OneMind

KarmaTube offers an inspirational short film about two challenged athletes, one American, one Ghanian, and how their paths cross in improbable ways to mutual benefit. You might want to have a tissue handy while you watch. Gives each of us even more reasons to be thankful this season!

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Tony Seton today has one of the most eloquent, moving pieces about why we should end the travesty, the ginormous error that is America’s folly in Afghanistan, right now. He points out that the odds are that the last American to die in Afghanistan is probably 13 years old today. This one really is a must-listen. Please do. And then please take some action in support of world peace, like join Ten Million Clicks for Peace and get your own personal Peace Impact Meter so you can see how much affect you’re having on the globe.

Peace.

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According to news reports, Apple has finished its review of the cross-platform smartphone development environment PhoneGap and will now begin approving iPhone apps built using that framework for distribution in the AppStore.

This is huge. Until now, Apple has been taking the position — or at least seemed to have been — that apps built using PhoneGap violated iPhone terms of use because the framework did some things that Apple felt were outside the bounds of legitimate software development needs and that might jeopardize the safety and usability of iPhone apps. The recently completed technical review apparently concluded that PhoneGap did no such thing and in fact violated none of Apple’s rules.

There are probably dozens of PhoneGap-based apps in the approval queue at the AppStore and we can now expect those to start moving out of the funnel and into the store for sale.

Even though it is true today that PhoneGap’s write-once-debug-everywhere approach to smartphone development doesn’t allow programmers to take full avantage of OS-specific features like location on the iPhone, it is safe to say that writing an app that runs on all of the major smartphone platforms will be much easier now. And for companies and developers uncomfortable creating apps only for one of those platforms, PhoneGap promises to be a great tool. And you just have to know that now that it’s been given the Apple kiss of approval, developers will start figuring out how to build hooks for specific smartphone features into future releases.

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It's no secret or surprise to regular readers of my blog that I have become a huge fan of NOLOH. I've decided to undertake a few demonstration projects on my blog to explain why I feel this way and to make it easier for my programming friends to understand this foray into the otherwise cruel and unusual punishment that goes by the self-reflexive acronym PHP.

One of the most interesting — and at the same time distressing — features of the Web has been its statelessness. Each interaction between the client browser and the HTTP server is an isolated event. Information is not automatically preserved between such interactions; rather the Web developer must spend some considerable time and effort both planning and managing the flow and preservation of data throughout a Web transaction. This was a major feature of the Web in its earliest days because it allowed for tremendous efficiency on the server side; the server essentially opened a socket for an event, processed the event, sent something back to the client and closed the socket. This enabled relatively low-powered systems to act as servers because they could have a limited capacity for simultaneous open connections without breaking the sense of interactivity the user would experience.

One consequence of this design was that when a browser sent a server an event that required that some portion of the browser display be modified, the entire window content (which roughly corresponded to a page) would have to be refreshed because nobody was maintaining the state of the page between messages. This resulted in a fairly herky-jerky kind of experience but users quickly became accustomed to it and increased speed of hardware and software on both ends of the exchange as well as of the network linkages made the experience seem a tad less discontinuous than it was in reality. Still, the programming problem of maintaining state remained. And as Web pages and sites gave way to a desire or a need for Web applications, the problem became acute.

NOLOH solves that whole problem with what I think is a unique approach. It maintains user state between interactions completely transparently to the programmer. Let me be clear here: user state management is completely automatic. The programmer needs to do nothing to make a stateful application work like a desktop application.

You can read here about how NOLOH does this but the fact is, as a programmer all you really have to know is that all of the effort and code that now go into creating a more fluid user experience despite a stateless protocol can now be spent making the app behave better, more smoothly and more intelligently.

In my first published NOLOH project here, I'll reproduce my now-famous Counter application in NOLOH and you'll get a chance to see how this benefits you as a developer.

Stay tuned.

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FactCheck has posted a commentary on a MoveOn ad repeating the observation that 45,000 people die in America every year because they don’t have health insurance. I rely on FactCheck to do just what its name implies: check facts and call attention when they’re erroneous. In this case, though, I think they do a disservice.

They begin their piece by pointing out that this number came from a peer-reviewed study published by Harvard Medical School researchers, which sure makes it seem like a useful and accurate fact to me. But then they go on to add gratuitously that this is the highest such figure they’ve seen and that other studies (whose credibility goes unaddressed) have a death toll of 60% of the Harvard study (i.e., 27,000) or less. As if that were an important limitation on the value or credibility of the Harvard study’s findings.

