Yesterday I watched The Third & The Seventh (via Daring Fireball), a fully computer animated short film featuring iconic pieces of architecture. Watch it full screen and in HD on Vimeo’s site if you have the bandwidth. If this isn’t art then I don’t know what is.

I’m all better now, but the point of bringing up being sick for too much of February is that it’s not conducive to productivity. At the AAN Web Conference we announced our new product, and the good news is that everyone wants it. But the bad news is that everyone wants it yesterday, and it’s something that we’ve only just announced, not something we can start selling. (It’s also not a boxed product, but rather an improved framework for developing and maintaining our customers web sites. As such, there will be a non-insignificant amount of setup work and time to get a client’s site into the new framework.) So I wish February didn’t have to go quite so quick, since there’s quite a bit of work still to be done.

I wasn’t too much involved with the development of this product before the conference, but I have been since. I’m glad I am, because I’m pretty darn excited about it. In addition to allowing clients to more directly manage the layout, style and functionality of their sites, it should help cut down the amount of development time we spend on doing site redesigns and allow new employees get up-to-speed quicker. That’s important, because there is already enough for a new developer to learn, considering we have both a proprietary abstracted database layer (Gyrobase) and proprietary programming language (<ev>).

Speaking of <ev>, that’s what I’ve been spending just about all my free time working on improving. Currently, the language’s parser and evaluator are written completely in Perl. While you might think this is a recipe for slowness — an interpreted language running on top of an interpreted language — it actually holds up reasonably well. But that’s not to say there isn’t lots of potential for improving performance, there is.

So, I’ve spent many nights and weekends in January and early February creating a compiler and virtual machine for <ev> written in C. In 2007 I had spent a weekend here and there writing an <ev> parser in C, mostly for the purpose of being a syntax validator. But it’s secondary purpose was to be the basis for this compiler and VM I’m now writing. It’s actually come quite a way. For instance, it successfully compiles and runs code that sets and displays variables. Though there’s still many more months of work ahead to get it to interact with the massive amounts of Perl code that would be impractical to re-implement in C, plus support for loops, conditionals, and math operations.

Truth be told, this compiler/VM has become a bit of an obsession. When I discovered that a compiler and a VM weren’t really such complex things and were well within my abilities to write, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how to go about implementing them for <ev>. And it’s actually been a lot of fun.

For anyone who hasn’t bought something recently at an Apple Store, you may be in for a bit of a shock. Apple has done away with cash registers, instead opting for roving employees with product scanners and wireless credit card processing devices. Since there is no place to form a queue, I had to roam around the store, constantly looking for an employee to free themselves from other customers. Instead of waiting in a line for ten minutes to get my iPhone, it took me forty minutes just to catch a free employee to fetch an iPhone and check me out.

On the whole, doing away with cash registers isn’t the problem — giving employees mobile checkout devices is actually a great idea. The problem is not having a designated place for customers to line up and make their purchases. Everyone complains about having to wait in line, but lines have stuck around for thousands of years because the alternative is chaos. The result of chaos is that a significant number of your customers feel like they were treated unfairly.

Frankly, I can’t see this absurd no-line policy resulting in anything but a decrease in retail store sales for Apple. I came very close to being frustrated enough to walk out without making a purchase.

My friend and co-worker, Collin, has noted this odd behavior from other companies. Dell, for instance, would list blade servers in their catalog, but not actually list their price. Instead, the catalog prompts you to call a rep and get a quote. As far as Collin is concerned — and quite rightfully so — Dell advertises but doesn’t actually sell blade servers. Perhaps Apple doesn’t have retail stores, just open houses where you can demo their products and drop stuff off for warranty repairs.

As for my iPhone, it’s great. Unfortunately, AT&T’s service in Tucson isn’t quite as good as my former provider (Sprint), at least in the two main places I need to use a phone. But I can make and receive calls in both places, and it seems like AT&T’s coverage is better than T-Mobile’s inside the office. For a while I had seriously been considering an unlocking hack because the Cell Test app (accessed by dialing *3001#12345#*) had me obsessing over signal strength. Eventually I realized that the real test of cell phone signal quality was whether or not I can make and receive calls from the places that mattered. I could, so I’ve stuck with AT&T.

