botWerks

turning a page in eucalyptus

i recently ran across a number of references to hiram bingham’s, Inca Land, which is available for free from project gutenberg.  this of course prompted the search for an appropriate ebook reader with hooks to project gutenberg.  behold eucalyptus, which will download books from project gutenberg on the fly and give you a killer interface for viewing the contents of the book.  insane attention to detail is visible everywhere.

the text is rendered in very high quality fonts, the animation is tight and the search function is spot on.  my only nit, is the lack of graphics for books which do have photos.

http://eucalyptusapp.com/ – definitely worth the $9.99 that they’re asking for it.

i should point out that i’ve also purchased classics (http://www.classicsapp.com/) which is equally stunning visually. however, the library that’s embedded inside classics is anemic.  while they’ve taken great care to display the content beautifully i find myself aching for more content.  i’d give up some of the visual appeal for the content and the portability.  eucalyptus seems to have struck a very nice balance here.

while all these two apps are capable reading platforms, i do find them lacking a few features which i really irritate me.  specifically these:

• the ability to annotate or make notes. now, i know that there are all sorts of additional considerations associated with this and there’s a corresponding need to provide a means to extract those notes into a different application, provide sexy input overlay, etc.  but i’m a margin writer or a highlighter.  if i like a book i like to make it mine.  while this is a general nit with ebooks, i would love to find a reasonably decent digital proxy.  failing this, i would like …
• the ability to copy a selected region of text and use the paste function to bring that content into another application for sharing or notes.  seems like a pretty duh item for me, particularly given that the content is all without copyright encumbrance.

these are hardly damning criticisms of these apps, in fact they’re more reflective of my desire to have a host of reading functionality in my pocket which to date i haven’t been able to find.  these apps represent the greatest non-kindle based means of portable reading that i’ve personally poked at and i find my curiosity piqued and a couple of things lacking.

we recently took a vacation which was a great opportunity to catch up on a bunch of quasi-work related reading. while i certainly sifted through a lot of bland and tired stuff, there was some stuff that percolated to the surface as being useful and worth of passing along.

• Running Out of Numbers? The Impending Scarcity of IPv4 Addresses and What To Do About It (benjamin edelman) – this is definitely worth a read for anyone who’s interested in the IPv4 depletion issues we’re running into as an industry and it provides a surprisingly good background review of the problem space. (IPv4 and IPv6 history and high-level technical issues overview) if you have to give someone a single paper to read regarding the IPv4 depletion situation, this would definitely be at the top of my list.
• The problem of synthetically generating IP traffic matrices: initial recommendations (antonio nucci, et al) – as someone who’s interested in realistic testing scenarios for routing platforms i thought this was a great overview of the challenges that arise in constructing a appropriately balanced synthetic traffic. definitely worth the read for router dweebs, but high on the nerd factor.

on a decidedly non-nerdish note

i was also able to burn through naomi wolf’s, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot . while ms. wolf certainly goes for the emotional jugular here with the constant comparison to the nazi takeover in germany and mussolini’s rise to power in italy, it’s certainly worth noting the parallels. it should be interesting to see what transpires with an Obama presidency. there’s no shortage of things which need to be corrected in terms of the direction of this country. this book certainly provides a list of places to start. the question remains as to whether we as a country can address these matters at the same time we’re addressing the economic downturn.

when folks worried about their jobs and homes, correcting lapses in the core tenets of our democracy tend to move to the back burner.

in running through some of my archives and scrubbing in prep for a new year, i ran across this list of OSX nits from my first days with OS X. i’m actually a bit surprised by how many of these have been admirably addressed over the years. where this warrants update and/or commentary, i’ve added them – prefixed with (>>)

$Id: osx-nits.txt,v 1.4 2001/05/03 11:50:52 sulrich Exp sulrich $

# os x nits
## general os and interface nits

 * when i hit the cmd key in a modal dialog box - i'm not presented with a
   list of keyboard short-cuts for the dialog box. it's a capital letter
   crap-shoot!  it would be nice to be able to hit the cmd key and have the
   corresponding keyboard shortcut displayed.

   >> it bears noting that this interface nit still stands.  however,
   >> i've come to terms with this to some extent.  changing the
   >> extension on a file from the finder is no where near as annoying
   >> as it used to be.``

 * it would be nice to have a real print manager that worked. the current
   printer controller is really lame and doesn't allow you to view the
   configuration of current devices.  it looks like the menu item is there
   but it's grayed out.

   * further to gripe about the printer support there appears to be a lack
     of real definitions for printer description files that you install.
     meaningful names for the printer definitions that are there would be
     really nice.

  >> this is an area where i have to say apple really stood up and did a
  >> good job. i admittedly have rather modest printing requirements,
  >> however, for a guy that has to add printers in foreign offices at
  >> work all the time, the support is wide and the hassle is minimal.

 * what i wouldn't give to be able to remap the apple key in terminal to
   behave like a meta key.

   >> this gripe stands. i've ameliorated this to a large extent through
   >> the use of the shipping X11 implementation and the use of
   >> xterm/rxvt. still, this leaves me with a nagging issue wrt cut and
   >> paste.

   just a follow up to this - you can kind of do this in emacs for mac os x
   with the option key but that is just a little too awkwardly placed for
   my tastes.  looks like i'll be an escape-key emacs user for a while

 * why must changing the desktop background color be such a chore? if i want a
   solid color why can't i just select one w/the color tool? i surmise that i'm
   missing out on something fundamental here but it's really annoying

   >> this gripe still stands. sure, there's a solid color option there,
   >> but you still don't get the color tool.

 * teeny hardware nit here.  why is the escape key so small?  the ~ is
   in the right place though and this is nice.

 * virtual desktops! - i'm running out of screen space and there is no
   virtual desktop functionality that i can find anywhere.

   >> spaces. need i say more? sure spaces isn't perfect, but it's
   >> pretty damn close and it's built-in with reasonable defaults.
   >> color me tickled.

 * make the PDF generation access a little more prominent on the print
   dialog.  while i love the ability to have PDF output i hate having to
   select that option repeatedly.  i'd like to make pdf output my default.

   >> well, you still can't make PDF generation the default, (to my
   >> knowledge.)  but it's featured much more prominently and there's
   >> slick integration that's taken place with the ability to direct
   >> output to applications.  which has my Yep! setup quite happy.

## terminal
 * terminal performance over the long haul is horrible.  this needs to be
   sped up considerably.

   >> fixed this, but i still don't use terminal - ref gripe re: cmd key
   >> utilization and emacs keybindings

 * more on terminal.app - this needs some real work on the termcap side of
   things.  there doesn't' seem to be a really consistent mechanism for
   making sure that you're dealing with the terminal on this.  what i
   wouldn't give for just really decent xterm support.

## airport / wireless
 * how about some meaningful stats regarding signal strength?

   >> still sucks if you ask me.

 * opening up the driver interface on the airport cards to support things
   like airsnort.

   >> improved considerably. there's a pretty wide range of support here
   >> and folks have filled in a lot of the gaps relative to tools for
   >> sniffing out additional wireless APs, etc.

## general networking
 * IPv6 support (addendum - looks like this will be in jaguar)

   >> pretty damn good support if you ask me. 

 * multicast support (w/support for IGMPv3)

   >> grrr. still outstanding. 

 * i would really like dummynet or some form of queueing for network
   traffic.  this would let me use my mac for testing some network
   configurations. altq would be heaven.

   >> no progress here.  understandably, this is a consumer OS after
   >> all.

 * pf would be preferred vs. ipfw (in all honesty i haven't had a chance
   to see if the necessary kernel hooks are there for pf)

   >> there's been a lot of forward progress on the firewall front. i've
   >> added to this with the use of little snitch which provides a lot
   >> more granularity in terms of the per-application visibility that
   >> you'd be interested in. still. pf is pretty much the bomb for this
   >> stuff.

overall, i really have to say a lot of my longstanding nits have been admirably addressed. if you look at this from the perspective that there are a fair number of nits that are purely networking dweeb oriented in nature, and you keep in mind that this really is a consumer oriented OS, you have to be impressed at how well they’ve addressed the spectrum of user requirements.