OK, I can’t say I’m surprised by corruption in the current U.S. administration that is being revealed more and more these days. Between Tom DeLay’s money laundering, Bill Frist’s stock dumping, and FEMA’s no-bid contracts for Katrina cleanup, well, it’s all pretty clear evidence of the philosophical bankruptcy of the republican party, and the end of the "Republican Revolution". In other words, no big surprise.

However, even I was surprised to read this seemingly clear-cut case of republican operatives’ mob connections (including hitmen!):

The fraud allegedly committed by Abramoff and his business partner Adam Kidan involved a phony wire transfer they used to purchase a controlling interest in SunCruz from the company’s founder, Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis, in 2001.

Abramoff and Kidan later fell out with Boulis in a bitter business dispute that turned violent. In February 2001, gunmen ambushed Boulis on a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., highway and shot him repeatedly. On Tuesday, Florida authorities arrested three New York men with mob connections for the Boulis killing. Two of the men – Anthony Moscatiello and Tony Ferrari – had received payments totaling more than $240,000 from Kidan and Abramoff. Moscatiello, a longtime associate of the Gambino Mafia family, and Ferrari were supposedly providing food and consulting services to SunCruz – or so Kidan claimed when questioned by prosecutors. There is no evidence, however, that Moscatiello and Ferrari provided any services to the company.

Connecting the dots isn’t difficult here: Kidan and Abramoff want to get rid of Boulis, who won’t go away. Kidan and Abramoff hire Moscatiello and Ferrari with SunCruz money. Moscatiello and Ferrari allegedly whack Boulis, without any motive of their own. If the Broward County state’s attorney has sufficient evidence to win convictions for a capital crime, some people will probably be talking soon in hope of avoiding the hot shot.

Just to reiterate, let’s repeat some of that last paragraph in big, bold bullets:

• Kidan and Abramoff want to get rid of Boulis.
• Kidan and Abramoff hire Moscatiello and Ferrari.
• Moscatiello and Ferrari allegedly whack Boulis, without any motive of their own.

Damn. I mean, damn! It’s been clear for a while that Abramoff is a real piece of work, but this is just over the top. These are the kinds of murderous bastards that our man GWB is fronting for. Hooray for us, for putting this kind of thuggery in the White House, time and again. To quote Wanda Sykes, "You can't blame the blind man for wrecking your car when you're the one who gave him the keys."

The past few months have spurred lots of discussion and opinions about Mac on Intel. One thing that’s been neglected in most commentary I’ve seen is mention of Apple’s old “Box” model.

Back in the late 90s, Mac OS X wasn’t called “Mac OS X”, it was called “Rhapsody”. The developer previews ran on both PPC Macs and normal Intel PCs. Apple spoke of different application environments that would be enabled in Rhapsody:

• The Yellow Box was the OpenStep application framework collection, which is now called Cocoa;


• The Blue Box was the legacy Mac OS 9 compatibility environment, now called Classic;


• The Red Box was the rumored (never confirmed by Apple) Windows compatibility environment that would allow Rhapsody for Intel to run Windows applications in a native environment, similar to VirtualPC, but running full-bore at native speed since no CPU emulation would be necessary.

Well, Rhapsody begat Mac OS X, and Mac OS X wasn’t going to be available for Intel. Apple stopped talking about their “boxes”, VirtualPC worked pretty well, and the world moved on. Now, the Mac is veering back toward Intel, and before we know it we’ll be running with Intel, and Microsoft will surely sell native-speed VirtualPC for running Windows…

But, what if there’s another way? What if we could run Windows apps on Mac OS X/Intel that were freed from the VirtualPC OS-in-a-window appearance? What if we could run Windows apps with something that strives toward a Mac OS X look? What I’m thinking about are the WINE project and its offshoot, Darwine.

For those who don’t know, WINE (which stands for “WINE Is Not an Emulator) is an independent implementation of a subset the win32 APIs, which most existing Windows applications are built on top of. The main purpose of WINE is to be able to run Windows software on Linux (the Darwine offshoot targets running Windows software on Mac OS X). Both projects sport ”http://www.winehq.com/site?ss=1">screenshots showing a variety of applications running. WINE’s subset of the win32 APIs seems to be quite a large subset indeed.

