In December 1995 I was halfway through boot camp, a time called service week. Service week was when the recruits went to work in the galley. Some served food, other mopped the floor, and still others handed out miniature boxes of cereal.

My name was chosen alphabetically for assignment to the GI Hole. There were six of us; our job was to wash the big pots and pans that the food was cooked in and to get rid of leftovers. Approaching the hole from the glistening clean galley, the walls would grow continually darker, the air thicker and warmer, and the odor more pungent. The hole itself was a very large room; with pots and pans stacked six feet high along three of the four walls.

We would work at a feverish pitch, trying desperately to finish at a decent hour. I was nearly deafened by the sound of the metal pans flying down the metal trough. One person would scrub a little, and then pass, scrub then pass. In the morning, the butcher would come with his gigantic cauldron the size of a wheelbarrow and dump the blood on the floor so it would run down the drain in the middle of the floor.

The problem was, the blood didn’t drain.

The screen covering the drain would clog up, and the water we used to spray the pans with would begin to collect on the ground. By noon, we were standing in two inches of warm water, rotten food, and blood. Over the course of the day, scraps of food build up, and we would dump them in a large metal bin three feet long and a foot deep. When the bin was full of leftover scraps of food, it was time to feed Igor.

Igor was the industrial strength garbage disposal in the center of our shallow gutter that we used to wash the pans in. We would scoop the food out with our hands, spread it out on the counter and look for peas. Igor didn’t like peas because they would cause him to choke. Then we would push the food into Igor’s mouth. Igor would churn and spit, and swallow, and tiny bits of food would spray out of his mouth.

The food would get everywhere, in my hair, in my eyebrows, in my nose, and in my mouth. Tiny bits of bloody rotting food were getting everywhere, and I couldn’t get it off! Some of my co-workers developed rashes in their arms from the big black rubber gloves that they wore. These gloves were never washed, and they came up over the elbow. Little bits of Igor’s snacks would get inside the gloves and fester for months.

Sometimes I ask if anyone remembers the GI Hole, but it seems very few do.

The hole was shut down soon after I left, for sanitary reasons.

In 2007 I spent two months working as a network engineer for a small tech consulting company. The work there was amazing. They had built a long range, city-wide wireless network, and were providing broadband to rural areas. They were also providing a “one stop shop” for everything IT for small businesses in town. The people who built this business were energetic and bright, and I was lucky to have worked there. I could have stayed there longer, made a career out of it, or perhaps launched my own solo career from there. That’s not what happened, I left after two months. The reason: I was scared to death.

I was in the Navy for 11 years. Being in the Military for that long, it starts to feel like a nice, warm cocoon. In the Navy, I never had to worry about what we were going to eat that day, or where my family was going to live. Basic needs were taken care of. After my first four years were almost up, I was planning on getting out and going to college. My wife and I were newly married, and we had our first child, so we decided that now was probably not the best time. I reenlisted again, and luckily, went to England for four years. While in England, the Senior Chief who was in charge of my area moonlighted in the UK as a security consultant. He taught us everything he knew, and pointed us down the right track. He’s the reason I learned UNIX to begin with. After that tour was over, I was going to get out and start my own consulting business. However, my wife and I had two kids now, and we were overseas, and we weren’t sure how long our savings would last, etc, etc, etc… So, I reenlisted a third time, for three years, and went to New Mexico. In New Mexico, I did a lot of networking, and network cabling, and felt like my skills were good enough to get out and give it a go in the real world. But, my wife and I had three kids now, and I had been in for a long time, so we thought about staying in and making a career out of the Navy, and retiring after 20 years. Then the Navy told me that I was going back out to sea, which meant months, and months, and months away from the family that I had grown to love being with. I believe that kids need their father around, so despite the tough times that we knew might lay ahead, I left the Navy.

The original plan was to stay in New Mexico. We had a house, and had started to put some money away in savings. We had connections in the local area, and I had a clearance that may have landed a nice government job. Talking with my wife, it became increasingly clear that Iowa was calling. Her father was ill, the schools were better, and New Mexico was becoming increasingly violent. When the convenience store down the street was the focus of some gang related activity, we decided it was time to go. So, against all odds, we left everything that we knew, and went to Iowa, where we knew almost no one, had no connections, had no home, and no job… and we were expecting our fourth child.

