The platform reigns are far, far too tight for my taste and they imply that Apple has a strong desire to become the gatekeeper for ALL applications and content (despite their relatively capricious and arbitrary standards of judgment beyond the ones laid out in their developer or reseller agreements). Amazon acts as a gatekeeper too, but they will sell me anything that isn’t illegal. I can buy sex toys and pornography on Amazon, as surely as I can buy a copy of Where The Wild Things Are (both the film and book). Apple applies subjective standards of taste to what they sell, and that troubles me.

The niche that this thing is supposed to fill doesn’t really exist yet; this begs the question “can Apple create a new niche on its own?” and I don’t see this specific incarnation of the tablet doing it.

Also, I hate how they’re describing this thing as “magical.” Gandalf was “magical.” Unicorns are “magical.” This is just a computer with a really, really garish keyboard it can dock into. I look forward to seeing what Gruber has to say about this and if he’s snowed over or a touch confused by it as well.

iBooks seems to have robbed its interface wholesale from Delicious Library. I don’t think I’m the only one who noticed. Only slightly distasteful…

I described this to a friend earlier as a cornerstone in the foundation of the next computing paradigm revolution, but not the revolution itself. I absolutely believe that within 10 years the desktop metaphor will be relegated to the same niche as command line interfaces: useful, but most people don’t understand them or understand why we still have them. But right now, the sheer volume of the functionality that’s abstracted away from the user is disheartening to me. I personally would prefer it if this device skewed closer towards the laptop on the scale and further from the phone, but maybe the next year’s sales figures will just demonstrate that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

The bottom line, for me is this: it requires a computer to sync to and it’s extremely iTunes Store specific. It’s an end point on the digital hub, but it’s not the hub itself. It doesn’t appear to be able to talk to an Apple TV or Airport Express, and there doesn’t seem to be anything resembling multitasking (except for the “blessed” applications like Mail or the iPod app). It is extremely ambitious but I don’t think it lives up to those ambitions, save for the fact that it comes closer than the other devices that have tried. On the other hand, I would really like to see some of those features (like home screen wallpaper) in iPhone OS 3.2 for the iPhone/iPod Touch proper. High hopes for that!

I reserve final judgment until I can actually get my hands on one and finally play with the damned thing some, but in this form, the way it is now, this entire device feels like an incredibly well engineered but still ultimately half-baked gamble.

The McKern family name isn’t especially prestigious, being best known as the surname of Uncle Leo (the best number two that number six ever confronted). But we’re not concerned with Leo McKern. We’re concerned with the traffic that funnels in for Ryan McKern.

The one that I’m most familiar with is the musician Ryan McKern formerly of (I think…) Minnesota, now of Louisiana. Ryan has a multitude of musical projects going. I think he’s in the process of moving into Facebook and abandoning the sinking ship that is MySpace but for now, I’m running with the links I know work. The projects of his I’ve chanced over are:

• The Guilt Øf…
• Ierased
• WOLVHAMMER
• Le’ goddess Rigamortis

While there may be other Ryan McKern’s, I know that he’s the only one who people have been searching for who have landed here. So if you’re looking for the Ryan McKern who can grow a beard and who PLAYS MUSIC instead of the Ryan McKern who shaves once a week and who LISTENS TO BAD MUSIC, he’s your guy.

Easily one of my favorite metal albums ever, despite its brevity. And possibly the sickest vinyl packaging imaginable.

Little known fact: I love metal. Maybe not the metal that the crazy kids in black on black attire with stringy hair listen to, but metal none the less. Which is why it behoves me to point you to Megasus.

(Picture blatantly stolen from The Providence Daily Dose. Credit where credit is due.)

Of note is that while I know absolutely no Python, I had no problem getting everything up and running. That alone is a big plus for Python when it comes time to consider dabbling in another scripting language.

On one hand, there is the bloat of another one-off module loaded into Apache to consider. On the other hand, there is some pretty smooth repository-serving action going on here, and it’s probably the best I’ll get without hopping on the Git/GitHub bandwagon or signing up for a Bitbucket account.

A small bit of background first: I’m using Snow Leopard and I’m unwilling to deal with the vagaries of less-than-native clients. This means that I’m not using ported Unix apps. So no Gnews, newspost, Pan, Pine, Slrn, or Tin. Those are right out.

