JB

It’s now the middle of December, which signals the end of my first semester ofgrad school. I took two classes, both focused on HCI: cognitive psychology andsocial implications. The paper I just finished writing for the socialimplications course was about answering the question of whether all softwareshould be free, and required a lot of research into open source, the FreeSoftware Foundation, and a lot of deep thinking about what I felt was right.

The definitions of freedom offered by the Free Software Foundation act on theassumption that computers are central to a persons well being, and that theuser of a computer should have full and complete access to the source code ofthe computer based on a natural right of well being. However, it is myposition that computers, or any other form of technology, only serve toincrease personal freedom of the user in proportion to the increase inoverall quality of life of the user of the technology.

Richard Stallman, in his essay entitled “Why Software Should Not HaveOwners” claims that authors ofsoftware can claim no natural right to their work, citing the differencebetween physical products and software, and rejecting the concept of atradition of copyright. Stallman uses an example of cooking a plate ofspaghetti to explain the difference between software and physical products:

When I cook spaghetti, I do object if someone else eats it, because then Icannot eat it. His action hurts me exactly as much as it benefits him; onlyone of us can eat the spaghetti, so the question is, which one? The smallestdistinction between us is enough to tip the ethical balance. But whether yourun or change a program I wrote affects you directly and me only indirectly.Whether you give a copy to your friend affects you and your friend much morethan it affects me. I shouldn’t have the power to tell you not to do thesethings. No one should.

However, what Stallman does not address what gives the second person whoreceives the software the right to benefit from the authors work withoutgiving something in return.

Before the industrial revolution, most people learned a skill and worked forthemselves in small communities. A single village would have all of the skillsets necessary to sustain itself, and each member of the community wouldapprentice into a particular skill set to contribute and earn a living. Theindustrial revolution pushed skilled workers into factories and assemblylines, work that was both distasteful and disdainful to an artisan in thecraft. However, corporations were able to reduce cost and increase profits,and the platform has persisted into current work environments.

In the information age, the assembly line mindset has created oceans ofcubicles filled with programmers who use their skills in small parts of largesoftware projects, sometimes to great success, but far too often to failure.The Internet and popularity of lower priced computers has created a market forhigh quality third party software, the kind that is created by someone with apassion for what they are doing. This passioncomes from learning a craft, and using that skill to earn a living, just likethe workers from before the industrial revolution. Instead of livingphysically in small villages, these new age artisans live online and createcommunities built around social networking.

In many ways, this is a return to a more natural way of life, and a simpleform of commerce. One person can create an application and sell it, andanother person can buy it from him. The person selling the software benefitsfrom being able to purchase shelter, food, and clothing for his family, andthe person who buys the software benefits from the use of the software. It isa very simple transaction, and a model that is not adequately explained in theGNU essays. If all proprietary software is wrong, then an independentdeveloper who sells software as his only job is also wrong. GNU supporterscould argue that there is nothing stopping the programmer from selling hissoftware, but he should give away the source code under a license that permitsredistribution along with the software once it is sold. At this point, sellingthe original program no longer becomes a viable business model. A programmercan not continue to sell his software when the user can, and is encouraged to,download his software from somewhere else for free.

While it may be the ethically right thing to do to purchase the software ifyou intend to use it, ethics alone are often insignificant motivation toencourage people to spend their money. If the choice of supporting thedevelopment of the software or not is entirely up to the user of the software,then purchasing the software becomes a choice that the user can make on awhim, with no real implications on the conscience of the user with eitherdecision. GNU and the GPL place this decision squarely on the user, andencourage the users to not feel in any way obligated to pay.