Another surprise was how susceptible the iPhone’s antenna is to interference from the hand holding it. Avoiding covering the antenna, located underneath the black plastic at the bottom of the iPhone, greatly improves signal quality. Apparently this is a problem with all GSM phones, so I can’t hold it against Apple.

One of the cool things about the iPhone is, or rather was, the developer community that rapidly evolved around it and the hack that enabled read/write access to the iPhone’s file system. The 1.1.1 iPhone firmware update just as swiftly put an indefinite hold on unauthorized third-party development. Sadly, third-party apps had just started showing signs of being useful.

I’ve already upgraded to the 1.1.1 firmware, mainly because the “double-click the home button” feature outweighed the benefits of the third-party apps. If development continues on the third-party apps for the 1.0.2 firmware and they become truly useful, I’ll have to consider downgrading.

Now, John Gruber and Mark Pilgrim are saying that if you wanted a phone that’s open to third-party developers you shouldn’t have bought an iPhone. I fully agree: if Apple decides the iPhone is a closed device I won’t regret my purchase. What is disappointing though is that we do not know if the iPhone is a closed device or not! Apple won’t confirm or deny if an SDK is forthcoming.

Apple is a notoriously secretive company, but usually it’s for reasonable reasons: to protect themselves from competitors or to keep forthcoming products from hurting sales of current products. If Apple does have an SDK in the works, I don’t see the harm in pre-announcing it. If it has no plans for an SDK, why can’t Apple just say that it currently has no plans? Apple should show a bit more respect for the developers who want to write apps for the iPhone and iPod touch platforms, and for the users who would really like to consume those third-party apps.

At it’s heart, it’s a tinyurl clone with heaps of JavaScript and AJAX sugar. But I’m hoping I’ll have the time to continue to add features to it, to make it more than just a clone of tinyurl. At the very least, it’ll be a place where I can store links to interesting sites so that I have a way of recalling them months later. (Bookmarks have never worked well for me.)

If you give a URL to the pixie, (and you’re using a browser other than IE 6), you’ll see an animation of pixie dust transform your URL into a short URL. What others may find interesting about this animation, is it’s relatively simple implementation. It doesn’t use <canvas> at all; it’s just a div, a transparent background PNG and a bit of JavaScript to change the background-position CSS property to point to different frames inside the PNG at short intervals. This works surprisingly well.

Perhaps a more naïve implementation would load each frame of the animation as a distinct image. (Or use an animated GIF instead of PNG, but the boolean transparency of GIF is a deal breaker.) This method however allows all the frames to be downloaded in one, ~150KB, shot. With a JavaScript preload of the image, it should be completely downloaded by the time the user submits the form and the animation needs to play.

One of the more interesting things I learned while doing this is that indexed color PNGs (PNG8) actually have support for a pseudo alpha channel! An RGBA-palette, as it’s called, where each color in the palette can also have an alpha value. For some reason, I had always thought that indexed PNGs were limited to boolean transparency the same way GIFs are. The Gimp gives this impression, as it doesn’t seem to be able to support anything more than boolean transparency in indexed color mode.

I doubt that there are many graphics packages that will save a PNG with an RGBA-palette. It’s a real shame, because with some proper optimization PNGs are can be made smaller than GIFs. If you’re interested in creating these types of PNGs you’ll likely need to use pngquant. And while we’re on the topic of optimizing PNGs, OptiPNG is a must.

Another side project I’ve been working on is unallocated.com. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going for with it, but currently it aims to tell you as much about your IP address as it possibly can. One of the recent additions is a bit of AJAX to allow for a much faster page load. Getting the reverse DNS, geolocation, and ARIN whois lookup of an IP all take too much time to hold up the downloading of the rest of the page. The AJAX additions allow parallel XMLHttpRequests to download the parts of the page that are too slow to do inline.

A few weekends ago I was using my old PowerBook G4 while over at Lauren’s. While packing up my PowerBook to head home, I noticed that the power adapter was abnormally very hot. Looking closer, I noticed that the DC output wire’s insulation was creating a slight burning smell and looked all bubbly.

I’m lucky it didn’t start a fire and burn down Lauren’s house. And I’m not the only one who has been lucky, as this seems to be a recurring problem with PowerBook and iBook power adapters. There’s even a class action lawsuit.

