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?

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

Late last week, I saw Ben Brooks link to the Solarized color scheme from Ethan Schoonover. Initially I was a little skeptical of Mr. Brooks’s claim that he was using it now “for everything,” and took a look. He was exactly right. I applied the TextMate theme and was blown away at how comfortable it is to work in. I’ve now applied the color scheme to the Terminal, OmniFocus and (using the OS X color palette) I even retouched Scrivener to display the light theme.

Just one more justification for my quest to never open Word or Pages ever again.

One of the few gripes about the iPad last year was it’s inability to access my entire music library wirelessly. It made little sense that I should be able to push music from my iPad to the Airport Express but not push music to my iPad. This resulted in a couple emails to Steve about this logical hole in iOS.

The solution came a few weeks ago with version 4.3 of iOS. If you haven’t already done so, activate home sharing in iTunes on whatever machine holds all of your music. Pick up your iPad, fire up the iPod application and look in the top left corner.

Now you can access your whole music collection, including that rare Grateful Dead set from Filmore East, that choice version of Porch Song by Widespread Panic From 2001 or whatever else fits your fancy.

Happy spring, everybody. After this winter, we all need it.

How it Works

When you log into Facebook, find your account settings and click on “Learn More.” You’ll be prompted to enter your account password again, and then will see a message indicating that they will email you when it’s ready. If you’re clever, you probably filter messages from Facebook out of your inbox, so make sure to watch for the email. They must not store the download for very long once it’s prepared because it took me three tries to successfully download the file once it was done. There isn’t any error saying that the download had expired, which is kind of a pain.

The download comes down as a collection of HTML files, images and a stylesheet. It’s very well done, and you could actually just post this directory to your own webserver if you’d like.1

E-Discovery Implications

While I haven’t had a chance to see the output from a corporate account or organizational page, I would imagine that the process is very much the same. If this is the case, then when a duty to preserve information in anticipation of litigation arrises then it’s probably a good idea to have the admin of a company Facebook page initiate the download.2

Since the duty to preserve is an ongoing one, regular archives should be made since the data on a Facebook page is pretty fluid. One downside for those who may have to review this content prior to production is that de-duplication through the use of MD5 or SHA-1 checksums will be ineffective since all messages and wall postings come down as a single file.

Things I Thought I’d Never Say

Back when I joined Facebook back in early 2005, I was a pretty big supporter. I liked how it was clean, unobtrusive and showed no signs of allowing the customization which was one of the contributing factors to the decline of MySpace. I also really appreciated how it was private, as did many of the initial users. As the service continued to grow, I lost interest and really only maintain my account now because as an alpha-geek in the legal community I have to talk about Facebook a lot.

Facebook did something very right with this from a number of perspectives. Web based services like Facebook, Basecamp, Salesforce.com and Google Docs are going to continue to grow and users (and their lawyers) need ways to get to this information outside the browser. Even if a magic wand were waved where we could easily do pure native document productions, dynamic web pages like a Facebook profile are still extremely problematic. The only way that the Facebook download profile format could be more friendly to your average lawyer would be if it came down as a series of tiff images with a database load file.

Hopefully the same model of exporting flat, non-interactive versions of dynamic webpages will spread to other services soon.

How much do you want DOSSHELL on your Windows XP box?

Daily Use

1. Reeder is a wonderful RSS feed reader. I don’t do a lot of “surfing” anymore as I’ve identified a few websites which I tend to enjoy reading and getting the content delivered to me is great. Reeder leverages Google Reader for management of the feeds that are coming down. This is kind of a pain when you want to add something new, but it is what it is. I put RSS feeds at a relatively high nerd level, but a little bit of work to set things up goes a long way. Here’s a great video about how RSS feeds work if you’re not familiar.
2. Instapaper is a close second and is where I head after cruising through news. You can send articles to Instapaper from Reeder, which is great. All the content that gets pulled down is available offline, making it great for the airplane.
3. Omnifocus is how I manage all my tasks. I was so excited about the release of this program on the iPad that I actually bought it from iTunes when I was on that potentially frightening network at DEFCON. I use OF on my Macs and iPhone too, but I think there’s great potential to use as a standalone tool as well.
4. The Apple Remote is where things really start blowing your mind. In it’s simplest form, you can control the music that’s coming out of your iTunes library. When you add an AirPort Express to your stereo or maybe an AppleTV1 to your home theatre you can push your entire iTunes library to any of your speakers and control it all from the iPad. This is so amazing during the summers when I’m cooking on the deck it nearly makes me speechless. We’ve come a long way since I used to plug an external drive with my music into a laptop tenuously plugged in with a wire to my stereo in law school.
5. Netflix is kind of a no brainer if you have a subscription. I manage my DVD queue with the app, and usually pick what we want to watch on TV using this instead of the AppleTV interface. I’ve been slowly moving through the Ken Burns Civil War series and Cosmos too.
6. TuneIn Radio is how I finish my day with a little Coast to Coast AM. It starts at 10:00 central time on WNIS out of Norfolk, VA.

