Floating Sun » apple

Some thoughts on iCloud

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 16:08:10 +0000

Sorry, all the sensationalist headlines were taken, so I had to pick something boring.

As we all know by now (read: probably 1% of the world’s population), at WWDC earlier this week, Apple spilled the beans on the upcoming iCloud, among other things. In this post, I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the much hyped iCloud (not that there is any dearth of opinions and articles on the subject, thanks to the echo-chamber that is Twitterverse and Blogosphere)

First off, some quick bullets summarizing what it is:

iCloud aims to make cloud storage painless, the idea being that your data should be available to you from all your devices, all the time.
It’s automatic and transparent. Apple is baking iCloud support deep into 9 different applications: iTunes, Photo Stream, Apps, Books, Documents, Backup, Contacts, Calendar and Mail. And that’s just the beginning.
It’s free. Upto 5GB — excluding purchased music, books, apps and photo stream.
Sync over the air: iCloud can sync across devices over wireless. As a concrete example, you’ll no longer need a cable to sync and backup your iPhone with your laptop.

Here are some cool things about iCloud:

Scan and skip upload (iTunes only): when dealing with large data sets (such as your movies and music collection), one of the main impediments to using cloud storage is the overhead of doing the initial import. With a 1Mbps uplink, a 10GB music collection will take a full day to upload. Of course, if the file you are trying to upload already exists somewhere in the cloud, you don’t need to upload it and this is exactly what iCloud does. Because of the iTunes store, Apple already has a library of 18 million songs (and counting) and detecting if two files are for the same song is a lot easier than for many other media types (say images or movies).
Storage APIs for developers: APIs are all the rage these days. By exposing the right set of APIs, Apple could attract developers to build iCloud functionality on other platforms (Android, for example). Unfortunately, the API is fairly limited at this point (key-value store or documents).
HP, Teradata, maybe EMC are rumored to have supplied bulk of the hardware in the spanking new datacenter that will be the backbone for iCloud.
Despite all the hoopla around “cloud” recently, it was still grounded firmly within the tech circles. Apple has the ability, experience and motivation to take cloud computing truly mainstream with iCloud.

What is NOT so cool:

Apple has a habit of exaggerating the novelty and efficacy of their features (remember Spaces?) Scan and skip upload is nothing new: it is just deduplication under the wraps — a well known technique in storage systems. Videos and photos will still have to be uploaded though — there’s no real shortcut for those. Of course, there are techniques to dedup arbitrary data and I hope Apple is leveraging them.
In the same vein, syncing of Mail, Calendar and Contacts is just catch up. Ever used Google? Likewise for Docs and Books. The delivery model is different — Apple apps work with the local data and sync when there’s connectivity. They haven’t touched upon conflict resolution, disconnected clients etc.
Implications for Dropbox: transparent, automatic sync across multiple devices is a phenomenally hard problem. Apple makes it sound like they’ve nailed it. It took Dropbox several years to address all the performance and security concerns. I’d wager Apple will run into its share of snags along the way.
Apples all the way: despite their claims, iCloud is designed to lock you in. Sure you may be able to leverage some of the features by installing additional software on a PC. But unless you are using an Apple device, you won’t get the full experience or service. Want your “reading list” available on Android (or Chome, for that matter)? Tough luck. Want your music available to other music players (open source players like Banshee and Amarok, god forbid)? How about your photo stream in Picasa?

Finally, there’s no doubt that iCloud will drastically alter the cloud landscape. However, Apple is focused mainly on the personal cloud — which is a good thing, they are playing to their strengths. It is also a great opportunity because the enterprise cloud market is still wide open. The requirements, challenges and “killer apps” in that market are very very different than the personal/consumer cloud market. Should be fun!

My experiences with Apple: A poem

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:45:42 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

I’m a Linux guy; Windows was never my thing honey
Apple seemed interesting, but required too much money

I have ideological problems with Apple too,
What with all the DRM and hardware lock-in they do.

But people are crazy about Apple, and I used to wonder why,
I had a dream: to own Apple products that I didn’t have to buy.