The ethics of open source come into question when the requirement of adheringto the free software philosophies result in an independent developer not beingable to support a moderate, middle-class lifestyle by developing a relativelypopular application. Kant’s first formulation asks what would happen if alldevelopers gave away the source of their code for free. In this imaginaryworld where all developers did this, the quality of software would go down tothe lowest common denominator of acceptability. Each developers motivationwould be to develop for himself, and since he would need to find a source ofincome elsewhere, only in the free time allotted to him. This would result ina wide variety of software availability, with very little integration ortesting, mirroring the current state of GNU/Linux based desktop operatingsystems. Current software companies would move to a business model arrangedaround providing support to customers of their software. Competition, andtherefore innovation, based on pure software features would decrease, sincethe source code of any feature another group could develop would be easilycopied and integrated into competitors products.

A second implication of business providing support as their primary source ofincome is that the support becomes the product, not the software itself.Businesses then have a vested interest in creating software that requiressupport, resulting in intentionally complicated user interfaces.

From a utilitarian point of view, the outcome of proprietary software hasclearly been to produce more pleasure for more people than open source has upto this point. Open source software is often more complicated, difficult tolearn and maintain, and harder for the average computer user to use. Appleproduces proprietary software and hardware, and states their mission to “makethe best stuff”. Using their position as a leading software company, andleveraging their control over their computing environment, including iPads,iPods, iPhones, and Mac computers, Apple has been able to successfullynegotiate deals with entertainment companies. The deals Apple has made allowthe consumer to download music, television shows, and movies off of theInternet and watch them on any Apple branded device, and output the media totheir televisions or home stereo systems. Because of the limits of DigitalRights Management, open source or free systems have not been able to providethis level of entertainment.

Free software enables the user to learn the intricacies of how the softwareworks, and modify the software to suit his needs. Free software also providesa legal and ethical alternative to expensive proprietary software indeveloping nations or areas where the cost of obtaining a license for legaluse of the software is prohibitive. Public institutions, like schools andgovernment offices, where the focus of the organization is the public good,have the option to use software that is in the public domain and is notcontrolled by any one company.

However, proprietary software is also beneficial to the public, as well asrespectful of the original authors rights regarding their creative work.Software is the result of a person’s labor; it does not matter how easy it isto copy that work, the author still retains a natural right of ownership,according to John Locke’s The Second Treatise of Government. Proprietarysoftware enables products like the iPad, which is being used to enable elderlypeople, nearly blind with cataracts, to create creative works of their own.The iPad is also being used by caretakers of severely disabledchildren toenable them to communicate and express themselves. It is possible that theiPad would have been created if the software used to power it had been free,but that is unknown. What is known is that the net result of the device is tobetter peoples lives, which is the true purpose of technology. Any technologyis merely an enabler to get more satisfaction and enjoyment out of life. Whatthe free software movement does is exaggerate the importance of a specifictype of freedom, without addressing the proper place of technology in ourlives.

However, the existence of free and open source software alongside proprietarysoftware creates a mutually beneficial loop, wherein consumers and developersare able to reap the rewards of constant innovation and competition. There isa place for both proprietary and free software, and it is the authors naturalright to their creative work that gives them the freedom to choose how and whytheir software will be distributed.

I should have known better… I do know better, but it was on sale, and it was Black Friday, and I bought an Android phone. I purchased the HTC Desire, a perfectly reasonable choice in high-end smart phones. Android 2.1, a 1GHz processor, 512M of RAM, and an 8G MicroSD card for storage. The phone is well designed, solidly built, and aesthetically pleasing, but at this point, its still on probation, I might take it back.

One of my oddly favorite things about the Desire is HTC’s marketing design. I absolutely love the hand drawn images that adorn the packaging and the HTC site. I think it gives the product a more earthy and homegrown feel, and ties in with the Android open source roots. HTC’s Sense UI is wonderful, and seems well thought out, with a few noticeable exceptions. HTC’s “polite ringer” which lowers or silences the volume of the ringtone based on the phones position is an excellent idea. Holding down the home button brings up a pane to switch between running apps. Pinching or double tapping the home button brings up an exposé type interface to choose the screen to bring up. The more I use the Sense Ui the more I like it. It is very different from iOS, but sometimes that can be a good thing.

