The MacBook Air
Wow, did I make a good choice.
In late August I upgraded from my trusty 15″ MacBook Pro (late 2008) to a 11″ MacBook Air (mid-2011). I was pretty nervous about the switch. I’ve been the productive owner of a 17″ Power Book so this represented a fundamental change.
I fly a bit for work and play. Of all the regulations that require compliance the worst are the limitations on the use of electronics “during takeoff and landing.” When you’re flying in and out of large markets the “takeoff and landing” portion of the flight can be an hour or more.
Nick Bolton does a good job asking the question on his New York Times blog but comes up empty.
According to the post, the FAA requires airplanes be able to withstand 100 v/m (volts per meter).
From the blog post:
When EMT Labs put an Amazon Kindle through a number of tests, the company consistently found that this e-reader emitted less than 30 microvolts per meter when in use. That’s only 0.00003 of a volt.
OK. But the post goes on to ask the obvious next question: LOTS of people have Kindles and iPads. What about THAT!?
But one Kindle isn’t sending out a lot of electrical emissions. But surely a plane’s cabin with dozens or even hundreds will? That’s what both the F.A.A. and American Airlines asserted when I asked why pilots in the cockpit could use iPads, but the people back in coach could not. Yet that’s not right either.
“Electromagnetic energy doesn’t add up like that. Five Kindles will not put off five times the energy that one Kindle would,” explained Kevin Bothmann, EMT Labs testing manager. “If it added up like that, people wouldn’t be able to go into offices, where there are dozens of computers, without wearing protective gear.”
If you’re involved in online media and/or journalism and haven’t looked at the Poynter Institute‘s News University (at http://www.newsu.org/), you are missing out. This weekend I took the Online Media Law course (self-paced). I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.
I started the course by taking the assessment. I scored an 85%. Not bad for a non-journalist, non-lawyer. :) We do spend a good bit of time working to understand media law so that it can influence product development.
The course was divided into three topics:
Some interesting bits:
Last week I was fortunate to attend the 2011 Semantic Technology conference at the San Francisco Hilton at Union Square. Given the length (Sun – Thu) of the conference and its technical detail the notes from the conference will be divided into individual articles.
In this first post I need to thank the main organizer, Tony Shaw and the San Francisco Hilton at Union Square for the power situation. It’s clear that airport designers and technical conference venues use the same electrical contractor/consultant. Their goal (learned through years of observation) is to provide as few power outlets as possible per person. The United gates at LAX provide about 3 outlets per 10k people which is a feat.
Not so at the 2011 Semantic Tech conference!
It might seem like a little thing but it’s not. The tables in almost every session at the 2011 Semantic Technology conference had a string (two per table) of power strips. Simple, relatively easy-to-do and yet surprisingly rare.
When you are away from the office for more than a day or two being able to plug in a laptop to wall power is so useful that it passes the threshold of being a nicety and gets to be a necessity.
Again, kudos to the San Francisco Union Square Hilton and Tony Shaw / Mediabistro (the organizers of the conference). Thanks!
If you’re interested in things local and social (e.g., Zope Corporation‘s customers) you should read Chris Dixon’s excellent (and short) blog post about graphs. As Dixon points out a graph is the real “secret sauce” at Facebook.
Example person-friendship graph
This graph lets us reason about Steve, Mary and Joe (they all know one another and are all friends). They likely have something in common.
This graph also invites some inference. Two of Joe’s friends are Sally’s friends. In the algebra of social networks that suggests Joe and Sally might be friends. This is (in an oversimplified way) how and why Facebook makes suggestions about people you might want to befriend.
Despite the only relationships in the graph above being “Friend” and “Possible Friend” this is all good stuff. Moreover, the graph of human relationships is arguably the most valuable one.
BUT… it is not the only one.
Local media organization like suburban newspapers, radio stations, and tv stations are the switchboard for graph information in their community. Consider the following graph:
Example community-everything graph
As you look at this graph see the Facebook graph extended with a day or week of news coverage and advertising in your community. Imagine this graph growing every day for a year. Now imagine how we might be able to reason about relationships between people, organizations, places, merchants, and schools.