We first lived with my wife’s family for a couple of months. That nearly drove me nuts. We finally found a place to rent, a tiny little shack with a decent yard in Coralville, between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. On top of this, we had taken a loss selling our home in New Mexico, and due to some paperwork snafu, we had lost thousands in the move to Iowa. The Navy will move you, but we decided to move ourselves and try to make a little money through reimbursement. The government calls it a DITY move. That idea went horribly wrong. It was against this backdrop that I met the owner of the consulting company that I would work for briefly.

I went knocking on doors. Asking everyone I knew if they knew a business looking for the skills that I had. I boasted a combination of UNIX, Windows, networking, and security. I also had no idea how I was going to put food on the table. I met the owner of the business wearing a suit and tie. We went into the back and talked for a while, and he explained that he might have an opening in a few months for someone with my skills that he would hire as a network engineer. I was excited. The atmosphere of the place reminded me of my aspirations to own a small business of my own. We agreed to stay in touch, and he would let me know when the position opened up.

That didn’t help for paying the rent at the time though. I was still technically on leave from the Navy, and was getting the last couple of months worth of my paycheck, but that was rapidly running out, and I didn’t have time to wait for that position to open up. However, a position did open up at Yellowbook in Coralville, where I worked as a UNIX systems administrator for four months as a contractor. Towards the end of the four month contract, the owner of the consulting company and myself agreed that I would come and work for him after the contract expired.

That’s a lot of back story to lead up to the main idea. My family and I were still living in the shack in Coralville, my wife was getting close to delivering, and I realized that I was not going to be able to afford everything. The work there was very, very interesting, and also very stressful. I was coming into a network that had grown organically over time, and had some very unique constraints. Working with wireless adds an entirely new level of complexity to the system. The owner sat right behind me, and set about to training me. The first day, I was so overwhelmed by the amount that I didn’t know that I nearly cried when I went home. This was a small business, with all of the network complexity of an enterprise business. The owner had a goal of organizing the IP allocation of the network to make better sense and be easily managed, and also to eventually set up BGP between their two upstream connections. We had lots of routers, all over town and out in the countryside.

As time went on, the owner began to feel like I was making good progress and was becoming ready to take over without his needing to be involved as deeply as he was. I on the other hand, began to feel more and more sure that I was in over my head. I was not making enough money to pay all of my bills and buy groceries without dipping into credit at the end of the month, I was paying for COBRA because the small business did not have a health insurance plan, and on top of that, I felt like I was not earning the salary I was getting at work. So, while I may have been able to ask for a raise, I really didn’t feel like I deserved one. In the last couple of weeks of my wife’s pregnancy, right or wrong, I sent my resume off to a couple of places in Des Moines.

Another thing that I noticed about the consulting business, I learned after I started working there that all of the employees and the owner went to the same church. That’s not a bad thing, I go to church too, but since I didn’t go to the same church, I began to feel more and more like an outsider. I made mistakes, I tried to correct them, and I just couldn’t get my brain in gear. There was too much going on.

I was actually fairly certain that the owner regretted hiring me. So I was surprised at his shock when I gave him my two weeks notice. I joined the business to try to live out some fantasy of mine about working for a small business, and not in a gigantic enterprise. I wanted to make a difference. It turns out that it was just not the right time, and neither I nor my family were ready.

I’ve aged ten years in the three that I’ve been out of the Navy. My hair is turning gray and the lines in my face seem deeper, but mostly the age is in my eyes. The Navy can be a warm cocoon, but real life is hard and demanding. My family has been blessed by God. I have a steady job that’s poised to do well through the recession, and that I’m quite good at, we were able to buy a modest home that’s a perfect size for the family, and is in a perfect place, and I’m once again putting money away for a rainy day. There were a lot of ideas I had about life when I left the Navy that turned out to be fantasy, and it took a long time to get to a point where I understood that.

