IT

It is strange no one seems to have picked up the news yet, but HP has reissued the legendary HP-15C in a special “30th anniversary limited edition”, and it became available for purchase last week.

The new HP-15C is not strictly speaking a reissue but a replica, as it does not use the original’s Saturn processor, but instead an emulation thereof running on an ARM CPU. Even emulated, it should be much faster than the original 640 kilohertz processor. I ordered two, and received them today.

As expected, the quality is in line with the current HP-12C, i.e. not as good as the 1980s models in terms of key feel, but still leagues ahead of any competing product. The originals used a special 47-point bonding process to ensure the utmost in rigidity and reliability, I doubt the current model had as much attention paid to detail. It is made in China, obviously, the Corvallis facility is long gone. The slipcover fits very poorly (too tight, and the seams are not trimmed properly) and feels thinner and outright cheap compared to the original. The labels on the keys are accurately positioned, at least, unlike the train wreck that was the HP-12C Platinum. The cheat sheet in the back is a garish black on silver as on the 35S, instead of the original’s silver on black. It also uses two 3V CR2032 batteries instead of the 3 button cells in  the original.

Speed-wise, the Limited Edition integrates the normal distribution nearly instantly, when that test that took 34 seconds on the original.

In short: not as good as the original, but still an excellent calculator for those who prize ergonomics.

I had to monitor a long-running process on a Solaris server tonight, but didn’t want to stay glued at a computer monitor. A neat trick:

ssh myserver.example.com "pwait 17601"; say "batch done"

You would replace 17601 with the process ID of the job you are waiting for, of course. That way, my Mac connects to the server, waits for the job to complete, then gives me an spoken alert when it is done. I can watch a movie, do chores or whatever during that time. I am sure there are equivalent commands to pwait for Linux.

My first IPv6 connectivity, courtesy of Hurricane Electric’s Tunnel Broker. It only took me three years…

In a triumph of hope over experience, I recently “upgraded” from Adobe CS3 Design Standard to CS5 Design Standard. I hardly ever use Photoshop any more since I started using Aperture and Lightroom (originally a Macromedia product, no matter what the lame “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom” face-saving branding may try to claim), the main driver for the purchase was actually InDesign CS5 and its ePub functions.

Of course, this is Adobe. Previous versions gratuitously included crud like a full Opera install (an older version, insecure, naturally) just to display a splash screen, or a full MySQL install to power Acrobat search. I never install Acrobat, of course, since that bloated and bug-ridden piece of garbage managed to steal the crown for most insecure software from Internet Explorer, no small feat.

Adobe does not want to confuse users with streamlined and efficient software, so they decided to include the mostly useless Growl on-screen notification program to nag you into registering. Increasing bloat and attack surface for malware is not a good idea, nor is interrupting creative people’s flow with interruptions. Of course, helping clients Get Things Done is a low priority at Adobe, as evidenced by their product choices.

You have to pity the Growl developers, whose reputation will suffer from guilt by association. I dislike interruptions and do not find it useful, but many people do and rave about it. They installed it by choice, not as a sneaky drive-by install for slimy marketing purposes.

Some more annoyances in CS5:

• The pricing for the suite is more than the sum of its parts: $200 each for Photoshop, InDesign or Illustrator, $700 for Design Standard. I suppose they must think Acrobat and their online tie-ins have a value of $100 (hint: they forgot the negative sign).
• Of course, they won’t let you upgrade individual component applications.
• On the plus side, they now have the decency to include Acrobat on a separate CD, so you can discard it immediately and not risk installing it as a side-effect of installing the apps that are actually useful.
• The icons were designed by the world’s laziest and most creatively bankrupt designer, just as with CS3 and CS4
• Performance on a high-end 8-core or 12-core Mac is actually slower than on a lower-end configuration, thanks to legacy cruft and incompetence.
• It is slower to load on my wife’s MacBook Pro. Each successive version of OS X is faster on the same hardware, Microsoft and Adobe deliver software that gets progressively slower.

In other words, unlike Lightroom, CS5 is designed to be endured, not to delight.

One of the greatest features in the Webkit-based browsers (Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome) is WebSQLdatabase, the ability for a web site to store information in a SQLite database on your browser accessible via JavaScript. This allows web developers to build database-enabled applications that run entirely in the browser, without requiring a server. This is very useful for mobile devices, which in the US enjoy flaky network connectivity at best. One very handsome example is the iPad-optimized Every Time Zone webapp.

SQLite is probably the most important open-source project you have never heard of. It is a simple, streamlined and efficient embedded database. Firefox stores its bookmarks in it. Google distributes its database of phishing sites in that format. Sun’s industrial-strength Solaris operating system stores the list of services it runs on boot in it—if it were to fail, a server would be crippled so that is a pretty strong vote of confidence. Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture use it to store their database, as do most Mac applications that use the CoreData framework, and many iPhone apps. In other words, it is robust and proven mission-critical software that is widely yet invisibly deployed.

WebSQLdatabase basically makes the power of SQLite available to web developers trying to build apps that work offline, specially on mobile devices. No good deed goes unpunished, and the Mozilla foundation teamed up with unlikely bedfellow Microsoft to torpedo formal adoption of WebSQLdatabase as a web standard, on spurious grounds, and pushed an alternate standard called IndexedDB instead. To quote the Chromium team:

Q: Why this over WebSQLDatabase?

A: Microsoft and Mozilla have made it very clear they will not implement SQL in the browser.  If you want to argue this is silly, talk to them, not me.

IndexedDB is several steps backwards. Instead of using powerful, expressive and mature SQL technology, it uses a verbose JavaScript B-tree API that is a throwback to the 1960s bad old days of hierarchical databases and ISAM, requires a lot more work from the developer, for no good reason. To add injury to insult, Firefox 4’s implementation of IndexedDB is actually built on top of SQLite. The end result will be that web developers will need to build a SQL emulation library on top of IndexedDB to restore the SQLite functionality deliberately crippled by IndexedDB. If there is one constant in software engineering, it is that multiple layers add brittleness and impair performance.

Of course, both Mozilla and Microsoft are irrelevant on mobiles, where WebKit has essentially won the day, so why should this matter? Microsoft has always been a hindrance to the development of the web, since they have to protect the Windows API from competition by increasingly capable webapps, but I cannot understand Mozilla’s attitude, except possibly knee-jerk not-invented-here syndrome and petulance at being upstaged by WebKit. WebSQLdatabase is not perfect—to reach its full potential, it needs and automatic replication and sync facility between the local database and the website’s own database, but it is light years ahead of IndexedDB in terms of power and productivity.

I am so irritated by Mozilla’s attitude that after 10 years of using Mozilla-based browsers, I switched today from Firefox to Chrome as my primary browser. Migrating was surprisingly easy. Key functionality like bookmark keywords, AdBlock, FlashBlock, a developer console, and the ability to whitelist domains for cookies, all have equivalents on Chrome. The main regressions are bookmark tags, and Chrome’s sync options are not yet equivalent to Weave‘s. At some point I will need to roll my own password syncing facility (Chrome stores its passwords in the OS X keychain, which is also used by Safari and Camino).