Irreal

Via the Programming subredit I was led this History of UTF-8 by Rob Pike. I already knew some of that history (such as Ken Thompson and Rob Pike designing UTF-8 on a paper placemat at a diner) but much of the story is new to me. Pike felt compelled to set the record straight because of a persistent story that UTF-8 was designed by IBM and then first implemented in Plan 9.

In fact, the IBM folks had called Pike to vet a design of theirs but Pike didn’t like it because their scheme couldn’t synchronize a byte stream with less than one character being consumed. So Pike and Thompson went to dinner where Thompson sketched out the encoding on the famous placemat. They returned from dinner and while Thompson banged out the packing and unpacking code, Pike started working on the graphics library. The code was done the next day and in another day they had it running in Plan 9.

This is a great story and if you have any interest in Unix (or Plan 9) history, it’s well worth a read. The story comes complete with the code that Thompson wrote that first night as well as some subsequent code, which is, apparently, pretty much what is running in Plan 9 today.

Recently Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie sat down for interviews: Thompson with Dr. Dobb’s and Ritchie with IEEE Spectrum. Ritchie talks mostly about he and Ken inventing Unix—the occasion for both interviews was Thompson and Ritchie winning the Japan Prize for their work on Unix—and the early efforts to make it portable.

Thompson talks about developing Unix, Dennis Ritchie, and the Go language. The best line in either interview, as far as I’m concerned, was Thompson saying that he, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer started the Go project because they all hated C++. That’s sure to ruffle some feathers but it’s a sentiment that many can identify with.

Both interview are short and leave you wishing for more but they’re interesting talks with two of the giants in Computer Science.

It appears that kicking the hornet’s nest worked out better for Lisbeth Salander than it has for Sony. The “hacker group” LulzSec has again embarrassed Sony by compromising SonyPictures.com and exposing user data for over one million users. Fortunately for Sony, the group did not have enough computer resources to download the whole database although it did take about 51,000 user records. Unfortunately for Sony, LulzSec has demonstrated once again how clueless Sony is about even rudimentary security. You can read LulzSec’s announcement on Pastebin here.

Consider this:

• The compromise was by an elementary SQL injection attack. How is this possible today? How is it possible especially for Sony who, one would think, would be on the alert after the PSN and subsequent disasters?
• The stolen data included passwords, email addresses, birthdates, and whatever opt-in data, such as telephone numbers, the users included.
• None of this data was encrypted.

All of this suggests that if Sony wants to sue and prosecute people for modding the PlayStation console, they better attend to their security first. Of course, it’s already too late for that. I wonder how many of those users who had their personal information exposed are already talking to lawyers. Sony is very likely to discover that those who live by the lawsuit, die by the lawsuit.

My main machine, at the moment, is a 27 inch iMac. It came with the Magic Mouse, which is an optical mouse that has a multi-touch surface on its top shell. It’s a great mouse and I really like it but I have a glass desk which means that I need to use a mouse pad for the optical tracking to work. That’s a problem because with that giant screen I was always running off the edge of the mouse pad and would have to pick up the mouse to reposition it.

So last weekend I bought a Magic Trackpad. Until I got my MacBook Pro I had always hated trackpads. For some reason the designers of every laptop I had ever used before the MacBook thought it was a great idea to have a tap on the trackpad represent a click. It’s one of those things that sounds good and natural but is terrible in practice. Terrible because it’s very easy to accidently trip the click simulation and yank focus away from whatever window you were working in. Say what you like about Apple but they think about stuff like this so their trackpad implementation was intelligently done. My MacBook is an older model so the trackpad had only limited gestures: a two-finger swipe was a scroll and, of course, the scrolls were inertial to make it easy to move large distances. The Magic Mouse added a gesture that would page forward and backwards in Safari and photos.

The Magic Trackpad has a full set of gestures and is much larger than a laptop trackpad as you can see in the picture.

It’s really easy to move around with it and it doesn’t take up as much room as the mouse pad did. All in all, it’s a giant win for me.

Over at Blog Kindle, Matthew has a post that asks if the Kindle is destroying the publishing industry. Matthew’s main point is that books have always been evolving and are continuing to evolve today. The most significant aspect of the current evolution is the move from physical books to ebooks. As Matthew points out, once you take away the paper, the publishers’ model becomes less sustainable.

Publishers and many authors are fond of pointing out that publishers do a whole lot more than “print books” and that, anyway, the cost of producing and delivering the physical book is not a significant part of the price of a book. Authors, they say, simply aren’t equipped to deal with editing, marketing, and fulfillment and therefore they need the publishers and therefore publishing will go on just as it always has.

But then Cory Doctorow ran his With A Little Help experiment to test those assumptions. Among other things, he found that a mere author can run the whole production cycle and that the oft cited fact of the relative insignificance of the cost of the physical book may not be true. A growing number of authors have reached the same conclusions and are choosing to self-publish directly to Amazon or to a print-on-demand service like Lulu.

None of this means that publishers aren’t useful or that they’re doomed but it does suggest that they should take a lesson from the music industry and try to avoid the same mistakes. In particular, they are going to have to rethink their business models. Just because charging a premium price for a new hardcover book and then reducing the price for the paperback edition a year later worked in the past doesn’t mean that it will continue to work with ebooks. And maybe a little sanity is in order for their pricing models. When I go on Amazon and see that the Kindle version of a book costs more than a physical copy of the same book, I’m insulted. I’m insulted that publishers think I’m so stupid that I’d actually pay a premium for something that costs them less to produce and ship. And I’m not alone. I know the arguments for why this happens but I’m not impressed. All I see is that I’m paying more for something that costs less to produce just so that publishers can protect their business models.

As it happens, I think publishers are useful and I wish them well. But they’re going to have to wake up to the reality that things are changing or they’re going to be disintermediated right out of existence. And it won’t be the Kindle’s fault; it will be theirs. As Matthew says, “We’re moving on.”