My phone went through the wash today.  Turns out it happened first thing this morning.  I really should be more careful about cleaning out my pockets before throwing something in the washing machine, but to be honest, I never liked that phone to begin with.  It had a faulty battery, and a faulty USB charger, so it would almost never fully charge and when it did, it would drain quickly.  The Bluetooth on it didn’t work either.  So, it wasn’t that great of a phone, and now its gone, and good riddance to it.  Now, I’m faced with the prospect of finding a replacement phone, but this comes with complications.

US Cellular has me for another 10 months.  My contract doesn’t end with them till November.  I can cancel my contract for $70, and I may wind up doing just that, but then I’ll also have to replace my wife’s phone as well.  US Cellular is a good phone company, but when I think about spending money on a phone, its hard to justify purchasing anything other than an iPhone, which takes US Cellular out of the equation.  I’m eligible for an “upgrade” in May, when I can get a new phone for a reduced cost from US Cellular, but if I want a phone between now and then, I’m paying full price.  That’s $159.95 for a Samsung SCH-u340, which boasts an internal antenna and a VGA camera.  When I look at that price, and think that I could get a refurbished iPhone for $9.95 <it>less</it>, it makes my wallet hurt.  

So, if I buy an iPhone, won’t I be chaining myself to massive monthly service charges from AT&T?  Well, maybe, maybe not.  We pay right around $100/mo. for our service now.  This is for 1000 minutes shared between our two phones.  Looking at our phone bills, I find that we do not come anywhere close to using 1000 minutes.  We would be perfectly suited to the At&T 450 minute family plan, which is right around $60/mo.  Couple this with the iPhone’s required $30/mo data plan, and we are at $90/mo.  Of course, I’d have to have two data plans… because there’s no way my wife would let me have an iPhone and not get her one as well, so that’d bring the grand total up to $120/mo.  So, $20 more per month than what we are paying now.  Since I’d have to cancel both of our accounts at US Cellular to get this to work, that would cost $140.  The iPhones, even refurbished, would cost $300.  So, for the first month, to get going, we are looking at $560.  We are not poor, but we are not rich either, and that amount of money needs to be well thought out, which brings me to the basement.

We’ve got an unfinished basement that I’m working on as time and money allows.  I’ve built a couple of walls, made lots of plans, taken lots of measurements, and bought some tools.  I’m a long, long way from being able to have a couple of my kids move their rooms down there.  The basement is also where I have my desk, which holds my monitor and Time Machine drive, and where I do most of my programming at.  Programming takes a lot of concentration, a lot of studying, and most of all… lots and lots of time.  Recently, I’ve been thinking that the unfinished basement would be much, much easier to concentrate in, if it were a little closer to being finished.  

The phone going in the wash today has actually been a conduit for me re-aligning my priorities.  I’m still very intent on finishing my application, but I think I would be more comfortable, and therefore be able to concentrate on development better, resulting in a better product, if I finish the basement first.  Since I’m going to have to adjust the budget for the new phone, and since I’m going to need money to finish the basement, I’m thinking that the new phone is going to have to wait.  Work gives me a cell phone every other week so I can be “on-call”.  Normally I simply forward the phone over to my personal phone so I don’t have to look like some kind of geek Batman carrying around a utility belt full of gadgets.  Now, since I don’t have a personal phone, I’ll just carry the one they give me.  I suppose I’ll also have to start carrying the pager again.  Yes, a pager, and party like it’s 1989.  

So, I’ll live without a cell phone for a while, and I’m also going to put development on hold for a while.  Not entirely, I’ll still have a little time in the morning, but I’ll probably put that time to use blogging either here or over at The Apple Blog.  The rest of my time, and the rest of my money, is going to go towards finishing the basement.  After that’s done, I’ll be in a much better position to move to an iPhone, and finish developing Go in peace and comfort.

Last summer I decided to dive into programming and give it everything I’ve got. For months, I would get up at 5 and pour through the Hillgass book, every page, every challenge. I’d revisit it at night, after the kids were in bed, and code till I couldn’t stay awake any more. I finished the book, and started coding my first real application. It was then that I found out how very little reading one book gave you. Hillegass says he gives you 80%, I’m thinking it’s more like 50%, tops. I reached out to the Cocoa Dev mailing list for help, and eventually even went to a CocoaHeads meeting with the local chapter. Meeting some “real” developers, I despaired. There was far, far too much that I didn’t know, I felt that it would take me an entire lifetime to learn what I needed to know. I gave up, wrote Goodbye Cocoa, and focused on something else.