Yesterday the phone had a bad morning. I had seen something on the Internet that I wanted to show my wife, so I took out the phone and started the browser, found the site, and waited for the content to download and render. It was taking a while, so I set it aside and turned to go back to what I was doing. After a couple of minutes I went back and found that the phone had turned off the screen, which it’s supposed to do if it’s not in use. But then, I couldn’t turn it back on. Pressing any of the buttons on the front didn’t help, and neither did pressing the button on the top. Pressing and holding the power button on the top did not help either. The phone was entirely bricked. So, I popped the back off, took out the battery, waited a minute or so, replaced the battery, and the phone powered up again.

Comparing the phone to a computer, pressing and holding on the power button overrides the operating system and kills power to the machine immediately, no questions asked. On iOS, pressing and holding the power button brings up a prompt asking you to swipe to power down the device. I’ve never once seen an iOS device die from loading a web page though, something very core to the system must be at work while browsing for that to happen. The HTC Desire ships with Android 2.1, but HTC also includes a flash plugin, perhaps that died.

While making breakfast for the kids, I put the phone in my pocket. I turned to do something on the counter, and heard a distinct “beep, beep”, and gave a surprised look to my daughter. I pulled the phone out of my pocket and found that it had pressed against my leg, activated the phone app, and started dialing a couple of numbers. Not the first time I’d pulled the phone out of my pocket and found that it had launched an app. I’ve since gotten in the habit of pressing the power button to lock the screen before the phone goes in the pocket. Again, not something I ever had to do with the iPod.

Later, I got in the car to drive to work, plugged in the Android to the aux port in the car stereo, and started one of the 5by5 podcasts to listen to on the way in to work. Nothing. I checked the phone, it was still on, the time was still ticking along, so the media player was playing the podcast, but there was no sound. I unplugged the cable from the headphone jack, and I could hear the podcast from the built-in speakers, plugged in the cable back in, and there was no sound. I said to hell with it, went in and grabbed my iPod and listened to my podcast on the way to work.

Once at work, I did some searching on Google, and found that several other people have had the problem with the headphone jack, and the fix for it was to reboot the phone. I did, and tested with a set of headphones, and sure enough, it worked again. At this point I thought… what next.

Throughout the day I’d use the phone for various things, checking Twitter, looking something up in a meeting, the kind of general mobile computing use that I’d use my iPod Touch for over wifi. After a while I noticed that the phone was generating a significant amount of heat. Not hot to the touch, but definitely much warmer than any phone or iOS device I’ve ever used. I handed the phone to a coworker and he noticed it too.

Around three in the afternoon, the battery on the phone started to die. By four, it was red, by four-thirty the phone was dead. The battery will not last for a full day of normal use. I checked to make sure that I had bluetooth, wifi, and GPS turned off, and all of them were. The Android system has an information page that details what applications were using the most battery life. Number one in my system was the Android OS itself. It’s clear that if this phone is going to stick around I’ll need a few places to charge the battery, and maybe a couple of spares to keep in the briefcase.

That was yesterday. Today, so far, has been a different story. The phone worked perfectly to check my messages this morning at breakfast. The phone worked great listening to my podcasts on the way to work. Most importantly, when I got a call from the school about one of my kids possibly having an ear infection, the phone worked great to look up the doctors office, schedule an appointment, look up the schools number, call them back, and send my wife a text message about what was going on. You know, the real work that a smart phone is meant for.

Except now it seems that 1Password has failed. Now what.

There is a lot to talk about with the HTC Sense UI, and the Android phone in general. When its good, its very good, but when it fails, it fails hard. Which is why, for now, the phone is still on probation.

Living out in the farmland of Iowa where we do, there’s really only one carrier who provides decent service, US Cellular. US Cellular has a great service for battery replacement. If you find yourself out and about and your battery dies, you can drop by any US Cellular store and they will replace the battery for free. I was in that situation today, so I spent some time looking at the Android phones HTC Desire and Samsung Mesmerize.