WINE’s main advantages over VirtualPC are twofold: First, it doesn’t require Windows in order to run (VirtualPC actually has a Windows installation) since it’s a reimplementation of some APIs rather than a full OS. Second, Windows created by WINE can be mixed on the screen with standard Mac windows, instead of being trapped inside another window.

Before WINE is fully ready to provide a proper Mac experience however, there are (at least) three main hurdles to overcome:

1. Incomplete APIs. WINE can run lots and lots of applications, but to be on a par with VirtualPC, it really needs to run nearly everything.


2. X-Windows. The current implementation of Darwine using X-Windows for drawing. This is an obvious stepping-stone for the developers, but in the long term it needs to use standard Quartz windows.


3. Windows look’n’feel. Windows applications running in WINE look like, well, Windows applications. Ideally we’d want them to look more like Mac applications. I’m not sure if there’s any simple workaround for this; My (perhaps mistaken) understanding is that win32 is usually used in a fairly low-level way, and that Windows apps (or the libraries they’re built with) actually draw most of their components themselves, including “standard” buttons, etc, so it would be difficult to give them Aqua-styled buttons, scrollbars, bevels, etc. But it seems like some things could be done to make the experience more Mac-like, perhaps by forcing menu bars to draw at the top of the screen or something.

Now, I’m sure that the WINE and Darwine teams have limited resources like most open-source projects do. But, hey, Apple has some cash in the bank, and a great team of engineers. What if they set a team to work on taking the existing WINE codebase, completing more APIs and adding some polish, to provide a smooth Windows-on-Mac experience for Mac OS X 10.5 on Intel? And then submitting most of their enhancements back to the original project? They’ve pulled similar stealth stunts before, both with building Safari from KDE code, and building the core Darwin OS with parts of various BSD UNIXes. If anyone can do it, Apple can.

What we’d end up with is a more flexible Mac OS X that would, in addition to the current APIs from Cocoa, Carbon, POSIX, and Java, support Win32 as well. This would even further ease things for potential switchers, since even though we assume that there are equal or better Mac apps for most uses, it would be even easier for people to switch if they knew they could bring their favorite text editor or graphics package with them.

I have absolutely no inside knowledge of what’s going on inside Apple, and no idea if this concept has even been considered, let along worked on, but it seems to me like lots of people would appreciate this.

Just read a pretty convincing article arguing that the reason that people like dubya win elections is largely through assuming an “alpha male” pose; that above anything else, people will vote for the guy who’s best at hollering, pounding his chest, and behaving like the top gorilla.

Stumbled across the DTV project, which promises to provide independent internet TV. Pay attention to two key features:

• Anyone can publish video content with the Broadcast Machine PHP script.


• The published file apparently doesn’t have to be hosted on a webserver, you can share it as a bittorrent from your desktop machine. The DTV client software implements the bittorrent protocol for downloading content, and presumably sharing content as well, so as soon as your video is “out in the wild”, the clients that have downloaded it will help keep your own bandwidth usage down

Currently only for Mac, but a Windows client is apparently on the way.

One bit of technology that Microsoft has recently started talking to developers about is the Microsoft Shell. This is something that may or may not be a part of the upcoming Microsoft VISTA OS. Basically, someone at Microsoft finally decided that DOS/Windows’ horrid built-in scripting language, as exemplified in millions of nasty BAT files around the world, needed to be more like a UNIX command-line.

Kind of ironic, since that old DOS pidgin scripting language was never anything more than a really feature-poor, painfully bad imitation of 1979-era UNIX.

This is where Microsoft Shell steps in, bringing things such as reasonable syntax and (hopefully) complete command i/o redirection and piping, just like UNIX has had since the dawn of time.

UNIX advocates have long argued the advantages of a command-line interface, mainly that it enables us to use our innate language abilities to interface with a machine, instead of just dragging a mouse around (which evolution hasn’t really built us for). So it’s great that Windows is finally stepping forward towards UNIX in this regard. Welcome to the 80’s, Microsoft!

Famed Russian spammer Vardan Kushnir was found murdered in his home in Moscow yesterday. Kushnir was apparently famous for saying "spam was what e-mails were for".

It’s unknown whether he was killed by a group of angry spam recipients, but that’s where I’d put my money if I were a betting man.

