Ithiriel // Thoughts From a Sysadmin And Occasional Coder

I've heard a lot of complaints about the iPad. Some people can't even understand why I'd want one. So I figured I'd address that.

At RoughlyDrafted Magazine, Daniel Eran Dilger is doing a series of posts
debunking myths about the iPad. I'm going to try not to repeat what he's written too much since he's doing a better job than I could. However, here's a few I'll address. (He does cover two issues I commonly hear that I've omitted here: "It's just a big iPod Touch." and "It's just another Kindle.")

The bevel's too big.

Well, first, how big is the bevel? The technical specifications for the iPad state that the iPad is 9.56 inches high, 7.47 inches wide, and has a 9.7 inch diagonal screen. Since the aspect ratio of the screen is 4:3, the screen should be 7.76 inches high and 5.82 inches wide. This leaves 1.8 inches on the height and 1.65 on the width for the bevel. Divide by two and this suggests an average bevel of 0.9 inches for the top and bottom and 0.825 inches for the left and right sides.

The iPad is designed as a handheld device. Unlike a laptop, there is nothing to support it but the user's hands. Unlike a phone or other small device, it cannot fit within the palm of the user's hand. So it must be held by the user much like one would hold a clipboard or a book. To hold it, the thumb has to have a place on top of the device.

The thumb rests in the bevel. Under the assumption that my hand is average-sized, I measured the width of my thumb. My thumb is about 0.875 inches across. This correlates roughly with the size of the bevel. If the bevel were smaller, the thumb would obscure the screen.

The 4:3 aspect ratio is wrong.

This depends a lot on what you're going to use the device for. As pointed out at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, the 4:3 aspect ratio is the standard ratio for just about everything but video. Trade paperbacks, such as System Performance Tuning, are 9 inches high by 7.5 inches wide, 4:3. The PDFs generated by The Pragmatic Bookshelf for their books, e.g. the one for Metaprogramming Ruby, specify these dimensions.

Using a 16:9 aspect ratio for video would also increase the size of the device. In order for the screen to be the same width (5.82 inches), it would need to be about 10.35 inches long. Adding in the bevel and it'd be about 12.15 inches high, making it a slightly odd size. It would be tailored well for showing video but not for much else.

You can't make phone calls with it.

This seems to come from a belief that the iPad is supposed to replace the iPhone. It's not. In the keynote speech, Steve Jobs says that the iPad is intended for a role between the smartphone (i.e. the iPhone) and the laptop.

So since the iPad is not a smartphone, why should it be set up for making phone calls? The consumer presumably already has some sort of phone already that they will retain.

It doesn't support Flash.

No. And why does it need to? The iPad will come with a native YouTube app. While I agree that it would be nice to see some other flash animations, I don't see it as a necessity.

Daniel Eran Dilger addresses this some. He makes one point that bears reiterating: "Flash is the primary reason Safari crashes, and even accounts for the vast majority of Apple’s Mac OS X crash reports." If your primary goal is to provide a stable, usable device, then providing a technology that has been shown to cause instability is a non-optimal choice.

One point that he does not make is: Adobe Flash Player is itself insecure. In 2009, Adobe released five security advisories for the Flash Player, each one identified by Adobe as critical and each one possibly allowing an attacker to take control of the system. A significant amount of malware, such as Gumblar, has been distributed via these vulnerabilities in the Flash Player. Given this track record, would you want Flash on anything that should be secure?

It doesn't support multitasking.

There is some merit to this. Under the current version of the iPhone OS, when you switch away from an application, it saves its state and stops. This means that network connections are closed. If you have an SSH or VNC client running and switch applications, you then have to reconnect to the server. I can see this being annoying.

However, for most other use cases, I'm not certain this is a huge deal. Between push notifications and the available applications, this no longer seems to be an issue for instant messaging. This may be handled for most other tasks for which you would want to have a background network application running.

There's a lot of complaining about a lack of active multitasking, i.e. having multiple applications shown on the screen simultaneously. For a screen of the size of the iPad, this seems like a bad idea. While the resolution of the screen is 1024x768, it's only 7.76 inches high by 5.82 inches wide. This means there are about 132 pixels per inch. On a 15 inch diagonal screen, this was only 85 pixels per inch. So while the resolution is the same, the density is much higher and it becomes harder to have multiple windows displayed comfortably. Thinking back on that 15 inch monitor with windows overlapping windows and having to switch to check on their status (something that even plagues me on newer monitors), I am reminded of this passage from Frederick Brooks' essay "No Silver Bullet":

The so-called "desktop metaphor" of today's workstation is instead an "airplane-seat" metaphor. Anyone who has shuffled a lap full of papers while seated between two portly passengers will recognize the difference--one can see only a very few things at once.

If the desktop metaphor cannot be achieved on a physically larger monitor (or even on today's much larger monitors with much larger resolutions), how can it possibly be achieved on a smaller screen? Showing only one application, while understandably limiting, prevents the sort of madness multiple windows would create.

It's not perfect

No, it's not. But is anything?

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that Steve Jobs and Apple have announced the iPad, the long rumored Apple tablet. Name jokes aside, I think we're seeing the beginning of a revolution.