Both phones are $280, with an $80 mail in rebate. Both phones have 1GHz processors, and both phones have 5.0 MP cameras. The main difference between the two phones is that the Samsung has a 4” Super AMOLED screen, and the HTC has a 3.7” WVGA screen. Software wise, while both phones use Android 2.1 as the core, they each have different themes, or skins. The difference in themes reminded me of the difference between KDE and Gnome on Linux. There are a few other differences; the Samsung is fully touch screen while the HTC uses hardware buttons for the four base Android buttons search, back, home, and menu. What I found most striking were the differences in the Android Marketplace.

I love Angry Birds for iOS, so I thought I’d see how the game looked and felt on Android. I searched for “Angry Birds” on the HTC and found two screens worth of knock-offs. Some of these applications took the artwork and Angry Birds name directly from the real game. There was one game called “Angry Avians”, who’s icon looked like a closeup of the red bird from the real game. There were Angry Birds wallpapers, Angry Birds books, and Angry Birds unlockers. I can’t imagine that any of these apps were actually licensed to use either the Angry Birds name or the Angry Birds artwork. They are ripoffs riding the wave of the original games success.

Pathetic, and a poor impression of the Android Marketplace.

What I did not find on the HTC was the actual Angry Birds game from Rovio. I knew that it was released, thanks to Dan Benjamin mentioning it on The Talkshow, so I checked on the Samsung. Sure enough, the Samsung search returned 53 results, and the HTC only 51, and the Samsung included the official game. I wonder how many people buy one of those ripoffs on the HTC when they can’t find the real game, knowing that it is supposedly available for “Android”.

A quick comparison of the iTunes App Store shows that there are a few Angry Birds references, walkthroughs and hints of where to find the golden eggs, but none of them use Rovio’s artwork, and none of them are copies of the game.

The Android Market is open and free, and doesn’t give one seconds thought to the end user experience. At least with the curated App Store, Apple does a decent job of keeping unethical developers from preying on users who just don’t know any better. The difference between the two markets feels like the difference between buying from an upscale mall, or buying from a back alley black market.

I’ve been using different forms of computer “chat” for over ten years now, starting with operator-to-operator communications over a 9600baud satcom circuit in the Navy. Over time, I’ve become used to using certain forms of “emoticons” to convey subtle nuances in the conversation that are unnecessary in face to face communications. I even have friends with whom I communicate with entirely over chat.

Over the summer my cousin appeared on chat, and I tried to have a conversation with her. She was not familiar with the conversational tone and rhythm of chat, which made the interface difficult and frustrating, to the point where we both simply decided to go back to email.

Apple understands the human element of their devices possibly more than any other company in their field. Their advertising plays to your emotions, and their products are designed to elicit an emotional response; an appreciation for their beauty. Technology like Skype and Apple’s FaceTime video chat removes one layer of abstraction between you and the person you are trying to communicate with, and allows the emotional facial queues that are so important in communication to come through.

If my cousin and I were chatting face to face rather than over the keyboard, I imagine our stunted conversation would have lasted a bit longer than it did.

Another point I’d like to make about emotion and computers is that even if you do see your computer as simply a machine, a tool to accomplish a task, it is difficult to use a tool for any serious length of time, with a serious financial investment without an emotional connection to the tool. A carpenter is likely to have his favorite hammer, a mechanic his favorite ratchet, and anyone who uses a computer to create something will have their favorite brand, and strong reasons for choosing that brand.

Last night I did my civic duty by casting my vote at the local community center. I walked down since it was not far from my house, and enjoyed the crisp night air. Once I arrived at the community center I noticed that the voting process was being run by a group of elderly women, two of whom had Lenovo laptops, which were curiously tied together by an ethernet cable. Each of the laptops had a label printer attached to it via USB, with the other USB port occupied by a mouse. As I approached one lady noticed me and asked me to fill out a form, which I did, and then asked if I had voted there before, which I had not. That turned out to be a bit of a problem, one that was easily resolved, and one that was caused entirely by the laptops.