Months passed by, and I began to rethink my initial approach to development. It became clear to me that I was trying to accomplish too much, and that I needed to start with something very small. At work, I wrote a small shell script that I use to ssh to the servers. The script was very small, and very, very handy. I called the script “go”. To use it, I just type go servername and I’m there. I decided turning that script into a gui cocoa app would be a great practice, a great learning exercise. So, I downloaded Xcode again, and fired it up.

This is the cocoa Go. There are sheets for default preferences and individual host details. The idea is to stay as close to the keyboard as possible, so all of the buttons are bound to the standard key combos. CMD-N creates a new host, CMD-, shows the preferences sheet, CMD-i shows the info sheet, Delete removes a host, and return launches Terminal with an ssh session to the currently selected host open. That’s Go in a nutshell. You can add hosts, and set up easy ssh to the hosts. The green light at the left of each host will (eventually) show if you can ping the host or not. I have the ping code down, and I have the code that shows the light down, I just need to tie them together in an if/then loop, and then set that loop inside of a timer to update every so often.

There is a lot of spit and polish left to add to Go. Adding a decent “About Go” panel, adding some nice looking help, and creating a decent status bar menu for it to live in for starters. I’d also love to add some of the really nice Core Animation stuff to the main Go window… just because its there. Getting Go to where it is now has been a lot of fun, and someday it may even be ready for public consumption. One of the first things I did with Go was to put it into an online Subversion repository, which I host here. Another thing I did very early on was to add the Sparkle framework for auto-updating, since I’ve got a friend in Maine who tests Go out for me on a fairly regular basis. After adding Sparkle to it, I followed these instructions to create an automated workflow to compile Go, create a zip file of it, digitally sign the zip archive, upload the archive to my server, and update the appcast xml file. An awesome amount of automation.

Adding the ability to ping was a challenge. A few of the forum posts that I saw said that there was no way to do it, and since you had to open up a raw socket to do it, you’d have to have root privileges. That was obviously not going to fly, but I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t already an existing cocoa class to do it. After much searching, I found SimplePing, buried in the Apple Developer site. I downloaded it, imported the class into Go, and gave it a shot. Calling SimplePing seemed to work! It would ping the host when I called it. Unfortunately, even if it tried to ping and could not reach the host, it still returned a return code of 0. That was not going to do. So, looking through the C code of SimplePing I found this:

if (error == 0) //was able to wait for reply successfully (whether we got a reply or not)
{
    if (gotResponse == 1)
    {
		{numberPacketsReceived = numberPacketsReceived + 1;}
	}
}

which I changed to this:

if (error == 0) //was able to wait for reply successfully (whether we got a reply or not)
{
    if (gotResponse == 1)
	{
		{numberPacketsReceived = numberPacketsReceived + 1;}
	} else {
		error = 1;
	}
}

and all was right with the world again.

Adding the ability to launch Terminal and ssh to the selected host was also an interesting challenge. Apple provides a framework to add the ability to manipulate other applications through AppleScript, called the ScriptingBridge.framework. To actually be able to call the Terminal, I needed Go to know what AppleScript Terminal would accept. So, I ran this command: sdef /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app | sdp -fh --basename Terminal --bundleid com.apple.Terminal This created a header file “Terminal.h”, which I was able to import into Go. From there, I created a “ScriptController” class, where I have this piece of code:

+ (void)runTerminal:(id)sender withUserName:(NSString *)userName andHostName:(NSString *)hostName;
{
// Create our terminal object
TerminalApplication *terminal = [SBApplication applicationWithBundleIdentifier:@"com.apple.Terminal"];

// Get selected host name and IP address from NSTable
NSString *script = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"ssh %@@%@", userName, hostName]; 

// Run the script
[terminal doScript:script in:nil ];
[terminal activate];

This allows you to pass a user name and host name to this class, which will create a ssh script, and pass that script to Terminal via AppleScript.

