John Benson dot com

So after a week of letting the WWDC Keynote sink in, I think I’m pretty excited about what’s coming over the next few months. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, my trusty Rev A MacBook Pro has seen its last major OS release with Snow Leopard but all good things must come to an end. Some of the changes with respect to iCloud make me worry about a couple things, but there’s more on that in a bit.

I think it’s a little early for everyone to start completely hyperventilating over everything[1] that was announced. It’s certainly not too early for everyone’s favorite troll to dismiss lion as the latest in "a decade’s worth of minor, purely evolutionary updates."[2]

Let’s break this down…

OS X Lion

As a heavy user of Spaces, Mission Control looks like a nice improvement. Gestures will be welcomed, although there’s bound to be some confusion with the inverted scrolling. Airdrop will be nice for sharing things between my wife and I when we’re both working on something, but its reliance on zero-config (aka bonjour) networking will make sure that none of that will work at a big company office.

Launchpad isn’t something that interests me, but for people like my mother who kind of struggled with OS X but loves her iPad it will be great. Full screen apps (as well as resizing a window from anywhere) justifiably gets some eye-rolls from anyone who’s used Windows for the past 20 years but there’s a difference. Full screen means full screen. There isn’t some janky 3 pixel bright blue border around the edge, nor is there a task bar or menu bar at the top. It’s a subtle, but important distinction which is much nicer on the eyes for the user than the traditional maximized window. Oh…seeing the terminal in full screen was pretty badass. Full screen takes care of the kids running laptops, but those of us with giant displays still have to turn to third party tools like Better Snap Tool to help tile windows neatly.[^windowsnap] Now to the two big ones..

Mail

Mail on Snow Leopard and prior really kind of sucks. Not in the same way that Outlook sucks, but it’s certainly not one of the things that I cite to people who are interested in OS X. There is even something that seems lacking about Mail on iOS. The new version looks really slick, bringing in things like message threading, and therefore the ability to wipe out an overloaded mailbox in no time at all. Even bigger is search.

First a brief sidenote. I’ve spent hundreds of hours working with folks in all kinds of jobs sort through and search for mail. I’ve seen just about every kind of folder structure and scheme that you can think of. Even the most type-a engineer type still fails in some area, whether it be in sent items or deleted items you always end up turning to search in some way. 99% of the time, this means turning to the built in search in Outlook. I could write a thousand words just about the number of ways in which Outlook (2003, 2007 and 2010) utterly fail at this incredibly important task. In short, I would really like to be an email searching snob if there was any desktop email client that was well done.

When I was watching the keynote, I was one of those people that was making noises like a 4 year old on Christmas morning when they demonstrated search.[3] It’s not just the fact that Boolean searching is there for nerds who know that syntax. It’s the fact that they made building the query easy and flexible. My goodness it even suggests similar terms based on messages in the database. Are you kidding me? iCal can continue to suck as hard as it does now, and OS X still would be possibly the best OS for people who do a lot of email…Exchange or IMAP.

At this point, things are looking great from the perspective of an attorney working in e-discovery. Then the other stuff happened.

Auto Save and Versioning

Auto Save is going to be a little more difficult for users to adjust to. Since the days of Windows 3.1, we’ve all been conditioned to save your work all the time. Some of the early screenshots had even removed the Command+S shortcut and option in the file menu. Whoa there. That’s a bit of a jump. Much like my perspective on iCloud, I’m conflicted about automatic versioning.

As an individual user, this is going to be nice. Not earth shattering, just nice. As someone who works in e-discovey this makes me want to crawl into the corner and weep. Even though “tracked changes” in Word are grossly misunderstood and feared in the legal community, their actual prevalence in data sets is relatively small. Now, tracked changes aren’t even an option. Sure, there’s no way to accidentally send your revision history to a professor, thereby proving that you didn’t do anything in that honors English class until the last day of final exams. The problem is that now lawyers have to figure out how to deal with all these revisions. Since they’re stored as deltas instead of full documents, can we open the prior versions on their own? Is there a duty to produce all of the revisions under a regular document request? It just makes my head hurt.

iCloud

I can’t tell yet whether I’m excited about iCloud or not. On one hand, it will be nice to have some seamless communication between iOS and OS X. On the other, I understand the file system and approach things in terms of projects instead of contexts. iCloud document storage will be great for people who open documents from the list of recently opened files, but for nerds who like to woller around in their perfect little file system it’s really going to mess with people’s heads.

The impact on e-discovery is unknown. Obviously the file has to live somewhere, it’s just a matter of poking around with Lion once it comes out to find them. Security should be interesting, although I have as much confidence in Apple’s security in transit as I do Dropbox.[4]

I’ll admit that I’ve been a MobleMe user since the iPhone was released. Essentially I’ve been paying $99 a year to sync my contacts, which is way too much. It also gives me some perspective on how well Apple has done with internet based services. The short version is that they completely suck. iDisc sounded nice, but somehow ended up being worse than carrying around a thumb drive. Back to my Mac didn’t even work for the first 6 months or so after it was released and it’s still pretty spotty. Calendar syncing hasn’t ever really worked well, but I’ll blame that on iCal as much as the servers trying to glue all of these crappy calendars together.

