Am I the only person who still cares about size?

I got an e-mail today that contained a bunch of Word documents as attachments. OK, fine, I can deal with this — but one of the documents was simply a note that said the relevant details were in the other document, and could I please call the originator if I couldn’t open it? (Ironically, it was this first document I had problems opening.) It would have been marginally acceptable, but this note was a whopping 88KB — all that, for what was essentially 4KB worth of information, including the formatting. Even if you accepted the idea you might want 8-bit encoding, you still wouldn’t even approach a tenth of the size of the original file. And for what?

You get the sense that, since disk space became practically infinite and the links that carry our packets became infinitely fast (at least from a user perspective), people and developers stopped caring about the size of a particular data set. I know that’s always been more or less true — I’d like you to meet emacs, circa 1990 — but at least developers used to make some kind of sop towards the idea of stripping out the extraneous junk from anything they created. If you could get away with plain text, or, better yet, make someone else apply the hard work to fancy up the text (hello, PostScript and TeX), that was a big win for everyone. Now we just e-mail multi-megabyte files back and forth, and think nothing of it — as though it has always been this way, and anyone who objects is a curmudgeon.

Separately, can I just say that the person who built my fence will stay alive only as long as I do not find out who they are? Seriously — the panels are about 8′ long: some are 96″, some are 94.5″, some are 90″… it’s like the fence replacement project is trying to drive me to drink.

So I was driving home this afternoon, after today’s aeronautical adventures (check-out in a new-to-me airplane), listening as one does to CBC Radio out of Vancouver. There was something weirdly familiar about the voices on the radio, and I couldn’t quite place them; I knew they were voices I hadn’t heard in a really long time, and the format was unlike anything I’d heard on any radio station in about as long, so I started paying closer attention, and then I realized what was going on: four people were talking about the inappropriateness of Lucien Bouchard advocating for Quebec as a member of the Prime Minister’s cabinet, and what this might mean for Meech Lake.

Around the point where I felt like I needed to make sure the year on my iPhone was in fact correct, Michael Enright showed up to point out that this was “Rewind,” CBC’s way of digging into its archives and pulling out interesting bits from the vault. Today’s show was a look back at the Morningside political panel featuring Eric Kierans, Dalton Camp, and Stephen Lewis, and that was the point where it all snapped into focus for me, why I knew the voices, and why the fourth voice was so familiar and yet managed to evoke some kind of weird longing in my brain — it was, of course, Peter Gzowski’s.

(As an aside, I really miss listening to Gzowski.)

I played the entire show through when I got home, and I was struck by how the conversation between Camp, Kierans and Lewis was so civilized — I mean, they started quoting Edmond Burke at one point! But it also felt like a relic from a bygone era; we can’t have this kind of thing anymore, because the world that spawned it doesn’t exist anymore. And maybe that’s a good thing; I’m not totally sure. People like me would complain that they represented the establishment view of Canadian politics, and that they were themselves too fungible, running the gamut from Red Toryism to Blue New Democrat (if you’re not from here, this is roughly like the distance between, say, the various candidates for the Republican Party nomination — it’s not a really meaningful difference, it’s more one of degree, except with less crazy). I probably would have also complained that the panel was too Triangle-centric, but I complain about that all the time. There’s not a lot of range there, and with a Parliament as divided as the one we have today, I’m not sure you could get away with such a narrow range of opinions. CBC’s still got political panels, but they are primarily journalists or political strategists now, and everyone’s got a partisan agenda they’re pushing, when they’re not looking at the inside-baseball stuff.

Regardless of whether this kind of thing would work today, it was a nice trip down memory lane. And did you know that CBC’s put a whole lot of archival stuff on-line for free? They did, and it’s fantastic. Got childhood memories of listening to stuff on the radio? Here it is. Go explore.

I took possession of the a new machine today, the first really new machine I’ve bought in donkey’s years. I say “really new” because this is the first time I’ve had any protracted exposure to Windows 7 — the Vista machines at work don’t count — and the new box is so far ahead of the old box that it’s kind of scary how much stuff has changed since I bought my last notebook. What I ended up with was a Dell XPS 15, more or less as tricked out as you can get and not spend an insane amount of money, and ye gods, is it ever fast.

The changes have not all been for the better. It is apparently very difficult to buy a machine without a chiclet-style keyboard these days (thanks, Apple!); I minimized the pain by buying a machine with the same layout as my Vostro 1500, so I don’t have to learn where any new keys are, and so far it seems like I’m able to type just as quickly on the new box (artemis) as I was on the old box (hallie). Since we all still type, multitouch mania notwithstanding, this is a pretty critical thing to focus on, and so I am relatively pleased that not only is typing on artemis almost as easy as it was on the old one, it now comes with a bonus keyboard glow (yay backlighting). We’ll see how the multitouch trackpad works — I think I’m going to have a tough time adapting to the two-finger scroll Dell has selected, and would be a lot happier if I could re-enable edge scrolling.

