@lindsay.at

Inspired by David McRaney, Anil Dash, and my dear friend Anne, I started thinking of kitty pidgin and its simple grammar, the idea struck me, what else deals with simple grammars?

I bring to you LOLCODE, an as-yet unspecified and unimplemented programming language.

The first step is always Hello World:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

Oh. That was quite easy. The next thing people learn to do is count to ten:

HAI
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
	UP VAR!!1
	VISIBLE VAR
	IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

I suppose you could count the even numbers by saying "UP VAR!!2".

Error checking on file open (and then conditionally printing the file) would be the next thing to implement:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
	AWSUM THX
		VISIBLE FILE
	O NOES
		INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE

Have any other contributions? Keep on the lookout for lolcode.com....

[Update: That was the soft launch. Did you miss it?]

Damn Joyent for continually being able to come up with products I want to buy. It's clear that they tap into a psychological type, and I fit that profile. I've written about the freedom offered by Joyent's pricing model for the "lifetime" plans, and all I can say is they've done it again: their virtual private server offering, the OpenSolaris-based "Accelerator," has a limited-customer offer for "lifetime" hosting.

Never mind that Joyent have repeatedly denied that they would (or even could) offer lifetime hosting on this utility-computing-style product. They did it. And halved the price for existing customers like me.

Never mind that while I had been intrigued and tempted by the Accelerators, I set the idea of signing up aside for two reasons: I have numerous containers at my disposal with my OpenSolaris servers at work, anyway, and the extra month's setup fee for an Accelerator didn't make it worth it for me. I bought it.

Absolutely brilliant of them: provide a product that I wouldn't pay $150 to try, but pay $500 more to "buy outright." I'm freed up from the pressure of having to take advantage of it right away. What surprises me most right now is that there is no news of the offer ending, yet. I would have sworn that there would be 200 takers within hours.

In the course of hanging out on the ZFS discussion list, I've developed a healthy paranoia for the safety of my data. Hard disk drives fail all too easily nowadays, and I know it's a matter of time before another major data-loss event, especially since my family's large media collections are being held on single external hard drives prized more for their attractive cases than for their reliability.

I found out a had a few hundred pounds left on my consulting account code at the university, and it's ideal for buying computer kit. I ran it past my Executive Producer (read: 'wife'), and she's also ready for redundant network-attached storage, having also looked into it for her job. I spent several days trying to figure out if I could build a solution myself based on OpenSolaris and ZFS, but ended up thwarted by form factor: I could find no cases that were compact as well as capacious enough for (at least) four hard drives.

So, I looked around, and it sounded like the Infrant ReadyNAS NV Plus is the unit to beat. As a UK supplier has a special on disks bundled with the unit, I put in an order right away.

But I wonder, what do I really want? I want flexibility and ease of administration. I want verifiable redundancy. I want ZFS. I also want something that will work seamlessly with my home network. I want something that understands Apple's protocols well. I want to be able to stop running iTunes at some point during the day, but still keep synching with my AppleTV. I want an integrated backup solution that works well with Apple's upcoming Time Machine feature in Leopard. I want something only Apple could provide.

The net is strewn with "Apple needs to provide this form factor or they won't get my custom" articles. I know that Apple's strength is in providing a simple, comprehensible product range that potentially serves a vast proportion of the populace. Still I wonder if an "iServe" could be coming. Consider:

• The AppleTV, iPhone, and the Airport Extreme (presumably running Darwin) are showing the way that Apple can expand their offerings while cashing in on the intellectual capital they've built up over the years of fine-tuning the full stack of Mac OS X. Add a little more sophistication with regards to storage to the Airport Extreme, and you have the basis of the device I'm envisaging.
• Apple has been building expertise and goodwill in the storage arena for years with the XServe RAID. It gets a fair amount of respect for that product from certain quarters. It won't be the first time Apple has tested a technology at the professional high end as a dress rehearsal for something in the consumer space.
• Apple has been very open about its efforts to port ZFS to Mac OS X/Darwin, and many have noted how ideal Time Machine would be as a GUI for ZFS's snapshot feature.
• The backup qualities of Time Machine only go as far as the reliability of the backup media, and external hard drives have had a sinking reputation for years. Building a reliable RAID NAS on ZFS would be a solution to a problem that people don't realise they have. You can now have faith in your backups, and serve all your home's or small workgroup's computers at once.
• Time Machine, as far as I understand it, seems to be rather storage-hungry (with snapshots, saving a copy of every version of every file that has existed on your computer from the day you install Leopard), and with the vast majority of Macs shipping with a single hard drive, that's a bit incongruous. Why should Apple sell you a software solution without providing the hardware or service to go along with it? This could be a sign for Apple to sell you something more.
• With iTunes moving into an increasing role as a media hub application, it makes bigger and bigger demands of the machine it runs on. With an AppleTV in the house, the ideal (as I use it) really seems to be 24-7 operation of the host computer, with iTunes always running. My Mac mini G4 has always been a 24-hour computer, but other people would like to send their iMacs to sleep once in a while. Seeing as iTunes serves multiple roles (media jukebox, media organizer, store front end, and a synchronizing/streaming server) at once, there's room for splitting off one of these functionalities into a lightweight server process that integrates with the iPod ecosystem more cleanly than the third-party daapd offered with RAID NAS products.
• There are NAS and RAIDed NAS products on the market already, and although they're gaining popularity, there are no dominant players. That's an opportunity for Apple to capture mind share with a new product. It's interesting that Netgear just bought Infrant, but Netgear still doesn't seem to be able to capture the public's imagination as Apple does.