The problem is that the design of the power adapter’s elegant cable management solution causes a lot of wear and tear on the DC output wire, especially where the wire meets the cable management hook, which is precisely where the big bubble is on the wire in the close-up. Apple is obviously aware of the problem, as with each revision of the power adapter they seem to add more reinforcement to the DC output wire. Unfortunately this is all that Apple has done. They’ll replace a fried power adapter for free, but the replacement of course has the same design flaw.

It’s difficult for me to judge how much this is Apple’s fault; I simply don’t know enough about electricity. Could there be circuit breaker that could stop a short on the DC side of a power adapter? Could the power adapter communicate with the computer on the other end to ensure that the power that is being sent over the wire is within a safe range of the power being received by the computer? I really don’t know.

In any case, it’s important for people who have a PowerBook, iBook, and even MacBook power adapter to handle their cables with care. If you have been rough with your cable — the power management hooks really do invite rough handling — then you should be wary of leaving your power adapter plugged in unattended. You might also consider buying a third party power adapter, like the the one sold by Macally. There is of course no guarantee that theirs is any safer, but it at least doesn’t suffer from the same design flaw as Apple’s.

Brian Nelson’s explanation for how Sen. Barack Obama’s picture got paired with a caption that read “Osama bin Laden” on the front page of Yahoo! News is perfectly reasonable. Yet nearly no one who replies in that thread actually believes him. It’s absurd, and sad.

The phone modems are turned on at 7:00pm on election day allowing the precincts to report totals. This phone communication method is fundamentally stupid. It opens the “crown jewels” (the central database of votes) to outside manipulation by anybody who has that phone number, often NOT changed between elections. Diebold’s software protocols allow standard personal computers to make an incoming connection, not just voting machines. Elections officials would never know that this “rogue” slipped in and manipulated the database.

The description of this exploit indicates that this system’s only layer of security is based on the assumption that an attacker does not have the phone number for the central modem bank. If this is true, the designers are relying on very bad security through obscurity.

Aug 29 17:59:26 localhost kernel[0]: AppleSMU -- shutdown cause = -110

Searching Google revealed very little about this error number. As the week went on, the reboots became more frequent. When I finally brought it into the Apple Store, it wouldn’t even turn on for them.

As it turned out, my problem was solved with a power supply replacement. Even though this iMac wasn’t covered under AppleCare, the local Apple Store replaced the power supply free of charge.

Yes, this goes against the common wisdom that everyone should use WEP to keep people from “stealing” your internet connection. But WEP is trivial to crack, so it only really provides a false sense of security. There’s also MAC based authorization, and that doesn’t keep people from listening in on your network traffic. So I leave my WiFi network open for all, and in doing so I try to be aware what data I’m broadcasting to the neighborhood when I use it.

The fact that my WiFi network is wide open isn’t news to the three neighbors I apparently have using it. In fact, they could even be reading this right now (Hi!), due to the fact that the network’s SSID is “limulus.net”. I don’t mind people freeloading on my wireless network, so long as they’re just using it for email and casual web browsing.

Today though, while I was playing WoW, my latency to the WoW servers shot through the roof. Typically I get about 80ms, but this was about 800ms. Pretty much unplayable. (Damn lag!) The wireless LED on my DSL/wifi router was flashing like crazy, and a quick investigation with Ethereal confirmed my suspicion: someone was downloading something via BitTorrent.

I didn’t bother to investigate what they were downloading, and I really don’t care. There are plenty of legal uses for BitTorrent (WoW uses it for game updates, for example). I suspect they don’t realize the havoc BitTorrent wreaks on a network — or maybe they figured it out and that’s why the download stopped only about a half hour in. Or maybe it was some piece of spyware running on their machine updating itself and they didn’t even know it was running.

At this point, I think most people in my situation would just block this user’s MAC address. But I’ve decided to be nice to this freeloading neighbor that I haven’t even met yet: I’m going to setup my FreeBSD machine using pf and ALTQ to be a bandwidth shaping router for my network. This way, my freeloaders will have their BitTorrent bandwidth capped, and I’ll still be able to use my internet connection for things that require low latency (like WoW, and SSHing to work machines).

The gory details on how I accomplish this will be posted here soon.