Regular Use

1. Epicurious is a very cool cooking app. It lets you build shopping lists that you can email or print which is really handy. What I really am looking forward to is Cooks Illustrated. They have an iPhone app, but the double pixel thing just isn’t that great.
2. NPR is a great companion to Epicurious (when I’m not listening to music while I cook). I’ll bet you found that one pretty quickly.
3. FlipBoard is pretty interesting for following high volume sites which I don’t want to add to my Reeder library like reddit or Hackernews.
4. The Economist is pretty passable. As you’d expect, there aren’t too many bells and whistles but the content speaks for itself. I’m hoping for some attractive iPad only subscription pricing soon.

Honorable Mention

1. The Financial Times was my favorite newspaper app when I got the iPad this spring. Once again, the subscription price is crazy high so I removed it after my free trial ran out. One of the biggest “whoa” moments came this summer when I was up late, moved to have a beverage outside and was reading the next mornings edition of the FT on my deck.
2. TED. Speaks for itself. (no pun intended)
3. Angry Birds. I’m not providing a link because I don’t like to directly contribute to the addition of others. Same goes for Snood.
4. Wired has found a way to add value to the magazine. I normally pick up a single issue of this the night before I get on an airplane. The issues are BIG so leave plenty of time for them to load before leaving.
5. Pocket Cloud is obviously great for remote desktop and is a must if you’re connecting to VMWare View.

I prefer to use the iBooks app for reading, although the selection is much better from the Kindle app. I’m sure you’ve already noticed that all your Kindle books and content got pushed to your iPad when you install it. That kind of platform independence is where Amazon has Apple beat dead to rights. Of course I read the New York Times, although that app seems to get slower and more buggy with each update.

I really wish that I could find a good podcast manager for the iPad or the iPhone. Downloading individual episodes through the iTunes store one at a time, then flipping back to the iPod app is all kinds of clunky. First world problem.

I started considering using this tool after seeing that this really is the easiest way to confirm that your nightly SuperDuper! backup completed successfully. Getting this functionality takes a little bit of work (including a little work in the terminal) but it’s worth it. It’s great to grab a cup of coffee in the morning and see whether or not your overnight backup successfully completed.

Since I’d taken the plunge to start running NerdTool, I figured why not throw some other stuff together? You can be as minimal as simply printing the date and time on your desktop, get dangerously close to teetering over the edge by adding an image that changes the weather, or go overly geeky and just run top all the time.

NetworkIntel.sh

Every time I connect to a network, I’d like to know a few things that are surprisingly difficult to display all at once in just about any operating system. Confirming my IP address is an obvious and anyone who has had to troubleshoot an internet connection can tell you that the address for the router is equally important. I take it one step further and like to know who else is sitting within striking distance of my computer.

The script below is pretty self evident but the script works by running a couple basic terminal commands, grabbing content from a static and predictable web page and displaying only the information for which you’re looking. I grabbed the actual syntax from a couple of easily found websites (just look for geektool scripts and you’ll find a bunch).

This goes one step further and performs a quick nmap ping sweep and pulls out the results.

echo “Network Intel”
echo “——————————-”
myen0=ifconfig en0 | grep "inet " | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | awk '{print $2}'
if [ “$myen0” != “” ]
then
echo Hard Line : “$myen0”
else
echo “”
fi
myen1=ifconfig en1 | grep "inet " | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | awk '{print $2}'
if [ “$myen1” != “” ]
then
echo “Wireless : $myen1”
else
echo “Wireless : INACTIVE”
fi
myRouter=netstat -nr | grep '^default' | awk '{print $2}'
echo “AP :” “$myRouter”
wip=curl -s http://checkip.dyndns.org/ | sed 's/[a-zA-Z<>/ :]//g'
echo “External : $wip”
echo “——————————-”
echo “Nearby Machines”
echo “——————————-”
nmap -sP 192.168.1.1/24 | awk ‘/report/ {print $5, $6}’
echo “——————————-“