The laptops were labeled “Primary” and “Secondary”, and each had stickers on it showing which ports on the side to attach the mouse and sticker printer to. They were each running some kind of database software that had all of our names and registration status. When I was asked if I had voted here before, I said that I had not voted in that town, but I had voted early at the county seat during the presidential elections of ‘08. They wanted to make sure I was in the database, but since they were continually having problems with the computers it took some time.

While I was waiting, a man next to me needed to be registered, so one lady asked another, who was apparently in charge, to come and help put him in the database. I overheard the two of them ask questions like “I’m not sure what the difference is between ‘accept’ and ‘apply’”, and “Ok, I don’t know what to do here, where do I go next?” I couldn’t help but wonder who had designed this system, knowing that its intended users were going to be elderly women who had little to no computer experience. One of the ladies rebooted her computer twice before she was able to get it to work again.

I leaned over to take a look at the screen, and confirmed what I had previously thought. It looked like an application left over from the Windows 3.1 days, multiple screens, buttons everywhere, seemingly random labels. How much simpler and easier could the entire night have gone if they would have given that application to a UX designer first, before sending it out to be field tested.

People have become used to computers behaving this way. They are incomprehensible, confusing machines that if you look at them wrong they break. I wanted to tell the ladies that the problems they were having with the computers were not their fault, but the fault of the people who designed the computer, the operating system, the application, and the process that must be followed to glue them all together. I wanted to tell them that it doesn’t have to be this way, and that computers are meant to make things easier, not harder; simpler, not more complicated. If they don’t, then why do we continue to use them? It would have been easier to stamp everyone with a rubber stamp last night than deal with those machines.

I wanted to tell them a lot of things, but there were people behind me in line, and it had been a long day already. So, I smiled, said thank you, and cast my vote. Then, I walked home and enjoyed the starry night.

I like to keep both my desk and my computer desktop clean and clutter free. I’ve found that when there is less visual noise, I’m able to better concentrate and focus. In the article “The Proximity Compatibility Principle: Its Psychological Foundation and Relevance to Display Design”, Wickens and Carswell outline scientific principle’s that back up my personal preference.

Unless I’m actively working on a project that requires papers, my desk has nothing on it except my notebook, my computer, and a pen and pencil holder. Likewise, my desktop on my Mac is normally free from files, icons, and distracting wallpaper. If there is a file on my desktop, or if the trash needs to be emptied, I find that my attention is drawn to those cues, and I wind up dealing with them right away.

I always thought it was just because I was picky, but in the article it says

“It is clear that the negative influences of confusion and clutter will be enhanced to the extent that the contributing elements are both salient (bright, distinctive) and cannot be easily discriminated from the relevant ones. (In the visual search literature, this is known as target-distractor similarity.)” (Wickens, and Carswell 473-494)

To me, this is saying that when there are distracting visual elements, like a bright and colorful wallpaper, it takes additional mental effort to concentrate on the task at hand. Furthermore, the article also states

“Added clutter is known to disrupt visual scanning, whether this scanning is carried out by movement of the eyeball or by movement of an internal ‘attention pointer’ (Thorndyke, 1980). It is evident that the costs of scanning over (or filtering out) this clutter will be greater when there are added burdens of integration.” (Wickens, and Carswell 473-494)

When writing, or entering commands into a terminal, I find it much easier to concentrate on the task at hand when there is a single window open on my display, and the background is a neutral grey, and all non-essential visual elements are removed or hidden. I was very glad to read about Information Access Cost, it is good to know that there is actually hard science backing up my personal preferences.

So, last night, when I should have been sleeping, I had an idea. What if, instead of going to a bank to get a loan, you could ask a few of your Internet friends for a loan instead? Say you want $1000 for a new iMac, you go to some imaginary website and tell it how much you want. This website does a quick credit check to get your credit score, and then determines your interest rate based on that score. You agree to the rate, and your request is posted anonymously to the site.

