One of my goals for 2010 is to start to be a bit more … mindful of the things I think. Twitter is like a magnet for the opposite of that, but it’s a work in progress.

I’ve had all day to mull over the iPad, and I’ve had a few friends and family ask my opinion about the product (some didn’t ask, but they got my opinion anyway). I figure, why let the great void of the interwebs go on without my armchair opinions; plus, this is a good place to point my family to.

A Heck of a Lot of Work

I have a few friends that work at Apple, and to them I have to say it is obvious there was an amazing amount of work put into that product. (We have a don’t ask / don’t tell policy about Apple stuff so I am only guessing this based on the product demos.)

Apple made a whole processor for the thing. That is pretty amazing. I mean, I’ve always been impressed with their hardware when I’ve taken Macs apart, but building your own product down to the processor – that must have been all kinds of fun.

The rework of the iWork and iLife products are very, very nice. They look great on the device. I wouldn’t mind having some of those UI elements on my Mac proper.

I don’t want to belittle the work that went into the device, the hardware or the software. It’s not like anyone cares about my opinion, but from the product demo, the software and speed of the iPad was top notch.

Concerns

Now, I wont be buying an iPad, and judging from the direction Apple appears to be heading, I am not sure how many future products of theirs I’ll be buying. I have two major concerns that were brought to a head with the iPad launch.

1) Apple appears to be becoming Zenith

Mac OS X is the best OS I’ve ever used; however, it appears to me to not be Apple’s main focus anymore. Apple appears to be less and less of a computer company and more concerned with turning out Jef Raskin devices that use the iPhone OS and are tied to the AppStore. Heck, they dropped “computer” from their name, which maybe I should take as a hint.

I half expect to see the iBlender, iToaster, and iRefrigerator come out soon – all running the iPhone OS – and they only work if Apple approves of the food stuffs you put into them.

Granted, I am taking things to an illogical extreme here, but my concern is basically that the power, freedom, and workflow that first got me hooked on Apple products, specifically OS X, is going bye bye and getting replaced by devices that have little to no real world geek value; work value; unix value. Modern DVD players.

I vehemently disagree with, but can understand, the locked down nature of the iPhone because it’s a phone. I see the move of using the iPhone OS in the iPad as a sign of “things to come” (which I think they even said in the presentation).

2) The cake is a lie

Perhaps the history I thought I knew about Apple is wrong. I wasn’t there obviously, but I’ve met a few people who were. I’ve also seen movies and read things online that seem to backup what I’ve heard.

Apple’s core goal originally, I thought, was to free the computer from the clutches of the likes of IBM*. Woz and Steve built one of the first computers and showed it off at the Homebrew computer club with the idea that everyone could have the freedom of their own computer – they wouldn’t have to bow down to a multi-billion dollar corporation to ask permission… you see where I am going with this right?

So what’s the goal now? It appears to be a manifestation of what they were against in the first place. Or, perhaps, I was just confusing myself – which is completely possible.

I mean, there is no freedom with the iPhone, there is no freedom with the iPad, it’s all corporate controlled and you need to ask permission – repeatedly – to use almost any aspect of it. This is the vision of things to come?

It has become clear to me that Apple is just another company, another “IBM”*; there is nothing special about it, and that makes me a bit sad.

Well played sir, well played.

Dude, I thought you were talking about the iPad?

Yeah, sorry. The iPad, for me, wasn’t just a failure of what I wanted it to do, what I wanted to use it for, and how I was hoping the ecosystem would work, it was Apple jumping the geek shark. (Still dig Mac+OS X though.)

If the iPad looks like a product you would like, go buy it. If not, then don’t.

• I personally don’t have a problem with IBM :)

Here is the quick walk through.

I went to the museum for the Windows 7 launch a few days earlier, but I didn’t explore the museum itself. I just went in for the event and left afterwards, but took note that this was probably something Ed would enjoy (he is a history buff).

We went back over the weekend, and scored a few “big ticket” passes. The big ticket passes let us on board all the ships they have on display – HMAS Onslow (1968), HMAS Vampire (1959), The James Craig (1874), and The HMB Endeavor (1768). (If you have the chance, I recommend a visit.)

Does this have anything to do with software?

I was astounded by the craftsmanship, and amazing hackery that went in to these ships. Not just the ships, but everything from the sinks to the bookshelves to the plate racks. Additionally, the scale of these projects and the building upon of past knowledge was humbling. I also realised that, in general, to do great, large scale things requires great wealth – and apparently a cat of nine tails.

