The Remote Desktop Envy
For all the advantages of Mac OS X over Windows, there is one thing that my IT friends always sneer at: That OS X has the inferior remote desktop protocol.
Apple makes remote management quite easy. Its Apple Remote Desktop, although expensive, has great user interface and is indispensable if you manage over a bunch of machines. Since OS X 10.5, it has become even easier and cheaper if you just need a quick access to another box—the screen sharing feature is built-in gratis.
This being said, OS X’s core performance of remote desktop management itself has a bad reputation. If you compare it to that of Windows, OS X’s remote desktop is slow. If you use Microsoft’s own client software to talk to a remote machine, it uses its proprietary protocol and only requires essential drawing commands. This is why the remote desktop is stripped of any theme when drawn in the client side (and many people like it). OS X, on the other hand, builds on the open VNC protocol and transmits lots of raw pixel information. That OS X has far more visual effects and its UI is more sophisticated is of no help. It seems that when OS X’s window system was designed, remote desktop was never taken as a high priority, even if the window system is also client-server based, like most modern desktop GUI systems are.
Another interesting consequence when all those design decisions got lumped together is that you can never have more than one person using the desktop remotely. That is, if someone is logged into the local desktop console, it is impossible for you to login remotely and have your own desktop served to you. Programmatically it has also limited the usefulness of OS X as a graphics server, as window-backed drawing processes must either be under an actively logged-in user (and that has to be in the local desktop console) or root, which is highly undesirable if your graphics program powers some web service. My experiences show that Quartz, when being used with higher-level abstraction layers like Cocoa, is far superior to any graphics package out there (e.g. ImageMagick), especially with its supported range of formats (especially PDF) and excellent graphics model, but that graphics server permission thing limits its usefulness.
On the other hand, the decline of the desktop—if we can term the trend as such—is evident in the way that not much has been changed in the basic design of modern window-based GUI, and remote desktop is among the laggards. And when laptops are so cheap (but bandwidth still a problem), it’s easier to build a service architecture around client-rendered web pages and server-provided web services. Serving desktops remotely is out.
That Reblogging Thing
Tumblr’s reblogging design says a lot of its peculiarity.
I find it fun reading my Tumblr dashboard everyday, in an age where blog seems done and RSS in decline—established media and writers make it a norm, whereas the rest of us have moved on to “microblogging”. I find truly insightful writings and excellent blogs on Tumblr. It has a light mix of social network, like the elements of following, but only a very light mix. It’s largely anonymous, like a masquerade ball: Many of its default themes don’t even show your own intro, and that is if you bother to fill in that info at all.
Then there’s this no-comment thingy. Not that you can’t do it, as there are definitely ways to extend, but it’s just not there as a built-in. Instead, reblogging is made insanely easy. Almost too easy that it could have become a retweet soup that deluged much of the Twitter scene, but apparently it doesn’t.
I’d say that reblogging to Tumblr is what comments have been to “traditional” blogging. By allowing comments, each blog entry becomes a forum and a point of attention on its own. Tumblr, on the other hand, makes easy adding your own words when reblogging. And this is important: Because it’s you, the one who reblogs, that is the center of the game, and you get a voice of your own. At the same time the original author also knows your existence. It is unlike the entry-comment design, in which comment is relegated to a secondary, albeit supportive, role. I’ve followed a number of interesting tumblogs by following the reblogging history of an interesting post.
Buying a code signing certificate for Mac OS X requires Internet Explorer. Good job, Thawte.
Judgment of Plagiarism
I’m at the beginning of Richard Posner’s “The Little Book of Plagiarism” and I ran into this passage (locations 138-145 of the book1, emphasis original):
A judgment of plagiarism requires that the copying […] induce reliance by [the intended readers]. By this I mean that the reader does something because he thinks the plagiarizing work original that he would not have done had he known the truth. […] If [the reader is] a teacher he gives a bad student a good grade, to the prejudice of other students in the class (if the students are graded on a curve), thinking the student’s paper original.
I’m citing this passage because I believe many of us, in our early student days, had this experience: you wrote something that the rest of the class copied, but you got a mediocre grade, if not the worst.
Many years ago I helped someone write her Fortran 77 homework (which was taught in her department of some engineering school, using g77), and many of her classmates copied her homework, some by copying the built executable, some by copying the printout of the source code, which carried errors. Surprisingly all those copiers got better grades than she did (some 90s, some 80s, out of 100, and she only got 70 something).
It was a very comical experience, not least because I was the ghostwriter. I tend to think I never became proficient in Fortran (or decided not to be) because of that episode.
Logo in the Age of Instant Communication
Ignacio Vasallo, on logo and branding in our age:
It was the first time any country had created an abstract logo to brand itself but today everybody thinks that all you need to do to rebrand a country is make a logo.
I think that’s out of date. Logos are old fashioned. These days, you can communicate almost instantly with the world. And the internet means that message has got to be verbal. How many logos do you ever notice when you’re surfing online? If I were in charge of making a new image for Spain now, or a new nation such as Montenegro for that matter, I would not be thinking about a logo. All you need is to be clear about what you’ve got to say. In this age of mass communication in English all you need are a few carefully chosen words.
His comment is definitely worth reading as he also talks about how Spain Tourism’s logo was created by none other than Joan Miró.
FreeDOS… Why?
Was in Kuang-hua Market (or Guanghua Market, or the so-called “Taipei’s-Akihabara-that-is-way-smaller-in-scale-than-the-real-thing-in-Tokyo”), saw this Lenovo laptop. 320 GB hard disk drive, 13.3” LCD, 2 GB RAM, all is well, but the bundled operating system was… FreeDOS?! Why? What do you expect people to run on DOS these days? Lotus 1-2-3? dBase III? Ultima 5?
Late Start, Late End
In an interview (via @gruber), Scott Hansen a.k.a. ISO50:
What is a typical day like for you?
Late start, food, long bike ride, food, coffee, design, music, coffee, design, food/bar, music, late end.
The world would be a better place if more people did that, and people who already do that were more unapologetic about it.
New social networking rule
mrgan:
dwineman:
No one, under any circumstances, for any reason, is ever obligated to defend his or her “following” list to anybody.*
*Especially people who aren’t on it.
I don’t know what people expect to hear when they ask me why I don’t follow them on whatever website. The answer is simple and obvious: I don’t find what they’re saying interesting.
How I Choose a Blog Theme
When I choose a blog theme, there’s really one thing that really matters to me: block quotations.
I discovered that the criterion alone can filter out about 95% of the themes offered by a blog service or a theme chooser. Previously I attempted to use criteria such as font family (sans serif typefaces for blogging in English; serif ones for blogging in Traditional Chinese) or overall design (one-column, minimalist, high contrast). But those are vague ones.
How one theme lays out block quotations, on the other hand, is very easy to judge. It either works or doesn’t.
I use block quotations a lot. It’s a habit I learned at graduate school, where you learn how to appreciate the fact that your idea seldom comes out of nowhere—there are always precursors and you always learn something somewhere that becomes the foundation of your idea. Block quotation is the writing tool that expresses such appreciation.
And in HTML we have the blockquote element. Tumblr happens to make block-quoting freaking easy by choosing Markdown as its default syntax1. So there’s no reason not to block-quote people when you should do.
That’s where so many blog themes fail. They fail to present a functional block of quotation. Sometimes the indent is not right. Sometimes they just bother to put a big quotation mark, with CSS tricks, beside the block text. Those don’t work. Some of them are not even visually acceptable. They hurt my eyes.
So I’ve got a better filter the next time I want to choose a new theme. Just first test if it handles block quotation well.