Next, people with money to invest come to the site and see your request. Let’s say your agreed upon interest rate was ten percent. One person might see your request and agree to loan you $100. This person would then make nine dollars off of your loan when you pay it back. On a $1000 loan, at ten percent interest, the web site would take one percent for itself, and then split the remaining nine percent evenly between individual loaners based on how much they loan. If one person loaned the entire $1000, he would make a profit of ninety dollars off of that loan when you paid it back. If ten people each loaned $100, each of the ten would make nine dollars apiece. If one person loaned $900, and another $100, the person who loaned $900 would make $81, and the person who loaned $100 would make nine dollars.

I’m sure this has already been done somewhere, but it was a new idea to me so I thought I’d make a note of it. I’m not sure how this compares to micro-loans for businesses in third-world countries, or how it compares to Kickstarter, but I thought it was interesting. I imagine there would need to be government regulation, and some kind of federal insurance as well, for cases when someone defaulted on a loan. I’m also sure there would have to be some kind of protection against fraud, but again, this is just a fresh idea, it’s not well thought out at this point at all.

Who knows… maybe there’s something there.

A long, long time ago, what seems like a different life now, I was a Sailor.Towards the end of my teenage years, I came to a point where I knew I had todo something with my life, and at the time, that something was not college. Myadoptive father was in the Navy, so I decided to follow in his footsteps andjoined the Navy myself in October of 1995. From June of 1996 to July of 1999 Iwas assigned to the USS Platte, an oiler. During this time I made the bestfriends of my life, met my wife, and travelled across Europe and even into theMiddle East.

It was a different world back then, back before 9/11. It was a brief time ofpeace, a period of national calm that came after the cold war was over, andbefore the war on terror began. I went on two six-month deployments to theMediterranean, Med cruises we called them. We would travel from port to port,spending anywhere from a couple of days to three weeks in port, followed by aweek or two underway.

In port, my friends and I would make a point of going out and seeing thesights during the day, before taking in the local beverages at night. I lovedthe architecture, I loved the age of some of the buildings and castles that wefound. Back here in the States, if a home gets to be one hundred years old,its an amazing thing, but over there structures built by man could last forhundreds and hundreds of years.

Sometimes, when we were out to sea, the water would be so calm it looked likeglass. Other times the waves splashed over the weather decks and wouldthreaten to wash an unwary sailor overboard. During those times I’d have totake medicine from the ship’s doctor to try to ward off the seasickness thatwould invariably come. I never got over it, in three years I never got my “sealegs” like most of the guys did. But mostly it wasn’t a problem, most of thetime we avoided the rough weather and stayed in the calmer seas to do ourrefueling of other ships. Most times the waves were small enough that I couldstand on the edge of the ship and watch flying fish dart between the crests ofthe waves. And sometimes, I would close my eyes and smell the salt in the air.

We’ve been having a months long discussion at work around which Linux OS to use. It’s all come to a head recently, and it looks like the winner is going to be Red Hat. The decision leaves a slightly sour taste in my mouth, but over the course of the past year I’ve gotten used to having it around.

While trying to understand why I’ve got such a dislike for this particular flavor of Linux, I thought it might help to take another look at OpenBSD.

OpenBSD and I go back a long ways. It was the first Unix operating system that I really got to know well. I had worked with HP-UX a little, and Solaris a little more, and a few flavors of Linux, mostly Mandrake and SuSE, but OpenBSD was different. OpenBSD doesn’t give you any room to not be an expert. You need to know what it is doing, and why it is doing it.

The demanding nature of OpenBSD begins with the installation, which is actually a shell script with a few prompts thrown in. Back then, you couldn’t get the OS in an iso download like Linux, you either needed to dd an image to a floppy disk and install off the network, or create your own iso and boot from that. Once you booted the install disk, you used fdisk to partition your hard drive. Next, the script would install it’s boot image, and after formatting the partitions, simply unzip the OS into the root partition.