New version of spinvaders is out. This is primarily a bug-fix release; the main bug was that 0.0.3 and earlier could not run on Mac OS X 10.4; Now, spinvaders is much more future-proof and should continue to run “forever”.

Changes in this version:

• This version now works correctly on the latest version of Mac OS X (10.4, “Tiger”)


• Cleaned up some sprites


• Player weapon now turns partly green when it is in “supergun” mode

And here’s where to get it:

• spinvaders for Macintosh (made for Mac OS X 10.4, but probably works on 10.3 as well)


• No windows build of spinvaders 0.0.4 is available at this time

Installation is the same as before: The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like.

Back in the mid-90’s, when I was a NeXTStep consultant, getting a job at OmniGroup was a sort of recurring daydream to me. Like Integrity Solutions where I worked, OmniGroup did NeXTStep consulting, but also commercial application development. Started by Wil Shipley and Ken Case and surely some other dudes whose names escape me at the moment, Omni seemed like Shangri-La compared to my job. Browsing their website, you’d see descriptions of their work environment, which I’d contrast with mine:

As much as I thought about it, for some reason I never tried to get a job there. Probably partly because I didn’t want to move, and partly because I was at a stage in my life where, for reasons I don’t quite grasp now, complaining about shit seemed like a more useful proposition than trying to actually do something about shit.

Anyway.

At some point (I haven’t followed the twists and turns that well), Wil left the company he founded, and started Delicious Monster, which has had a “monster hit” (yuk yuk) with Delicious Library, an application that, to me, seems like cool technology that I would never have guessed would find an audience. Fortunately for Wil and the gang, it has found a huge audience, earning them $250,000 in its first month, receiving awards, etc.

To top it off, Wil has started blogging, which has been fun. One of the more interesting posts lately is about his Student Talk from WWDC 2005, in which Wil gives newbies some advice on starting their own company. Like Wil, I once started my own company; Unlike Wil, I didn’t really consider doing commercial app development (if you think the Mac market for commercial software in 2005 is small, try to imagine the miniscule size of the NeXTStep market in 1997!), but focused on consulting, and then let it sort of flounder after I couldn’t, on my own, find enough interesting work to do that way.

Three cheers for Wil, the man who proves that nerdery + chutzpah == success.

Last week, Apple made waves when it announced that future Macintosh models, beginning next year, will contain Intel processors just like other PCs. Some people have asked me what I think about this, so here goes:

The transition to Intel is going to be a great thing.

Now, before I continue: I really don’t much care for the Intel architecture. I am a True Believer in the RISC approach embodied in the PowerPC architecture. However, for reasons that should become clear as I continue, for most intents and purposes, the processor doesn’t matter.

I started off working life as a NeXTStep developer. For those who don’t know, NeXTStep was a product of Steve Jobs’ other computer company, NeXT, the one he created during the “dark years” (ca 1985-1997) that he wasn’t with Apple. NeXT was a financial failure, but they created some great technology, both hardware and software. The software, in the form of the NeXTStep operating system and development environment, makes up the underpinnings of Mac OS X. I have always held the opinion that Mac OS X could more accurately be called “NeXTStep 5.0”.

Anyway, back in the early 90’s, NeXTStep ran only on NeXT’s own hardware, great beastly black boxes with Motorola 680×0 processors. The hardware was technologically similar to top-of-the-line Macs of that era, but typically with much larger screens, larger hard disks, more RAM, and a much higher price tag. In 1993, NeXT announced that they were getting out of the hardware business entirely, and were going to focus on the NeXTStep operating system, which they had secretly ported to… Intel! Does this sound familiar to anyone?

So what was a developer to do? Well, in most cases, they could simply compile their software for Intel by clicking a single checkbox in the NeXTStep IDE. The compiler would then compile the code for both platforms, and bundle them together into what could have been called a “universal binary” (again, does this sound familiar?). This would then run on both Motorola-based NeXT machines and Intel-based PCs.

Not content to stop there, NeXT also ported their operation system to run on Sun SPARC workstations and HP HP-RISC workstations. And as a developer, all you had to do was click on the checkboxes to enable those platforms, and off you went!

