Solipsism Gradient

Tomorrow WWDC begins and as usual there are many rumors and few certainties. I didn’t make it this year, unfortunately.

Of course possible ideas have been flying fast and furious, but as usual nobody else knows for sure what sort of new Steve Jobs will present at the Monday keynote. Still, here are my ideas about what might happen, or at least about what I wish might happen.

WWDC being a developer’s conference, it’s not usual for it to see new hardware released – the iSight, the Mac Pro and of course the Intel migration being notable exceptions. Still, I think that new iMacs and/or new displays aren’t completely unlikely to be a by-the-way item in the keynote, or perhaps might be announced a few weeks later. Certainly both lines have gone too long without an upgrade; personally I’d like to see new displays and iMacs sharing a front bezel; the iMac’s “chin” is certainly avoidable by now, and it would mean that the iMacs would be distinguished from the same-sized displays only by a deeper rear casing. Having iSight cameras in the displays would of course be a given.

Some people feel that we’ll see a new iPod and/or a new tablet/ultrathin MacBook line – there’ll certainly be no iPhone hardware announcements. I think this unlikely, except in the context of…

…OS X without a “Mac” in front of it. Yes, I do have hopes of seeing a generic “OS X” SDK; Leopard will either be OS X or we’ll have explanations of how Mac OS X and OS X relate. Currently we have a multi-layer OS with several distinct APIs that developers can code to, but they all ultimately are seen in a single GUI layer – the one formerly known as Aqua – and run on a unified hardware platform (the Mac). Possibly, from now on, we’ll also be able to code to several hardware platforms and several GUI surfaces; neither iPods nor iPhones will ever sprout mice and keyboards, and it will be years before desktops and laptops will be accessible from multitouch only. (Though it would be cool to have optional multitouch sensors on those hypothetical new iMacs and displays…) And, before I forget it, there’s also the simplified – in fact, iPod-like – interface on the TV, which would be yet another GUI surface to reckon with.

Of course to have a generic OS X SDK we’ll need development hardware to test stuff on. If it’s unsafe to let developers code directly for the iPhone, as Apple has repeatedly said, some sort of touch tablet might even be a viable development system. I suppose this mostly depends on larger screens/panels being available, and thinner screens and mainboards. Some of Apple’s recent patents point in that direction; the one about glueing together structural casings, for instance.

On the general software front, Apple is of course making an effort to put people into a position to code cool new stuff for when Leopard comes out in about 4 months. Hopefully this will extend to releasing the “final” beta of Leopard during or very soon after WWDC; keeping it overly secret would now be unproductive. So, all that stuff like resolution independence and core animation will hopefully be used by the new apps. Speaking of apps, some people are of course viewing Leopard mostly as a vehicle to see incremental improvements to Mail, Safari, iChat and so forth – a distinctly unexciting way of seeing in my opinion. I’m not really that interested in the apps that will come included in Leopard except as examples in using all the cool new APIs.

An exception is the Finder, the app that even for most developers is the “face” of the OS. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth has ensued when the past Leopard seeds showed a scarcely changed Finder; I do think (and hope) that we’ll see a reasonable facelift to it during the keynote, though perhaps a completely new Finder might be too much to hope for.

I’m reasonably sure that we’ll have ZFS as a formatting option for external hard drives, and it would certainly be neat if this option meshed somehow with Time Machine for more reliable/expandable backups, but I’m not informed enough about the technical aspects of that. I don’t think booting from ZFS is likely, especially after the recent leaking of that possibility by some folks at Sun – let’s just hope Steve Jobs doesn’t cancel it outright just to prove them wrong!

Virtualization, after being discarded months ago as an option, is suddenly rumored to be in the works again. The options seem to be: a Parallels workalike built into Leopard (unlikely), Apple buys Parallels outright (also unlikely), simply releases a final version of Boot Camp (a little more likely but utterly boring), or – the one I think possible, and have mentioned here before – Apple will build a virtual machine hypervisor into the firmware, running OS X and whatever Boot camp supports in multiple virtual screens.