A few months back my wife gifted me an iPhone, bro!
And then at work I got the new Macbook Pro!!

Thus suddenly I was an Apple user,
Sure, some people called me a sore loser.

Allow me to share my early experiences,
Some accolades and some grievances.

I’ll try to keep a neutral tone,
Shall focus on the Mac and not the iPhone.

Integration, integration, integration!
The attention to detail gives a wonderful sensation.

User experience is the key,
Excellent design is for all to see.

They’ve taken care of the enterprises,
Exchange support, Google integration — no surprises.

It’s by far the best laptop I’ve ever used,
The hardware is slick, the software is smooth.

Image via CrunchBase

But boy do I hate iTunes,
It’s so broken it should be called Looney Tunes.

Try connecting multiple iPhones to the same device,
Or plug your iPhone in another laptop (poor advice).

Sync is threatening, sounds like a bully.
“I shall sync or destroy”, that just sounds silly.

The Terminal app should aspire higher,
No 256-color support leaves much to desire.

Keyboard shortcuts are hard to find,
Change them? you must be out of your mind!

“Features” like “Spaces” are overrated,
More like awaited, belated and deflated.

I prefer iTerm over Terminal and Adium for chat,
Chrome over Safari, and this over that.

I’m certainly not blown away,
But a Mac is convenient, I have to say.

Big Brother Apple

Diwaker Gupta — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:30:51 +0000

Do you remember the [[http://youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8|1984 ad from Apple]]? I’ve embedded it at the bottom if you haven’t. Anyways, the point is that I was trying to download the “free” Apple iPhone SDK today and apparently they require me to sign up first. I thought alright, that doesn’t seem too unreasonable. Now I have the sign up form in front of me, and I just don’t understand why the following fields are marked as “required”:

* company: what if I’m NOT in a company? what if I’m NOT using the SDK for work related purposes? what if I just don’t want to tell you where I work? Of course I realize I can always make this up, but why does Apple feel the need to pry on my professional/personal life so badly?
* address: are you going to send me a check in the mail? As long as I’m not involved in a monetary transaction with Apple, they shouldn’t be need my address. If they want to geo-localize interest in their SDK, I’m sure they are already doing that by logging my IP address. Again, I can make up an address but that’s not the point (besides, I’m sure somewhere in the fine print they will have me click some check box that is a proof of my consent that the information I have submitted is accurate)
* phone number: tele marketing?

Well guess what, the iPhone SDK is only available for Mac. So much for cross platform development and openness and what not.

httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

Enough with Linux as a second class citizen!

Diwaker Gupta — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:04:02 +0000

I’m sick of Linux being treated like a second class citizen. Hardware and software vendors alike almost proudly display “Supported for PC and Mac” tag lines. Technically, that doesn’t even make sense, because both Windows and OS X can now run on pretty much the same hardware. And so can Linux. Even from a market share stand point, I can understand vendors’ desires to advertise out of the box Windows support, but the market share of OS X is not substantially greater than that of Linux (specially if you put together all the different distributions).

But most importantly, I think it just being mean to the open source community. Consider the recent [[http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/03/18safari.html|Safari announcement]]. Now it is well known that Safari is based on [[http://webkit.org/|WebKit]] which has its roots in [[http://konqueror.kde.org/features/browser.php|KHTML]], the HTML renderer originally developed by the [[http://kde.org|KDE community]]. To its credit, Apple has showed its interest in giving back to the community and [[http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/07/23/the-unforking-of-kdes-khtml-and-webkit|WebKit and KHTML developers are collaborating]] to share their innovations.

But then why does Apple release Safari for Windows and Mac only? WebKit works fine on all platforms (both with GTK and QT) so there’s really no good reason. For that matter, what about iTunes? Why isn’t there an iTunes equivalent for Linux from Apple itself? Why does it want to alienate so many iPod and iPhone users who have Linux on their desktop? What about keyboards and wireless mice? Or monitors and hard drives and webcams and tablets and microphones? Or any number of the zillions of peripherals out there.