Some stuff is nice: The HD screen feature on the XPS 15 is so worth the $100. Holy crap. I installed “Modern Warfare 2,” a game that made the old box chug along even with the resolution turned down, and cranked it up to the full-fledged 1920×1080 resolution, and discovered that, once again, first-person shooters running at really high resolutions with butter-smoothness induce nausea in me. I guess the next step is to go out and rent some BluRay discs so I can see what it really looks like — then go out and buy a BluRay player for my giant TV in the living room. Or maybe we just plug in the HDMI cable to the notebook. I dunno. The sound on this box is phenomenal: notebooks should not come with a subwoofer, but this one does, and it sounds great.

Libraries are apparently the new big thing, and from a conceptual standpoint they make a degree of sense — the average user shouldn’t really need to worry where her files are stored on a machine; grouping by function and form makes a lot more sense, unless you’re old and cranky and used to managing things like large audio collections manually. This made sense back in the bad old days when I was building playlists in Winamp and organizing by directory, but I’m not sure it’s reasonable anymore. Regardless, it took me the better part of five hours to get half of my music library moved over and into the new iTunes instance — thanks to a combination of changes from Microsoft and Apple’s totally help pages.

Ultimately, I ended up having to do a find-and-replace on the iTunes XML description file: the library used to live in “\Documents and Settings\My Music\iTunes\” under XP, and under Win7 it lives in “\Users\whoever\Music” — which isn’t handled well. It would be easy if you could export your iTunes library to an external device and then re-import the whole shebang, but it turns out you can’t do that without consolidating the library in one place. (Guess how much fun this is if you’ve got 2.5 GB on one drive and another 15.something GB on another, and less than 6 GB of free space on the primary? Yeah, can’t do it. Guess what Apple’s suggestion is: “delete some files and make space.” WOW. THANKS.)

Anyway, I think the upshot of this is that I’m going to just let iTunes manage everything from here on out. For the foreseeable future, this is how things are going to work in the computing world, so I might as well get the painful transition part over with and be done with it.

Continually popping up dialog boxes informing me the system is going down in 31 minutes, and that I should clean up and log off, every time I send data to the server does not, in fact, help me clean up and log off in 31 minutes.

Imagine a computing technology where your data is instantly available from anywhere on the network: no matter where you are, there are your files — just as you left them. You work with relatively simple tools, with a consistent user interface, and it’s entirely location-independent. If you’re over at a friend’s, just open up your account and do your thing. There’s no need to haul USB drives around, or worry about who has the most current version, it’s all Out There, Somewhere.

Hey! Welcome to 1984!

I can’t be the only person who thinks we have, once again, come full circle in the computing industry. It’s hard to tell whether this is a good thing or not. But the innovations in processing power, the cheapening of mass storage, and the hellacious pace of network deployment and development have brought us to a place where the solutions don’t seem all that different from what we started with back at the beginning of the whole experiment. At the dawn of networked computing systems, the idea of having one master copy that you worked with wasn’t particularly radical; that was just how things worked. The rise of the killer microcomputers and PCs with steadily improving power and accessibility meant that the centralized computing facility, shared by scores of users, started to decline in its importance. But those PCs weren’t really useful until we networked them together, and then we were left with the problem that although they could talk to one another, they were still individual machines.

So now here comes cloud computing that is going to unshackle us from our PCs for all time (or somesuch nonsense; I don’t read the PR) by turning every computational device we have in our homes into what is basically a dumb terminal with a much prettier interface (and longer boot times). I remember this from the early 1990s; we called them X Terminals. And I’m hard pressed to think what the point of all that development work was, if we’re going to return to a model from the past. In the case of Google’s Application Suite, so long as you could get a compliant Web browser to run on a device of some kind, why on earth would you still need a multicore processor-driven machine with 3D graphics capability?

I’m not saying this is a bad model. Believe me, there are a whole bunch of things in my life that would be a lot easier with ubiquitous cloud computing (free of bandwidth limitations, mind you, which is my biggest worry about this whole concept). A few of us have even half-assedly kicked the idea of starting a private cloud up — a decidedly low-tech cloud, mind you, but a cloud none the less, with the same intentions as the more staid offerings from the usual suspects. It’s not a bad idea at all. It does promise to be very liberating, and make technology work in a way that might actually be useful.

I’m just trying to figure out why it’s better than a remote account on a Unix box in a data center somewhere and either an X client and/or copies of putty and rcp. Because it’s pretty?