The final item of interest is .mac. There’s an SDK for that and everybody, up to and including Steve Jobs, agrees that .mac is underpowered and behind the times. In the last few days it’s become more likely that the increasing collaboration between Apple and Google would extend to Google taking .mac under their wing. They certainly have more server power to do it; in my tests, .mac has always been so slow in Brazil as to be unusable.

So, that’s it for now. More after the keynote…

Been some time since I linked to a test, so here we go. This time it’s for musical skills. It’s really three tests which you should take in this order: Tone Deaf, Adaptive Pitch and Rhythm Deaf. You’ll need a quiet room (or a good earphone) and about 15 minutes.

For what it’s worth, here are my scores:

– tone deaf: 83.3% (in the “very good” range, which goes from 80 to 89%)

– adaptive pitch: 2.7Hz (in the “normal” range, which goes from 6.0 to 1.6Hz)

– rhythm deaf: 64% (in the “normal” range, which goes from 60 to 69%).

I knew I had good musical memory, which is measured by the first test, and I also notice when some instrument is off-tune – in the second test, a halftone would be about 30Hz.

However I’m rather surprised at my normal score in the third test, as poor rhythm memory and perception have consistently foiled me when I tried to learn at least a dozen musical instruments – I can’t manage to learn to dance either, much to my wife’s distress. I suppose this confirms my theory that I suffer from an IQ gradient which goes from 100% at my head to almost 0% at my feet; I enjoy listening to complex pieces like Dave Brubeck‘s and Don Ellis‘ which feature unusual time signatures, although I can imitate only the simpler ones with my hands, and tapping my feet in time with them is hopeless. I also have a problem making sense of song lyrics (in any language) or of spoken poetry… though I suppose that’s not related to the other symptoms.

im in ur programmz codin in ur dialect:

Periodically, one goes through periods of deep metaphysical malaise. You look around at the world, wondering how such evil could flourish and such suffering could endure. You descend deeper into darkness, your faith in humanity waning, wondering why we were ever born into this cruel world. Then, suddenly, you realize that somebody has written a programming language based off of the dialect of Lolcats/Cat Macros, and your faith in humanity’s inherent good is completely restored.

More at lolcode.com:

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

Can gcc support be far off…? Maybe in Mac OS X 10.6 (LolBigCat)!!!1!1

Thanks to the Language Log for the link. kthxbye.

Update: lolbots and more at Boing Boing. And a summary of lol*s by Laughing Squid.

Update#2: head for the hills, the lolsingularity is nigh.

Update#3: Schrödinger’s LOLCAT. Now why didn’t I think of that? Or did I, and the state vector didn’t collapse properly…? …and also the lolburners Flickr photo pool.

It’s been some time since I visited the Doing Business site, but now they have a new map up which makes it easier to compare various countries regarding the ease of doing business.

Of course, as usual, Brazil is among the worst countries for business. Specifically, it’s #106 for starting a business, #101 for emplying workers, and #149 for paying taxes and closing the business after it folds (which is very probable). New Zealand and Singapore have the best ratings.

In the last year I’ve been getting an unusual number of queries from people wanting to open some sort of business in Brazil; even more unusual, a Mac-related business. My answer is always “don’t”. Yes, ratings for investing money here have been seen very positive increases lately, but it’s better to do so indirectly, via the stock market for instance. (For US investors, funds like iShares MSCI Brazil (EWZ) have had excellent returns.)

I used to have a one-man consulting company – opened during a period where the usual requirement to have at least two partners had lapsed – but I shut it down due to several factors, many of which related to taxes and bureaucratic inconveniences. While the company is dormant, I haven’t dissolved it; it takes 9 to 12 months to do so, and is expensive. Bankruptcy proceedings are known to take 2 to 15 years. Many reports are available; check the latest one about Brazil (PDF) for details.

