This is the time of year when technology writers predict the future of the industry. I can’t do that, but I can try to imagine what I’ll be working with one year from now.

Macintosh

One year ago, I was still pouring money into my Old World Mac. First it was a PowerMac 7500 in a 7200 case, and I finally moved the whole show (G3 upgrade card, IDE adapter, RAM, hard drive, and Radeon) into a 9500 case. I spent a lot of time and money trying to make a cheap fast Mac. I still believed that Macs were expensive.

Today, I have an iBook (600 MHz G3, ATI Rage Mobility graphics) on my desk. It suits my needs for the most part, but I wish it were a G4. My most commonly-used peripherals are a 30GB FireWire drive and a Bluetooth adapter.

In one year, I hope to have something faster. I drool over the 1 GHz PowerBook with its SuperDrive, but I can’t picture myself spending that much, or giving up the iBook’s durability and small size. Between now and then, I expect modest speed bumps and integrated Bluetooth. So, in one year, I’m hoping for a 1 GHz G3 (G4 would be nicer) iBook with Bluetooth and Airport.

.NET

A year ago, I was writing books and articles about an emerging technology called .NET. At the time, I was spending a lot of time with C# and developing code to generate API references for books like C# in a Nutshell. I did all of my .NET hacking on Windows.

Today, I’m more interested in .NET Mobile technology (Compact Framework and MMIT), and I spend a lot of time fixing bugs in and supporting the code that generates API references for books like C# in a Nutshell. I do most of my .NET hacking on Windows.

One year from now, I expect to be working with C# 2.0, and leaving the mobile technology to other folks. I will be doing most of my .NET hacking on Unix or Linux.

Wireless

One year ago, I had an 802.11b network at home and a CDPD modem for when I went on the road. The CDPD modem was really slow, but I could use it anywhere from Washington, DC to Boston, MA. It was reliable enough, and I had a flat rate for unlimited bandwidth.

Today, I still have the 802.11b network. I gave up the CDPD modem and replaced it with a Sony Ericsson t68i (GPRS and integrated Bluetooth). I now spend $20 a month for a measly 8MB of data. I use my bandwidth sparingly and wish for more. However, I’m pleasantly surprised by the number of places where I get decent GPRS coverage (as compared to the AT&T Wireless coverage map that I saw when I signed up). When I’m on the road, I use 802.11b hotspots wherever I can find them (mostly airports and conferences).

In one year, I expect to still have the t68i. I’ll probably still have the crappy 8MB data allowance, since it takes a long time for Big Telcos to change (and sometimes they never do). Something slightly faster and cheaper will have come out, and I’ll be ticked off about my 2-year contract. However, this will be offset by the fact that I’ll find coverage in many more places.

In one year, I’ll still have an 802.11b network at home, and I’ll find enough hotspots when I’m on the road to keep me happy and make me much less dependent on GPRS.

In one year, I’ll have a digital camera that has built-in Bluetooth.

Windows

A year ago, I ran Windows 2000 on a 600 MHz Pentium laptop for most of my work and used a 1200 MHz Athlon for my heavy lifting. I thought that I could slowly migrate over to Mac OS X if I could only get decent performance out of Virtual PC (which was buggy and slow).

Today, the Athlon is in my stepson’s rumpus room. I still use the laptop from time to time, but I mostly log into it from my iBook with Microsoft’s free Remote Desktop client. I can get some of my work done with Virtual PC, but it is still kind of slow (but not quite as buggy). I run Windows 2000 under Virtual PC and .NET Server 2003 (Release Candidate 2) on my Pentium machine.

One year from now, I hope to use Virtual PC for most of my Windows work (Virtual PC 6.0 is out now, and it promises a big speed boost over the current edition). If I get a newer iBook, it will support Quartz Extreme (my current iBook doesn’t), have a bigger L2 cache, and a faster processor. But I’m not fooling myself; I’ll still need to keep a PC around for occasional use when Virtual PC doesn’t cut it.

One year from now, I expect that I’ll run .NET Server 2003 for most of my Windows work, and I hope to be looking at Longhorn betas by then.

