“Huh?”

I told you you’d say that. But that’s what my new company, Nest, is making, and what I’ve been unable to tell you about until today. It’s a smart thermostat. It learns when you are home and what temperatures you like, and it saves energy and money by managing your heating and cooling more efficiently. Today, we’re introducing it.

I’ve got two at my house, if you want to see one in person. Or you can save yourself the trip by visiting our web site:

Nest | The Learning Thermostat

Hope you’ll give it a look.

What is the OL team’s take on Steve’s toughts on Flash?

Enjoy… http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Gentle reader,

I agree regarding the support of open standards such as HTML 5, which OpenLaszlo heartily supports too. The greater standards compliance we have, the better.

But it is amusing that Jobs contrasts the ubiquitous Flash player with the ubiquity of the Webkit “player”. The primary difference is that Webkit is open source, which presumably saves us from being beholden to any one manufacturer for bug fixes. But in reality, that depends on whether individual manufacturers track the latest releases of Webkit on their devices. Somehow I don’t think that any phone manufacturer has a provision to run the Webkit nightly on their phone. [We have even run into this in Safari. The Webkit team made a severe optimization error in the current squirrelfish engine that OL tripped over (incorrect caching of prototype properties). They pretty quickly developed a fix for it and we verified it in the nightly, but they had to advise us that there was no way that fix would be out in a release for at least 6 months. So OL has to browser sniff and at runtime adopt a much less efficient class implementation on the current Safari release.]

The battery life and performance issue is a marginal point. Clearly they could set a standard/licensing term for that and just say that Flash has not met the bar (yet).

I disagree vehemently with the current license stance (which Jobs does not address in his note) that they are using to further lock Adobe out from delivering a cross-platform development environment. This has created a substantial amount of collateral damage. For instance, take the Frotz app, which implements the Infocom Z-machine. Technically under Apple’s current license this app is illegal and will eventually be removed from the store (it has not so far). Another that has already been removed is the Scratch player. This is in no one’s best interest. Scratch is potentially creating the next generation of programmers!

OpenLaszlo is not affected by the license, as I pointed out in my blog post, because we deliver a web app, not a native app. Presumably all interpreters could do the same, but that just points up the ridiculousness of the license restriction — it boils down to “you may only run an interpreter on the iPhone if it requires a network connection”. Huh?

How does one define an interpreter? Every program is an interpreter because every program has data that drives the state changes. iTunes is an interpreter of mp3’s. How is that any different that the Frotz player interpreting a .z5 file? Where do you draw the line between data and interpreted program?

Dear Lazzie, I was reading this article, and it seems to spell doom for OpenLaszlo on the iPhone and iPad. Should I worry?

Gentle reader,

OpenLaszlo is indeed a cross-compiler, translating from the high-level declarative LZX language to various runtimes, such as Flash and DHTML. But, because OpenLaszlo generates standards-compliant HTML web apps, it is not covered by the Apple SDK agreement. Any application that runs in Mobile Safari will continue to run, regardless of how that application is generated.

OpenLaszlo does have the unique advantage of being able to generate a Flash-based version of your application if you need to deliver in an environment where CSS2/HTML4-compliant web browsers are not available, or if you need to integrate with other Flash-based technologies. But if your application is being delivered to modern web browsers (which includes the browser for the iPad and iPhone), OpenLaszlo can generate a DHTML-based version of your application with no changes required on your part.

In theory, OpenLaszlo could follow the approach of Adobe’s CS5 and build another back-end to generate native iPhone apps. If they did that, they would find themselves in the same boat as Adobe — developers using their product would be in violation of the new Apple SDK agreement[1]:

What remains to be seen is how Apple will enforce this new agreement, and whether the market (the ultimate arbiter) will go along with them. Veterans of the business will surely be reminded of IBM vs. Telex, where IBM tried to lock out competitors from making compatible peripherals for its mainframes. IBM succeeded for a long while; even wearing down the government’s effort to bring an anti-trust case against them. But in the long run, the market ruled against them (by moving away from mainframes altogether).

Power to the people!

—

[1]: It’s ironic that OpenLaszlo is able to generate applications for the Flash 10 player because Adobe’s FLEX SDK is open source. OpenLaszlo cross-compiles to ActionScript 3 and then uses the Adobe SDK to compile from there to Flash.

Engineer comes. Knocks on the door. Where does your phone come in? From the pole the fiber is hanging on. Oh, ok. You should be able to order tomorrow after I send in this paperwork.

Next day I try to order on line. No go. Call. Yes, we can order for you now. We have to send an engineer out to survey your site. Huh?

Next day, a different engineer is back. Where does your phone service come in. Off the pole the fiber is hanging on. Hm. We’ll have to order a trenching unit. I think we could run it down the street to where your drive comes in, and then up along the… (describes about a 400 yard route). Uh, I have a conduit buried that goes down the hill to the pole with the fiber. That’s how my phone line comes in. It’s about 50 yards. Well, we’ll have to send out our burial contractor to see if they can work with that.

Next day, 3 guys show up in a pickup with a shovel, a bucket, and a roll of twine. The fat one and the tall one stand around while the young kid runs up and down the bank. I show them the pull tape that I have left in the conduit, on the assumption that I might someday have some other service. This is great they say. (Their plan was to disconnect my phone, pull their twine back with my phone line, then pull the phone line back with another piece of twine…) They finally get their twine in the conduit. They don’t handle fiber. The VZ guys will do that.

Next day, a VZ guy shows up, with the custom VZ fiber-pulling pull tape. They attach this to the twine and pull that through the conduit. It’s marked off so they know what length of fiber to pull (they try not to cut it in the field, every truck is stocked with rolls in 25’ increments, the reason for the big box in the basement is mostly so they have a place to wind the slack). He pulls his tape through and tells me the install team will be there next week. It is, after all, now Friday.

Monday, a new VZ guy shows up. Realizes it will be much too strenuous to climb up and down my hill, and doesn’t trust me to pull one end of the tape, so he phones for backup. They start to pull, get about 3 feet, and are stuck. Much hemming and hawing. Cursing the damn trenching contractor who should have checked this out. I finally grab my shovel, go to the bottom of the hill and start digging. It’s pretty simple: the fiber has this huge connector dingus that can’t make it around the 90-degree at the base of the pole. I dig all that up, and with a little elbow grease, we get it through the elbow and up the hill it goes. (Oh, not without a lot of discussion that if they could just rip out the Comcast wire, they’re sure the fiber will fit much better. And me saying nothing doing, I gotta keep you guys honest.)

They are in the house by about 12. One guy starts installing the ONT, battery, etc. The other guy wants to know where my TV’s are, and is about to start replacing all the coax in the house “to make sure I get a good signal”, when his buddy suggests that maybe they can just try it and see how it works.

After a lot of bullshit with the network guy plugging his secure USB dongle into his craptop and logging in and out of some diagnostic program, he finally gets the thing enabled. I have no idea what IP they think they are protecting with all the hoops this guy had to jump through. It was unbelievable.

Of course they want me to plug in my PC to see if the network is working. He has a custom program he can install that I can use… Finds out I have a Mac, is crestfallen. I tell him I don’t want any wireless security. I open my laptop. It finds the basestation, connects, and I pick up my mail. Guess it works.

By 4 pm, the same installer guy is now playing “stereo salesman”, showing me the 400 buttons on my new remote and all the things I can do with it. My eyes are glazing over. I tell him all we watch is NESN, and if he can show us what channel that is, I promise never to change it. Wouldn’t it be nice if I didn’t have to pay for the 873 other channels that I will never watch?

5 truck-rolls, 2 engineers, a 3-person outside contractor team, and 2-person installation team — it’ll be a cold day before VZW makes back their customer acquisition on me.

Oh, one other hint. One day my POTS goes out. I call on my cell and tell them. They can’t see my ONT from their end. They have me push the reset button. Still no good. They will have to roll a truck. It will be 3 days.

On a whim, I figure I will just power-cycle it. Which is not as simple as it should be. There is no on-off. You have to pull the plug, then open the battery compartment and unplug the battery. I put it back together. It boots. My POTS is back. I wonder whether I should call them and tell them…

A friend wants to consolidate his domain registrations. Not technical, so they ask me to help. What seems like the right approach? Let’s log in to your account at Register.com and make me the Admin contact, so I can help you out. Simple enough. Hum. Your domain is set to auto-renew, be locked, and have safe-auto-renew protection. Guess we’ll have to turn all those off to be able to transfer. Okay, I suppose they should tell you that by turning all that off you might lose your domain if you don’t know what you are doing, but we do. But, you can’t turn off auto-renew, because you have “mail” and “hosting” bundled with this domain. Ok, how do we unbundle those? Turns out you haven’t been using these features anyways, since your webmaster is hosting your site and email accounts on their server. Maybe if we just turn off auto-renew on those… That seems to do the trick.

Now, we need to request the transfer. We’ll log in to the registrar you want to consolidate to, and ask them to initiate a transfer. That’s working, I got an email (as admin) and they just need me to enter an “auth code” to proceed.

Back to Register.com. How do we get an “auth code”? Burrow down about 5 levels… aha, there’s the “request auth code” button. WARNING! Turn back, you surely don’t know what you are doing. Yes I do. Okay, but don’t say we didn’t warn you. BTW, did we mention that this is a bad idea? Yes, but I want to do it. Okay, but you know you could LOSE YOUR MANHOOD by hitting this ok button! Are you really sure?? YES! Just one final question, since you are trying to leave us, we’ll offer you a nifty renewal package at 10% off. I don’t want that. Are you sure? Yes. Ok. We will send you an auth code IN 4-5 DAYS, after our “security staff” have had a chance to evaluate your request.

[5 days elapses]

My friend gets an email from Register telling him that his request for an auth code has been denied due to “suspicious activity” on his account and that he has to call a customer service rep to get one. What is the suspicious activity? His domain records were recently updated to have a new Admin contact!

I volunteer to make the call, but of course, I don’t know the answer to the “security question” (What is the name of your great-grandfathers previous ex-girlfriend?). That’s ok, they can send an email to my friend so he can reset that question, or, they can call me (using the suspicious update that made them deny the request in the first place) to verify that I really am the admin contact. Anyone else think this is a sham yet?

So, I hang up, wait, they call, all is well. We’ll send an auth code. To me, the admin contact? No, we’re not allowed to do that. It has to go to the owner. Ok fine, just send it. I will have him forward it.

[2 days elapse]

We have an auth code! Well, I have to refresh my transfer request, because that has timed out in the interim. We plug in the auth code. Things seem to go through. Our transfer is now “Awaiting Registry Approval”.

My friend gets an email from Register. They are sorry to see him go. Just to make sure, they are NOT going to okay the transfer for a week, in case he would like to take advantage of this really tempting offer to renew his domain services for 10% off…

Funny how that is justshy_ of the maximum possible time they are allowed to actually effect the transfer.

I think it has the potential to be the ideal computer for 90% of the people in the world who really only use a computer to read email and surf the web. The one catch: it seems (as far as I can tell), you still need an “iTunes base station”, albeit only occasionally. I understand that there are people who have iPhones that have never connected them to their PC, so, perhaps the iPad can also run stand-alone (once activated)?

I am angling to get my company to buy one (because I think we can make some hay on Steve’s anti-Flash stance and OpenLaszlo’s ability to deliver to Flash and HTML from the same source). If they won’t, I will surely buy one myself, rabid fanboy that I am.

If “grampa” were not such a technophobe, I would say it would be the perfect computer for him, because it should be simple enough to operate that even he could read email. Even if he never replied, at least he could see email, see pictures his children and grandchildren send him, etc.

For the student (for any casual user who mostly takes notes, looks things up on the web, and maybe has a few job-specific applications) I can see it replacing the laptop they carry now. Modulo the concern above that you need an “iTunes base station”. Maybe the Mac mini will be repurposed to be that?

For the geek household, I see it as replacing the hand-me-down laptop that you keep rather than sell, just so you have one you can browse with from the breakfast nook, or loan to visitors so they don’t accidentally peek at your bank statement that is open on your machine in your office. I don’t see it replacing my laptop. Although I wonder how long it will take for someone to package Emacs as an app?

I’m looking for your financial support so that I can finish writing my fourth novel, Creation Science, and publish it.

Creation Science

What’s a third party? It’s someone that is not you and is also not the owner of the website you are visiting. Usually it is an advertiser that is showing ads on the side of the website you are visiting. They have their own website that serves up the ads. You are not intentionally visiting their website — you’re just getting there as a side-effect of seeing their advertisement.

In the bad old days, web browsers used to let any site see all the cookies on your computer. This was bad. It might let the evil Pr0n site you “accidentally” visited gather information to impersonate you at your bank. They don’t do that any more, but they still, by default, allow any website to store and retrieve cookies. Which means, unfortunately, while you may be visiting yourfavoriteblog.com, if they are showing ads on their page, those advertisers can also read and write cookies. When you go to another website (say sillyvideos.com) with the same advertiser, they can ‘track’ that you saw one of their ads on both of those sites — they can track what sites you visit. In this case, the advertiser is a “third party”. They are not you. They are not the website you are visiting. They just happen to show up on that web site. If you don’t like being tracked, you should turn off “third party cookies”.

Most web browsers by default don’t allow third-party cookies these days (or as Safari puts it “Only accept cookies from sites I visit”). But if you turn off third-party cookies in your browser, a lot of sites will just use Flash cookies instead. Stupidly, the default for Flash is to allow these “third party” cookies. If you follow the link below:

Adobe - Flash Player : Settings Manager - Global Storage Settings Panel

you can turn this feature of Flash off. I recommend you un-check the box that says “Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer”, if you value your privacy.

So I’m profiling along, and I find an anonymous function that is being called a number of times. It doesn’t cost a lot, but I’m curious why it is anonymous. It’s not really anonymous, because our compiler assigns a debugging name to anonymous functions that you can use to find them in the source. Here’s the anonymous function:

static var _ignoreAttribute = {toString: function () {
      return '_ignoreAttribute'}};
  

_ignoreAttribute is just a unique sentinel object that we use as a way to indicate that an attribute has already been processed, deep in the inner workings of LZX. Someone (probably me) graciously gave it a toString method, so that when you are debugging and trip across it, you will realize that it is not just any old empty object.

But I’m not debugging. I’m profiling. I’m not calling _ignoreAttribute.toString(). It’s nowhere in the source code that I can see. What is going on?

Gentle reader,

Well, here’s a problem:

if (null != this.datapath && dp != LzNode._ignoreAttribute) {
  this.datapath.setXPath(dp);
} else {

Can you spot it? When dp != LzNode._ignoreAttribute runs, dp is normally a string, and read the fine print for how equality is computed in Javascript (from p. 64 of ECMAScript Language Specification Edition 3):

1. If Type(x) is different from Type(y), go to step 14. […]
2. If Type(x) is either String or Number and Type(y) is Object, return the result of the comparison x == ToPrimitive(y).

Well, I won’t bore you with more gory details, but the bottom line is, every time we compare _ignoreAttribute to a String, the runtime has to call its toString method to see if it is “equal”.

The storal of the morey is, when you want to compare for “identity”, use the “strict equals operator” (=== or !==), not the “equals operator”. [For my money, the former should have just been called the “identity” operator, but unfortunately it isn’t quite. There are some odd edge cases that make it not a true identity operator.]

P.S., Heck, global warming would probably be solved just by turning off all the computers that are wasting cpu-cycles folding, spindling, and mutilating tax returns today.