The iPad is the first piece of technology in my lifetime that I am honestly looking forward to. I think it is going to be the beginning of a revolution. I don't know where that revolution will lead or what it will mean to me as someone used and reasonably well-adapted to the current era of computers. It will certainly be interesting.

I have a lot of what I want to say about the iPad which I'll spread out over a handful of entries. Today, I'll start with why I want one, how I think I would use it.

My commute to work each day is just over an hour each way. Even though I have a laptop (an aging iBook G4), I find it difficult to do significant work during the commute. Mass transit methods are not really set up for using a laptop. When you fly on a plane, when you take a train somewhere, you have a tray table on which you can put a laptop. You don't have that on a bus, in the subway, carpooling, etc.

So I spend a lot of my time reading. (Or sleeping.) It's easy to bring a book and read it. However, if what I need to read is only available in electronic form, it becomes necessary to print it out. One of my new projects is to replace my aging webserver (which happens to host this site and others) so I have been reading server security documents. I spent $130 to have FedEx Office (formerly Kinkos) print out some of these documents.

And since I've done this once, I will likely do it again. If nothing changes, some day, another $130 will be spent to have more documents printed. If I do this three more times, the cost comes to $520, more than the cost of a base iPad. This certainly makes it cost effective, not including the definite benefits that the iPad provides over several binders of documents.

I also know in the future that I will be expected to start carrying a laptop on my commute. Between the size of most laptops and the limitations of my laptop bag, this will limit what I can carry with me. After my notebook, I can probably only carry one book. Or I can carry an iPad. Based on Apple's announced dimensions, the iPad is slightly thinner than Web Design For Developers (which is about 0.6875 inches thick). With a case, it's probably thicker but probably not more than an inch thick. Even though I like books, there is a definite sense of economy here. (This assumes that the iPad will be able to use PDFs. However, since the iPhone can, the iPad should be able to as well. And since there is so much content available as PDFs, I think that it would be a mistake for PDF support to be omitted. However, what I think the iPad will/should do is really something for another discussion.)

A 3G iPad would provide me with something I don't currently have: An internet connection usable during the commute (or, theoretically, even while traveling). (I absolutely despise doing web browsing on the Blackberry I have.) There is definite appeal in having a reliable SSH client to fix problems that arise while I'm out. Being able to check blog entries or other resources to help me research whatever project I'm working on would help. Also, to add to the sense of economy above, I know that the iPhone can use the mobile interface for Safari Books Online so the iPad should be able to as well, something my current phone cannot do.

And I find that as I think about the iPad more, I can find more uses for it for me. I don't know that I would call it "magical" but it certainly has the potential to be revolutionary. And just like the iPhone changed things, the iPad certainly will.

Saturday night, I finally updated the site to Drupal 6. While I was doing this, I made a few other changes. If you read this purely through an RSS feed, you should not notice any changes. If you come to the site, you should see some. I am hoping that these changes are for the better.

Tagline

First, I changed the tagline for the site. I decided that the old one, "Curiosity, Creativity, Code," was probably a little too presumptuous and didn't convey everything I wanted. Also, it specifically mentions code while one of my hobbies (and my day job) is system administration. Since this is figuring highly in my current project which I will likely post about, I figured I should make sure it's in scope.

I'm not particularly happy with the new tagline, "Thoughts From a Sysadmin And Occasional Coder." It is more accurate but it's not catchy. I may change it a couple more times before I'm satisfied.

Visual changes

• The content portion of the site is now shown in a slightly larger font so it should be more readable on larger monitors with larger resolutions.
• Headers now have a dotted line below them to separate them from the rest of the content.
• The search field now has a form button.

Module changes

• The ajax module has been added to improve experience with the forms.
• Those who create accounts can receive emails when posts are updated (e.g. when a comment is added) through the subscriptions module.
• Spam protection is now handled through Mollom.

I have been comparing email statistics between two years ago and this week. The percentages of emails rejected as viruses seems to have changed dramatically. Two years ago, the number of virus emails flagged by ClamAV made up at least 10% (and as high as 30%) of the email volume. This week, I'm seeing less than 1%.

I have no reason to doubt that ClamAV is performing normally. However, such a change is still unexpected. Has anyone else noticed a decrease (at least percentage-wise) of virus emails?

I threw out a couple days worth of code a couple weeks ago.

I read somewhere that knowing that you can throw out code and start over should be uplifting and exhilarating. It's not. When I threw it out the topic branch in my local git repository, I was annoyed, I was disgusted, I was unhappy. Perhaps that has to do with why I threw it out.

I have this project I'm working on in my spare time. As I've mentioned before, I'm trying out BDD with RSpec and cucumber. And I came to a point that I realized that most of what I was doing was not behavior-driven. It wasn't even adhering to the YAGNI principle. I had a possible case, one that may not arise, and I was writing to try to meet it without a test case. I had realized I was doing this early on and instead of stopping then, I just said that I would run it through rcov and add tests later.

Sometimes I am very, very stupid.

The problem with BDD or TDD or any new way of doing things is that it requires discipline to properly follow them until you get in the habit of doing them. Once you're in the habit, it's not so hard but you have to get there first. Until then, you have to face your urges to use the old method, to take the quick way you've already learned, and deny them. It requires discipline.

And discipline, at least for me, is hard.

I will be trying again on this particular feature tonight or tomorrow night. Hopefully I will have the discipline this time.