The entire process of installing OpenBSD takes about six minutes. When finished, the server is ready to be a web server or a firewall, but not much else. Everything else is build from the ports tree.

If you accidentally muck up some file that OpenBSD needs, you could just unzip the tarball that holds that file from the root partition, and you’d be back where you started again. I’ve seen OpenBSD servers run for years without a problem. They are the kind of server you setup once, and then forget about. OpenBSD is simple and powerful, and simply feels like quality engineering.

Looking at OpenBSD I discovered the root of my annoyance with Red Hat. Its not just that Red Hat has continued to add more and more junk to their operating system for no need. Its not just that they have gone out of their way to charge their customers more for a more confusing setup. Its that they feel just like every other modern product on the market today. Full of features, and lacking in quality.

Its not just a problem with geeky computer operating systems. Its not just a problem with computers. Its a problem with everything that is on the market today. Air conditioners, refrigerators, hardwood floors, cars, coffee makers, the list goes on and on. At some point in our recent past, consumerism took a turn for the worse. Companies decided that they could make more money if they made a worse product, and we went along for the ride. So instead of a washing machine lasting for fifty years, it might go for six before some part in it goes out, and fixing that part is more expensive than buying an entirely new machine.

In the 40’s and 50’s, American companies made some great products. I went to pick up a mixing bowl for my brother in law the other day that he got off of Craigslist. It was a classic, built in ‘48 or so. The seller wanted to show me that it still worked fine, so she plugged it in and gave me a demonstration. Sure enough, it fired up and worked perfectly. That little device is at least sixty years old. What are the odds of any of our small appliances or electronic devices lasting even half that long today?

My wife’s grandmother has a Maytag washer that she’s had since she can’t remember when. It has a hand crank on the top of it, and she still uses it to wash clothes today.

There is simply not enough great stuff in the world anymore. Companies produce crap that’s just good enough to get by, offer it up as being worth it because they’ll warranty it for three years. Then it breaks on the fourth year and you buy another one.

I don’t have room in my life for crap.

Things are only expensive if they don’t last. Quality lasts. A few companies get it. Apple gets it. They don’t build crap. They could start pushing out $300 netbooks and flood the market with substandard junk that’s slow and throwaway breakable, but they don’t. They build quality machines, and improve on them year over year. They build quality software, and improve on it slowly over time. Saddleback Leather is another company that seems to get it. The specialize in quality leather goods that are built to last. Not the “quality leather” that you can get from a TV infomercial, but real tough leather that only starts getting broken in after the first few years of daily use. They have the only warranty I’m interested in. 100 years.

Quality. Volkswagen didn’t change the basic design of the bug for over two decades. They made small improvements over time. OpenBSD looks almost the same today as it did when I first fired it up seven years ago. Its not that they haven’t been busy building awesome software, it’s that the initial product is timeless in its simplicity.

Simplicity is hard, admittedly. But what if there were more companies that took Apple’s approach to building consumer products? How about a washing machine with one button on it that says “wash”. Who needs a digital display and sixty-four buttons on a washing machine? Looking around my kitchen right now I see I have four clocks. One on the stove, one on the microwave, one on the radio, and one on the coffee maker. Why? How about a coffee maker with one button that I press after I’ve put in the coffee and water? Does everything need to be digital?

When I look at our server infrastructure I think that it needs to be simpler. Complexity is the enemy of security, and uptime. Too many companies have taken the easy way out by not considering how to simplify their products. Linux, all flavors of Linux, are most guilty of this. The more complex a product is, the more parts there are that could fail, or at the very least, not work as well together as they should.

Which brings me back to OpenBSD. I’ve loved this system for years because of its simplicity. Which happens to be the same reason I love Macs, and the same reason I love things made out of leather and oak and metal and glass. Simplicity and quality.

I don’t have room in my life for anything else.

