Why would I want to put my cloud in the cloud?

Ever since Spar­row Mail went the way of the dodo,1 the search for a good email client has been on. Spar­row con­tin­ues to work, but it nev­er ful­ly matured as an email client and will nev­er again be sup­port­ed. Spar­row there­fore is not a good long-term option. I still use Spar­row on my lap­top and on my iPhone, but I’ve moved back to Apple’s Mail.app on my desk­top sys­tem. Mail.app’s inter­face has improved sub­stan­tial­ly in the time I … Read the rest

Sparrow Mail flips users the bird

This morn­ing’s email includes an email by the mak­ers of my favorite email client for the Mac and for iPhone: Spar­row Mail. At the top of this email is a sim­u­lacrum of Spar­row’s logo, but drawn with Google’s trade­mark col­ors. The email starts off with this cheer­ful news:

We’re excit­ed to let you know that Spar­row has been acquired by Google! You can view our pub­lic announce­ment here, but I want­ed to reach out direct­ly to make sure you were

Read the rest

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie 1941 – 2011

On the heels of last week’s death of the man who turned Unix into a pop­u­lar con­sumer prod­uct, I am sad to learn of the pass­ing of Den­nis Ritchie, inven­tor of the C pro­gram­ming lan­guage and co-devel­op­er of the Unix oper­at­ing sys­tem. He was a 1998 lau­re­ate of the Nation­al Medal of Tech­nol­o­gy and Inno­va­tion for his part in the inven­tion of both C and Unix.

Many who aren’t pro­gram­mers or engi­neers may not know Mr Ritchie’s name, but any­one … Read the rest

Steven Paul Jobs 1955 – 2011

Steve Jobs died today.

There’s no use repeat­ing what has already been said: that he was a vision­ary, a genius, bril­liant, and so on. It’s cus­tom­ary to speak well of the recent­ly passed, but the truth is rich­er and more nuanced. Steve Jobs did not make his con­tri­bu­tions by invent­ing every last com­po­nent or by mak­ing every design deci­sion in Apple’s prod­ucts, a fact his crit­ics like to point out. But he did see things in a way too few of … Read the rest

How do market forces prevent gas main explosions?

This post is the first in the Invis­i­ble San­ta Bun­ny top­ic, so named because of a com­menter’s wry query about how the «Mag­i­cal San­ta Bun­ny of the Free Mar­ket» would address cer­tain prob­lems with­out leg­is­la­tion, com­bined with Adam Smith’s famous «invis­i­ble hand» of the free mar­ket. It’s a chest­nut of lib­er­tar­i­an rhetoric that prob­lems will resolve them­selves with mar­ket-dri­ven pri­vate-sec­tor fix­es, and that those fix­es both will be more effec­tive and will bet­ter pro­mote free­dom. This top­ic explores that idea Read the rest

Careerbuilder.com: Spam King of the Recession Age?

Like many Amer­i­cans these days, I’m hunt­ing for pos­i­tive cash­flow and inves­ti­gat­ing ways in which I can trade my time and effort for paper I can turn around and trade for food and lodg­ing and art sup­plies. And in this day and age, the way to do that is through a vari­ety of web­sites that con­nect job seek­ers with employers.

The high­est val­ue sites are ones where the employ­ers have to pay to look at a résumé. The log­ic is … Read the rest

How I became a Java expert

I was teach­ing myself C out of the Kernighan and Ritchie book (sec­ond edi­tion, so you know I’m a poseur john­ny-come-late­ly) when I tried to pick up Java. This was 1996 and my head was filled with «what if» sce­nar­ios that are still as absurd today as they were then. You know, like «what if all appli­ca­tions were Open­Doc com­po­nents writ­ten in Java?» Which is sec­ond only to «why can’t we all just get along?» in it’s naïveté. But any­how, … Read the rest

Apple’s Bad News and Good News

For back­ground, please read the arti­cle from news.com.

I don’t know why I care much about the fate of Apple, but I’ve been try­ing to fol­low this sto­ry along, and I am hope­ful about Apple’s future. Although I still would­n’t buy a Mac for myself (we’ll see how their NeXT-gen­er­a­tion machines look? I’m keep­ing an Open­Mind on this issue 🙂 ), I think that Apple has been a great pres­ence in this indus­try and that it would be a … Read the rest