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TextDrive. Last week from a lonely hotel room in beautiful Pleasanton, California — I was in the Bay Area for Documentum training — I (without much planning) jumped on a stellar webhosting offer from Dean Allen, maker of Textpattern, and thus became one of the lucky VC200, first “venture capitalists” of many customers to come in Dean’s (and business partner Jason’s) new webhost service TextDrive.

As the Textpattern CMS is TextDrive’s emphasis (but not requirement of course) perhaps I should devote more time to mastering it.

Textpattern. I’ve been admiring Textpattern for quite some time as an alternative web publishing system to Movable Type, which I’ve been using happily for the last year and a half.

Why an alternative? Not because I’m all a-dither about the Movable Type 3.0 pricing brouhaha — I like MT, understand it reasonably well, and appreciate its Perlishness relative to PHP. And I trust Ben, Mena, Anil, et al. to get the pricing/licensing kinks worked out.

Freedom. I’m interested in an alternative because I’ve been a Free Software enthusiast and advocate since my immersion into Linux in early 1998, and I want to use truly free weblogging software. (Shelley and Mark provide informative takes on freedom, blogging, and software licensing.)

WordPress. WordPress is another truly free contender (GPL license) and perhaps has the most post-MT mo’ right now. Shelley’s extensive writing about it at Burningbird (just search her blog for “wordpress”) persuaded me to look closely at WordPress, and it is indeed wonderful.

But Dean’s style just radiates from Textpattern (BSD license GPL license as of g1.19) in a way that intrigues me and captures my imagination. And my <ahem> skim-only, read-only “participation” in the Textpattern community over the past several months tells me these are people I’ll enjoy knowing better.

Objects. Textpattern employs software engineering concepts that rang familiar as I studied Documentum last week. For example, instead of uploaded graphics files being scattered in the filesystem of a served directory where they’re hard to track, each graphic file uploaded to Textpattern becomes an object with category, alt text, and caption metadata accompanying it. The uploaded graphic filename itself is of no consequence — it’s actually saved with a numeric filename — because Textpattern keeps the physical file associated with its image metadata. This easy-to-grasp object approach (where behind the scenes the object == filesystem file + database metadata) is generally how Documentum does things.

Object-oriented thinking in this context is still somewhat new to me, so I may be making too much of this. But I was struck by — and impressed by — the conceptual resemblance between Textpattern and Documentum on this.

Sizzle. Even though I advocate Free Software, I nevertheless use Mac OS X on my PowerBook most of the time instead of the completely free Gentoo- or Debian Linux distributions, each of which is as extraordinary on PowerPC hardware as it is on ix86 PC hardware. My use of Mac OS X is a conscious decision to forego a bit of freedom in exchange for enjoying The Most Empowering OS I’ve Ever Experienced. But even within the half-free, half-not-free world of Mac OS X, I use much Free Software, thanks primarily to the Fink project.

Here I am two and a half years into blogging, and I’ve cycled back ‘round to thinking I don’t have much to say. The unholy alliance between church and state in the U.S. is now unraveling on its own, thank God. The malign incompetence of our Executive Branch is becoming common knowledge. In my railing against these in this blog I’m hardly the lone voice I felt like last year; I’m now one among many. And of these many political- and faith-obsessed oriented bloggers, most write far more effectively than I do. So maybe now is a good time for me to be quiet and learn free blogging software.

I hope to return to writing about odds and ends I find interesting, useful, beautiful, lifegiving, instead of being constantly consumed by political/religious anger and despair. After all, blogs that showcase the multifaceted interests of people I’m delighted to meet are the blogs I most like to read.

Okay, I may be a month past the buzz but now I too am awed by Quicksilver, the first Mac OS X utility to come along that challenges the indispensible LaunchBar. Maybe it’s better. And it’s free. It made me say “Awesome!” and seriously, I don’t say that much.

Jasmeet provides the review that clued me in, and leads me to Dan’s, Todd’s, Jack’s, and Jay’s reviews. Plus there’s the official manual.

BTW, LaunchBar continues to be awesome itself. It sets the standard IMO.

On last week’s CNN Rock the Vote Democratic debate, one questioner asked the candidates, “Which is it, Mac or PC?” Besides being a fluff question, it doesn’t even mean anything unless the questioner was referring to hardware. Generally speaking, there’s Apple hardware and there’s PC hardware. But each can run multiple OSs. So what the questioner probably meant was “Mac OS X or Windows?” (She could have been excruciatingly precise by asking, “Which is it, Mac OS X or Windows or Linux or NetBSD or … on what kind of hardware?”)

Specifically addressing the Mac OS X or Windows debate, MacWorld UK reports that UK newspaper The Times pitted the two by having two reporters, one a long-time Mac user, the other a “Windows-based PC man proud to say that my machine is always in pieces,” swap computers for a week.

[Mac user Nigel] Kendall says his first encounter with the [Windows] PC was a “heart-stopping experience” and that he had the feeling that “something nasty and utterly incomprehensible is lurking just below the surface.” …

“After a week with a Windows machine I get the feeling that this system is designed by people who know a lot about computers. Macs, on the other hand, seem to be designed by people who know a lot about people,” he concluded.