Because studies disagree on the extent of the problem does not seem to me to be a good reason for FactCheck to call attention to the study. To people who follow the organization’s work, that seems like an indictment of the Harvard report, which it is not. Besides, isn’t 27,000 still too many Americans to die because of a lack of health insurance in the only Western democracy without universal health care?

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The Republican National Committee (RNC) plans to vote in January whether to require any GOP candidate seeking party funds and support in an election bid to subscribe to at least 10 of the party’s proposed conservative principles. Party purity is the aim here and that’s not necessarily a bad thing (though it will almost certainly result in fewer Republican electoral victories). But some of these principles seem to me to have some pretty deep flawed thinking. Many are not legitimate conservative positions and those that are, are often misstated and misrepresented positions that are poking at straw men at best and dissembling at worst.

Read on for my point-by-point commentary and rebuttal:
Read more

My buddy Tony Seton’s daily SetoNotes today bemoans the lack of guts and courage among Democratic leaders, not just today but in the recent past as well. He views President Obama as someone who is “not a warrior,” and quotes Maureen Dowd as saying we need someone at the helm who is “less Spocky, more Rocky.” Clever turn of phrase but perhaps not too far from a real truth.

Tony says that if Al Gore had gotten mad and really fought for the stolen election he “lost” or if John Kerry had not let the lying Swift Boaters do him in, we’d have been spared the Bush-Cheney debacle. And he’s right. “What we need,” he concludes, “are more warriors…for peace and justice.” I’m not sure you can go to war for peace, but certainly we need leaders who can ignite passions in their team members and in their followers to pursue important goals like health insurance reform with more vigor and perhaps a willingness to become righteously indignant at the scurrilous lies and ad hominen attacks so freely indulged in by their unprincipled, win-at-any-cost opponents.

Has it actually become true that in a public debate he who is willing to tell the bigger lie with the loudest voice wins? Or has it always been that way and I’ve been to naive to see?

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I recently picked up an Ativa 240HP flat-panel display to augment my MacBook Air’s puny screen when I’m working at my second office location. I like the monitor a lot but I’m frustrated at not being able to get full-screen coverage for the Air.

When I set the display to 1920×1080 resolution, the image fills up the center of the display area, leaving a space of about 1/2-3/4 inch top and bottom and about an inch on either side of the image area black and unused.

My business partner uses a Sony laptop and it fills the entire display quite nicely, thank you very much.

Any ideas why?

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It appears from this article on Ars Techica today that Apple’s widely publicized and uniformly hated iPhone AppStore policies and management are beginning to catch up with the snazzy company. A couple of key developers have publicly announced that they will no longer develop apps for the Apple smartphone platform due not to the market but to the channel. This is a ridiculously untenable situation for Apple but the company has passed up numerous opportunities to do the right thing by its developers and has turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to their legitimate complaints.

Arbitrary rejections of software submissions based on ill-considered and poorly documented reasoning by an apparently largely bureaucratic neophyte group of screeners has frutstrated dozens if not hundreds of iPhone developers. While it is hard to know whether the underlying policies on which rejection is based are sound and logical or just anti-competitive, it is clear that both the process and communication with developers are deeply flawed.

Apple needs to fix this. Now. It is only a matter of time before this attitude — on the parts of both Apple and the developer community — causes Mac developers to begin to reconsider their commitment to Apple platforms and technologies. And without that particular flavor of loyalty, Apple oculd be in big trouble, fast.

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I got an email this morning from CIA Director Leon Panetta. No bull. Actually heard from the top spook. I mean, he does make his home in Monterey, so maybe he just thinks we’re buds or something.

Seems he wanted to warn me about a Nigerian email scam and to let me know that the CIA is behind some of these activities on behalf of the Nigerian government. So I should not send these thieves any more money but rather send only $650 directly to the CIA and they’d take care of me for sure.

Wow.

I can’t believe anyone falls for these ludicrous phishing scams but I’m obviously wrong or they’d stop doing them. This note was so full of typos and grammatical errors that you wouldn’t believe it came from anyone intelligent. Or even from a relatively ignorant public official (which, I hasten to point out, Mr. Panetta is definitely not).

It is so easy to detect these things. In this case, e.g., the From email address purported to be infonews@cia.gov (which may even be a legitimate email address for all I know or care) but the Reply-to: address was centralintelligence@gazeta.pl. Which means it originates with or at least uses a server in Poland. Anyone answering this deserves to lose the $650 (plus a lot more that is yet to come, I’m sure).The only way I know to stop spam and phishing schemes dead is to sign up for LOQMail secure private email. (Disclaimer: I’m an investor in WebLOQ.)

Meanwhile, I hope the CIA tracks down this culprit and finds some suitable discipline for his nefarious scheming.

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