No, I'm not buying an iPhone. Apple won't let any third-party applications onto the device. In other words, it's not hackable, and I'm not gonna drop $600 on a computer I can't mess around with. Apple's current line on third-party applications is, "if you want the iPhone to do something that it doesn't do, build a website that does it." I want to play Ogg Vorbis files, run an NES emulator, SSH into my web server, record lectures, act as a remote control for my PowerBook via bluetooth, and make VoIP calls. None of that can be implemented as a website (at least, not without flash). I don't care if the applications that do those things aren't as shiny as native iPhone apps -- I need to be able to decide for myself whether installing a program is worth it or not. Apple didn't design the thing for people with my priorities, and that's fine, because that's what Nokia is for. I got a Nokia E70 a few days ago (the iPhone is driving down prices of other smartphones on the secondhand market), and since then I've been a gleeful little nerd.

Some folks were talking during a break in one of my courses about banks and the newfangled authentication systems they're using, such as two-factor authentication. This turned into a discussion of phishing, and it occurred to me that RSS feeds would solve that problem very nicely.

I bought a laser printer on Craigslist (a Samsung ML-2010) and decided to set it up as a networked printer so that everyone in my new Canadian apartment could use it. I bought a Motorola WPS870G print server, which is a cool little gadget that doesn't cost much. It supports 1 USB and 1 parallel port printer, and connects to either a wired or wireless network (which is a must here). However, it rebuffed all of my Powerbook's attempts to print to it, and the Internet insisted that I'd wasted my money. But I figured it out after a few hours and thought I'd put the solution up here.

All the nerd events I've been attending lately have highlighted a problem I've long had: sometimes, I'd like a way to keep track of all the folks I meet. I want something like <a href="http://www.openngo.org">CiviCRM</a>, but less complicated, and geared towards single users, not huge organizations. A personal contact manager.

I'm at BarCamp San Francisco, and one of the (half-joking) rules is I have to blog about it. If more events I attended included compulsory blogging, I might write more often. (I also attended a Mashpit on Tuesday, where I participated in the inchoate birth of PhoTiger.) I feel a little like I'm in a cleaner version of the sixties. Shorter hair, flannel pajamas instead of tye-dye, and the Microsoft office in the Embarcadero aint exactly the Panhandle, but the ethos is the same. BarCamp is basically a weekend-long be-in for geeks. There's a pervasive feeling of technical promiscuity -- free code, bluetoothing files, open networks. Document everything and put it online, so that other BarCamps can build on the stuff discussed. And it's all got a fight-the-man cadence to it. There is beer and pizza. There is shwag from companies I can't pronounce. There are acronyms UTW. It sounds like it's raining gently outside but it's really the soft static of constant typing on laptop keyboards. I'm having a blast. I think half the people who keep the internet fun are here. Notes:

Suppose the world's high-class chefs awoke this morning consumed by a fear that their recipes would be used in ways they didn't intend. Suppose they were tortured with constant visions of people going home after a nice meal at Chez Indulgênce and whipping up an enormous vat of the asparugus gazpacho they just paid $10 for. The more extreme of these visions may involve serving the gazpacho to other people or modifying the recipe without permission! Suppose these chefs suddenly felt compelled to protect their creations, at any cost, from the legitimized espionage of the recipe-swapping black market. Might as well try to stop the tides, right? Cooking is inherently an open process -- when you eat dinner at a nice restaurant, you can guess 90% of what's in it and how it was made, just by looking at it and tasting it. But most restaurants provide much more. The food industry has learned that maximizing openness maximizes customer satisfaction. With all these conventions in place, what's a paranoid chef to do? I offer some advice.

John Irons and Carl Malamud, at the Center for American Progress, propose a tax credit to promote open-source development:

An open source tax credit is proposed which would allow individuals who develop open source software to receive a tax credit worth 20 percent of their out-of-pocket costs. Corporations and self-employed individuals may already take a deduction for their development expenses for both open source and proprietary commercial software. The open source tax credit provides a similar incentive for individuals who currently have no means to deduct these expenses. Subsidizing open source software development can also be justified on grounds of economic efficiency. Open source software development enhances the ability of other developers to create new products. It also enhances the development and dissemination of knowledge and ideas more broadly. Since the benefits to the broader software development community and the economy as a whole go well beyond the users of an individual software product, a policy that subsidizes open source development would increase economic efficiency.