Standing on one of those ships and looking at the dual purpose… everything… was amazing. Everything was thought out. Everything had a purpose. Nothing appeared to be thrown in at the last minute on a whim. If something was done wrong, everyone on board could die. The shear magnitude of these projects, the number of people involved and the cross disciple input it would take to build – let alone invent – one of these ships was simply amazing.

The ones that really got me where the old ones. The 1768 wooden hull ship – the HMB Endeavor – was spectacular. This ship was built with things that mostly don’t exist, navigated with devices that are obsolete and using math that isn’t likely taught anymore.

This is an example of true engineering and hackery. A thing of beauty. And when the power goes out – it still works.

However software and computers are quite new. Designing and building system is often rushed, and the process is not respected. “Do it cheaper, do it faster” is the motto. Quality, for budgetary reasons, is an often an after thought. Yet I can’t help but think we are the ones at the beginning. We are the pre 1768 Endeavors. I wonder if these ships were designed and built with the “do it faster do it cheaper” mentality.

Ships were used to discover new lands and new routes, and software is used to discover new knowledge, understanding, human potential – and, yeah, twitter.

No one will die if web software goes bad, but it will never be as pretty or stable as a tall ship until the process is given a healthy dose of respect – and probably a few hundred years of trial and error.

All pointless rambling aside, if you get a chance, go outside to a museum. There is an amazing amount of unexpected inspiration.

I’ve looked into it on and off for a year or so, and finally decided to give it a go. I wanted to see if it was possible, how well it was supported DNS wise, if any services supported it, and how well browsers stood up.

First a quick gotcha to lookout for. You may or may not know that in theory UTF-8 encoded URLs can be a bit dangerous. What’s to stop some one from registering “http://wellsfargο.com”. That o is actually a Greek letter omicron Unicode 03BF. Unless you are using an older version of windows (which, in my experience doesn’t have very good Unicode support by default), you probably can’t tell that is not a normal “o”. I wouldn’t be able to. [1]

The other problem, from what I can deduce, is a lot of the systems out there only do ASCII or ISO-8859-1 style encoding. Think of an old HP3000, Windows box, or some other old yet still working system hanging on the net. They likely only can handle old style encodings, but still need to work.

To fix the encoding problem “they” decided to come up with a way to map more worldly Unicode characters to ASCII using something called IDNA.

In practice what this mean is that the unicode domains you might register will run though some algorithms called ToASCII and ToUnicode to resolve and display. (You’ll often have to use a special area to register a unicode style domain too).

For example, you can type in http://小罗.com into a modern browser and it will work. However, the browser is actually asking DNS to find the IP for the address http://XN–YETY43F.COM. The XN– part is the part that denotes a Punycoded URL.

When setting up DNS, apache, and what not you’ll be using something like the XN– URL. For example, I use godaddy.com which, awesomely, supports Punycoded URLs. It even has an “International” view which shows the URL rendered in Unicode:

Setting up Apache to answer the call is just as you would expect. You simply use the xn-- version as the server alias (or whatever you usually do):

Browser support seems to be a bit spotty currently. I tried both Safari 4 and Firefox 3 on the Mac. While both figured out what I wanted, and resolved correctly, only Safari left the URL as I typed it. Firefox switched to and stayed the xn-- URL (which behaviour is correct I leave for you to decide).

I also setup Google Apps with the domain to see how well it faired. I had to use the xn-- URL to sign up for the account because using the 小罗.com version “contained invalid characters”, but the account was created and so far mostly works. URLs like “http://sites.google.com/a/小罗.com” throw an error, but the “http://sites.google.com/a/xn--yety43f.com” version works as you would expect.

When I get more time to play I am going to setup Gmail to see if that will let me use the proper Chinese domain version for my email, admin@小罗.com, or if it has to use the long version.

From what I can tell support for unicode domains seems to be making progress, but it doesn’t seem supported enough to use for anything critical. It does look like it should be here pretty soon though so if you are into protecting your presence on the web you might look into registering your 苹果.com and 窗户.com addresses now ^^.

[1]Internationalized domain names

If you are in Sydney, don’t miss Code wars tonight – which should be really fun.

I never really mentioned it either, but I’ll be talking about iPhone Web Application development, and I’ll be hanging out talking about iPhone native app development at a birds of a feather chat if you are into iPhone stuff.