Mobile Computing

One year ago, I was trying to use a Palm III for my mobile computing needs. When I packed it to use on a trip, I’d never use it (except to play games on the plane ride). I hated using Graffiti for input. I never had more than a dozen contacts on the thing and probably half as many appointments

Today, I use my t68i the way I imagined I’d use my Palm. I use iCal, Address Book, and iSync on my Mac to manage information that’s stored the phone. I have more contacts than ever in my address book and a whole mess of appointments in my calendar. Occasionally, I type appointments and contacts into the phone, but I do most of my data entry on the Mac.

In a year, I’ll still use the t68i, but I’ll have many more contacts and appointments. iSync, iCal, and Address Book will be much better than their current versions, and I’ll have lots of fun with them.

What do you imagine you’ll be working with a year from now?

Maybe it was a deal that Apple had to strike with the Devil to give iPods the appearance of legitimate, non-criminal devices. But I’ve always hated the fact that I could choose only one computer to be the “host” for my MP3 collection, and that was the only place I could freely swap my music files back and forth with the iPod.

It’s a limitation that gnawed at me because it ran counter to the very spirit of the device. I bought my tunes and I want to play them anyway I want, and that includes using the iPod to move them from one computer to another.

In case you haven’t encountered this friendly little “RIAA-laden” message, it reads like this when you connect your iPod to a non-host computer:

The iPod “Derrick’s iPod” is linked to another iTunes music library. Do you want to change the link to this iTunes music library and replace all existing songs and playlists on this iPod with those from this library?

Hell no I don’t! I just want to copy the audible book I downloaded earlier (you know, the one I bought) to another computer so I can listen to it while I sift through 350 emails waiting for me in my inbox.

Once again, the enterprising spirit of independent developers came to the rescue. There are a handful of nifty applications you can use to take back control of your iPod. My current favorite is PodWorks 1.1 by Buzz Andersen.

This $6 shareware program provides you complete access to your iPod music, including its proprietary, internal database format. That means you can pull the ID3 data, along with the music, out of your Pod and on to your desktop. You can then copy the music into another iTunes library without a hitch.

Now I can use my iPod the way I want to use it, sharing my music and books among the Macs I own. Thank God for independent developers to save us from corporate compromise and silly limitations.

A jury of four women and eight men decided that ElcomSoft had never intended to break the law by producing software that allowed users to make copies of electronic books and have them read aloud to the blind. This case caught the public’s attention when ElcomSoft programmer Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested in July 2001 after a talk at a conference in Las Vegas.

“Today’s jury verdict sends a strong message to federal prosecutors who believe that tool makers should be thrown in jail just because a copyright owner doesn’t like the tools,” said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney at San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which works to protect civil liberties in cyberspace.

This is clearly a blow to the 1998 U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, since the ElcomSoft case was the first time the U.S. Federal Government has attempted to enforce the law.

For more reading on this case:

Russian Firm Cleared in US Digital Copyright Trial, Reuters

Russian firm acquitted in digital copyright case, San Jose Mercury News

Russian Software Firm found Innocent, Associated Press

Verdict Seen as Blow to DMCA, Wired News

Thanks to an extremely gracious Apple employee, our home printer sharing issue has been solved. After posting Rock and a Hard Place last week, WebObjects/Enterprise support team member Henry Stukenborg contacted me with an offer to try and help sleuth out the source of the problem.

As it turns out, CUPS has a nifty http interface, which becomes available as soon as you enable printer sharing - just hit https://localhost:631 (and no, this doesn’t mean people can control your printer remotely if they know your IP - CUPS restricts administrative access to localhost).

From there, click on Printers - you’ll see all the shareable printers on your network. If all is well, you should be able to print test pages from here. More importantly, you’ll be able to see the names by which CUPS sees the printers. This interface revealed that my print chain was breaking down somewhere between Print Center’s identification of the remote printer - which is managed by Rendezvous - and the operating system’s ability to actually send documents to it - which is managed by CUPS. CUPS will use either IP or hostname resolution to identify printers — what was breaking down on my system was the resolution of hostname to IP address (nslookup helped here).

When pulling up the CUPS http interface from the host computer, the printer appeared as HL-1440_series@gong. But the same printer as viewed from the CUPS UI on her machine was HL-1440_series@betips.net. Neither idenfication was correct.