RoughlyDrafted had a nice analysis of Apple's current NAS storage capabilities when it compared the new Airport Extreme with Windows Home Server. I think the Airport-as-NAS is just the thin end of the wedge for Apple, so here's what I propose:

• A 4- or 5-disk RAIDZ-capable array of disks
• AFP and SMB file sharing
• Printer sharing
• The server portions of iTunes
• Low power consumption
• Small form factor
• Simple administration through something resembling the Airport Assistant
• Possibly a gigabit ethernet interface (but certainly at least 100Mbit), for workgroups or direct connections
• Possibly USB and Firewire for direct connections

...and that's it. It could be a wireless (802.11 draft N) device, and could have router and wireless access point capabilities, but those would dilute the message on what this device is for: to serve and protect your files, reliably, quietly, and cheaply.

Everyone wonders when, with Apple. This is mere speculation: it may never happen. When could it happen, then? I would expect this sort of product to come in the wake of next year's Macworld Expo in January 2008, at the very earliest. I see the iServe as dependent on Leopard shipping, to help build the demand for the feature through Time Machine. It wants a major announcement to give it the time in the spotlight for the general populace to understand what it's for. That suggests Macworld Expo. As I've envisaged it, it's quite a boring, back-room product (which, we have to note, resembles the new Airport Extreme in 2007, which didn't even get a Macworld keynote mention), so an October release for the Christmas buying season would be inappropriate. I know that I could use this sort of product tomorrow, and would happily cancel my Infrant order to do so. That, I must acknowledge, is more wishful thinking than anything else in this article.

Any thoughts?

[I know I'm not the first to propose an iServe (though these couple links were found just after I finished the article). This is ultimately a revisiting of an idea that's been around for a while, with an idea on how Apple could make its mark on an emerging market category, and a survey of current developments with the Apple of 2007.]

I just found out that Apple's having its annual shareholder meeting today. Here's a question that I was surprised didn't get asked on the financial statement phone conference a few weeks ago:

How much did the settlement with Apple Corps cost?

I mean, Apple clearly paid a lot of money to be absolutely in the clear with the name, and it seems that it's essentially buying goodwill and the ability to work in the clear in the music industry. I wondered about this before, but still haven't turned up any answers.

Ars Technica's article, iPhone to be subsidized or not? We're getting dizzy trying to answer, is a bit more muddled than their usual coverage:

Will the iPhone be subsidized by AT&T or not? Yes? No? Maybe? Reply hazy, try again? The theories are all over the map, but recent reports say that the answer is "probably not."

I really had the impression that this was nearing resolution (or consensus) already. In learning about Verizon passing on the iPhone, we learned what Apple was after: a share of ongoing revenue from the mobile carrier's subscribers. It seems like a reasonable substitution for subsidies: what would normally be discounted from the up-front price is instead paid out to the hardware supplier. Why shouldn't we believe that's what Apple got from AT&T/Cingular? It makes sense for Apple, as:

• It protects the price point of the iPhone and the iPod, the relationship of which is very critical.
• Such price point protection allows Apple control across markets – iPhones are not going to be radically different in price between the US, UK, Germany, and South Korea due to different network providers offering different levels of subsidies.
• It gives Apple an ongoing revenue model to allow for new feature updates, in keeping with Sarbanes-Oxley (a point we learned about with Apple's 2007Q2 conference call).
• There's clearly no need for Apple to lower their price point to the consumer in order to garner higher volume: if this is like most other Apple product launches, supplies are likely to be constrained in the first couple months as production ramps up.
• Prices will drop, not at the rate of new phones (often halved within six months, at least within the UK), but at the rate of iPods (more like $50/year for the top-of-the-line iPod).

No, there's no way we can know for certain until the iPhone is launched, but I believe this is in keeping with the Apple we know: hacking an entrenched system to work to its own advantage. It can't get around the network carriers being the gatekeepers to its hardware, but it can tweak the existing model so that rather than cheapening its product, it gets even more profit.

Today is the end of a personal era. Today is the day I let my long-held-in-reserve domain dandysalami.com expire. For a long time, I had intended the domain as a web home, and obtained it some six years ago as a quirky personal domain. (It's an anagram, get it?) I never did anything with it, and as my professional profile grew and the web matured, it seemed harder and harder to justify sending anyone to that domain with a straight face, or with that expressing anything about my identity. When I had the brainstorm about this domain last autumn, I went for it, and haven't looked back.

Still, I do feel a pang of regret, and the decision was made especially bittersweet when I received the following spam.

You are looking at a photo, made especially for you so that you can really see how your website or company name comes into its own on your company car.

To watch our [FOO]PLATES VIDEO follow this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyFUsc_d_iw.

The product you can see is called [FOO]PLATES.

[Foo]plates are three dimensional letters, made of the same material as car manufacturers use for their brand name. The letters are chrome-plated so that they are resistant to any type of weather.
A standard [Foo]plate consists of 20 characters. A [foo]plate with 20 characters is approximately 40cms (15,7 inch) long. For more than 20 characters you can request a quotation via sales@[foo]-plates-b2b.co.uk. There are letters of 2.2 cms such as a, o, m, c etc. and of 3.2 cms high such as A, B, C, D, l, p, k etc. Additional characters are _ @ ( ) ? , € - ! The delivery time is between 1 to 3 weeks. [etc.]

I elided the company name because, well, clever though it is, it's still spam, and the last thing I want is to poison my google cred with that stuff.

Anyway, I thought that was a great use of an image processing script for something that was absolutely absurd. (Plus they get props for using Myriad as the font, and for roping YouTube to run their commercial.) Has anyone else run into these folks?