If you read the news, there is no dearth of evidence that open source in general, and Linux in particular, is impacting our daily lives more than ever before. Even if you don’t realize it. From embedded systems to mission critical systems, from enterprise systems to the OLPC, from news papers to television stations, Linux and open source are every where. For a comprehensive in-depth article and lots of numbers backing these claims, I highly recommend [[http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html|this article]] by David Wheeler. How long will we have to wait before vendors finally accept that this is a customer base that they can NOT afford to ignore? How long will the community will have to keep proving itself over and over again that it is NOT a bunch of nerdy hobbyists who have no connection with reality?

**Update**: Here are some more resources on Linux/open source usage:
* [[http://mtechit.com/linux-biz/|Linux in business]]: business by categories
* [[http://www.aaxnet.com/design/linux2.html|Companies using Linux]]
* [[http://www.desktoplinux.com/index.html|Lots of news about Linux on the desktop]]: several big vendors like Dell and Lenovo now sell laptops and desktops pre-installed with Linux

Whats with __MACOSX in Zip files?

Diwaker Gupta — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:16:26 +0000

More and more people are using Mac’s for development these days. As an example, a lot of the core developers from some of the leading web frameworks use Mac as their primary development platform. Several plugin and theme authors for WordPress also develop on Mac. While this is a good thing, there is one particular side effect of this development that annoys me beyond relief.

It seems that the easiest way to archive something on Mac is to right click on your directory of choice in Finder and select “Archive as…”. This creates a Zip file, which then the developer can distribute to users. The problem is that Apple, like many other software giants, tends to twist and bend the user’s will and interpret what the user wants to mean something else. In this case, the natural thing for the OS to do is pack up that directory, and ONLY that directory in a Zip file. But no sir, how can that be? How can Apple “transparently” embed some metadata in the Zip file so that if some other Mac user opens it in Finder, he/she can benefit from this metadata.

Apple does this by creating another folder suspiciously named ”%%__MACOSX%%” at the root of your Zip archive. Here’s an example (its the Cutline theme):

0 02-02-07 12:37 Cutline 1.1/ 12292 01-31-07 17:16 Cutline 1.1/.DS_Store 0 02-02-07 12:38 __MACOSX/ 0 02-02-07 12:38 __MACOSX/Cutline 1.1/ 82 01-31-07 17:16 __MACOSX/Cutline 1.1/._.DS_Store 82 01-31-07 00:12 __MACOSX/Cutline 1.1/._ie6.css 238 01-30-07 23:59 Cutline 1.1/ie7.css 82 01-30-07 23:59 __MACOSX/Cutline 1.1/._ie7.css 0 09-13-06 17:30 Cutline 1.1/images/ 12292 09-13-06 17:30 Cutline 1.1/images/.DS_Store 0 02-02-07 12:38 __MACOSX/Cutline 1.1/images/ 82 09-13-06 17:30 __MACOSX/Cutline 1.1/images/._.DS_Store 65705 09-11-06 15:55 Cutline 1.1/images/header_1.jpg 34365 09-11-06 15:55 __MACOSX/Cutline 1.1/images/._header_1.jpg 62867 09-11-06 15:59 Cutline 1.1/images/header_2.jpg 33224 09-11-06 15:59 __MACOSX/Cutline 1.1/images/._header_2.jpg 82708 09-11-06 16:01 Cutline 1.1/images/header_3.jpg 34855 09-11-06 16:01 __MACOSX/Cutline 1.1/images/._header_3.jpg 59780 09-11-06 16:03 Cutline 1.1/images/header_4.jpg 33555 09-11-06 16:03 __MACOSX/Cutline 1.1/images/._header_4.jpg

This folder contains, among other things, thumbnails for images in the original archive. Now, this kind of unwanted, undesirable outcomes just really really annoy me. But I’ll try to keep my cool, and present a systematic analysis of not only why what Mac OSX does is wrong, but also stupid and unnecessary:

No surprises: As a user, I don’t like surprises, specially of the bad kind. If I request to archive a directory into a Zip file, thats exactly what I want. If I later unarchive that zip file, I should get my original directory back. Nothing more, nothing less. Any kind of unintended behavior is BAD.
We are not stupid: If I wanted you to stick in an extra folder named ”%%__MACOSX%%” in my archive, I’d let you know. Your users are a smart group, don’t insult them like this.
I hate clutter: In my WordPress themes directory, I unzip Cutline. If each theme starts creating its own ”%%__MACOSX%%” folder, then my themes directory would soon get cluttered with needless garbage.
It breaks things: If MacOSX did something harmless, like embed some metadata (like Zip file creator) into the Zip file itself, I might have been OK. But creating an entire tree structure in the archive just breaks things, in ways more than one. As an example, if like Cutline, each WordPress theme started creating ”%%__MACOSX%%” folders in the root of the archive, then later if I install another theme, I’ll get lots of errors and file name collissions because the new theme will also try to extract in the ”%%__MACOSX%%” folder. Not only this, some programs (like Gallery and WordPress) have the ability to load plugins/images directly from Zip files. As a result, I’ll end up with unwanted images, themes and plugins in my setup. Not only this, it might actually just break your installation. Since you did not create the ”%%__MACOSX%%” folder yourself, you don’t know what is in it, and it might not always obey the expecations of the software.
Security: Again, you did not explicitly create that folder. What if someone creates a virus, that just modifies the default zip program on Mac to sneak in malicious payload via the ”%%__MACOSX%%” folders in any new Zip archives you create? Apart from the security risk, its a time sink. Why should I go around cleaning up mess that I did not create? Software is supposed to make my life easier, not harder.
Redundant: From the looks of it, it seems that all of the data inside the ”%%__MACOSX%%” folder is created from the original directory. No external information is used/needed. If thats the case, why oh why would anyone EVER need this stupid new folder? If some metadata is needed, it can always be reconstructed from the original on demand. This seems downright stupid to me.

Would someone, anyone, please explain Apple’s intent and motivation behind this “feature”? What are the benefits (if any)?

History of Computing — 6

Diwaker Gupta — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 02:47:53 +0000

As you can see, I didn’t blog about the last HoC class largely because I had to leave early for Surtaal practice, but it was a wonderful lecture and I encourage all those who are interested to look at the video/slides. Armando Fox is a great speaker — his slides were both amusing and insightful. I missed Steve’s section on Antitrust but I think I’ve heard that material before from him from the earlier two courses.

Anyways, so for today’s class we have none other than [[wp>Steve_wozniak|Steve Wozniak]]. He’s shorter than I thought. He’s not using slides. But he’s speaking enthusiastically and passionately, so its really enjoyable just listening to him.

He’s basically off on a tirade about his life, which is fair I guess since he had a pretty big role in the development of the personal computer as we know it today (and which happens to be the subject of today’s class). His childhood was pretty fascinating apparently. When he was in 5th grade, his dad took him to these technology fairs — so at that early age he already knew about circuits and transistors. By the time he was 12 years old, he was already building simple circuits — for example, he built an electronic tic-tac-toe.

By the time he was in high school, he was so advanced in electronics that his high school teacher arranged for him to take electronic classes at a nearby college. He also started programming in Fortran when he was in high school — probably one of the few kids in the entire world to be programming a computer at that time. One of the first programs he wrote was the [[wp>Knights_tour|Knights Tour]].

He then got his hands on the manual for the PDP-8 and fascinated by it, he started designing his own computers. Of course he could never build and test those designs, but still, think about it — a high school kid, actually //designing// a full-fledged computer!!

He says that by the end of high school, he had designed and re-designed so many computers, and //optimized// so many existing designs that he was convinced that his designs were more compact and efficient than any other designs out there. He knew that he knew more than what could be taught in any electrical engineering course in college.

He was planning to go to tech schools like MIT for college, but he was visiting Colorado and he was so enamored with the snow there that he decided that he would only apply to Colorado. He was crazy about programming. He cost his first year college a lot of money in computer bills. He had to take a year off after his second year (which he did at De Anza, not at Colorado) working for a company to make enough money to finish college and get a car.