Since it was fairly easy to add this ability, I’ve been playing with the idea of also adding VNC capability to Go. Leopard includes a Screen Sharing application, which is based on VNC, so I’m hoping to be able to script it in a similar way. I also looked into Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Client and CoRD, but neither allows AppleScript, so it would be very difficult to tie them into Go.

Go is a “document based” application. That means that you can create different “sets” of hosts, and save those sets as individual files. So, if you are on a team, you can share your set with the rest of your team.

The concept of Go is pretty simple, you have a set of places, and you want quick access to those places. I’m toying with the idea of adding a lot more capability to Go, like storing bookmarks, Finder folders, ftp, sftp, etc… It will be interesting to see how it goes. Right now, I’m just trying to get the basics down. Programming is perhaps the most challenging thing I’ve ever done, but I’m glad I didn’t give up for good.

I’ve been unlucky enough to be working with quite a few pieces of so called “enterprise” software, the worst of which I’ve been working with lately is called the Tivoli Workload Scheduler. TWS is, at its core, a glorified cron. It is a scheduler, you can create jobs, or scripts, and have them executed at given times. You are supposed to be able to cascade jobs, and create dependencies between jobs. This is all well and good, but there are some serious problems with this software.

The first problem is the price. List price for TWS is $33/value unit. IBM bases its pricing scheme on how many CPU cores are in the server that you install their software on, 100 value units per single core CPU, and 50 value units per core for dual or quad core CPUs. So, if you have four servers, and each server has four quad-core cpu’s in them, that comes out to around $26,400. I think we just went ahead and bought 1000 value units up front. That’s a fairly good sized amount, and that does not include the cost of the consultant its going to take to install, configure, and actually use the software.

Why tie the cost of the software to the number of cores in the system? TWS doesn’t use CPU resources to actually do any work, it passes off the work to other applications, TWS simply schedules them to be run. The price would almost be bearable, if the software actually worked. For $26,000 I’d think that it ought to make me coffee and pancakes in the morning. The reality is that after several months of enduring the software, it still doesn’t work properly.

The end user of the system has been trying to add event rules that fire off an email if a job doesn’t end correctly. Wow, that’s like, what… one line of shell script? But, since this is the TWS, we have to put in a call to IBM. IBM will call back, and ask for a ton of information. They’ll ask for directories that don’t exist, ask you to run commands that may or may not work, and generally take up a lot of time. Meanwhile, I’m starting to think that we are actually beta testing this software for IBM, and they just didn’t bother to tell us.

And then there’s the user interface. The UI, like many IBM applications, is quite obviously built on Java, evidenced by the length of time it takes to launch. Once it is launched, there are cascading left to right areas of a single window that allow you to perform separate tasks. At $work, I’ve got a 22” monitor, and this is the only application that I expand to full screen. It needs it. The application, called the “Job Scheduling Console” provides it’s own tabbed MDI interface. It is extremely confusing. Part of the confusion is that evidently the developers decided that there were too many options in the man application window, and chose to add a second interface to TWS through it’s integrated WebSphere application server. The second interface, also Java, is accessed through a web browser. Unfortunately, not just any web browser, it seems to only support Internet Explorer. I tried to access it first through Chrome, which did not work at all, and then through Firefox, which almost worked, but there were pieces of the application missing. IE worked well. The web interface is just as jumbled as the fat client on the desktop. Buttons seemingly randomly placed, some options hidden in drop down menus and others placed either above or below the data.

There is no clear, obvious method to accomplish anything with this user interface.

And that is not all my friends, oh no, that is not all. You must also have access to the command line on the server where TWS is installed. Even on the command line TWS is not a good citizen. There is no man page or online help shipped with the application, you have to load a ton of special environmental variables, and they provide scripts that launch a faux-shell that only accepts certain commands. One such command, conman, offers the ability to view the logs in real time (why, for the love of God, do you not log everything to syslog?), but only if you enter the command “con se” at the conman prompt. Also, you should enter “lev=4” to make sure you get all the logs. Proper logging in an application can be a lifesaver, and it could have been an area where TWS could redeem itself somewhat. That is not what has happened. The “con se” command only works sometimes. Other times it simply says that it submitted that command to be processed and returns you to your prompt. Great, thanks… so where’s my logs?

