Collateral Damage

The US Government yesterday shut down popular file storage site Megaupload (I can’t link to it because the site is down). The Feds have a very well written, 72-page indictment indicating the illegal activity that was going on there and the fact that the stuff pretty well knew that they were making their millions by selling files they didn’t own. That aspect of the case will be covered in court, and, whether or not you agree with the circumstances, it’s not what I want to cover here.

The problem is, of course, that there are tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of users who used Megaupload for perfectly legitimate, legal storage of files. As of yesterday, all their access to those files is gone. Work documents that groups were collaborating on, family photo albums, insurance records, and other valuable documents, now completely unavailable.

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Stop PIPA and SOPA

I have the regrettable honor to live in the congressional district of Lamar Smith, sponsor of the more regrettable SOPA and PIPA bills. Here is the letter I sent him this morning:

Dear Sir,

SOPA and PIPA are bad laws that fundamentally affect the freedoms enjoyed by Americans. I do not want to see the USA using the same techniques as China and Iran to control our citizens. Moreover, I have worked in the Internet industry—previously, as an engineering manager for Yahoo!, and currently as a software architect for Rackspace hosting—and I can tell you that these laws, if passed, would create huge burdens on providers while actually doing very little to stop piracy.

I encourage you to drop your support for these laws. No businesses have ever been successful in the long term by using the legal system to repress competition, and these acts will simply NOT stop the mechanisms used, nor the motivations for, sharing illegal content. The solution to intellectual property infringement is NOT to place a huge burden on businesses to enforce someone else’s rights, and I, for one, am appalled as the loss of freedoms that have occurred in the USA to such an extent that such laws could even be conceived.

Yours sincerely,
Glen Campbell

2011: the year that was

Bleh.

My nieces and nephews carry my father's coffin in July, 2011.

To say that 2011 was eventful is a bit of an understatement. I began the year in an apartment in San Antonio, Texas, a scant month or so after starting a new job with Rackspace Hosting. I traveled back and forth to Beaumont and Houston more times than I can count to be with my parents in the hospital and, ultimately, to attend their funerals. I lost my brother quite suddenly to an aortic aneurysm, and my sister-in-law to complications from surgery. And I lost two dear aunts on separate sides of the family.

Given all that, the fact that my alma mater won a bowl game and had its first Heisman trophy winner in the school’s history doesn’t seem like such a big deal. And, in the grand scheme of things, it certainly isn’t (but I will definitely lord it over everyone else for the next year).

I remain, as ever, full of hope, however. I suppose I have reason to complain, but life has its ups and downs and its our job to handle what we’re given.

All the best to you and yours in 2012, and may God give you the strength to handle whatever challenges come your way.

Pile up the photos

PhotoPile.me is a really cool site that lets you view all of your Instagram photos at once. Ok, maybe not all of them, but a nice big pile of them that’s really quite striking. Here’s mine (click through to see the live site):

Very cool (at least if you use Instagram).

How I invented Web 2.0

I recently took down all of my Siteframe-based websites. Because of the innovative nature of some of the technology (if I may be so bold), I’ve written up a brief history of Siteframe for your perusal.

Let me know if you have any questions.

 

The Kindle Fire

Thanks to the kindness of Santa Claus, I received a Kindle Fire for Christmas. Here are some of my first impressions.

First, as many others have noted, this is not really intended to be a generic tablet device aimed at toppling the iPad’s dominance of the market. It really is an upgraded Kindle with enhanced abilities to consume Amazon’s content: books, music, and video. It performs those tasks extremely well. Moreover, you can install selected apps from the Amazon App Store, so I can also view my Netflix movies in addition to the Amazon ones. Should I need to, I can check my email, though it must be said that the setup and usage is a sad disappointment to those of us who are familiar with Apple’s flawless execution in that department.

Let me expand on that point a bit: Apple’s iOS does things so well, users come to expect it. My primary email is on Google Apps; when I set it up in iOS, I specify “Gmail” as the provider, give it my email address and password, and voila! everything is set up perfectly. On the Kindle, I have to fill out an entire page of information, supplying the IMAP and SMTP server names and choosing authentication methods (Plain? CRAM_MD5?). Once set up, however, it worked fine.

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Remembering Steve

Steve Jobs passed away yesterday, and the tributes from the world were immediate and overwhelming. He’s been called the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison, a visionary, and even Bill Gates said that it was an “insanely great honor” to have known him. It’s hard to imagine another individual whose life has touched the world in quite the way, or to the same extent, than Steve Jobs.

IBM may have made the “personal computer,” but it was Steve Jobs who made the computer personal. Personally, I cannot imagine how the world would be different without the effect his singular vision has had on how computers and machines interact with each other. He was perpetually pushing us to “think different” and to do things better than we ever imagined. The list of his successful products are being listed all over the web.

But I’m also interested in his failures; if ever there was a person who learned from his mistakes, it was Steve Jobs. Do you recall the “Cube,” the beautiful but feeble Macintosh? He learned that beauty was not enough to make a good product; it also had to have performance.

The original “iPod Phone,” made in conjunction with Motorola, was a joke. With a crappy user interface and limited to only holding 100 songs (can you imagine?), this worst seller forced Jobs to confront the real problems in the phone business, resulting, ultimately, in the iPhone, the “smart phone” that changed the entire industry.

The Apple TV was, and still is, one of those “little projects” that Apple still plays with. It has its enthusiasts, but it’s never really caught on in the wider populace. Yet Apple keeps tinkering with it, convinced that there’s “something there.” Will Apple ever get it right?

So much product development consists of tiny, incremental changes. Much of it is based upon user feedback; this is good, but users don’t think outside the box. They don’t imagine things in a vastly different way than they already exist. When all personal computers had a command line and a 24×80 character display, Jobs envisioned (with the help of Xerox PARC) a fully graphical user interface in the hands of every single computer user. While the iPod wasn’t the first music player with a hard disk, it was the first to offer an online store, with the full participation of record labels, where users could simply purchase and download music as opposed to ripping MP3′s from their CDs. When every computer “had” to have a floppy disk drive, Jobs sold the iMac without one. (Side note: when my wife and I got our MacBook Airs, she insisted on getting the plug-in CD drive. We’ve never used it.)

The world is a better place because of you, Steve, and we will miss you.