Local media organizations are in THE best position to capture this graph.
Dixon ends his blog post with a hint at the value of social identity (via Facebook Connect and OAuth) and I think he’s right on:
Besides creating graphs, Facebook and Twitter (via Facebook Connect and OAuth) created identity systems that are extremely useful for the creation of 3rd party graphs. I expect we’ll look back on the next few years as the golden age of graph innovation.
Stay tuned.
As Tom Waits (an American singer, songwriter, composer) once said, “The large print giveth, but the small print taketh away.” Truer words have not have been spoken.
From the You-Have-Got-To-Be-Sh^H^H Kidding Me Department… As reported on ReadWriteWeb on April 28, 2011 the GPS manufacturer TomTom was caught with its hand in the cookie jar. The company company sold speed data (collected while its customers were navigating with the TomTom application) to POLICE in the Netherlands!!! The fact that it was not personally identifiable means little in my opinion.
What percentage of TomTom customers actually read (and appreciated) the TomTom Terms of Service? Somewhere in those Terms of Service, TomTom asserted the right to do anything they wanted (including sell to the police) with the data their device collected while riding around in your car.
Here’s an idea for a consumer-facing startup subscription service. Consumers register and identify the products and services they use or are contemplating using. This startup (let’s call it fine-print-taketh-away.com) would legally review the licenses and highlight the issues about which you should be aware (e.g., your GPS vendor can use your navigation data in any way they like including selling it to the police). You would get notified when they changed their terms of service. I’d pay for that…
Dutch speakers can read the original article. English speakers can use a Google translation of the story to get the gist of the story.
At Zope Corporation we write a LOT of content in reStructuredText.
From the reStructuredText site:
reStructuredText is an easy-to-read, what-you-see-is-what-you-get plaintext markup syntax and parser system. It is useful for in-line program documentation (such as Python docstrings), for quickly creating simple web pages, and for standalone documents. reStructuredText is designed for extensibility for specific application domains. The reStructuredText parser is a component of Docutils. reStructuredText is a revision and reinterpretation of the StructuredText and Setext lightweight markup systems.
Many of the artifacts I create and work with use plain-text tables. Working with plain-text tables manually can be painful. The other day I stumbled on emacs’ support for text-based tables. I found it pretty useful.
ExpanDrive allows Mac users to mount remote storage as though it was local. While this alone isn’t rocket science, the variety of supported remote storages and the reliability of the software have made it a nearly indispensable tool.
I routinely use it to mount:
ExpanDrive relies on the MacFUSE kernel extension. MacFUSE is a Mac variant of the FUSE which allows programmers to implement complete filesystems as a user-space (i.e., not in the operating system kernel) application. This is a huge advantage the technical bits of which are beyond the scope of this post. Curious technical readers should check out the FUSE article at Wikipedia.
As a total bonus ExpanDrive supports and preserves OpenMeta metadata on the ssh and Amazon S3 volumes I’ve used. I’ll be writing another post on OpenMeta soon. Until then go get yourself a copy of ExpanDrive!
Every now and again you find a little piece of software that, in hindsight, you wonder how you lived without. A while ago I found just such a piece of software, MsgFiler. The developer recently released an upgrade exclusively through the Apple App Store which provoked me to purchase the upgrade and renew my appreciation for what I begun to think was a feature built-in to Apple Mail!
MsgFiler makes filing email messages as efficient as possible.
A few things make this a great match for me:
MsgFiler is invoked with a (configurable) hotkey (I used the suggested Apple-9 combination). You then get a dialog box for searching your folders (using an “incremental search” interface). When the search has narrowed your list you press your down arrow to drop into the selection box. Select the destination folder and press Enter. Message(s) is/are filed. Done. You can select multiple messages and file them. You can Copy messages (i.e., as opposed to moving them).
Highly recommended!
Sometimes it’s the small things that make a difference. In this case a friend of mine referred me to a very clever little utility called Caffeine. From the product’s webpage:
Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Hold down the Command key while clicking to show the menu.
Run and get some.