It’s been some time since I posted updates on XRay. Quite recently MacUser UK published a mini round-up on Finder utilities where, somewhat to my surprise, XRay scored 5 out of 5 against 4 competitors – and also was “Editor’s Choice”. (If anyone has that specific issue – 4/2007 I’d be grateful for a scan of the printed page.) Not bad for an utility which hasn’t been updated for quite some time!

This prompted me to review my sales graph which I had somewhat neglected lately. Here’s the current curve, with annotations:

The initial spike for the 1.0 release is no doubt due to several months of public beta. I wouldn’t necessarily say this would be applicable for all cases; XRay is targeted towards developers and more proficient users. During the public beta period I released new versions every month or so and took great care in replying to any comments and suggestions. So there was a pent-up demand and a ready-made userbase waiting to register their copy in the very first week.

After that, of course, sales decayed exponentially with a slight recovery when the reasonably significant 1.0.5 release came out, with subsequent releases nearly or completely vanishing in the noise – I suppose most people who needed it had already registered. Some other blips are due to the software being included in CDROMs. Still, for the last 3 years sales have stayed reasonably flat with a slight upwards trend detectable since the Intel Macs came out; no doubt this just reflects the expanding market. There are a few peaks (marked with “??”) which I have no ready explanation for…

Still, XRay 1.1 (the current release) isn’t an universal app, though it still runs fine under Rosetta. The downside is that the XRay Contextual Menu doesn’t work, as it’s called by the Finder, which (on Intel Macs) works only with universal plug-ins. However, it’s still possible (and even faster) to select an item in the Finder and XRay it by pressing shift-command-X.

Of course, as I’ve said here now and then, XRay II (2.0) is in the works. Unfortunately the universe has lately conspired to keep me from making any significant progress; still, I’m seriously determined to have a public beta out before the year is over. Hopefully sooner. Maybe much sooner. Stay tuned.

More LOLology at the Language Log. See also Meme Cats.

So The Onion said:

Hallmark Scientists Identify 3 New Human Emotions

…In 2002, McMurrough monitored the MRI activity of nearly 10,000 test subjects between the ages of 25 and 40 as they described all emotions they had experienced in the past six months and rated each for its intensity, duration, and whether it would be conveyable to others by mail…

The first emotion the project successfully isolated was “requiapathy,” the combination of relief and guilt that comes with the sudden realization that you no longer miss a dead loved one. That discovery quickly led to the uncovering of “seprudity,” the feeling of appreciating a coworker’s dedication without fully understanding his or her job function, and “trepatiousness,” a synthesis of rage and jealousy, though more muted and often accompanied by a sensation of weight-lessness.

Hah.

Of course Hallmark was interested only in emotions that might be “[interpreted] in warm, concise verse; inoffensive, ingratiating humor; and reassuring pastel watercolors” to quote further from the article. What they neglected to say was that several other emotions were also identified, and I present a few of them for your edification.

Debloggery: the combination of guilt and panic felt when you realize you haven’t blogged anything for at least two weeks, and may have even forgot the password to do so.

Backupenia: the first stage of what you feel when your hard drive was wiped out and your only backup disk refuses to mount properly. The following stages are “disconnecticity” (blaming it on the cable and rushing out to buy a handful of new ones) and “declaimitance” (pretending to everybody that you actually wanted to initialize your drive anyway and the lost data were of no significance).

Retradelessness: the sinking feeling you get when you discover, upon returning from the store with your new Mac, that the Apple Store web page is offline in preparation for new products.

Fartusity: the rapid succession of superiority and that “uh-oh” feeling when you whip out your trusty 10″ slide rule at a job interview and the interviewer asks if it runs Linux.

Applemunity: the smugness you, as a Mac user, feel when you overhear two Windows users complaining about viruses.

Well, those guys don’t waste any time: lolgeeks! (thanks to boing boing for the link.)

Update: See also lolbrarians. Found at the highly recommended Language Log; they also comment that “…the field of lolguistics is even more sadly underdeveloped”. lol.

Update#2: Good analysis and l337-katz0rz deconstruction by David McRaney guesting at icanhascheezburger!!!1!1!!

Update#3: Took some time, but xkcd explains all.