The kink in my setup is that I run a domain off the machine - betips.net - and allow my ISP to handle the DNS. But I’ve always called this machine “gong” - I had entered “gong” as the hostname in /etc/hostconfig and as the Computer and Rendezvous names in Sharing prefs. Thus, a subtle discrepancy between the “gong” hostname and “www” or “www.betips.net” had always been present - I had just never tried to do anything that exposed the discrepancy.

By returning the hostname entry in /etc/hostconfig back to -AUTOMATIC- and restarting both computers, OS X was able to identify machines on the network the way it saw fit. My wife practically blew a gasket of joy when the remote printer hummed to life from her workstation.

So as it turns out, the problem was fairly pedestrian and the fix was simple. It’s one of those problems that seems almost obvious in retrospect, once you know the solution. But it’s only obvious if you know where to look. The Apple Geniuses, Brother’s support dept., and I all suspected either the printer driver or the CUPS layer. None of us thought to look at problems in hostname identification. As Wittgenstein said, “A man is imprisoned in a room forever if it never occurs to him to pull, rather than push the door.” Henry thought to pull the door. I owe him one.

I’m stuck in one of those loops where both the OS vendor and the peripheral vendor point the finger at one over a basic incompatibility, leaving the customer stranded.

A few months ago, I bought a USB Brother HL-1440 laser printer on the recommendation of a local Mac outlet. The printer prints perfectly from the PowerMac it’s attached to. And thanks to Rendezvous, the printer shows up automatically on my wife’s machine (which is also OS X 10.2.2). But when she goes to send a print job, the fun stops. Her Print Center displays the incredibly helpful error message “IPP0: Undefined Error” and the job never materializes.

A little poking around indicates that this is a problem in the CUPS layer, although no mention of it appears in the Apple Knowledge Base. I posted to the Apple support forums and found a few other people with the same problem, but no Apple employees have responded there.

When an Apple store opened up in Emeryville, I stood in line at the Genius Bar to get some answers. Their response: It has to be a problem with the printer driver, and I should contact Brother. This made no sense to me, since A) The driver works perfectly on the local machine and B) My impression had been that any USB printer with a working driver should be shareable via Rendezvous. I didn’t believe that the printer vendor had to write sharing support into the driver - that should be handled by the CUPS and Rendezvous layers.

Nevertheless, I contacted Brother’s tech support. Their response was that my printer did not have Rendezvous support - they’re talking about something different here - I don’t care about built-in Rendezvous, but about USB printer sharing. They said there was nothing else I could do but contact Apple.

I went back to the Genius bar and told them Brother had sent me right back to Apple. This time the Genius acknowledged that it should work, that the driver doesn’t need any kind of special support. But he did not have any theories as to why printer sharing doesn’t work on my home network (static IPs, in case you’re curious).

So for the past three months, my wife has only been able to print by copying documents to my machine first, and printing from there. She wonders why we didn’t just get Windows machines, because this kind of thing “just works” with Windows (ouch!). Brother can’t help me. Apple can’t help me. It seems clear to me that this is a problem in Rendezvous and/or CUPS, but I can’t get Apple to acknowledge that there is even a problem. I would be more than happy to provide debug logs or anything else they require. But I can’t even get through to Apple without purchasing AppleCare (I refuse to pay to talk to someone about their own bugs).

The situation is absurd. Apple is a premium brand, and we pay top dollar for Apple solutionsin part because of their reputation for superior usability. If Apple can’t deliver that, and if they persist in charging for support on their own bugs, they’re sunk.

Earlier this week I read a note on the Farber list titled, (DMCA) Digital Copyright Law Up for Challenge by Michelle Madigan, Medill News Service (originally published on Yahoo News). In her writing Michelle stated:

The Copyright Office is accepting comments on the law, which makes it
illegal to copy digital entertainment and imposes restrictions that
some users say violate their fair-use rights. A comment form is
available online and must be submitted by December 18.