The iTunes store, on the other hand, seems to work without a hitch. This makes me pretty darn optimistic about iTunes in the cloud. As someone who has to share a wireless circuit with over a hundred people going through a 3Mb pipe when I’m at the office, streaming isn’t really a good option so being able to grab albums from my library a-la-carte on my laptop is going to be just fine.

iTunes Match is huge and as I’ve been browsing through the iTunes store, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how little I’ll have to upload myself. Almost all the Dick’s Picks and a ton of Widespread Panic shows are up there and ready to go. Negotiating what is in effect amnesty for the millions of people out there who have acquired music through ripping CDs against the record industry’s wishes is great. There are some people who are concerned that this is some kind of trap for the RIAA to identify pirated music, but if that was going to happen it would have happened when iTunes added album artwork or the whole Genius concept. That said, a clear privacy statement from Apple before the thing goes live will be nice.

Overall, there are some really neat things coming out soon for those of us living in the Apple ecosystem.

The Big Picture

What Apple is doing is really making corporate IT departments look bad. People are starting to realize that using a computer doesn’t have to be the hell on earth experience that is working in the Windows/Office environment at work. Legacy “enterprise” software packages unfortunately mean that for most organizations Windows will continue to linger for quite some time, but if you’re a user who spends most of their time working with a connection to Exchange and writing documents, OS X is probably a better OS than Windows. If the new Mail doesn’t completely destroy the Exchange server, then why not run OS X as the desktop operating system with virtual machines for those Windows tools that we just can’t shed?

Last night the Royals thumped the Yankees, taking a series from them in the Bronx for the first time since I was still in high school. It’s just might be fun to be a baseball fan in Kansas City again. Unfortunately this possible resurgence of our home town team coincides with the departure of one of the greatest sports writers of our time.

Joe Posnaski is moving to North Carolina and has written one of the most moving tributes to my Home town that I’ve ever read.. I, like many of the commenters, grew up reading Joe’s column in the Star every day, and up until he left for Sports Illustrated it was really the only reason to open the paper for anything other than starting up the grill.

Joe crystalizes not only the sights, sounds smells and history of KC, but also the sense of community. Even folks who have spent a short time here can attest to the neighborly atmosphere that exists everywhere in the town. When I was in college, I’d always get a tingle down my spine when I returned to the House at 520, but nothing like the feeling I got when I would emerge from the Arrowhead concourse and take in Arrowhead as I made my way down to row 6.

One of my fondest memories is the day that I cooked for a Law School recruiting picnic in Loose Park. It takes a while to cook 30 pounds of pork loin, and it takes an impressive cooker to handle 25 whole chickens at once. I sat in the parking lot all day, watching my temperature and talking to every person that walked by who asked about the cooker.[1] Everyone was perfectly friendly and was happy to strike up a conversation.

To all my friends who have sadly moved away, my guest room is open for reservations after you read this piece.

For a long time I’ve wanted to learn a serious programming language. I’ve been down with HTML and CSS for well over half my life now, but have always wanted a little more. With my web development days mostly over, digging into PHP or JavaScript didn’t seem very useful. Learning C (or C#, Obj-C or C++) is a little low level for the things that I’m looking to do. Perl has always had some appeal, primarily because it’s easy enough to read (mostly in issues of 2600) but I couldn’t find a great resource to get me from zero to fully functional scripts in enough time. I’ve used and loathed Java apps and read enough Joel on Software to be pretty bias against that nonsense too.

When I saw Adam Laurie give his talk about the RFID passports at LayerOne a few years ago, he raved about how nice it was to work in Python and that’s stuck with me. From time to time, I’d take a look at some samples of textbooks online, but never found anything that seemed to click.

I saw a recommendation for Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw and decided to check it out. I’m currently about halfway through the exercises and am extremely happy with the results. One of my favorite parts of this book encapsulates why I think that anyone who is ready to start making computers work for you instead of the other way around should learn Python or any other scripting language.

Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but if you want to make about the same money and be happier, you could actually just go run a fast food joint. You are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines. – Zed Shaw at page 155 of Learn Python the Hard Way

He left one discipline out there: Law. If you do a lot of repetitive calculations, such as document review estimates, spousal support calculations or estimates for lost income then Python gives you the opportunity to create a tool that is superior to doing calculations by hand or in Excel.

It’s not just Python that you end up learning though. You end up learning about how your computer works, why special characters like the \ character can cause problems in other software and most importantly how to use your keyboard.

When you’re working through the exercises, you’ll get really sick of using the mouse to move around and select text. Where you always might have known that you can theoretically use a computer without a pointer device you can see why that’s a good thing through banging out lines of code. Heck, I even have started to appreciate (although I haven’t made this nerd jump quite yet) VI and VIM key bindings.

The book is tremendous for anyone at any level of knowledge of technology and gets my highest recommendation.

Finally, I will say that learning to create software changes you and makes you different. Not better or worse, just different. You may find that people treat you harshly because you can create software, maybe using words like “nerd”. Maybe you will find that because you can dissect their logic that they hate arguing with you. You may even find that simply knowing how a computer works makes you annoying and weird to them.

To this I have one just piece of advice: they can go to hell. The world needs more weird people who know how things work and who love to figure it all out. When they treat you like this, just remember that this is your journey, not theirs. Being different is not a crime, and people who tell you it is are just jealous that you have picked up a skill they never in their wildest dreams could acquire.

• Zed Shaw in Learn Python the Hard Way