Having multiple interfaces to the application is fine, if you could accomplish everything needed in any one interface. However, that is also not the case. You need all three, and the end user must switch between the web interface and the fat client, and I as the administrator must switch between the web client, the fat client, and the command line to try to coax this monster into doing what it is supposed to do. Which is… schedule jobs. That’s really all this is supposed to do, schedule jobs to run. I don’t think it should be this hard.

Take these points into consideration in the light of the cost of the application. Now, let your jaw slowly close and realize that IBM can charge this much because it has found a market that no one else is tapping. TWS is only one example of horrible “enterprise” software, there’s a lot more of it out there. Personally, I see an opportunity here. An opportunity for well thought out, beautifully crafted software that works well, is easy to use, and gets the job done.

The ability to visualize a complex system is key to a real understanding of it. To me, this applies to computers and technology. To Daniel Tammet, this applies to numbers and letters, on a far, far more vast scale. Daniel is a savant, an extraordinary person who pushes the boundaries of what we believe we know about human capability and learning. What he has to say rings a bell, because how he views his numbers and letters is similar to how I understand the inner workings of a computer. I can visualize what is going on, or what I want to happen. I can do this because I’ve worked and studied the computer field for years, and because I enjoy the work. What I’ve found is that there is a distinct difference between understanding the technology and memorizing what happens when you click a button.

If you work in the tech industry, memorizing technology is a bad idea. Technology changes, it evolves and grows. It is better to understand the attitudes and purpose of the technology. Networking is a great example. I started out learning about wave propagation theory in the Navy, and about how we could get data from the size, shape, or velocity of the wave. Later, when I went on to learn TCP/IP networking, I found that the data was still transmitted the same way, as 0 or 1, but how it was decoded was different. Then the stack, then the applications, then scripting, and now, I’m learning a high level programming language, and its finally starting to click.

The thing is, I couldn’t have learned these skills if I didn’t have a visual image in my mind about how it worked under the gloss of the computer screen. I can’t imagine trying to use a computer, much less program one, without at least a passing knowledge of what happens when you click that mouse.

Then again, to 99.999% of people, it doesn’t matter, and really shouldn’t. Computers should be so easy to use that you don’t have to learn a new skill to use one effectively. They should be as self explanatory as toasters. Unfortunately, they are not. Windows 7 is coming out this year some time, and it will sport a new user interface which its users will have to learn all over again. Many, many of them will simply try to re-memorize what button does what, and what order to click things in. You shouldn’t have to learn why the computer works the way it does, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. In the end, it makes things much easier too.

I love January 1st. It’s not that this day is really any different from any other day, other than having the day off. Its the mental association that goes along with the start of a new year. The calendar restarts, and it seems like a fresh clean slate to build the rest of the year upon. I like resolutions, and I kept mine last year, so I’m going to try to keep another one this year. Last year I resolved to learn how to swim laps, and I did. I still swim fairly regularly now, and am actually looking forward to increasing how often I go swimming.

When I return to work tomorrow, there will be no acknowledgment of the new years significance, but it will be in my mind. A fresh start, a clean slate, and another chance to build my life to be whatever I dream it can be.

Songbird is a very young product with a very bright future. The Mozilla based media player has come a long way since first releasing a beta, unfortunately to unseat the ruling titan iTunes, Songbird still has a very long ways to go. Songbird is open source, packed with features, and seemingly infinitely expandable through various add-ons and web integration. Also, like the rest of the Mozilla suite, Songbird is cross-platform, a point that becomes glaringly obvious the moment the app is launched.

First the good points. Songbird is a lot of fun! On first launch, Songbird asks if you would like to import your existing iTunes library. I was able to import mine without a problem, including DRM’d tracks and movies. Songbird cannot play the movies, but it has no problem playing your iTunes purchased music. The mashTape extension gives quick and easy access to information from across the web concerning the currently playing track. It will pull up the artists biography, discography, reviews, news, photos, and videos. Another interesting extension is integration with the SeeqPod website. Selecting the SeeqPod Search item from the left pane allows you to search the Internet for songs, and then download them to your library with a right click. The search is a bit slow, especially when Songbird attempts to verify all of the links. Certainly a lot of fun, the SeeqPod extension seems to be of questionable legality.