I am not sure if WebDU is sold out yet, but you might be able to score a last minute ticket…

I put the system together from unused computer parts laying around the office. This would be considered an underpowered system by most people’s standards, but it runs incredibly well – even the duel(ah English… what one letter will do) dual monitors and eye candy works seamlessly. It probably wouldn’t do video editing very well, but it’s powerful enough to run everything need, and doesn’t skip a beat.

I have a list of apps that I need replacements for, and I’ll try to blog my findings as I go. However, I have my critical path apps all set.

For my Textmate replacement I am using gEdit. gEdit doesn’t do CFML by default. To remedy this I threw together these files to make it support CFML. It’s very basic and really just uses HTML colouring, but it allows the whole system (and therefore gEdit) to understand .cfm, cfml, and .cfc files.

It looks like this after you’ve installed it:

You can download the files here. You can run the install.sh file to add them to your system, or just look at that file and do what it does by hand (it’s only 3 commands).

gEdit is missing a few things to put it on par with Textmate, but fewer then I thought. I used it all day today, and everything I needed it to do it did. (It would be nice if it supported Textmate bundles, but I think gEdit is more python based and Textmate more Ruby based.)

The good news, for me anyway, is I can probably add the things I want since it’s open source :-D

This set of questions came in as a result of the EC2 and S3 videos I posted a while ago.

1. Is there a way to share a file system / volume across multiple EC2 instances? As in, if we have 2+ App servers running, it would be ideal if they shared a volume so that if files changed, they would be changed on all servers, instantly. If not, I suppose we could run NFS or something similar. Ideas?

It would be possible to have one of your EC2 instances be a master and share the files – just as one would do in any other “normal” situation (smb, nfs, whatever). If you’re only talking about code, you could also use something like rsync, or directly checkout from your source control to keep code in sync.

Another thing you can do for assets is write the data to S3 and share it via buckets. While this approach requires quite a bit of infrastructure and error handing on your part, it also gives you unlimited data storage and an “automatic” content delivery platform.

The last project we did we used the S3 approach. We used message queues to inform parts of the application about changes, and also to retry on failures. However, that project has massive data storage and delivery requirements.

2. Are we correct that making any configuration changes to an instance necesitates re-bundling that instance into a new AMI afterwards? Otherwise, all changes are lost the next time it’s shut down and fired back up.

Yes and no. You can build a custom AMI that has everything you want on it (or buy / rent a premade one), and then save all your configurations to a mounted EBS “Elastic Block Store”. An EBS basically equates to a hard dive you mount to the AMI. You can use the EBS just like any hard drive attached to a “normal” computer, and it’s storage persists.

It’s awesome on Linux because you an just mount the EBS anywhere (like in /var/www, /opt/coldfusion, or /etc/config), but you can achieve the same effect on Windows as well.

In other words, you’ll always lose changes to the C:\ when you bring the system down, but not lose the D:, E:\ etc.

(You’ll want to know how to build an AMI at some point though – system updates / upgrades and what not.)

3. We have some legacy windows only apps, so we are going to be running windows instances and linux instnaces, but we’re starting with the windows ones (assuming they will be more difficult)… Have you noticed any differences between the two that you want to mention? Have you worked with the windows instances much at all?

The windows ones are a bit more expensive, and they seem to take a really long time to start (3-4 minutes vs. 30-45 seconds on Linux), but once they get going they seem to be just like any other box. You can terminal service in to manage them – if you didn’t know it was an AMI you wouldn’t know it was an AMI :)

I’ve also never built a custom windows AMI, but I hear that it is easier (when it works). Building a Linux AMI can be completely scripted, and I don’t think a windows one can (though, again, I’ve never built a windows one)

4. We are a bit concerned with the complexity of making changes to instances and needing to take them down and re-bundle them for those changes not to be lost… I suppose we could do so to copies of the AMI so that we don’t need to take down production instances, but it still seems overly cumbersome. Do you know of a decent plan/flowchart/graph/play-by-play of how other companies/people have worked with EC2 servers as a production environment?

I can understand your concern, and the best remedy is to get in there and play. You’ll find that if you configure you infrastructure correctly, use EBSs correctly, you can bring up whole new production instances in 30 seconds (or so). Need a test deploy server? Bling. Done. You can do new releases by reassigning the IP to a new running instance… Anyway, I think you might want to read up on EBSs because it sounds like will alleviate a lot of your concerns.

As for the plan / flowchart … that’s the kind of stuff I get paid for :-D

Min’s descriptions on these videos are the bees knees.

Register now – I highly doubt you’ll be sad you did.

WebDU Registration twitter.com/webdu

You most likely don’t want to miss it.

WebDU Registration twitter.com/webdu