Monday monday

Back to action after a badly needed week off.  The Tahoe portion was just right – some getting away from it all, not just sitting around doing nothing but not pressured to do anything either, and two nights away was just the right amount to leave time to accomplish everything at home – whether that consisted of getting projects done or determining they didn’t need doing at this point.

Not least among the achievements was finally cleaning up the home Mac mini and its iTunes management and backup solution.  The machine was bought in February 2010, but it was the previous model (in an internal Apple new-old-stock clearance) and it’s showing its age, so getting reliable backups set up and a less complicated model for managing iTunes was nice (the wife and I share an iTunes ID but have different content and playlists, and previous attempts to fix and consolidate had left a slew of duplicates and no room on the hard drive to maneuver. Comment if you want details; it’s too boring even for me to recount.)

So hanging out the wash for Monday morning:

* ‘Er indoors is changing jobs.  Which is always exciting and terrifying in similar measure, not least because it means willfully giving up your track record and institutional memory and regenerating, and putting in the necessary time to progress from Rookie of the Year to Most Improved to MVP to The Wolf.  Fortunately, I have absolutely no doubt that she will do it, and faster than I could, because she has a bunch of stupid stuff like “diligence” and “professionalism” and “initiative” and “talent” and bullshit. ;]

 

* The Apple-Samsung saga continues, this time with the extent to which Samsung ripped off iOS wholesale for its own UI – literally its own UI, as Samsung’s Android devices use their own proprietary TouchWiz UI over top of Android’s native interface. Color, graphic elements – it’s absurd. The hits just keep on coming from the media covering the case, too – this article actually does a good job breaking down how even the packaging design abruptly changed after the iPhone hit.  Not that any of this is particularly surprising for those who saw the “Blackjack” and “Blade” launched in the wake of the success of the Blackberry and RAZR.

 

* So another tragic shooting, and this one pretty clearly the work of a white supremacist with more guns than intelligence.  At this point, it’s absurd – James Fallows has the definitive lines, which I will quote in full:

One person who (unsuccessfully) threatened the lives of his fellow airline passengers ten-and-a-half years ago has changed air travel for every single passenger on every U.S. flight in all the time since then. We responded (and over-responded) to that episode with a “this won’t happen again” determination, like other countries’ response to mass shootings. It is hard to know what kind of mass killing with guns would evoke a similar determination in America. The murder of six people including a federal judge and near-killing of a Congresswoman last year obviously didn’t do it. Nor, in all probability, will these latest two multi-death shootings. In their official statements of condolence yesterday, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney replicated their achievement after the Aurora murders: Neither used the word “gun.”

This is where we are at – the media, the elected officials and the very citizenry of this country have been so completely mau-maued by the NRA and its apologists in conservative media that no one will even table the possibility of doing something to impede, however slightly, the ability of one person to obtain military-grade weapons and ammunition and attack without warning.  One hint that somebody might make some sort of secret terrifying Wonka bomb and we’re dumping our drinks out and putting our shoes through the X-ray for years. Two mass killings in a month, enabled by assault weapons, and what are we prepared to do?  Fuckall.

This isn’t difficult. No weapon with a sporting purpose honestly needs more than five rounds between reloads. I’m willing to countenance ten, even.  But I’m having a really hard time understanding why you need thirty shots and instant reload unless you’re deliberately looking for trouble.  And yet, as I say, as long as we remain in thrall to the people who want to need the guns, we’re going to have trouble.  Of which more later.

 

* Mat Honan famously ran into trouble this week when somebody managed to social-engineer a password change out of Apple tech support.  The problem was, since his Google account was sending its backup email to that iCloud mail address, it was a simple matter to get the Google password reset – and from there it was a piece of cake to start wiping his devices.  And because he had his Twitter account linked to Gizmodo’s, once they had a way into his Twitter, they were able to use Gizmodo’s for all sorts of mischief.

The problem with the cloud is the problem of any ecosystem: you need diversity.  You can’t put all your eggs in Apple’s basket, or Google’s, or Yahoo’s or Microsoft’s. A non-trivial chunk of what I do is run on a private system where I married the operator’s sister.  None of my Twitter accounts are linked together (although some do follow each other, what do you want from me).  Large pieces of the system don’t overlap at all – nothing in Google points back to iCloud, nothing in iCloud points to Yahoo, there’s no remote support to fiddle for my private system, etcetera. Diverse ecosystem = robust ecosystem.  If one piece of my operation falters, I have something to fall back on, pretty much across the board.  This is not by accident.

 

* Starting tomorrow, we’ll find out whether “early to bed and early to rise” is going to happen for yer boy.  Fingers crossed.