This left me with a list cobbled together from MacUpdate:

• Unison, $24.95 from Panic
• Nemo, $14.95 from Malcom Mac
• MacSoup, $20.00 from Stefan Haller
• Pineapple News, free from Allen Brunson
• Xnntp, free from EDV Consulting
• Hogwasher, $49.00 from Asar
• OSXNews, free from Anurodh Pokharel
• MT-NewsWatcher, Donation requested, from Simon Fraser
• MaxNews, $20 from MaxProg

I had intended this to be a marginally comprehensive review of my time using these clients, but I barely got into the account setup with most of them, if I installed them at all. Here’s how it broke down…

Unison looks like crap; It hasn’t been updated in since 2/26/08, and it has quirks under Leopard and Snow Leopard that I’m just not prepared to deal with. It feels dated, by which I mean it doesn’t look good by modern Aqua standards; it also uses multiple windows to manage a lot of it’s information. It feels like it’s really based around the filesharing on Usenet, instead of being a general-purpose NNTP reader, which led me to uninstall it within five minutes. It’s probably the worst looking Panic application (but one of the better looking ones in this list), which is unusual for a company who is often considered the vanguard of independent Mac development.

Nemo? So much promise. So god damned buggy. Poorly translated. Unfortunately priced given the wide-ranging nature of the bugs. These are fixable (and the price would be reasonable otherwise), but the simple fact of the matter is that this client is an example of how not to use cocoa frameworks. Didn’t even make it to “use” because once it littered the root of my hard drive with empty files, I trashed it.

UPDATE

The Malcom-Mac site is down for “scheduled maintenance” and the developer of Nemo has stated his desire to squash these outstanding bugs and polish his software. I’ll revisit this in a few months time.

MacSoup? No idea. It asked me to create a “settings file” to create a new database for news and mail. Obviously doesn’t get what “native” client means. Looks like it’s using old quickdraw calls to render the UI. Never set up accounts in it.

Pineapple News is free but the custom icons look extremely janky compared to the “standard” icons they’re replacing. After setting up accounts it just hurt to use. It’s visually grating on the eyes.

Xnntp has an installer. Aint no damned reason for that. It’s a bloody NNTP reader. It doesn’t need to create system files. OS X uses the application bundle format for a reason.

Hogwasher looks like an old Hotwire¹ client that someone stripped the filesharing out of and glued NNTP support to. It costs a lot of money (and maybe it took a lot of time to develop) but it’s just god damned unusable. Trashed within minutes.

OSXnews looks awful too. Probably works better than Nemo, but has a distinct level of spit and polish missing. Never even got to setting up my newsgroup account. The author stated in July of 2007 that he was working on version 3. I wrote this in October of 2009, just to

I cannot stress how terrible the experience with MT-NewsWatcher was. It is basically an old Classic Mac application that has been updated just enough to sort-of run under OS X. It took a while to do anything, and it might be the worst looking of all of these clients. Apparently, Classic Mac OS users love it because it still looks and works like a Classic Mac application. Just so we’re clear, I fucking hated the Classic Mac OS.

MaxNews was downloaded, but at this point I gave up and just installed the Thunderbird 3 beta. Is it a little overkill? Yes. Is it a little bloated? Yes. But it just works, and it works well.

So what happened? I think that a few options are plausible: these developers date to a different era, with different development mores and means. They may think that people still using NNTP don’t care about their clients looking or working like complete shit, or they may think that because NNTP and Usenet as a whole date to an era where people would just roll their own GUIs or slap some shit together in curses and call it a Usenet client, they can still get away with that sort of behavior and worse still, get away with charing money for it.

So, am I being a bit of a snobby dick and trashing developers hard work?
Yes, I am.

But when the honorable mention you give to Thunderbird 3 (which is in beta right now, and more usable than anything else I listed) is the best thing you have to say about Mac OS X NNTP clients, the whole damned situation is in a sad sorry state of affairs. And if you’re going to ask me to pay money for something, you’d better give me something worth paying money for. So this attempt to review these clients has ended in abortive failure, and concession to get by with the least worst option available.

1:37:20 PM Matthew Miller: Think I’m going to write an RFC with the suggestion that we extend the standard 4 option I/O error handling directives — Abort, Retry, Fail, Ignore — to include a fifth: Fuck_It_Dude_Lets_Go_Bowling
1:37:31 PM Ryan McKern: i’ll second it if you do
1:37:45 PM Matthew Miller: excellent. let’s see what the experts group thinks.

n. pahyl

1. a collection of objects laid on top of each other

2. What happens when something is so utterly terrible that it’s heaped into a mound of failure, resembling nothing so much as a collection of animal shit, which you’ve probably just stepped in.

Example: The kerfuffle over this subdomain and it’s associated implications for the document root that it serves has turned gone hostile. This project is officially a pile.

synonyms: heap, mound, agglomerate, cumulation, cumulus

While this is only one incident, I hope it portents a seachange. I find that more and more the Powers That Be are attempting to spoonfeed the idea that all technically oriented people (be they developers, sys admins, or even just “hardcore” gamers) MUST indulge in a diet that is terrifyingly high in saturated fat, processed starch, chemically manufactured corn-based sugar products, and “brain enhancers” like guarana or caffeine. In discussing his epiphany regarding his diet, Katz extolls the positive benefits it’s had on his health, his weight, and the level of enjoyment he derives from the simple act of eating.

Working on the help desk and transition into full time admin work, I found that the diet of most of my peers can be described as one of convenience at best. Lunches are short, and often taken at Burger King, D’Angelo’s, local take-out Chinese counters, or the local mall. The meals are high in processed, saturated fat and processed starch, and loaded with flavorful chemicals. The staple is red meat, and the only vegetables I see eaten regularly are in the form of french fries and bread and butter pickles served on sandwiches. Snacks are frequent and often come from the candy vending machine. The sugary beverages, often provided from the soda fountains and fruit juice machines on every floor, flow freely; 200 calories of high fructose filler at a time 4 to 6 times a day.

I don’t know what the industry average for obesity, diabetes, or heart disease are compared to the rest of the population, but I’d be willing to at least make a safe wager on it being markedly higher. When I realized that this was killing me, I quit High Fructose Corn Syrup outright, cut caffeine from my diet, and began attempting to sharply limit the amount of refined sugar in my diet. Some months I do better than others, but the act is about the effort as much as the results with large lifestyle changes like this.

Nitpicking aside, while I might think his use of a bread maker is indulgent (because I have a seething disdain for machines that only do one thing well) or that his claim of cooking brown rice on the stove being “impossible” is misleading (full disclosure: I use a rice cooker to get back space on my stove top; It’s an excellent steamer in addition to a rice cooker, therefore not a uni-tasking space hog), I applaud his willingness to examine his diet and make the big changes. I respect his willingness to talk about a subject that I find more and more of our peers just don’t “get” or want to understand. I wish more people would do what he’s doing right now, much less more geeks, nerds, admins, or developers. Talk about your diet! Think about your food!

And Yehuda, if you’re reading this for some reason (or, you know, anyone else who has made it this far), check the instructions for the grain cultivar you’re cooking if you ever try brown rice on the stove again. No two brown rice cultivars are the same and they all have (sometimes very) different directions. I recommend basmati rice if you’re so inclined. The brown variation is fragrant and nutty, with a pleasant chewiness that white basmati lacks. Goes well with both red and white meats and is an excellent rice for a hearty pilaf.

If you’re interested in literal food for thought, in addition to the books that Yehuda recommends, might I also suggest Ruhlman’s Elements of Cooking where he discusses both why professional chef’s do what they do and how they do it, and Jacques Pépin’s Complete Techniques, which is an essential primer for learning to do simple things better, and making hard things easier.

First things first, I should probably talk about TextMate. Textmate 2 feels like vaporware.

Is it? Probably not. And in the interest of full disclosure, I wrote this post in TextMate using the not-utterly-terrible Blogging bundle.

However, it’s been a few years since there was anything especially novel about TextMate, and this doesn’t help the fact that the editor is getting a little long in the tooth visually. This isn’t really a problem, as a good editor can outlast almost anything else in the environment surrounding it. Many, many cranky people still use vi and emacs, which have both outlasted the operating systems they were built for.

I’ve just grown weary of having to sort-of finagle and finesse TextMate into usable shape. Admittedly, the Green Moleskin mod helps substantially (good bye project drawers!), and the use of updatable bundles has kept this editor viable in these rough and tumble times. I just can’t help hating the fact that I have to keep CyberDuck open if I’m editing something remotely. Lack of SFTP/SSH support really is all I’m wistful about. Finicky bundle extensions (the Blogging bundle specifically is what I’m thinking of) are annoying but not deal breakers.

The Challengers

Since I am a geek, and therefore always looking for a better tool, I began testing Coda ($99) and Espresso (49.95€ with existing CSSEdit License, or about $68.86 at todays exchange rate). Both offer a generous, fully functional, trial period. Both offer promises of kitchen-sink editing (defined as being able to handle all of my editing needs without leaving the app, including CSS editing, script editing, and remote filesystem editing over SFTP/SSH).

Panic is one of the top old-school Macintosh software companies. Their webpage is slick, and their applications are polished like a granite mirror. Coda is their relatively seasoned (released in April of 2007) web development application. MacRabbit, also an extremely slick (in the lick-able sense) Macintosh software development company, then released Espresso (in March of 2009) into the same kitchen-sink web development market that Coda was fighting for. If you work with HTML and CSS, or work in a language like PHP or perl but you hate Dreamweaver, Panic and MacRabbit want your dollars.

Espresso

Espresso, editing a ruby script

I started with Espresso, as I am a regular CSSEdit user. As mentioned earlier I have had nothing but good things to say about CSSEdit, especially since they rolled in the live preview/x-ray and local override features. Espresso is extensible through the use of small plugins called Sugars. Unfortunately, this means that as of today it also has poor language support (the Coffee House aggregator shows that Sugars are relatively immature and that there is no best-practice or general standards for them yet.). Of note is that there is no real support for Ruby yet, which is annoying as all hell since most of my back-end scripts are in Ruby. You’ll see in the included screenshot that Ruby documents are just plain text documents, with no syntax highlighting. However, HTMl, PHP, and Python support and highlighting were all excellent.

Interestingly, Espresso has none of the CSSEdit guts worked into it from what I could find. It’s very much a web programmers editor, not a web designer editor. While it wasn’t uncomfortable to work with CSS in Espresso, I found myself switching over to CSSEdit more often than not. I imagine that in time MacRabbit will probably roll CSSEdit and Espresso into a single application. For now though, it’s more context switching, with no gain in productivity to show for it.

Espresso shows promise (it is a beautifully designed application), and the concept of workspaces is novel. I appreciated the ability to work on something locally while automatically publishing it remotely, and Sugars have the potential to be as awesome as Bundles, if not more so. But much as every child has the potential to be president someday, only time will determine if Espresso’s Sugars are making me coffee for $6.00 an hour in a few years.

Coda

Panic’s challenger for my hard-earned editor dollars is Coda. Coda does a few interesting things, like integrating the SubEthaEdit engine for collaborative editing and incorporating the Transmit core for remote file operations. As of late it also supports plugins, though I’ve been unable to really find much in the way of usable plugins, since they’re a relatively new feature.

The kitchen-sink approach that Panic took with Coda also extends to having a built-in terminal, which can connect to a local machine or a remote machine, for code debugging, remote operations, or whatever you’d normally keep a terminal open for while developing. Coda is a very, very complex application, and that’s ultimately the problem I had with using it.

Coda's weird autocomplete suggestions

Coda wants to be everything at once, and it’s very good at most things that it does. The text editor never feels like it’s holding me back, but one of the big quirks I found was that the constant language-unaware auto-complete suggestions are much, much more aggravating than helpful.

I also found little utility in the included HTML reference, but that’s only because I know HTML and CSS very well (not that my blog layout implies this, but I do. Honest.), and for a developer who only uses HTML to present manipulated data, I can see it being a helpful reference. Panic has recently (as of version 1.5) added the ability to point Coda towards other websites as reference guides, and that’s much more useful long-term.

Conclusion

At the end of the day the only real utility Coda and Espresso offer me is remote editing. They don’t support any configuration file formats and their support for anything except “web languages” (ASP, PHP, perl, Python, ActionScript, HTML, CSS and kinda-sorta Ruby) is poor at best. TextMate has bundles for Apache, nginx, and SSH, as well as general support for any of a variety of key-value pair style config files. it also supports Bash and these are ultimately the make-or-break features for me.

However, I recognize that Espresso and Coda aren’t trying to be the programmers swiss army knife that applications like Vim or TextMate already are. They’re editors geared towards web developers. Unfortunately, while that is a sizable 20% of my needs, the other 80% of my work is dealing with configuration files every single day I am on the clock.

For the time being, it looks like I’m sticking with TextMate.

Follow-up questions

You might ask now “Why not MacVim or BBEdit? What’s wrong with TextWrangler?”
Well, BBEdit is an excellent editor that just took too long to have its visual appearance overhauled. It used to look exactly like a Classic Mac OS application running inside a Cocoa OS X frame. They’ve just released a new version that I’m told would be worth my time to test and no longer looks like a very powerful editor hidden inside a child’s toy. I may revisit it soon and see if it’s shaping up into something that doesn’t make me want to punch my monitor in frustration. TextWrangler feels almost like borderline abandonware at this point and it’s an extremely watered down programmers editor for the languages I’m working in and for the amount of work I have to do. MacVim is an excellent port of Vim to Mac OS X, but at the end of the day it is Vim, and Vim gives you AIDS. Worse still, if you use Aquamacs then your genitals will spontaneously combust.

If you’ve stopped in, this pertains mostly to the use of automatic updates over SSH2 not working for me in WordPress 2.8. If you’re not experiencing this problem, I don’t think this write-up will be of much help. But feel free to stick around a while. We’ve got snacks.

After upgrading to WordPress 2.8 I discovered that this update has broken automatic core and plugin updates for me. I use SSH2/SFTP as I don’t trust/like/need/support FTP, and the SSH log only shows that the PECL module is opening a connection and then closing it, with WordPress returning only the following to to the browser window.

Unable to locate WordPress Content directory (wp-content).

I dug through how WordPress handles upgrades, and tracked this all down to the /wp-admin/includes/class-wp-filesystem-ssh2.php file. Replacing the version in 2.8 with the one from 2.7.1 restores full functionality but this is obviously NOT optimal, because that rewrite happened for a reason. I’ve got a diff file and some debug logs, and I’m sitting down to out which function is failing if I can (FYI, I probably can’t). I look forward to filing my first real bug report and then having it closed with my first instance of “Will not fix”, “Works for me”, or “Cannot duplicate”.

UPDATE 6/13/2009 @4:40PM EST

The rewrite happened because use of the ssh2.sftp wrapper was introduced, replacing the older version of the function which copied contents into temp files and pushed the data around. It was a drastic speed increase, but it doesn’t bloody work on my system for one reason or another.

UPDATE 6/13/2009 @7:16PM EST

I’ve officially cried “uncle!” and turned to the most wretched hive of scum and villainy in blogging, the WordPress forums (as well as their bug reporting and ticketing system). I also identified the patch which introduced the code which caused SSH2 support to go flying off the rails for me.

UPDATE 6/18/2009 @4:17PM EST

The WordPress team has marked this bug as belonging to milestone 2.9. There is a slim chance that maybe I’ll see some relief in 2.8.1, but more than likely they’re going to yet again refactor how SSH2 works for automatic upgrades. If this changes, I will update this post accordingly. For now, I believe I may have to simply let it be broken.

Other than that, this round of upgrades has been mostly painless, and the hyped speed increases are not just hyperbole. WordPress 2.8 feels only slight underbaked beyond SSH2 hiccups. I confess that I haven’t had a chance to play with the redesigned sidebar widget administration yet though, as I haven’t even figured out how I want to implement support for sidebar widgets into this theme.

The bug that deletes some custom fields if you update posts that have them is still there. No idea how to begin tracking that one down, but I can state authoritatively that it’s theme and plugin independent. Why am I linking to some dudes blog, and not the official WordPress bug tracker? because I don’t even know where WordPress keeps its bug tracker.

I also had to reset WordPress Blog stats because WordPress was tracking the wrong subdomain for all of my stats. The numbers tallied up with Google Analytics and the AWFFull log grinder, but the URLs were all effed up. I fixed the problem on the WordPress.com backend, and in the process lost months of aggregated history.

The upshot to this loss is that I hope to have a new round of search hit inspired commentary ready to go in a week or two.