Later in her article, Michelle posts some quotes by Seth Finkelstein, a computer programmer from Cambridge, Massachusetts who authored a successful exception to the law the last time it was open to review. He offers some advice to others who’d like to comment to the Copyright Office:

Finkelstein encourages individuals and businesses to take advantage of
the opportunity to voice their concerns about DMCA provisions. He
offers this advice: “You can’t argue ideology. The Copyright Office
has said over and over that they don’t want theoretical arguments.” Be specific and stick to the facts, he says.

Related to this, O’Reilly Network writer, Richard Koman, has created a special weblog to capture developments related to DMCA, copyright, patents/open source, etc. Richard has been following these stories for a couple of years and has interviewed many of the great minds who take issue with aspects of digital rights management.

Later this week, Tim O’Reilly is publishing an article on O’Reilly Network titled, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution. In this piece Tim draws from his own lessons as a book publisher and talks about how some of these experiences may apply to the music and film publishing world.

Bottom line: We have a window of opportunity to influence digital copyright law. If you have an interest in this area, and I hope you do, please read some of this content and share your thoughts to those who can act on your behalf.

Funny how StarOffice gets all the press for being the best alternative to MS Office — compared to Gobe Productive, StarOffice is just as bloated as MS Office, and doesn’t really push the game forward.

Gobe was forged from old Claris Works engineers dissatisfied with Apple, who went off to develop BeOS software. I wrote quite a few glowing reviews of Gobe Productive during the BeOS years, not just to be a cheerleader, but because Productive truly rocked. They were doing stuff with cross-app data integration that Microsoft hadn’t even dreamed of yet — one app to handle spreadsheets, word processing, graphics, illustration, and presentations, shifting seamlessly between modes in a single document. Awesome.

Long story short, Be belly-flopped and Gobe created Windows and Linux versions of the product. Then the dot-com teat deflated and Gobe hit hard times. For a while there’s been talk that Free Radical Software was going to buy the Productive license from Gobe and open source the product. But they too are cash shy, so now organizations like BeUnited are going door to door to raise collaborative money (more discussion).

An open source Productive would benefit users of all platforms (even Windows). Yes, there’s got to be a good Office alternative for the open source crowd. No, StarOffice ain’t necessarily it.

I had a few spare minutes today, so I decided to try compiling one of my C# apps under Rotor. (This app is what generates the API quickrefs in books like C# in a Nutshell.)

I tried just typing make, but I had a call to MessageBox.Show() that won’t compile under Rotor. When I commented that out (as well as the using System.Windows.Forms; line), I was amazed that the whole app compiled without a single error, warning, or tongue of flame ejecting from my Macintosh’s Firewire port.

What was even more surprising was that it was able to run without a single error; I asked it to reflect over System.dll, mscorlib.dll, and System.Xml.dll, and it gave me an XML document that I ran through our production tools, giving me this lovely PDF.

So even though Rotor includes only a subset of the .NET Framework Class Library, it’s a pretty useful subset!

Somehow, I managed to write a somewhat complex application that only used the types in the SSCLI. How lucky is that?

Leander Kahney just published Apple: It’s All About the Brand as part of his ongoing series on Wired. In the article, there’s the statement, “… in some cases, branding has become as powerful as religion.” And I think this is true in Apple’s case.

I’m not a critic of powerful branding, mind you, especially concerning Apple because I believe it saved the company. Clearly, one of the most important moves Steve Jobs made upon his return was to reestablish the brand that had floundered under the watch of the previous inept CEOs.

Alan Deutschman covers this quite well in his biography of Apple’s controversial CEO, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, which you can download from Audible.com and listen to on your computer or iPod. By reestablishing the brand, Jobs was able to quickly stop the bleeding and buy time to develop an entirely new product line up, including Mac OS X.

But sometimes companies cling too tightly to brand identity, and I think Apple falls prey to this also. The company wants everything to appear “very simple” because a key component of its identity is ease of use. Actually, many of Apple’s products, like the iApps, are really quite sophisticated.

I’m not really complaining about this because I make my living by showing people the hidden power beneath the advertised GUI. But I do think, as technologists, we shouldn’t let ourselves become hypnotized by effective brand advertising. There’s always more beneath the surface — both good and bad. And we’re the ones who need to keep that discussion alive along side the branded messages.