steven n fettig's Jitterin' Thoughts

On the heels of my last posting involving my disgust with the concept of a tiered internet and the completely uneducated comments that the CEO's of telcos are making these days, comes another gem:

Please. Google and MSN don't have bills for the bandwidth they consume? What is he smoking? He is making claims that providers of content aren't paying for the type of bandwidth (QoS/guaranteed, etc). This flies in the face, however, of the fact that operations like Google, MSN, Yahoo pay for mega pipelines to the internet that us geeks sitting behind our capped upstream connections can only dream of. Not only do they pay for their fat pipes (which should be covering the costs that Whitacre claims are not being covered), but they are paying multiple providers for their pipes to make sure that their content gets to the user as quickly as possible. If Whitacre wants to complain about the size of the payments he is receiving, then maybe he's simply dreaming of the mono-telco days of yesteryear. What seems to slowly come to the surface in all of the complaints we are hearing from the telco boys is this: they want to convince us that they are not getting their fare share and that the government should step in to assist them assist us. They are scared and it shows. By placing controls on how content is delivered from one side of the net to the other, they take back some of the control they had when our phone lines were captive portals into our homes only to find DSL had competition from cable, wireless (in the form of WaveRider, Trango, Canopy, WiMax, and cell companies), etc. - and the competition was working hard to get our money instead of them.
While these guys continue talking in circles, I hope the rest of us are able to see what it is for: competition is hard and they want it easy.

This is one for me and the search engines. I feverishly worked on getting WordPress up and running on my PowerBook to test for a new website I'm working on. (Actually, I started with typo, but that's another story.) I'm not bragging, but I can set up website that use PAM (php, apache & mysql) blindfolded. Back when MySQL didn't provide a binary installer for MySQL on OS X, it was a bit more difficult, but these days, everything is easy as cake - or so I thought. The binary installer for MySQL sets the socket location to a different place than PHP is expecting. Hence, when I tried to load the new database backend for WordPress, I constantly got errors that my configuration file (wp-config.php) was not giving the program correct settings to reach the MySQL database. Then began the frustrating experience of loading, reloading, reconfiguring httpd.conf and many other gestures that resulted in nothing but two hours of my time being wasted.
Lo and behold, the answer was hidden in a Drupal forum: the socket for MySQL on OS X is at /tmp/mysql.sock, not /var/mysql/. Dammit. Open up and edit php.ini (or copy php.ini.default to php.ini and edit) in /private/etc (can someone please tell the Apple people to start using BSD similar locations for config files?) and change:

Voila - WordPress is running on my local machine.

Everyone (who I read) espouses the goodness of BBedit (from Bare Bones Software). Where do I start? Well, I first tried using BBedit some years ago when I moved to OS X with my first PowerBook. One of the things I never liked about OS 8 and 9 (from Apple) was that I felt the UI to be clunky. (Yes, that is my technical term for it.) I found access to the command line and some of the then recent updates within the Windows UI to be much more user friendly. OS 8 & 9 never felt organized to me. Perhaps part of that was because I didn't understand that Mac OS didn't put restrictions on the way that you structured data (and with the advent of search utilities like Spotlight, that is even less important) - I like my data structured; folders stuffed into folders with documents organized according to topic. There were other things: I was a network administrator at that time and had nothing but problems trying to integrate our Macs into our TCP/IP network. We spent a relatively long time converting from AppleTalk to TCP/IP - something that Windows was doing quite well at the time (it is really amazing what a difference eight years makes). So, when I opened up BBedit on my shiny new PowerBook with the shiny new OS X UI, I saw what reminded me of OS 8 & 9. Yuck.
Alas, I tried. I was looking for an editor that would help visually mark up php script and BBedit was the program of choice - according to all of the web research I had done up until then. I found BBedit to be cumbersome in one primary area: text sizing for the user. There is one major area that irritates me with text editors: the inability to change the size of the text that you view on your screen (either through a zoom feature or vis a vis application preferences). I work on big monitors (my latest is a 30" Cinema Display from Apple), so I need an easy way of viewing text that would otherwise look large on a small monitor. Firefox has the command-+, same with Safari (although there is also a menu item that handles the same thing) - Word allows you to size your document via percentages (although why it doesn't stick with whatever percentage you set, still eludes me).
If you take a look at the following screenshot:

(BBedit)

and compare it to this:

(TextMate)

If the images are readable once on the web, you will see how much easier it is reading TextMate's visual rendition of the file I was working on. While I'm sure there are ways of changing this in the preferences, etc. - I haven't found it. And that is what started to irritate me about BBedit. When software programmers decide to add knobs to their product, they ought spend a lot of time thinking about how the user - especially a new user - is going to go at a given change. Matt and I have been working on a web application for the company I work at. One of the first issues I tried to tackle was making sure that the application used as little mouse interaction as possible. Whenever I switch over to a Windows machine, the first thing I miss is the depth at which keyboard shortcuts go within OS X. Why use the mouse when your hands are already on the keyboard? And if you are going to add functions to your program, spend time (a lot of time) on figuring out where to best locate the function within the menu system
What this brings up is the topic of usability. You want to allow a user to sit down at a program and simply "know" how to start. While I understand applications like Photoshop are going to be less than intuitive due to their complexity, it is still amazing how few programs meet the challenge of being easy to use for basic tasks the first time you use it. (Photoshop is one of the worst offenders.)
With BBedit, I tried a number of different ways of setting text display size and simply gave up. Not only was TextMate ready to go, but it was intuitive to customize. One other nagging issue made me simply give up on BBedit: language markup tools. I wanted to get BBedit to recognize and use color markup on the language I was working with (namely, ruby). Instead of having a simple import function built into one of the menus to install markup for a given language, there is a convoluted process of finding an Application Support directory and adding the file which defines the markup to that directory. Neither BBedit nor TextMate seem to make this an easy task. (At least with TextMate, the markup was already installed for ruby.) I don't know what other issues I will find with either program - or TextMate in particular - because I am only using it for basic editing. I do know, however, that I've settled on TextMate for now and highly recommend it to others who have had similar issues.