The Windkey and the Lamplighter

This abacus bracelet is awesome. I am *terrible* at counting rows and stitches when I’m crocheting. Maybe I need to take a trip to the bead store.
(Mine, however, will not be orange and red. Yuck.)

I want a smartphone. Currently, I’ve got a Nokia T610, inherited after I lost my little Motorolla flip-phone. The T610 accidentally calls 911 through the lock on occasion, but otherwise has no particularly good nor bad features.

The camera is a disadvantage (my employer prohibits cameraphones in many of our buildings), but I’ve had trouble finding even non-smart phones without a camera, so I’m willing to deal with it.

There are four things I really want: a telephone that will work in most places, a fast web browser, an IMAP email client, and a password safe. An mp3 player is a bonus, but not a necessity. 12+ hours of battery life would be good.

The last of these seems to be the killer for the iPhone—it’s a closed platform so I can’t port the Palm app I use now (even if I relearned programming to do it) and nobody out there is offering something that actually keeps the passwords on my device.(1) I’m also looking at the Treo 755—I held one at a Verizon booth in the mall last week, and it looks like a nice toy, but it didn’t have enough battery time remaining for me to try out the web browser.

Anyone have other widgets I should be considering, or input on the iPhone or Treo?

(1) I found a password-keeping application for the iPhone that stores your passwords, encrypted, on a website. It looks okay, but I am not interested in trusting even my encrypted passwords to a remote server. Besides, I want to be able to get my passwords even when I can’t get online. Even the parts of my office where a cameraphone would be allowed are in a 1950s-style brick-and-steel Farraday cage—my current cell phone doesn’t start working until I’m over 100 ft from the building.

I found this post at Sense of Events a very informative, intellectual, and moving account of the events that occurred (according to some calendars) ~2000 years ago this last weekend. Just thought I’d pass it along while I’m working on organizing my own thoughts for original reflections on a bunch of topics.

Libby Lewis filed a report with NPR this morning describing the 15% drop in median home price across the U.S.  She further said that the Real Estate industry said that this was due principally to a drop in the price of higher prices homes.  This comment went unremarked.I don’t see how this can be. Changes in price in the upper half don’t affect the median value at all. The situation is a little more involved when the population sizes change from month to month—but not enough to justify the statement that falling prices at the upper end of the scale drove a change in the median reported.

Joel Spolsky has written several thousand words on the subject of standards compliance, Postel’s Robustness Principle, and their effect on web browsers in general and the new Internet Explorer 8 in particular. His axioms are correct, and he reaches many correct conclusions from them. He misses one alternative open to the IE 8 team, and one critical point of interpretation of Postel’s Law.

First, IE8: if you haven’t read Spolsky’s summary, you should at least know that most big web pages have two sets of CSS and two sets of JavaScript: instructions for IE, and instructions for everybody else. Some now do differentiate between the bugs of Firefox, Firefox 2, Opera, and WebKit. Special features for WebKit Touch are becoming particularly common. IE8 isn’t much like I7. It has many fewer standards-compliance bugs. Web page code sees the IE identifiers, though, and inserts bug-circumventing extras. Pages that look great in Firefox or in IE7 after they’ve worked around its bugs look terrible in IE8. They are often unusable. The Microsoft folks and ex-Microsoft Spolsky have fixed on two futures: one in which IE8 breaks lots of web pages by default, and one in which IE8 ships with a IE7 bug-compatible mode by default.

But the problem doesn’t happen until the web-page code figures out that it’s running in IE and takes action appropriate only to IE7. There’s a very simple technical solution: don’t admit to web pages that this is IE. Microsoft already lies in its user-agent strings, claiming IE to be Mozilla 4.0. They should just lie in the internal tags as well, changing the few symbol names necessary to ensure that none of the common checks for browser identity will give away that this product is marketed and sold as Internet Explorer. What doesn’t work in that scenario?

Separately, Joel (and perhaps the authors of early web browsers) misunderstand a crucial point of Postel’s Law. The proper reaction to malformed tags is not to guess—it’s to remove paired tags and display the content as plain text. Keep the data and the requests, but reject (and log) bad commands and context. There are some commands that should be handled differently, whose content it’s not safe or appropriate to just disclose. But that’s a very limited set. This is how malformed character entities are already handled. Malformed HTML should work in just the same way.

Last weekend I played my second game of Starcraft.  It took about seven hours, not counting pause for dinner.  I tried a Zergling rush.

It didn’t work.

My migraine (and other headache-suffering) friends and I have long noticed a correlation between eating spicy foods and a cessation or reduction in pain symptoms, especially headache pain. Now, Science (specifically, scienceblog) says that not only are we right about that, but those same pain receptors may be involved in learning and memory.

“activation of TPRV1 receptors can trigger long-term depression, a phenomenon that creates lasting changes in the connections between neurons…believed to be the cellular basis for memory making.”

So (maybe) eating spicy foods will cure your headaches and improve your grades? I think I will have to watch the Brown University Research Team to see where their research leads, but it sounds good so far. Pass the pepper, please.

Apple’s new SDK reads:

3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).

There’s some nice commentary on this at sublimeguile. I’d certainly be inconvenienced by it. I quite like having LispMe and a HP-48 emulator on my palm pilot. If this is meant to be a ban on interpreted code… what a pain! But if it’s only meant to be a ban on downloadable interpreted code, it might be survivable. And there is the Safari JavaScript interpreter.

It’s more interesting to me that Apple is demonstrating a serious multi-pronged attempt to combat malware. Leopard added code-signing in a nicely subtle way. Every application bundle on a Mac is signed when it first runs. Changes after that point cause warnings to users, and clear any special privileges (like listening to the network). It’s clear that Apple can and will extend the set of privileges restricted with this mechanism using the sandbox MAC system also introduced in Leopard.

The iPhone is a step ahead. The restrictions placed on third-party applications will make self-replicating malware very, very difficult to install. The Mac’s biggest malware threat for the last eight years has been Microsoft Office macro viruses. The iPhone won’t have anything like that, because it won’t have extra network-capable interpreters. Moreover, this is done in a way that won’t inconvenience more than a fraction of a percent of the user base. Sun and Adobe will mind, since their Java and Flash interpreters won’t be permitted. Microsoft’s Office team may or may not mind… but their Windows Mobile team should be terribly jealous.

Last night, as part of my church’s Lenten observances, we walked a seven-circuit labyrinth. The one we walked is temporary—along the same design as the two built into the floor of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, but only seven instead of eleven circuits, and marked in blue ink onto a white tarpaulin spread out over the floor.

The labyrinth experience itself was interesting—we had about 30 people walking simultaneously, so though it was nearly empty when I entered, it was quite full and we had people passing each other as I was winding my way out. (You enter and exit the labyrinth by the same path.) I enjoyed the clockwork-like, intricate dance of my fellow-travelers, both during my walk and after I left. However, that was not my favorite part.

My favorite part was the words I encountered when I got to the center. The vicar who organized borrowing this labyrinth from our Synod had left a bible open to Psalm 139 and 140 in the center. I’m not sure what text she intended to leave out, but one verse particularly spoke to me:

Psalm 139:14 - I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

I held that phrase, “fearfully and wonderfully made” all through my exit from the labyrinth, and looked it up while waiting for the rest of our group to finish in the KJV that I have on my PalmPilot. (What, doesn’t everyone keep a Bible in their pocket?) I later learned that not all translations have that same poetry, though this Hebrew/English Bible does. I need to learn to read Hebrew, I suppose, but in the mean time I’ll just hold on to the KJV’s poetry and relish the imagery that it grants me.

Marcus Borg is speaking this weekend at Boston University. He is the author of Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith, which I reviewed last year, and many others.  He’s been invited by the Episcopal Diocese of Boston.  This is the same denomination that recently had a priest ordained as an imam, and that recently advocated a system of split family law for Britain.

I’m going to hear him speak; I found the book stimulated many good arguments. I hope to have some more afterwards.  I invite you to join me.  Registration is required.