But could it really be that easy? Well, in a word: YES. If you didn’t do much low-level bit-flipping, it really was pretty much that easy. So much so that freeware developers routinely released “quad-fat applications” that ran on all four platforms, even if they never had access to one or more of the target platforms for testing. They’d just put it out there, say “email me if it doesn’t work right on your machine”, and call it a day.

Of course, there are applications that require low-level bit-flipping, but that can usually be done with per-platform compiler macros and what have you, so you can abstract that away and off you go.

So, we jump forward twelve years in time and arrive at last week. Apple announces technology that old NeXT nerds like me have always known they’ve had, and that we know works. Hell, even people who’ve been Apple nerds since 1997 or 1998 or so should remember that the early, pre-release “Rhapsody” versions of Mac OS X ran both on old Apple G3s and Intel PCs. So really, the technology is not new and has been obviously under the covers ever since Apple acquired NeXT, who nailed this a decade ago.

[ But of course, it wasn’t called that. It was called a “fat binary”. No one ever accused NeXT of being especially good at marketing.

One concern I’ve heard thrown about is that PPC hardware will be “orphaned”. Although this will surely happen at some point, it’s still years away; everyone using current hardware will be able to use it several years into the future. Look at it this way:

• Currently, Mac OS X can run on every Mac released since 1998, from the very first bondi blue iMac all the way up the chain. This is millions of machines.


• The Intel version won’t be readily available until mid-2006 (Apple’s estimate) at the earliest. Many developers won’t bother shipping universal binaries until then.


• Intel won’t take over the whole line until at least late 2007 (Apple’s estimate) or, more likely, 2008.


• Therefore, Apple won’t be shipping all-Intel Macs until perhaps nearly three years from now. No developer in their right mind would ditch PPC support any time before that.


• Even when Macs are all-Intel, there will remain a huge PPC user community. Unless Mac sales go up dramatically after the Intel release (we can hope), it will take several years before the numbers of Intel Macs equal the number of PPC Macs. My guess, we’re talking at least 2010.


• Until the numbers of Intel Macs seriously overtake the number of PPC Macs, smart developers will support both platforms. So maybe 5 years from now we’ll start to see significant amounts of Intel-only software, but many developers will probably continue to ship universal binaries much longer than that, since they will keep access to the PPC users “for free”.

I believe that 5 years is a pretty good amount of time for people to think about buying some new hardware, so I really don’t think this is going to be too painful.

The only real scenarios I can see being problematic are where people are running specific PCI hardware such as for high-end audio/video applications; If your manufacturer can’t or won’t create new drivers for MacIntel (if they’ve stopped caring about their Mac products, or have gone out of business, or whatever), you’ll probably have to buy new extra hardware for your special needs when you switch to MacIntel. But in five years time, you’d probably want to replace it anyway, since considering the march of progress, today’s “top-of-the-line” audio gear is tomorrow’s “free-with-your-subscription-to-PC-user-magazine” throwaway kit, so hey.

(I never thought it would come to this, but here I am: blogging about Michael Jackson. Hopefully this is the only time.)

So, the big “not guilty” judgement came down the pike yesterday. I’m not plugged-in to the 24/7 American disinfo feed (FAUX News, CNN, etc) so I didn’t hear this important news until this morning when I awoke to hear the TV saying “Michael Jackson blah blah king of pop blah blah” followed by my wife calling out “Michael Jackson’s DEAD!!!” That kidder. As if.

Anyway. I caught a clip of some jurors talking about the reasons for their decision, and one of the explanations was that no sound parent would let their child attend sleepovers at Michael Jackson’s house. Let’s lay this out:

1. Michael Jackson is a known freak.


2. That mom let her son stay at Michael Jackson’s house.


3. No good mom would allow that.


4. Therefore, that’s a bad mom.


5. Therefore, Michael Jackson is innocent.

Now, I know a little bit about logic, and I think that the jump from step 4 to step 5 there is a little wide. But then I’m no legal expert, and the law surely can’t be held back by something like logic.

This reminds me of the Chewbacca defense, a Johnny Cochran parody defense in South Park, which (in extremely shortened form) goes something like this:

1. Look at this picture of Chewbacca.


2. Chewbacca is a Wookie.


3. That makes no sense.


4. Therefore, my client is innocent! You must acquit!