Songbird has cleaned up their interface quite a bit, and with the exception of the play and volume controls being at the bottom instead of the top, the default “feather” (or skin) looks fairly similar to iTunes. As a matter of fact, there are a couple of iTunes skins for Songbird, but they either were not compatible with Songbird 1.0, or looked nothing like the real iTunes. The Mini Player view is reminiscent of some of the older media players, a very compact interface that I really enjoy.

For all the fun Songbird is, iTunes will remain my media player of choice for now. While Songbird does makes advances with its interface, no skin will replace not having a native mac UI. Something in the way the app feels while using it gives it away as being a port of a “multi-platform” application. A small and rather insignificant example of this is how the “About Songbird…” menu option opens a sheet covering the library with the software license agreement. A normal mac citizen would have another window, most likely with the applications icon centered towards the top, followed by the applications version, and then maybe some other interesting facts about it. A quick look through my other open applications (Mail, iChat, Safari, TextMate, and Yojimbo) shows a consistency that Songbird lacks. This is a small example, but one that shows the lack of consistency with standard Mac UIs that is pervasive throughout the application.

Songbird also seems to consistently take up quite a bit more resources than iTunes. Songbird uses approximately 20-25% cpu during playback, and ranges from 100 - 150MB persistent RAM size. Compare this to iTunes which uses between 4 - 7% cpu and 80-100MB of RAM. Songbird takes longer to launch, and adds to the resource utilization as more add-ons are installed and used.

Songbird seems like an application that missed its mark. With all of its web enabled functionality, it still cannot perform some basic tasks, like playing a movie or video file, or importing a CD. Given that this is a 1.0 release, I’m looking forward to some great things from this project. Once an open source app gains steam, advances can be made very quickly. I’d like to see a faster start time (how about one bounce in the dock?), a native user interface, and a lot of work done on the back end to reduce resource utilization. Given that there are really not a lot of players in this market, I’m excited to see an iTunes competitor. I just hope that Songbird’s goal was not to be a poor iTunes clone.

“And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? Christmas came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ‘till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”

—Dr. Seuss (1904-1991); writer, cartoonist

I thought I’d try OSZen on MobileMe yesterday, to see if I could consolidate even more of my online accounts. Unfortunately, the limitations of both iWeb and RapidWeaver became quickly apparent. I pointed 1and1’s DNS servers at MobileMe, and uploaded an iWeb site. I liked the theme, but the first thing that struck me as odd was the URL. In iWeb I configured the site’s name to be OSZen, and to use the Blog page as the home page, but the URL turned out to be http://oszen.net/OSZen/blog/blog.html which for the home page was just ridiculous.

Next, I changed the name of the site to “writing”, and wound up with a home page URL of http://oszen.net/writing/blog/blog.html. Again, ridiculous. I’m assuming that this is Apple’s way of allowing more than one iWeb site, but I wish that it had better support for personal domain names.

The other thing that really bothered me about iWeb’s blogging engine was how each new blog post was formatted with the default theme’s pictures and text. Meaning that for each post I had to delete the picture and change the layout of the page. This equates to worrying far more about how the site looks instead of concentrating on writing.

These two small items were all it took for me to switch the DNS setting for OSZen back to 1and1, and back to the comforting ease of Wordpress. The great thing about Wordpress is that it’s meant for writing and self publishing, and it does it very well. The more recent ability to update itself and it’s plugins only adds to the ease of maintaining your own Wordpress installation. Also, I’ve got MarsEdit, which rocks, and means that I almost never have to actually get into the admin interface of Wordpress. I do all my writing for OSZen from an application that was designed for writing.

I thought it might be fun, since I’m consolidating all of my online accounts and pruning them down, but the truth of the matter is, web hosting at MobileMe is for sharing your family photos with Grandma back home, it’s not a serious blogging platform.