I’ve been writing online since around 2000, starting with a geocities site. After that, I had a 50megs.com site that offered gasp 50 Megabytes of online storage! (Just noticed, they still do!) After a couple of years, I noticed a company named 1and1 that was offering three years of free hosting and the domain of your choice. That was a deal I couldn’t pass up, and I grabbed the domain name sourceport.org. I used the domain, but didn’t get a whole lot accomplished with it. I used it for a while to sell PCs as firewalls with OpenBSD, but that didn’t end well, so then I started a Wordpress blog with that domain name. Unfortunately, the person who owns the sourceport dot com address had a beef with me, so I moved the blog over to a new domain: jonstechblog.com. While I was using this blog, I moved away from wordpress and started using a Mac application named RapidWeaver. I switched to RapidWeaver because it made the task of posting videos of Linux distros that I was testing out easy. I was testing the distros anyway, so I figured, why not share it with the world.

One day, I got an email from the guys at OSDir, asking about a “link exchange”. It turns out he thought I was on to something, and that he was toying with the same idea. He donated all of his videos to me, we exchanged links, and osvids.com was born. OSVids was a big hit, and got very popular very fast, starting with an interview I did with Tina Gasperson from NewsForge.

It turns out that the site grew too popular too fast. When I first started uploading the videos, I was encoding them with quicktime, which turned out to be a very bad idea from a usability standpoint for my target audience. The Linux crowd demanded an open format, so I offered downloads in Ogg-Vorbis format in addition to switching to the more widely deployed flash. Starting out with Quicktime had another very bad side effect: bandwidth. The quicktime files were huge, and I went from a negligible bandwidth use to 1.5 Terabytes in one month. This took a toll on my wallet in a big way. I noticed an advertisement for a hosting company that claimed “Unlimited Bandwidth!”, so I signed up and moved OSVids over to their servers. Another bad idea. I learned quickly that there is no such thing as “unlimited bandwidth”, as OSVids quickly brought there servers to a screeching halt. I complained, they tried to respond, and eventually I moved the site back over to 1and1. Even on shared hosting, 1and1’s servers never skipped a beat, and I never had any downtime with them. But, like I said, I paid for it.

I kept up the site for a few months steadily adding videos of new distros as they were released. Then, several things happened in my personal and professional life that caused OSVids to begin a slow but steady decline. The most major item was the loss of hardware. Through some unfortunate events, I lost the nice IBM laptop that I was using to create the videos. I tried using my Mac, but the resolution was too low on the iBook, and even after upgrading to a MacBook, the resolution was far too low. In addition, we sold our house, moved to a new state, I had to find a new job, and we had some semi-serious in-law issues. The biggest news was finding out that we were expecting. So, I tried several different approaches to make OSVids work, but in the end I had to shut the site down. Not because it didn’t get any traffic, it did, but… it was an open loop that needed to be closed, and I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to take the time to do all the video encoding and manual coding of the web site that made OSVids run. I lost most of the data from the site, but what I found I uploaded to YouTube.

I started this blog a few months after loosing OSVids. I needed to completely reboot my online presence. I found that what I really needed was more time offline, to really think about why I wanted to write, and what I wanted to write about. After some thought, I’ve decided on a simple blog hosted here on github.

I’ve been inspired by Daring Fireball, and Dive into Mark, and a host of other great sites. I hope that over the years as my writing voice develops I’ll be able to look back on what I’ve written here and see my work progress. I do not write this blog for it to be popular, I write it because I love to write.

The loss of OSVids was unfortunate, but really inevitable. Even without my life going nuts at the time, the rise of YouTube, Google Video, and all the other video sharing sites quickly made my hand-coding and inability to accept submissions from fans obsolete. Perhaps there is still room for OSVids. I still own the osvids.net domain, and I’ve been contemplating bringing it back. For now, I’ve really come full circle, but as a much more experienced writer. In the end, its just me and my blog, but if you’d care to join me, I’d love to have you.