Wozniak met Jobs sometime during his college years. He says Jobs was more “liberated” than he was (in context of the Hippie movement prominent in California at the time). He went to Berkeley for his 3rd year college. They made “blue boxes” using which they could basically tap into the telecom system and make phone calls anywhere in the world without having to pay for anything.

(//At this point, the “lecture” really sounds like excerpts from iWoz, not really an academic prose on the advent of the PC from Apple’s vantage point. Probably it’ll better fit into the lecture as things proceed, but right now its simply an interesting story//)

During their Berkeley days, Jobs and Wozniak thought of selling the blue box on campus. So they did some door to door marketing, never got caught and sold a bunch of blue boxes.

Later Woz got his hands on one of the first legendary HP calculators (those which could do non-trivial math — calculus, for example). Woz was later hired by HP as an electronic engineer to work on calculator designs. In order to test his calculator designs, Woz also worked on //simulators// for the calculators. HP had one huge shared computer to run these testing and debugging routines.

He was a //hacker// par-excellent — he built a LOT of stuff on his own: he built a pinball machine, he built his own electronic Pong game (complete with TV display and controls). Out of this Pong machine, he designed a keyboard-video interface that was a cheap and better replacement for the expensive teletype machines. Jobs and Woz would later sell this terminal design to a Mountain View based company.

Later he designed a one player Pong game (better called Bricks) in //4 days// that he and Jobs later marketed. Recall in those days games were not really like any other program — things had to be hard-wired and stuff had to be coded in hardware. Very little software abstraction.

Woz was part of a “Homebrew” computer club where people interested in microprocessors met and talked about things. Jobs came to Woz saying that they should start a company to build self-contained components — a printer circuit board (PCB) which would have the basic functionality like keyboard input/output, video displays etc. Jobs secured a $50,000 order for their first PCB (morphed into Apple I).

Woz designed the Apple II from scratch. It would be the first low cost small computer with high resolution color display. He infact wrote down the entire BASIC interpreter //by hand// because he couldn’t afford a computer to type it out and compile it in. Jobs basically ran the business side of the company, while Woz led the technical side.

The first Apple ][ didn’t have a floppy drive, nor floating point BASIC. So they later worked on a floppy drive controller (in two weeks) but got the floating point BASIC from Microsoft, which Woz says was a big mistake for Apple because it was licensed from M$ for 5 years. Apple also wrote the first “home” oriented application — they wrote a checkbook manager, probably the world’s first consumer finance application as well.

Apple converts Australian mine into iPod

Diwaker Gupta — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 18:43:58 +0000

Nifty! Apple converts Australian mine into iPod Related posts: Apple’s new toys iPod Shuffle sucks YouTube – microsoft ipod packaging parody Related posts:

YouTube – microsoft ipod packaging parody

Diwaker Gupta — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 04:32:27 +0000

This is *the* best video I’ve seen in a long long time. Hilarious! YouTube – microsoft ipod packaging parody Related posts: Microsoft: Open source ‘not reliable or dependable’ | CNET News.com India channel on YouTube iPod Shuffle sucks Related posts:

Two interesting reads

Diwaker Gupta — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 22:11:12 +0000

One technical: [[http://www.bitrot.de/macswitch.html|When a Linux user buys Apple's Mac mini]] One non-technical: [[http://www.bitrot.de/workinusa.html|Working in the USA - Experiences of a European]] Someday I need to write my own versions of both of the above. Someday. Related posts: Today’s interesting reads … Continue reading → Related posts:

Do you love Apple’s app installation?

Diwaker Gupta — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 03:13:01 +0000

If you’re a fan of Apple’s DMG and the self-contained, click to install, drag to trash nature of Apple’s apps, but miss the same functionality on Linux, you need to check out [[http://klik.atekon.de/ubuntu.php|Klik]]. You can even try out [[http://klik.atekon.de/blog/?p=5|E17]] with … Continue reading → Related posts: