and Gil both turned a page, Jeff Goldblum pranced upon the stage, and lime computers were the rage, the day Amelio cried. 

Talkin’ Intellectual Property Blues

Helter Skelton: Edward Felton and Dmitri Sklyarov were dealt a hand that neither one forsaw. They ran afoul of the law. They gave a talk and read a book, the DMCA said, you’re a crook. Now you can’t even post a link but you may end up in the clink. We all sat down to code and watched our rights erode. Oh as the programmers try to make the scene the lawyers start in to get mean on 2600 Magazine, until we turn the tide. 

Sympathy for the Devil

Oh and there we were all in one place, except that place was cyberspace, which everybody seems to want to own. And you know Bill is nimble, Bill is quick, Bill has never missed a trick, because winning is the devil’s only friend. Oh and as I watched him on the prowl, the Netscape hounds began to howl, no way in hell that we — can compete with something free. And as the marketshare hopelessly fell and they sold out to AOL, I heard competition’s sad death-knell, the day the browsers vied.

Carly’s Tune

I met a girl who sang the blues and I asked her for some HP news but she just smiled and gently coughed. I went down to the gadget store where I’d bought oscilloscopes before, but the man there said they’d spun that business off. And in the boardroom the children screamed, directors cried, and Carly schemed, but not a word would they say — about the old HP Way. And the two men I admired most, their fabled legacy is toast, their business on a downhill coast, the day that HP died.

Backstory

The tune is Don McLean’s American Pie; the verses capture moments in the ongoing story of the personal computer industry at the time this was written.

Sorry Circuit Cellar Serenade

The memory of seared flesh no longer fresh, we can recall with rosy-spectacled nostalgia the heady thrills of hobby computing, when Steve Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar column in Bytemagazine taught us how to solder our digits to our widgets.

Dot-Com Lament

For a magical time, it was possible to believe that the law of gravity had been repealed, that Internet companies could be erected on hope alone, and that technology stocks would rise forever. The dot-com crash infused the proceedings with the raw taste of sobriety. Linux kernel, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, K and R, and tight coding are tech talk; day-trading and margin-trading are finance jargon; and SOL is what the believers in the repeal of gravity were when it all fell down.

Little Green Apples

A verse about Steve Jobs. Stripped of power in the company he founded, Jobs left to start a new computer company. Years later, Apple was on the ropes and he returned triumphantly to save the company. Co-founder Steve Wozniak was indeed a jester, having run a dial-a-joke service for a while, and did build the original Apple circuit board that is considered a work of engineering art. Jobs got into trouble at Apple because of his wildly unrealistic projections for Macintosh sales, and was stripped of his power by John Sculley, whom Jobs had hired away from Pepsi-Cola with the pitch “Do you want to sell sugar water forever, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Gil Amelio was the turnaround artist who brought Jobs back into the fold, only to find himself forced out by the founder. The original fruit-colored iMacs released soon after Jobs returned had a lot to do with Apple’s turnaround, and actor Jeff Goldbloom did dance oddly in commercials for the iMac.

Talkin’ Intellectual Property Blues

Sympathy for the Devil

Carly’s Tune

I really should explain these too.

Categories
Swaine’s Flames Technology

The Age of Mobility

Remember this one?

Embracing the future, Mike goes mobile, as long as his wrists hold out.

More mobility. Must have maximum mobility.

The yoga’s helping, and of course the finger-stretching exercises, but despite all my efforts, the smaller joints are still a tad tight.

The more one embraces mobility—in the form of mobile phones, portable computers, sub-notebook computers, in-car computers, personal digital assistants, MP3 players, pagers, beepers, and other forms of pocket, lap, wrist, head-mounted, strap-on, wrap-around, and surgically implanted technology, the more need one has for mobility—in the form of flexible fingers, willing wrists, and forgiving forearms.

We are tearing headlong into a mobile computing future while leaving our wrists behind, a tortuous image for a torturous technological trend, and that doesn’t even touch on the psychic trauma.

Jacqueline Landman Gay first tagged deja vu as a repetitive motion injury, but I’ll take credit for first identifying the syndrome of psychotechnological whiplash, caused by being rear-ended by rapidly advancing technology.

Mobile computing in its many forms is careening out of control around the cloverleafs (cloverleaves?) of the information superhighway, shaking up the PC and Web development industries like tourists in the Space Needle during Seattle’s recent quake, and provoking even more far-flung figures of speech than these.

Mobile computing calls into question the venerable concept of the desktop personal computer, a concept on which rests an uneasy multi-billion-dollar industry. It raises daunting questions for Web developers, mostly along the lines of: how can I possibly design a reasonable Web page for display on a cell phone? (It would be prudent for us not to dwell here overlong on the fact that the original concept of HTML was that all pages should be display-size independent; it’ll only make us feel bad.) Plus, it gets you in the joints.

Even the language of mobility tests the tendons, although that’s a tendency it shares with pre-post-PC technology. One just gets the PC acronyms memorized and now there’s a whole new set of mobile acronyms. HTML, make way for WML; and wrist get ready to wrap around WAP because acronyms, especially unfamiliar ones, twist the typing hands into painful poses.

Which I’m willing to put up with as part of the cost of the mobile experience. And boy do I want that mobile experience. I want to integrate my voice browsing and audio content aggregation with big honking alerts. I want roaming wireless access, instant connection with everything around me, I want BlueTooth on a BlackBerry. I want streaming video, streaming audio, streaming smells. Give me streaming pixels, unleash the streaming text.

I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade into your enfilade, cast your multidimensional browser spell my way, I promise to go multi-D. But do I go thence on Mike Rosen’s CubicEye browser, which displays five Web pages at a time on the inside walls of a virtual cube? Or do I ride the BroadPage browser, with its tabbed and tiled multi-pane views that let me juggle 100 Web pages at a time? Neither sounds like it would be much fun on a cell phone screen, though. I had a really twisted witticism to insert here about jugglers and flexible wrists, but my editor said it was too much of a stretch.

My desktop computer is a laptop, my LAN is wireless, my office roaming. I’m ripping my britches on the cusp of the curve, beyond the present reach of ergonomic design. And there’s the rub (on the heel of my left hand). The reams of recommendations on the proper position of the ergonomic desk, the shape of the ergonomic chair, the ergonomic posture, the ergonomic forearm angle, are all grist for the shredder when the computer sits on your lap. Time to revive the child-care books? Probably not; not everything that sits on your lap deserves to be treated like a child, just as not everything that sits on that rickety table on the plane deserves to be treated like a barf bag.

Airlines aren’t going to be much help regarding the proper ergonomic placement of that laptop in flight, either: these are the same people who think that it’s perfectly all right to attach the table you eat from to another passenger’s tilt-back seat.

Yet we do more and more of our work in moving vehicles. Trains, planes, and automobiles are the offices of the Twenty-first Century. The offices of Century 21, especially: no realtor really needs to go into an office any more, and other professions are becoming similarly mobilized.

As are we all. I can hardly wait until I get one of inventor Dean Kamen’s revolutionary gyroscopically-stabilized scooters that are going to end pollution and postal worker disgruntlement in our time. We’ll all soon be able to get mobile without Mobil—or Chevron or BP—but Dean, where am I going to put my laptop?

Reprinted from Dr. Dobb’s Journal.

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Swaine’s Flames

Loveless and Baggage

From a proposed take-off on the burlesque British history 1066 and All That tentatively titled 6502 and All That:

Ada Loveless invented female programmers. Before her time, while there were no programmers, they were all male. This was a Good Thing, however, because during WWII all computers were female. In America, many of these computers were wax, while in Britain they were usually wrens found belching in the park.

Ada Loveless was the daughter of the famous author and entrepreneur H. P. Loveless. When he was not writing horror stories, H. P. Loveless was busy founding HP, a Packard dealership and garage just off Woz Way in Silicon Valley. HP was famous for getting its Way. Anyone who prevented HP from getting its Way was forced to donate several hours polishing the cars backwards. This was known as Reverse Polish Donation, and was a Good Thing.

Ada Loveless was British, and so of course was close friends with Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Charles Bronson (of the literary Bronson sisters, Charles, Emily, and Ann), and Charles Baggage, an engineer on the Jacquard–Turing Line.

Baggage was famous for not inventing the computer, which he didn’t do twice. He didn’t invent the computer so well that today he has a museum named after him, called the Computer History Museum. He also invented steampunk and talking about technology at cocktail parties, so not inventing the computer was perhaps a Good Thing.

Ada Loveless later joined the Navy and studied martial arts, at which time she was known as Grasshopper, or sometimes Admiral Grasshopper.