Although I'm an open-source software (OSS) developer myself, and generally believe that government can and should pull its weight to solve big systemic problems, I have a few issues with this proposal.

As far as I can tell, the Republican line on sacrifice for the greater good, in the case of the Iraq war, is that there's no need for the average American to pay more taxes, burn less fuel or start victory gardens, because we have aggregated all the necessary sacrifice into the bodies of our troops. They offer up the entirety of their lives in the name of the fight, so that we don't have to give up portions of ours. Until now! (maybe.) It seems that Bush is making good on his "addicted to oil" metaphor by enrolling the USA into a twelve-step program. Step one, of course, is overcoming denial:

MILWAUKEE Feb 20, 2006 (AP)— Seeking to fuel his own agenda, President Bush encouraged Americans to change their energy consumption habits and help move the nation away from its reliance on oil. ... "By changing our driving habits," Bush said, "we change our dependency on foreign sources of oil."

This is all via Nicholas Beaudrot at Ezra Klein's blog, who will believe it when he sees any policy proposals that ease us onto the wagon. That's absolutely right, but I hope us lefties learn how to applaud changes like this without letting up on the pressure that makes sure these prescriptions come to pass. We like it when environmentalism is embraced as common sense. Bush won't self-identify as an environmentalist until he's neck-deep in melted glaciers, so it's up to us to remind folks that Bush is saying what environmentalists say.

I've jumped with gusto onto the Ruby on Rails bandwagon. For the non-programmers out there, Rails is a programming system that makes it really really easy to create spiffy websites that run on databases. I don't have the years of web-coding experience that all the other converts do, but I know different when I see it. In fact, I think I'm in the sweet-spot user base. Rails lowers the entry-barrier for web programming to speed-bump height, so that guys like me feel confident that they can whip up a web-based application during BART commutes. I'm working on my first from-scratch web application, and I'm doing it now because Rails is here now. Scott Raymond writes a good bullet-pointed summary of why Rails is such a breath of fresh air. But it includes this sentence:

Like many Railsians, I started programming on the web (many years ago) as a PHP hacker of the worst sort: huge files of proceedural code, jumbled messes of include()s, inline SQL, and HTML.

Railsians? No no no. That can't be the word that's going around. We can do better than that. Users of trendy technologies need trendy collective nouns, and "Rails" is a word with potential. But it's gotta be established soon. Here are my nominations:

• Railiens (not to be confused with Raelians)
• Raeltors
• Railists / Railistics
• The Railsh (think "the Welsh")
• Railitives

I'll stop there. Now if only I could think of a name for the project I'm working on...

iTunes can play Ogg Vorbis again! I rip all my CDs to the Ogg Vorbis format -- partly because of sound quality and partly on principle. The algorithms for turning a song into an MP3 file are proprietary, encumbered with copyrights, licensing rules, codicils about first-born children (you'll find that out soon enough) and so forth. Ogg files come with none of that, because its algorithms were developed the same way Linux was developed: a distributed hive of geeks worked in their spare time to do what needed to be done, and they released the result as liberated software. I found out the hard way that Windows beats Mac hands-down when it comes to options for playing and encoding Ogg files. There used to be a plugin that enabled Ogg playback in iTunes, but it doesn't work on Tiger or Quicktime 7. Audion was pretty good but didn't have all the music library management features. Now someone has done the work, and Ogg works in iTunes again. If iPods ever play Ogg files, I might just buy one. Also, I managed to fix my MP3 player (one of the few that also plays Ogg files) with a twist tie. This makes me even more loathe to own a car. From what I gather, most automotive problems can't be fixed using twist-ties, or even duct tape. Also, Harvey Danger is giving away their latest album online. They're the guys that wrote that "Flagpole Sitta" song last century. It's a good album, distributed via BitTorrent and available in Ogg format.