In contrast —

Three hours into using the Mac, PC user [Stuart] Miles admits, “I started to wonder if I should have made the change years ago.”

“The well-styled hardware has a wow factor out of the box (even the box has wow factor), while the oh-so pretty user interface, with its rounded corners, 3D rotating graphics and smooth dissolves, gives you a feeling of security.”

As for compatibility, Miles found getting the Mac to talk to his home PC was “simple”. This point is even more astounding when he notes that is something even his Windows laptop struggles with.

I adamantly think life’s too short to screw around with Windows. It’s not that I have a problem with PC hardware per se; hell, I’m an electrical engineer by training and I like having my computers in pieces. I know and use PC hardware extensively, but what I buy is Apple hardware because it’s durable and elegant.

Hardware aside, I see the more significant debate as being between Windows and Unix (more precisely, “Unix-like” OSs †) where Unix is understood to include Mac OS X, Linux (say, Debian or Gentoo), NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. In that debate there’s no contest as far as I’m concerned: Unix wins, hands down. And my hands-on favorite is Mac OS X, the most usable, satisfying implementation of Unix now available.

Just be informed, then use what works best for you.

† I refuse to use the official designation of UNIX in all caps; that’s as ugly to me as a cheap PC running Windows95. Besides, Unix isn’t an acronym that needs to be capitalized — it’s a pun. :-) 

Woo-hoo, it’s the day of the Panther.

Apple releases Mac OS X 10.3 Panther today. And FedEx tracking tells me my copy is now waiting for me on the porch at home. Yes!

I hardly know how I could like Panther better than its predecessor Jaguar (10.2) that I’m using now, ‘cause Jaguar on a TiBook is pretty damn dreamy. But I’m game to pace the panther, baby. I can use the excitement.

2003-10-27 update:
Panther is indeed wonderful — faster, even more aesthetically pleasing to me than Jaguar (taming the horizontal pinstripes down to almost nothing pleases my eyes), and lets me keep work state through a log out.

Whither uw-imapd? But one important thing doesn’t work: I can’t get my local fink-installed uw-imapd daemon to authenticate connections. This is critical to me as I keep all my mail in local IMAP mailboxes (which I like because it lets me use any IMAP mail client I feel like using at the moment). My hunch is the authentication solution is simple but I don’t see it yet.

    later … I see sbromlin provides a partial Panther authentication
    explanation and a temporary brute-force kludge for uw-imapd.
    Works! Now I can start living in Panther.

[2003-12-02 update: Norman Gall provides a proven Panther-friendly PAM imapd solution at Installing UW imapd/pop3d on MacOS X 10.3 (Panther). Thanks, Norman.]

I like Brad’s post about switching to Linux leading him to buy — surprise — an Apple PowerBook. Agreed, Unix rules: Mac OS X on Apple hardware for hands-on use, Linux (or *BSD) on PC hardware for servers, all seamlessly and almost identically administered — and I’m happy. (Microsoft expunged is icing on the cake.)

Brad links to Mark’s article about Apple’s almost-obsessive attention to “grace and simplicity and aesthetic warmth” instead of hawking “just another suckass hunk of plastic and wire and metal.” Oh, yes. Aesthetics matter. Not to everyone, apparently and inexplicably, but to me — always.

Once again we’re seeing a security panic and much hustle-bustle over the latest round of Internet worms and viruses. The way you hear TV and corporate IT people talk, the problem is inescapable for Internet users everywhere, part of the human (computing) condition.

In fact, worms and viruses are quite easily escapable, as is supporting the neverending antivirus software racket. Just step outside the Microsoft box. Computing — to say nothing of thinking — outside the box is fine advice indeed.

I’m a big fan of Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and NetBSD. In part it’s because I’m lazy — if I can opt out of unnecessary security headaches, I do. If I can fix things and have them stay fixed, I’m there. No Microsoft software, no major security or reliability problems. Works for me, makes me happy. YMMV.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball has some pointed and well-considered observations himself on corporate IT, email, viruses/worms, computers and reliability — in general, on the shortcomings of an “all Microsoft all the time” computing policy.

Basic theme: CIOs can and should expect their computing infrastructure to be as reliable as their facilities’ plumbing. Implied recommendation: Don’t put up with crap.

• Good Times
• Dynomite! (a hilariously titled follow-up)

In the follow-up, John mentions —

It’s my experience that your typical IT [person] knows next to nothing about Linux.

I wouldn’t have thought this possible if I hadn’t seen an example of it with my own eyes — an IT support guy at work told me with pride that he knows “nothing about Linux and never will. All I know is Windows!”

Especially in these days of tight corporate budgets and shrinking support staffs, shouldn’t a working knowledge of free, reliable, secure open-source software be a requirement for computing professionals? I certainly think so.

Good thing the support guy doesn’t report to me — I’d have fired his butt. :-)

2003-09-18 update: See also today’s related articles —

• NY Times: How susceptible is your operating system to viruses?

• Baltimore Sun: Government issue: Macs could help defend federal agencies from cyber attacks